Links for 11-05-2008
Suburbia redux; urban redevelopment in NYC; iron snow on Mercury, gold-farmers; BASH commands reference …
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“Encouraging people to move from the suburbs closer to their place of work in the city because it’s actually cheaper … only works when nobody else does it.”
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The true cost of urban redevelopment in New York. Depressing, but worth reading anyway.
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“With a span of less than 15 centimetres, his aircraft qualifies as a micro air vehicle (MAV), but it has an unconventional design to say the least. It is a saucer shape covered with electrodes that ionise air to create a plasma.”
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“Flakes of iron snow could be falling inside the planet Mercury, according to a new experiment. This hot metal snowfall might help generate Mercury’s puzzling magnetic field.”
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5 – Gold farmers“Ge Jin, a 30-year-old Shanghai native and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, San Diego, has shot a Gold Farmers, a documentary that delve into the background and lives of Chinese gold farmers.”
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“… as we go down the length scale towards flash fiction, we find we have to leave out more and more aspects of general fiction, and focus on that which is important.”
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Reference-tastic!
Tags: links
May 11th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Oh the joy of category mistakes. The article on the Suburbs mixes up “cheaper for the environment” with “cheaper for individuals” and does so consistently within the article.
There are two other problems here:
1. For the past fifty years, we in the west have enjoyed artificially depressed prices for pretty much everything. One reason for this has been transport links which were sufficient for the distances we needed to travel in *order* to make something cheap. This is crucial to housing: in the 1860s, New York, London and Paris were horribly overcrowded because there simply wasn’t anywhere to spread to. Trains reduced distances and allowed spread. But we’ve filled that space and we can see the overcrowding coming in (I live in a small terrace, the same kind of house in my area is being turned into two bedroom flats) because we cannot move out any further. Most people won’t travel more than two hours to work.
2. Time is the “cost” factor that the article does not take into account. Even as individuals time costs money. Shortage of time = expensive ready meals instead of cheap cooking = babysitters because one gets back later from work = time spent in traffic etc. etc. etc.