Mexico City, poor air quality, bad noses
Mexico City’s air quality–which is substandard about 300 days of the year–has rendered residents’ noses unable to detect the smell of rotten food. [via]
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Infra Alia
Two days out of the year Manhattan seems like it was built to accommodate the sun; they call it Manhattanhenge.
The Financial Times reports that housing prices and mortgage difficulties in London and the southwest of England have prevented 40 percent of young households (aged 21-40) from purchasing homes.
Clever art from Harmen de Hoop (1, 2, 3)
“Chicago has what many believe to be the most sophisticated public surveillance camera system in the country.”
Superfund365 presents a collection of data visualizations for one toxic site within the United States per day.
The most in-depth review of notebooks you will ever read.
“Hegel says at some point that a great man causes others to write commentaries about him and his work. I have probably spent more time thinking about Dick than about anyone else outside my narrow circle of intimates.” - Raymond Geuss remembers Richard Rorty.
All hail our Turkey overlords
Turkeys are invading our suburbs and cities. And they’re wild. The seven million wild turkeys in the United States, once thought to be suited only to wide expanses of unbroken forest, are adapting to urban environments better than biologists predicted. While the wild turkeys I’ve seen seemed pretty spooked around people, Chris Leahy, of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, claims today’s turkeys are similar to yesterday’s:
“If you look at records going back to the Pilgrim [era], turkeys moved in large flocks and they were quite fearless—or clueless—and people could basically walk up to them and bop them on the head.
“Turkeys have not been particularly afraid of humans and have been readily accommodating to our habits and ways of living,” he said.
“So it’s not terribly surprising that we find them wandering in the suburbs or the streets of Brookline [in Massachusetts] and sort of catching meals where they can.”
See also my post linking to a story on owls in Charlotte, North Carolina, that seem to think the city is an old growth forest. Happy Thanksgiving.
Anti-pigeon movement takes flight, wants bread
Cities in Europe are discussing methods for reducing their pigeon populations.
Scientists, city officials and animal welfare activists met in the western German city of Essen on Tuesday for Germany’s first Town Pigeon Conference to discuss how to deal with the growing pigeon population which is expected to rise by around 50 million to up to 400 million worldwide in the next 10 years as a result of growing urbanization.
There are around one million of them in New York, and Venice has the highest pigeon density with an estimated three birds per human inhabitant. In most big European towns, there is around one pigeon for every 20 citizens.
What are the risks?
[T]he birds can and do spread diseases, allergies and parasites to humans. Haag-Wackernagel says many everyday illnesses including allergies can be attributed to human proximity to the birds which carry salmonella, lung illnesses, fleas, ticks and a host of other ailments — something to think about when surrounded by flapping pigeons in town squares or outdoor cafes.
How do we get rid of them?
“Killing makes no sense at all,” says Haag-Wackernagel. “The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they’ll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available.” A pair of pigeons can produce up to 12 fledglings per year.
“The best way to reduce the population is not to feed them. People say it’s cruel to deprive them of food but in the wild the sudden absence of food is a completely natural occurrence and animals adapt to it.”
Photograph by Pensiero.
Paris is greener than you think.
What’s in the middle of those oddly-shaped Parisian blocks? Peter Levine uses Google Earth to find Paris is much greener than a stroll down its boulevards might reveal.
The greening of Toronto’s parking lots
Atlanta could learn something from a pilot project for creating more efficient and appealing parking lots within Toronto. Spacing Toronto writes:
the City of Toronto is piloting new design guidelines for “greening” surface parking lots. The proposals include measures to address many of the major environmental problems, and in the process, they address some of the aesthetic problems as well. Ideas include landscaping with trees and grasses, using permeable surfaces such as bricks, and creating separated pedestrian walkways.
Tensions between mass transit and mixed-use
…there is a contradiction in the planning approaches of many jurisdictions that are developing mass transit, in that promotion of mixed-use urban areas actually weakens the strong nodes that are the lifeblood of mass transit.
To be fair, the concept of mixed-use areas is intended to support short walking trips rather than public transport; but the application of mixed uses, increased densities, parking requirements and public transport are not always thought through in a coherent way at the metropolitan scale.
This presents a serious risk to the attainment of green transport. The greater risk, though, may be the inability of metropolitan authorities to exercise adequate control over all the factors that need to be brought together for a green transport strategy. Even in the context of strong policy, planning is often fragmented and stymied by political interference, uncooperative developers and unreliable funding.
This tension is not clearly evident in Atlanta but, then again, the city’s largest mixed-use development doesn’t seem to encourage any form of transportation that isn’t via automobile.
The city as old-growth forest
Owls in Charlotte may think their city is an old-growth forest:
Urban wildlife numbers have been increasing in recent decades, notably in populations of squirrels, Canada geese, raccoons and deer, but the appearance of significant urban populations of barred owls, the third largest owl species in the US, is a surprise to many biologists.
“If you read about barred owls in the textbooks, it says they need large stands of old-growth forest to survive,” notes University of North Carolina at Charlotte ecologist and ornithologist Rob Bierregaard, who has directed the six-year-old research study. “Either the barred owls in Charlotte haven’t read that book or the book is wrong, because they are really here and apparently doing quite well.”
“We have concluded is that there may be a third possibility: that old suburban neighborhoods in fact are an old growth forest, at least as far as the barred owls are concerned.”
Wise, my ass.
Designing away climate change and fat people.
Britain’s health secretary, Alan Johnson, proposes the “10 eco towns already being planned by the government should now be built and designed to confront the UK’s obesity crisis.”
“We have to look at ways of improving the built environment, doing more to help people make physical activity a normal part of everyday life.”
Mr Johnson is leading a cross-government drive to put the eco towns concept at the cutting edge of the fight against obesity. Each new town is planned to house as many as 20,000 people. He has also been looking at tackling some of the least healthy cities in the north or London boroughs to see if progress can be made in redesigning existing towns.
Obesity is estimated to cost the UK £1bn a year and is projected to rise to £45bn by 2050.
Scientists are uncovering the history of climate change in the works of the old masters.
The scientists are analysing the striking sunsets painted by [JMW] Turner and dozens of other artists to work out the cooling effects of huge volcanic eruptions. Scientists are uncovering the history of climate change in the works of the old masters.
By studying the colour of sunsets painted before and after such eruptions, the researchers say they can calculate the amount of material in the sky at the time…The team found 181 artists who had painted sunsets between 1500 and 1900. The 554 pictures included works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Gainsborough and Hogarth. They used a computer to work out the relative amounts of red and green in each picture, along the horizon. Sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, so the reddest sunsets indicate the dirtiest skies. The researchers found most pictures with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the three years following a documented eruption. There were 54 of these “volcanic sunset” pictures.
Grist: 15 Green Cities
Grist highlights 15 green cities. This list seems to come out once a week, each time from a different source. I was happy to see Curitiba, Brazil, make this one.
Handheld urinals relieve truckers, German soccer fans
For well-hydrated fans at next year’s European Championship in soccer: the roadbag. Der Spiegel Online says:
A Cologne-based company has developed a urinal-in-a-bag and is negotiating with a merchandising firm to distribute it at next year’s European football championship in Austria and Switzerland.
The bag contains absorbent polymers which soak up the urine and turn it into a gel, preventing any subsequent spillage. A moist towelette is also supplied for clean hands.
So, they’re really just handheld, non-wearable diapers, right?
Los Angeles Times fire map
The Los Angeles Times has mapped the fires in Google Maps. I was having a difficult time imagining where they were based on scattered news and reports. Not anymore.