Robin Finn writes in the NYTimes of a growing garden menace -- a truly immoral and sordid under-class of culinary criminals -- in her piece Pilfered Peppers in City Gardens; Tomatoes, Too...
"...the first commandment should be obvious: Thou shalt not covet, much less steal, thy neighbor’s tomatoes, cucumbers or peppers. But people do. [...] By midsummer, the urban irritant of garden pilferage was in full bloom, right in sync with the crops, the heat and the mosquitoes. On a recent evening, Jackie Bukowski, president of the West Side garden, was batting away biting insects while talking about the thefts from the garden, which has 87 vegetable plots under cultivation. She recalled her disbelief last summer when hundreds of ripe figs were looted overnight. “Every single one of them, gone,” [...] “I know that people who garden in the country have trouble with squirrels and deer and turkeys; here in our neighborhood, we have old ladies,” he said. “They’re the culprit.” [...] Theft was a given. This summer the pepper crop is under tight surveillance. “Last August someone stole every pepper in the garden,” Ms. Freedom recounted. “We’ve lost not only ripe veggies but whole plants and garden ornaments to these folks who want to take an easy way around growing their own. I caught a woman taking all of our honeysuckle blossoms because it was cheaper than buying them in Chinatown.”
What a bunch of verminous vegans! They're really rather worse than looting locusts and ravenous rats combined -- they're plundering macro parasites, all of them!
Rise of the Apes movie looks very promising! Plus definitely check out super-trailer! Plus the larger story at WETA in Wellington, NZ... And this ApeK-47 action in Africa! And finally, all the extras!
Thanks to UniqueDaily for spotting Colin Rich's LA Light timelapse! Compare and contrast to the Blade Runner intro! And while you're at it, check out Hervé Attia's amazing film location documentary comparing real sites in LA 2009 vs Blade Runner's fictional LA 2019!
Just chatting with MIT alumna Dhaya Lakshminarayanan about inspiring kids about STEM through humor and irreverence and these two brilliant Hydro promos came to mind! According to Duncan at The Inspiration Room...
"The Hydro TV advertising campaign was developed at DDB Norway by creatives Martin Thorsen and Torbjørn Kvien Madsen. Filming was directed by Roenberg (Joachim and Espen) via Motion Blur with producer Richard Patterson. Visual effects were developed at Fido Film, Sweden."
Mark Wagenbuur writes about Fietsstad 2011 nominees and, in particular, supports his home city, Den Bosch. This Cycling City competition run by the Dutch Fietsersbond, or Cyclists’ Union, seeks out the best exemplars of infrastructure, safety, vitality, and more, with special emphasis now on the situation for school children...
"The theme for this year’s competition is ‘onderweg naar school’ which would loosely translate as ‘on our way to school’. In 30 years the age of children who cycle to school on their own in the Netherlands has risen from 6 to 9 years old. Something which alarms the Cyclists’ Union. The city that best makes it possible for children to cycle to school on their own will have a good chance to win this year’s title."
"The tower, which will cost $1.2 billion and take 63 months to build, will include a Four Seasons hotel, apartments and condominiums, office space and the world's highest observatory. It will be at least 568 feet taller than the Burj Khalifa. [...] There's something very special about being the world's tallest building. Everyone wants to be able to do one. I think in this situation there is a development going around the tower -- a $29 billion development -- and this tower acts as a catalyst for that development. Putting such a tall tower in first actually increases the land value around the tower, so even if you don't make a lot of money on the tower itself you'll make money on the land. [...] What struck us is that Saudi Arabia is trying to open itself up to more business and more opportunity. So we thought about the fact that this is a new vision for Saudi Arabia, and the idea of newness struck us. We thought about how the palm tree, when it's just starting out as a plant, it will grow to a point and then the prongs will separate. The building is not a replication of that but the idea influenced us. [...] The idea started out as a helipad, and we came up with the projected, cantilevered dish. And then we started talking to pilots and they said, 'Well, up at that height it's going to be pretty difficult to land.' But the owner and we liked it so much that we thought we'd keep it as a sky terrace. It'll have a little garden; don't forget, six months of the year here it's a beautiful climate. The winter here, temperature wise, is a lot like living in California."
It's stupidly socialist that cities massively subsidize automobile usage, most egregiously via cheap or free parking, usually curbside. But streets should be for movement, not for storage! Auto owners should pay market-rates for parking and the laws of economic supply and demand should dominate. See here Streetfilms on Parking Reform...
In the heart of the Boston Financial District is a glorious gem of a greenspace, a 1.7 acre patch surrounded by skyscrapers -- Post Office Square's Leventhal Park -- whose motto is Park Above, Park Below! What's especially compelling about it is that not only are there 7-stories of parking spaces for 1,400 cars underground, but the greenery above and storage below replaced a fugly, squat 4-story concrete eyesore of a parking structure... Central to this privately funded and organized transformation was MIT alumnus entrepreneur and urban visionary Norman Leventhal who championed the project!
Thanks to Rohit Wanchoo for promoting GiveDirectly which enables philanthropic donors to send money directly to the poor. To do this effectively, they...
"...locate impoverished households in Kenya and then transfer donations electronically to their mobile phones. [The] goal is simple: to provide the most efficient, transparent, and respectful way to give."
"Households typically save or invest 50%-80% of transfers they receive; Household spending on "temptation goods" like alcohol and tobacco either does not increase significantly or increases in proportion with other spending; Households sometimes spend money on items that an "expert" could never have predicted."
I love urban rooftop helipads! Helicopters are truly the most civilized form of fast transport -- plus they're quite crucial for emergency and disaster response. Every first-class city should have hundreds of helipads -- and we all should expect manufacturers to deal with the top enabling chopper challenge -- Noise Reduction!
CATO correctly calls the latest American budget "deal" a disappointment. But that's an epic understatement. It's not a cut, but rather a slight slowdown in the rate of growth, yet more Orwellian Newspeak and ponzi politics from Republicrats and Demoblicans alike. For the sake of future generations, we truly need to decimate the state, massively cutting fat and bloat, stopping unwise international "defense" expenditures and stupid wars, selling off excess assets, privatizing as much as possible, adding fees-for-service, and eliminating the vast majority of entitlements, including agribusiness subsidies and welfare payments alike. And the unavoidable reality is that in addition to wholesale slashing of spending, it's likely that taxes need to go up temporarily by at least 10% across the board, with every citizen finally sharing the pain -- and thus motivated towards civic participation and voting ASAP to eliminate this burdensome ball-and-chain -- and to vote out the corrupt+idiot politicians who enabled this gross debt stupidity. Otherwise it's bread and circuses for now, but Roman Empire 2.0 in the end. Why? Because in America alone there is US$115 Trillion of true debt, including the super-skyscraper of money representing unfunded liabilities, meaning Medicare, Medicare Prescription Drug Program, Medicaid, Social Security, Military and civil servant pensions, and myriad others...
"Local citizens of the town are reportedly tired of luxury car owners constantly parking in the various cycleways and have requested the local council do something about it. So, as reassurance that the public can rely on the council to clear up such matters, mayor of Vilnius, Arturas Zuokas, jumped in an army troop carrier and drove over a Mercedes-Benz S-Class that was parked in the lane. Now that is what you call a proactive council. Zuokas said, “I’ve had enough of these drivers parking their luxury cars on bike lanes and pedestrian crossings. This tank is a good tool to solve the problem of parking in the wrong place."
"China's bullet train was supposed to signal its arrival as a high-tech leader. Instead, a crash that killed at least 40 people has made it a lightning rod for anger at the human cost of recklessly fast development. [...] More than anything, the aftermath of the high-speed train wreck last month in Zhejiang province has come to underline the fact that for all of China's enormous economic growth, the nation is still overseen by an opaque, authoritarian regime frequently plagued by corruption. It's a system that relies in large part on the promise of material progress for its people, with the threat of heavy-handed tactics for those who step out of line. During the past nine days, that approach has seemed especially off-balance. In trying to explain, or not explain, the events that caused one train to rear-end another on July 23, officials ordered the media to censor reports on the accident, made announcements that strained credulity and then blamed a confusing jumble of factors including lightning, badly designed equipment and poorly trained workers. Interviews with passengers on the trip between Beijing and Shanghai over the weekend suggested that in addition to worries about rail safety, the incident has for some reinforced a sense of unease with the pace of the nation's development. No one spoke about a seismic shift that would threaten the government's hold on power, but most obviously had spent time thinking about the implications of the wreck. "I think it's an issue of national credibility..."
Images of Chinese high-speed train wreck from the Guardianarticles... P.S. Read also Yasheng Huang's piece on China's Growth.
I'm very interested to read Dayo Olopade's upcoming new book The Bright Continent. A Nigerian-American journalist, Olapade is interviewed here by CNN's Robyn Curnow to talk about learning from African innovation...
"It's a continent approaching a billion people, all of whom have something to say. It's a very young place -- I think something like 60% of the population is under 35 -- and so in the next decade we're going to see this generation really take advantage of what is both global technology and global ideas and what they're already working with on the ground and there are so many examples that I see all over the place. [...] A sense of individual responsibility and a sense of entrepreneurship are endemic to Africa. [...] And they've got their side hustle and I think the ability for people to find opportunity where there is none is something very important in terms of the way that the 21st century will move forward. [...] People may not call themselves entrepreneurs, but they are very entrepreneurial."
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
Robin Finn writes in the NYTimes of a growing garden menace -- a truly immoral and sordid under-class of culinary criminals -- in her piece Pilfered Peppers in City Gardens; Tomatoes, Too... 
