"In 1989, [artist Pat] Rawlings was working on illustrations for a collection of children’s science books by the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Using acrylics, he painted a view of a solar eclipse as seen from the moon, and named it after the date when the next eclipse would cross over the continental United States: August 21, 2017. This week, Rawlings tweeted a photo of the painting, which is at the top of this story. “I actually thought 28 years in the future tourists might watch the eclipse from the Moon,” he wrote. “Sigh.”
P.S. Here's the real thing from Mon 8/21/2017...
"Scientists at UW–Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) observed the eclipse through the eye of one of the world’s most advanced weather satellites, GOES-16. The eclipse images from the satellite were taken at a rate of one every five minutes. Stitched together, the images show the shadow of the moon tracking west to east across the continental United States."
Plus here's a previous eclipse seen in March 2016 over ASEAN + Pacific region via the Himawari-8 Spacecraft in Geostationary orbit!
"Researchers at cutting-edge hubs of urban theory like the University College London and the Santa Fe Institute have been homing in on some key properties of urban systems -- and contradicting much of today's orthodoxy. [...] In one sense, these lessons are not so new. Legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs was famous for her prescient insights about the emerging sciences of “organized complexity” and what they offered for a more effective approach to urban planning -- insights she published all the way back in 1961. [...] Jacobs was also famous for excoriating the backward-looking “pseudo-science” of that era's planning and architecture, which she said seemed “almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.” She urged city-makers to understand the real “kind of problem a city is” -- not a conventional problem of top-down mechanical or visual order, but a complex problem of interacting factors that are “interrelated into an organic whole.” She urged planners and architects to show greater respect for the intrinsic order of cities, and to apply the best insights of the new sciences, coupled with the most pragmatic methods. [...] The new findings confirm and extend Jacobs' original insights. Here are five of the most significant:
Cities generate economic growth through networks of proximity, casual encounters and “economic spillovers."
Cities generate a remarkably large “green dividend."
Cities perform best economically and environmentally when they feature pervasive human-scale connectivity.
Cities perform best when they adapt to human psychological dynamics and patterns of activity.
Cities perform best when they offer some control of spatial structure to residents.
These examples illustrate that cities are complex, adaptive systems with their own characteristic dynamics, and -- if they are going to perform well from a human point of view -- they need to be dealt with as such. In that light we must re-assess our current systems of planning, building and managing cities -- the laws, codes, standards, models, incentives, and disincentives that effectively make up the “operating system” for urban growth. To make better cities, we need to shift to an evidence-based approach, able to draw on the best lessons of science and history about the making of good cities, from a human point of view. But this is far from conventional urban practice, which too often features an art-dominated approach to architecture that values novel visual imagery over enduring human city-making."
Here CityLab spots Physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute describing What Is A City?
Thanks to io9's Lauren Davis for spottingThe Atlantic's Katherine Wells's Soda / Pop / Coke, a visual remix of the American dialect survey by Bert Vaux...
Nice design by Singapore-MIT team for Sesame Ring, an RFID replacement for the Charlie Card to access public transit (and in principle, much more!) This "One Ring To (Ride) Them All" is now Kickstarting! (See also Jenny Xie's nice writeup in Atlantic Cities)
Thanks to Brad Feld for spotting Richard Florida's piece in the Atlantic on The New Global Start-Up Cities and embedded maps by Martin Prosperity Institute's Zara Matheson...
"The world [...] is spiky, with its most intensive economic activity concentrated in a relative handful of places. Global tech is no exception -- and it is taking a decidedly urban turn."
"Though the waterway hasn’t really been a natural habitat since the 1930s (when the city lined the riverbed with concrete to control flooding), new bike paths, public art, and kayak tours now draw Angelenos to the water’s edge. [...] The Los Angeles River Revitalization Plan, completed in 2007 by the landscape design firm Mia Lehrer + Associates, calls for the removal of most of the concrete and natural habitat restoration around the river."
NASA/NOAAGOES-14 satellite imagery from 35,800 km up...
"Light from the changing angles of the sun highlight the structure of the clouds. [...] The "super rapid scan" images -- one every minute from 7:15 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. EDT -- reveal details of the storm's motion. Animation by Kevin Ward with images from NOAA and University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies."
"There are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids/hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That's about 365,000 kids/minute; about 6,100/second. Totally doable."
MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, Enterprise Forum Global, Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, Muddy Charles Pub, African Business Club, Sloan Entrepreneurs for International Development, Global Startup Workshop, Sustainability@MIT, TechLink, Making Progress, HighTechFever.tv, MIT Innovation Tours
P.S. Here's the real thing from Mon 8/21/2017... 
