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Gotham Gazette has an interesting article about Upstate legislators interfering with New York City policy, Rural Legislator, City Issue: How Upstaters Decide:

This year, New York City residents will see legislators from all over the state vote on issues that directly affect their lives. From the transit bailout to school control, rent regulation and perhaps even term limits, the city will watch legislators from rural areas, small towns and suburbs decide its fate. This drama plays out every year, but last year the defeat of congestion pricing and enforcement cameras for bus rapid transit left some New Yorkers wondering how legislators from outside New York City make their decisions when they vote on issues that only affect New York City.

Not to harp on this subject, but this is a structural issue which will always affect New York City. Big surprise that the State appears to be shortchanging the City in Stimulus Bucks – there are only so many Downstate politicians versus the rest of the state. This will continue, unless either structural issues revolving around representation is reassessed or New York City becomes an independent state.
Further Reading

• Rural Legislator, City Issue: How Upstaters Decide
• The 51st State – State of New York City
• Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas
• Comparing NYC & Washington DC – Area, Population, Density & Average Income

curvaceous Flatiron, originally uploaded by ifotog, Queen of Manhattan Street Photography

In the mid-eighteen-nineties, Daniel Burnham, then the most prominent architect in Chicago, met with a young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright. Burnham had been impressed by Wright’s talent but felt that he could use some seasoning. He offered to pay Wright’s tuition at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, to support his family, and to give him a job when he returned. Wright turned him down. It was one of the few times that Burnham, who was probably the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced, didn’t get his way, and he told Wright that he was making a mistake: the Beaux-Arts style, of which Burnham was a leading exponent, was taking over the country, and Wright was deluded if he thought that his modern approach, with its open spaces and horizontal lines, would ever amount to much.

– Paul Goldberger, Daniel Burnham’s great Chicago Plan turns one hundred

Le Mont-Saint-Michel (France), originally uploaded by koert michiels

Here I was watching Return of the King and thinking how cool the Gondor Beacons were (imagine the Appalachians with a similar system where New York calls out for help from Georgia) when I found out that this system was actually used in China in the Valley of a Hundred Fengsui:

If you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and remember the scene where Pippin sets a large tower alight, sending a message calling for help across an entire mountain range, you know how the system of fengsui worked. All along the wall, from Jiayuguan to Shanhaiguan, beacon towers were built so that a fire signal (feng) or smoke signal (sui) sent from one would be visible from the next in line, making it possible to transmit military information back and forth rapidly across the entire border region. According to one military manual from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), when the system worked according to plan a message could travel 1000 kilometres in a day and a night.

5, originally uploaded by soundofdesign

Ty Lettau is collecting abstract satellite images from Google Earth:

The only rule is that the composition should not be recognizable as a feature of earth. Some look like pure geometries, others like micro-organisms, while still others look like circuitry or wires… they all share an unfamiliarity that makes them unique.

The only pity is he isn’t including the location of each feature to directly look in Google Earth of Maps (small quibble).

(untitled), originally uploaded by [phil h]

Today the Transport Politic has an excellent article comparing the funding mechanism of the MTA and the RATP (Which runs the Paris Metro), How to Fix Transit Financing:

The real question for us, then, is how Paris’ Stif is able to maintain fiscal balance: how is it funded, and why does its system work more efficiently than that of the MTA?
About 2/5 of Paris’ transport funding comes from the versement transport, a tax collected on salaries in the Paris region. The fees are highest – at 2.6% – in Paris and the neighboring rich département (similar to a county) Hauts-de-Seine; they’re lower, at 1.7%, in two poorer neighboring départements, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne. In the four départements on the edge of the region, the rate is 1.4%. Having the tax rate vary by location, with people who are more likely to be able to take advantage of public transportation paying more, makes a lot of sense. The region’s decision to tax the poorer départements bordering Paris at a lower rate also serves as a social equalizer, attempting to encourage investment in less-well-off areas.

It just so happens that the Ravitch Plan includes both inflation-adjusted tolls on the East River Bridges and a payroll tax on all counties who are serviced by the MTA.
Now if the politicians can just pass this plan.

A concept for a tiny house I hope to build this year (2009). This model doesn’t show all the details but the plans include everything needed for a house, kitchen, toilet, bed, shower, storage, etc… all contained in a nine square foot house.

If you want excellent explanations on how we got to where we are in our wonderful global economic meltdown, the following three pieces of reporting published in the last week is an excellent place to start.
First, listen to This American Life episode 375: Bad Bank:

The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes. Our crack economics team–the guys who explained the mortgage crisis, Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson–are back to help all of us understand the news. For instance, when we talk about an insolvent bank, what does it actually mean, and why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to rich bankers who screwed up their own businesses? Also, two guys go to New Jersey to look at a toxic asset.

The second is Felix Salmon’s article, The Formula That Killed Wall Street:

As a result, just about anything could be bundled and turned into a triple-A bond–corporate bonds, bank loans, mortgage-backed securities, whatever you liked. The consequent pools were often known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. You could tranche that pool and create a triple-A security even if none of the components were themselves triple-A. You could even take lower-rated tranches of other CDOs, put them in a pool, and tranche them–an instrument known as a CDO-squared, which at that point was so far removed from any actual underlying bond or loan or mortgage that no one really had a clue what it included. But it didn’t matter. All you needed was Li’s copula function.

Lastly is The Crisis of Credit Visualized, an 11-minute high-level overview of the worldwide credit crisis by Jonathan Jarvis:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3261363&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
All three put together will help explain where we are, how we got here and what future steps we might have to take. And all three do this is a way which isn’t condescending and without dumbing down the content.