As is my tradition, below is a list of cities I have visited in 2011. I count only cities where I spend a majority of the day or a night in. Cities with an asterisk (*) denote visiting the same city on non-consecutive days.
I have been in India for the last 3 months, and during that time Occupy Wall Street was occupying everything and in India a series of protests have made the news. Except these protests, how to say it nicely, are really insane:
And these were just the protests reported in the popular press. There are undoubtably many more protests which happen across the subcontinent which aren’t reported in the daily papers.
I challenge you to imagine the situation of a disgruntled man in the West, upset at some injustice, brings a bag of live cobras to the government building and unleash them on hapless bureaucrats.
This why India is amazing – as long as you aren’t in the office when the bag of snakes is unleashed.
The dog woke up a few minutes later…
NPS symbols are free and in the public domain and contain all sorts of symbols and pictograms (or pictographs if you like), including recreation pictographs, north arrows, bar scales, road shields, accessibility, winter recreation, and water recreation. One of my favorites is the dam pictogram above.
Download them in Illustrator, PDF, TrueType Font Symbols and map patterns here: Map Symbols & Patterns for NPS Maps.
Today is the third anniversary of the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks which took place in 2008 over the course of 60 hours. It is hard to understate how much this attack has indelibly changed the face of Mumbai: from the military checkpoints and machine-gun pill boxes, to the security theatre which surrounds entering any location which hosts large groups of foreigners, to the increase in negative views (if possible) of Pakistan.
The LIMTV (linear induction motor test vehicle) is tested at the Department of Transportation’s high-speed ground test center (now owned and operated by Association of American Railroads) near Pueblo, Colorado, in March of 1973. The experimental vehicle was designed to operate at speeds up to 250 miles per hour, using electro-magnetic forces for noiseless propulsion.
While not exactly the SUPERTRAIN, the 1979 Love Boat-style show set on a huge nuclear-powered train zipping from NYC to LA which I’m obsessed with, the LIMTV undoubtably influenced SUPERTRAIN’S aesthetic. Except LIMTV actually helped pave the way for an actual product using linear induction-based systems, having found a niche with the aid of Bombardier’s Advanced Rapid Transit system. Notable installations are in Vancouver’s SkyTrain and NYC’s JFK AirTrain (below).
I didn’t have Turkey, mashed potatoes with gravy, cornbread, any other fixings and didn’t get to spend the day with loved ones. But I am thankful for the last year. And thankful my wife bought me my favorite West Wing episode for iTunes download, Shibboleth. My favorite part is on youtube:
Thumbs Up!, a photo by plemeljr on Flickr.