the healthy suburb myth
and you thought you moved there because it was healthier:
Dr. Sturm and a colleague, Dr. Deborah Cohen, a RAND researcher and physician, released a study last fall that found that people who live in sprawling suburban areas are less healthy in certain areas - mostly associated with exercise, or the lack of it - than those who live in compact urban neighborhoods.
from the nytimesso not only are the suburbs bad for our forests, our open space and our farms - they are bad for you too. you think we'd realize by now that what is unsustainable for 'nature' (because there's a constructed connotation we are different) is bad for people. but then again, suburbs are unsustainable by our own constructed standards - requiring ever higher taxes to pay for massive, under-utilized infrastructures.
i guess people just don't make sense.
supermarket workers
so i went to the local supermarket
tops to buy some groceries this morning.
there was a new cashier! granted i've been away for a couple of weeks but i was shocked at myself because i was surprised that:
1) the cashier is a he
2) he is also white
3) he looked pretty snazzy, wearing a bright green t-shirt under a slightly-worse-for-wear jacket
in response to 1 and 2, my first thought was "wow, the economy is worse than i thought"
in response to 3, i wondered "is he trying to pick up girls?"
stupid girl. supermarket cashiers are not always hispanic women.
grow your breasts from stem cells
oh this is a really good application of research moneyhow many lives do larger breasts save?
yeesh. is medicine just going to become completely taken over by the image machine? reconstructive surgery - fine. but for the emphasis in research using controversial techniques to be on breast implants... well, i don't think it would help the arguments of those that advocate stem cell research.
the decline of the fourth estate
this blew my mind
Evolving Personalized Information Construct it's slightly creepy that this has come to my attention just now, because last week i just started re-reading debord's society of the spectacle.
#32: the spectacle's function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation.
in these times, we have ample evidence of the use of the spectacle to manufacture truth and erase history, and the consequences for what it means to live in a free society
more interesting to me, however, is the thesis that the role of the spectacle is to manufacture alienation. much has been written i'm sure, of the role of the internet community in bringing people together - but at what point does this reach the balance point, where one's community actually starts shrinking because of the ever increasing choices we have in our lives to seek out and find others who subscribe to our perspective. this narrowing of perspective makes me uncomfortable. encountering diversity of opinion, i.e. not demanding (and expecting) information that conforms to our existing world views, is the only way we will really ever find tolerance and democracy.
mediasocietyinternetEPIC 2014 provides, a slick look forward into the future, with a past rooted firmly in recent events. it foretells a time in the near future, when technology facilitates the increasing personalization of content - google rules the world, to the point where news - the granddaddy of media content, if you will - is generated by algothithms tailored specifically to target the ever increasing amounts of information about our lives, in an increasingly digital world where more and more of our lives are lived on-line.
nyc goes without wal-mart
vornado real estate has dropped its plan to
build a wal-mart in new york city labor organizing = keep wal-mart out.
word.
the military themed escort / white house reporter
more jeff gannon!!!!
first of all, read the questions that he never got to ask in the white house briefing room (
halfway down the page)
then, you can decide if you want to
to buy any of the xxx domain names that he owned.
the sensational society has arrived, and now even the bloggers have gotten sucked into the spectacle. apparently you can now get money if you can prove jeff
slept with anyone important he's the next monica! how funny though that for the republicans it's a gay man with a military fetish.
remember there is a war going on over in iraq? genocide in the sudan? roll back of environmental rules? the u.s. wasn't part of kyoto?
tsunami?
i saw
hotel rwanda and it was upsetting and sobering. my friend got really upset and angry, and wanted to know why no one did anything
maybe we were watching o.j. get chased by the cops, very slowly, right
around then ?
i'm just saying.
apple madness
the apple store of the future! i so clearly must have a YogaMac. and ThoughtPort! it's too bad that there aren't links for more details... i am intrigued by iTug but i suspect that women aren't the target market.
social networks
the requisite sarcastic commentary about
friendsterof course, we all really love friendster because it allows us to find old friends, realize that some of them actually know each other (!) and to get in touch with boys you hook up with that you thought you would never have a chance to talk to again.
the gates and neighborhood parks
the gates are a success. even
Starquest has concluded as such. even if from the ground they may look like some odd home depot shower curtain promotion (i suggest going at dusk, when the sun is lower and the gates look less like hazard orange; also the lamps peeking through the panels are a visual treat). and of course, this being new york, there are the inevitable spinoffs - both
edible and
minature.
while it probably doesn't beat the view from various multimillion dollar central park perimeter penthouses, i'm sure the folks up at the space station are suitably impressed, given that the Gates are visible from
outer space. i'm sure they have better optical sensors too.
Steve Colbert from the Daily Show considers the Gates a prime example of how
$21 million can be used to decorate a bike path.
if only our public spaces were really funded to the tune of millions! sadly, such princely sums are typically reserved for mayoral pet projects and iconic parks, especially when they are privately raised as the funding for the Gates was. consider that $21 million is approximately 10% of the annual operating budget of the entire
New York City Parks department to take care of every neighborhood park and playground. the FY06 mayor's preliminary budget proposes a $10 million (5%) cut in parks funding. take the time send a letter to bloomberg
here. writing a letter to a politician actually works, especially if enough people do it - you're taking up their valuable staff time in just the processing of these things - they pay attention to what you write in about.
the Gates are a good thing and the more public art the better. let's just not forget about the small gems in our neighborhoods. you know, the ones where the tourists don't blindly walk into you, because they aren't there in the first place.
