Archive for April, 2012

Apr 28

From Lunch to Landfill

A good visual of what happens to the trash from your meal. Something to consider the next time you eat out and consume a single-use bottle and plastic fork only to have it sit in landfill for the next 100+ years.

via From Lunch to Landfill on Vimeo.

Apr 24

The Family that Went to the Moon

Talk about posterity. In April of 1972, the Apollo 16 mission touched down on the moon and conducted three EVAs. Charlie Duke and John Young explored the Descartes Highlands by foot and in a Lunar Roving Vehicle. On the third and final EVA, Charlie Duke left this photo of his family. This photo will be sitting on the surface of the moon for a very, very, very long time.

The Family that Went to the Moon.

Apr 22

From Birth To Age 12 In Less Than 3 Minutes

Here is an example of someone with consistent dedication and a little extra time on his hands. I would love to do something like this myself.

Lotte Time Lapse: Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45. on Vimeo on Vimeo

Apr 22

Parking & Horrid Urban Planning

There are few things I hate in life more than parking. It brings out our primal instinct. Some people fight for a parking space more fiercely than lions for a piece of red meat. But besides that, parking is a huge waste of space and a clear example of bad urban planning in most cases.

Here is an example of how bad it’s become in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Along the way, cities developed zoning formulas to determine the number of parking spaces needed—typically, between six and 10 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor space. Mr. Ben-Joseph argues—as did Donald Shoup in “The High Cost of Free Parking” (2005)—that these ratios created an enormous oversupply of parking, designed to accommodate only two or three days of maximum use per year, like Black Friday. This seemingly minor miscalculation has had a dramatic effect on urban environments. In some U.S. cities, such as Little Rock, Ark., surface lots cover nearly a third of the land area. Mr. Ben-Joseph estimates that there are 500 million surface-lot parking spaces in the U.S., covering more than 3,590 square miles, a landmass larger than Puerto Rico.

The issue of parking has become a bit of a meme lately and I welcome it. Hopefully it awakens cities to reconsider how they develop their urban centers.

via Book Review: Rethinking a Lot – WSJ.com.

How The NFL Schedule Gets Made

Putting together an NFL season schedule is a pretty daunting task. The Atlantic Wire has an interesting bit (half way down the page) on how schedules are crafted in the NFL, part computer, part human:

Putting together a 17-week NFL schedule is hard work. To begin with, a full 17-week grid is full of lots of tiny boxes. That’s always a sign that things are going to get complicated. There are also travel considerations (you don’t want to send Minnesota to Miami and then up to Seattle the very next week), bye weeks, the NFL’s new plan to stack divisional games in the second half of the season, and conflicts with other weekend jamborees. The league office uses a computer For the last eight years, the first step has been consulting a computer capable of “spitting out 400,000 complete or partial schedules from a possible 824 trillion game combinations.” After sorting through 14,000 potential schedules, NFL “scheduling czar” Howard Katz sent commissioner Roger Goodell an email at 12:33 a.m. on Monday that the 2012 slate was finally set. The entie process “gets serious in January, when teams submit lists of requests detailing stadium availability and preferences for scheduling order.

How Your NFL Schedule Gets Made; Andrew Luck Is A Winner – Entertainment – The Atlantic Wire.

Apr 19

Rome On A Cheap Video Budget

It’s amazing how much a camera, some editing software and a little time can do nowadays in making a nice little film. Here is a film made with a Canon EOS 5DII and an iPhone 4S. Slap on some cool music and you have yourselves a short and touching little movie. And he manages to capture a lot of the little eccentricities and beautiful qualities about Rome that one can only know if you’ve been there enough times.

If a movie director had made this in the ’60s and ’70s, I would have paid a few dollars to see it.

via amo®oma on Vimeo.

Apr 16

Joan Baez In Concert In 1965

It makes sense to me to follow up a classic Bob Dylan concert with another classic from Joan Baez. This concert is given in 1965, one year after the “Quest” concert of Bob Dylan.

One thing that strikes me about this concert is Baez urging the audience to sing along with her, something that is a staple of folk musicians. Pete Seeger also had audiences singing along with him, and in a concert I recently saw with Paul Stookey (Peter, Paul and Mary), he asked the audience to sing along with him several times throughout the evening. And in a memorial concert on Martin Luther King day last year, I saw Baez again asking the audience to sing along with her. I’m assuming this is not common practice in today’s music scene, with perhaps U2 being an exception.

This concert is Baez at her best. Baez performed the following program:

I’m A Rambler, I’m A Gambler
There But For Fortune
Copper Kettle
Mary Hamilton
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
I’m Troubled And I Don’t Know Why
We Shall Overcome
With God On Our Side
Plaisir D’Amour

Apr 16

Bob Dylan Performs “The Times They Are a-Changin’” in 1964 Canadian TV Broadcast

In early 1964 Bob Dylan released his third studio album “The Times They Are a-Changin’”. A month before embarking on tour, the Canadian Broadcasting system offered Dylan a 30 minute concert on its TV program “Quest”. On February 1, 1964, Dylan performed the following program: