Category: General

Conceptual Art Drill

This machine was inspired by dreaming about gear ratios and considering the unexpected implications of exponential powers.
Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are quite large. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before the final gear makes but one turn. Given the truth of this situation, it is possible to do anything at all with the final gear, even embed it in concrete.

Concrete Drill via Kottke. Check out the other Kinetic machines the artist has created.

Top Ten Content of 2008

Here are the Top Ten hits for the last year:

  1. London Underground Map formatted for iPhone – 16,603 hits
  2. Main Page – 5,336 hits
  3. Accessible Transit – London Underground – 2,971 hits
  4. Le Corbusier and La Ville radieuse – 1,921 hits
  5. Ebenezer Howard Garden Cities of To-Morrow – 1,736 hits
  6. Download World Subway Maps for Apple iPhone – 1,501 hits
  7. Accessible Transit – New York City Subway – 1,485 hits
  8. 2007 Submarine Cable Map – 835 hits
  9. Tunnel Boring Machine begins boring under Manhattan for LIRR East Side Access – 790 hits
  10. New National Gallery / Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin – 530 hits

Thanks for visiting, and have a Happy New Year!

My Year in Cities, 2008

As is my tradition, here is the list of the cities I visited in 2008. To make the list, I needed to either stay a full day in the city or overnight. Cities marked with a (*) are cities I visited on non-consecutive days.

  • New York City, NY *
  • Philadelphia, PA
  • Columbus, OH *
  • Sydney, Australia
  • Melbourne, Australia
  • Washington, DC *
  • Annapolis, MD *
  • Las Vegas, NV
  • Omaha, NE
  • Dallas, TX *
  • Chicago, IL *
  • Pittsburgh, PA
  • Savannah, GA
  • New Haven, CT *
  • Toronto, Canada
  • Cambridge, OH
  • Cleveland, OH

Interstate Infrastructure

Ryan takes issue with Greg Mankiw’s contention that infrastructure is a local issue. Besides the Federal Governments Constitutional purview of Interstate Commerce, Mankiw is also wrong because political boundaries are often arbitrary, capricious or outdated.

Take the greater New York City area, which is composed of three states and at the very least 16 counties. As I’ve previously wrote about in The 51st State – State of New York City and Comparing NYC & Washington DC, it is more logical to think of the greater NYC area using both OMB and Census Bureau’s Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Area than existing political boundaries. Currently the Census Bureau counts over 170 MSA’s ranging from Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA to Louisville-Jefferson County, KY-IN to Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY. You can even download a map of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United States and Puerto Rico, December 2006.

All of this is to reinforce that while infrastructure does have a local use component, the funding, design and policy aims of the greater American infrastructure network is decidedly Federal in nature and needs to be part of the larger political process.

Deep Thought – Infrastructure

If I was the head of a railway or transportation department at the local, county, regional or state level, I would make sure any Environmental Impact Reports and designed infrastructure projects were being polished up in the next 64 days to submit to Washington on 12:01 pm January 20th.