Tertiarymatt

In this day and age, video gamers have so many choices. Companies spend billions of dollars a year trying to develop the most graphically advanced games they can. And yet, with simpler strategy games such as Sid Meier’s Civilization V, gamers can arguably input more hours of gameplay in those games than they can in any big name release.

Sometimes simple is better.

Civ V is a turn-based video game developed by Firaxis Games. In Civ, the player chooses a historical leader and leads their civilization from prehistoric times into the future. The end of the game is reached either when the player reaches the year 2050, or they achieve one of a number of different victories through research, exploration, diplomacy, expansion, economic development, government and military conquest.

It was released in September 2010, but with expansions in 2012 and 2013, the developers took an already addictive game and gave players even more ways to win and achieve their goals. What makes this simple (by comparison) strategy game so addictive?

One of the main reasons is that you are forced to think. Civ V is a strategy game, meaning you need to think about how you want to play the game and how you can achieve your victory. With most other video games, you follow a set story line and “win” the game when you complete the ending they have already thought out. However, Civ not only allows the player to decide how they would like to play the game, but their actions directly affect the final outcome.

For example, say the player wants to achieve through military conquest, they are going to have a much different experience and outcome in comparison to the player looking to win through science. The military player will probably have many cities they have taken and very little allies, while the science player could have the opposite. Being able to strategize and think about your play style makes for a more in-depth and engaging experience.

There is also the chance for surprises. Between the AI leaders and barbarians, players are constantly struggling to earn their victories while also responding to what’s around them. You can plan to build your knowledge and technology, but if you don’t have any military units, and France decides to declare war on you, then you’re kind of screwed.

Another reason simpler games can be better is because they are easier to put down and pick back up. When you are playing a game that’s very story-heavy, it’s hard to quit the game and return at a later time. It may take you awhile to get back into the story, or you may decide to start over in order to get reinvested in the game.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all about the story and will play games again and again if the story intrigues me enough. But with games like Civ, it’s much easier to stop the game, leave for an hour and get right back into the gameplay without missing a beat. However, this is easily the reason why these types of games are so addictive.

It’s easier to keep going and going with a game when there is no end plot. When you do try to pull away, you find yourself saying, “Well, just one more turn…eh, maybe another turn. I swear I will stop after this turn!” Five hours later. “Mmmm…one more turn.” You are so invested in how you are playing the game and how you are going to win that you can’t pull yourself away.

Of course, with multiplayer you can drag your friends into the addiction as well. It’s easy enough to play against the computer. But when you are playing against your friends, it adds another level of play. Not only are you strategizing your next move, but you’re also able to think about who you are playing against and try to predict their moves. Which victory are they more likely to go for? What move are they most likely to do next? And why the hell did they conquer that city-state when they KNEW you were going for it, that son of a bitch!

Contrary to popular belief, most gamers actually like to be challenged when they play. They like to be able to think and to plot. But what is probably most important is the replay-ability. With numerous victories, leaders and expansions, Civ 5 has plenty of content to keep gamers entertained for years to come.

Body mass and vocal pitch don’t always match. Male koalas have deep, rumbling vocalizations, an unexpectedly low sound that might normally be associated with wild boars or a huge braying beast the size of an elephant instead of a small herbivore. And now we know why…

In a study published in the journal Current Biology, scientists describe a second, much larger pair of vocal folds located outside of the larynx that creates the unique mating sound. From National Geographic (which has a great “animal body mass to vocal pitch” chart): 

Koala bellows have a pitch about 20 times lower than they should be given the animals’ size… Male koala bellows, for instance, are so fearsome that sound designers used recordings of them to create the T. rex roars in the movie Jurassic Park…

Study co-author Benjamin Charlton, of the University of Sussex in the U.K., explained in a statement that during inhalation, koala bellows sound like snoring, and during exhalation, they sound more like belching.

In the archives: more koala videos.

toru-meow:

Russian traditional architrave - “nalichnik” - still can be found even in a big cities.

Some of those was made in XIX century.

http://nalichniki.com/en/ 

beautiful

“Throughout U.S. history, our military has been used not for moral purposes but to expand economic, political, and military power,” says a cartoon Howard Zinn in Mike Konopacki’s 273-page comic book A People’s History of American Empire. Written with Zinn and historian Paul Buhle, the book adapts Zinn’s pathbreaking history from below, A People’s History of the United States, and his autobiography You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train in a direct examination of the U.S. Imperium. Konopacki calls the book his “answer” to the textbooks of “the power structure.” (Explore highlights from the comic history here.)

Above, you can see a short video adaptation of some key text from A People’s History of American Empire. Narrated by Viggo Mortensen, the video gives us a nutshell version of Zinn’s cultural, political, and moral education—what the Germans used to call bildung—as he grows from a somewhat naive WWII bomber pilot, to a college student on the G.I. Bill, to a graduate student, then professor, of history. Along the way he notices that the map in every textbook labeled “Western Expansion” shows “the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon”:

That huge acquisition of land called the Louisiana Purchase gave no hint of anything but vacant land acquired, no sense that this territory was occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes that would have to be annihilated or forced out of their homes in what we now call ethnic cleansing.

Zinn goes on to chart the rise of U.S. Imperialism into the twentieth century as the increasingly militarized nation seizes Mexican territory and invades Cuba and the Philippines. Then we come to the ostensibly anti-communist “police actions” in Korea and Vietnam, and Zinn’s highly influential 1967 book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. When entrusted by Daniel Ellsberg with hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers, Zinn learns that the war in Vietnam is largely waged for the same reasons as our other imperialist moves abroad: the papers “spoke bluntly of the U.S. motives as a quest for tin, rubber, oil.”

But what of the war Zinn begins with, the war in which he fought? Near the end of the short film, he returns to his days as a WWII bomber, when he heard a fellow pilot argue that the U.S. was as “motivated by ambitions of control and conquest” as its enemies. He disagreed at the time, but in the intervening years came to see his fellow airman’s point. What we get with our idealism about any war, Zinn says, is a seeming “Imperialism lite,” whose motives are benign. Soft power, we’re told, wins the day now. But peel back the curtain on our actions in the world, and we will see the same atrocities, the same cruelties, and the same basic motivations as every other act of imperialist aggression.

Related Content:

Howard Zinn Dies at 87

Welcome to the Plutocracy! Bill Moyers Presents the First Howard Zinn Lecture

Pulitzer Prize Winner Picks Essential US History Books

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Watch an Illustrated Video of Howard Zinn’s “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire” is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

An article on slashdot brought to my attention that Elsevier--Academic Publisher and Intellectual Gangster--is going after authors for sharing their own work. According to the terms of their ridiculous agreements they are probably legally entitled to take this course of action. Of course, that doesn't make it right.

I haven't really written here before on the travesty that is academic publishing.  Once upon a time I was incredibly naive about it, thinking that it must function something like the way all other publishing works, just with less/no money involved for the author(s). When I found out what the actual terms of many publishers are like, I was appalled (note, they have improved, slightly, since then).

Don't be fooled by the use of Creative Commons for the Open Access version of Elsevier publications. To publish on the OA model with a big publisher costs a lot of money: as much as $5,000 for prestigious journals.  It's true that PLOS charges up to $2,900 to publish a paper, but they also don't turn around and charge $39 for access to said paper, or engage in shady journal bundling for institutions. The bulk of PLOS's funding comes from those fees, and they have a tiered pricing setup for those who cannot pay.

I recognize that journal publishers used to provide essential, vital services; to some extent, they still do. But the most important component of academic publishing--the review and critique of work by peers of the author in their field--is conducted by unpaid researchers. Yes, a nice layout is useful (though I'd argue the old print layouts are not optimum for the web and non-printed pdfs), and LaTeX is a pain in the ass for authors that aren't mathematicians or physicists. But libraries don't really want print copies anymore, and distribution on the web is relatively inexpensive (hence academic publishers making money hand over fist).

Frankly, I find the way the academic publishers have been stripping publications rights from authors and reaming institutions in pursuit of the bottom-line to be repellent. I'd greatly prefer to have no part of it.
I want to sign on with the boycott, and have nothing to do with them.

The problem is that I am a graduate student. I am expected to publish. And who publishes all the top journals in my field? Urban Ecosystems? Springer. Ecological Indicators? Elsevier. The other options are mostly with ESA, who--while getting better, and making an honest attempt to grapple with these problems--still could improve.  Little journals like Ecology and Society are less costly, and have reasonable copyright policies... and low impact factors.

So what can I do? I am frustrated by the fact that if I want to advance my career, I almost certainly have to deal with these companies, due to the narrow range of journals available.

What do you intended to do?

As a politician who's neither from Detroit, nor remotely associated with it, nor even attached to the political party that people in Detroit tend to support, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul seems like an unlikely suspect to volunteer his thoughts on how to save the bankrupt city (he also opposed the auto bailout that rescued at least some jobs in town).

But there he was on Friday, opening up a Republican "African American Engagement Office" in the Motor City, delivering a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, and trying to convince residents of how his ideas could help them "bail themselves out."

Paul's case seems like a long shot in a city that gave 97 percent of its vote to Barack Obama in 2012. Detroit's population also has the highest share of blacks of any major city in the U.S., and that's a demographic that Obama won nationwide by a stunning 95 percent. But by foraying deep into a Democratic, majority-minority city, Paul has at least drawn attention to the rocky (often nonexistent) relationship between the Republican Party and urban voters more broadly. As he put it in a call with reporters on Thursday:

"You look at the red-blue map of the United States, almost all the rural small cities are red, and almost all the big cities are blue. I think Republicans as a party, myself included, need to do more in the cities, and I think instead of saying, hey, the free market floats all boats, we need to specifically come in with plans for areas."

His blunt assessment of his party's recent approach to urban voters is a start: "We lose all the big cities," he lamented in his speech Friday, awkwardly adding that the GOP needs voters with "tattoos, ponytails, and earrings."

Much more has been made of the demographic hurdle Republicans face nationally if they don't do a better job courting Hispanics. The same is true, however, of big cities (however you describe the people who live there).

On some issues, Paul – a libertarian-leaning Republican – is sincerely speaking to the concerns of urban voters. He's vocal about the damage of the war on drugs, and the disproportionate impact that over-incarceration has on minority communities. But the crux of his pitch is an economic one. He plans to introduce a bill in the Senate on Monday that would create "Economic Freedom Zones” in distressed places like Detroit. Here is CNN's description of the plan:

In places where the unemployment level is at or greater than 1.5% of the national rate, the Senator wants to create taxes "so low that essentially you're able to bail yourselves out."

The bill would reduce income taxes to 5% and eliminate capital gains taxes. The payroll tax would also go down for both the employee and the employer, he said.

The key to the bill, however, is that only businesses that are seeing success would enjoy the benefits.

Paul says he wants to support growing businesses, not bail out failing ones. A Republican proposal to explicitly invest in cities would be a novel one these days, but his message may not resonate with struggling families who need more than a tax break on the little income they already have.

Paul also spoke on the eve of his trip to Detroit about the need for Republicans to "find out what's going on" in urban communities, and then come up with solutions for them. That's not exactly what he's done here, turning up for the engagement while carrying the answers at the same time. At least it will be interesting to watch what happens next. (You can also watch some of Paul's speech here).

Top image: Jason Reed/Reuters

One of the great sustainability challenges of the 21st century is revitalizing poorly planned and outdated suburban neighborhoods and commercial districts, consistent with contemporary goals for enhancing walkability and transit access, delivering a sense of place, and doing so in a way that works for both existing and new neighbors. I'm all in for urban revitalization, and in many cities we are making great progress at reviving centrally located neighborhoods. But suburbs present a different set of problems to confront, including greater automobile dependence, lower densities, and a relative lack of people-friendly infrastructure. 

We need more and better models of suburban revitalization, and not just in growing affluent areas where investment dollars are relatively easy to come by. What about in places where it remains pragmatically important to accommodate drivers, and where change can occur only gradually, over time?

Before. Courtesy of Dover Kohl.

After. Courtesy of Dover Kohl.

The South Miami Hometown district may be providing such a model. Here's a description from the website Build a Better Burb:

During a 1992 community planning process, residents of the City of South Miami – a suburb of Miami – said over and over again, 'We want our Main Street back.' The City subsequently adopted a Hometown Plan and created the Hometown District Overlay Code, aimed at making the downtown more people-friendly.  

Emphases of the Hometown Plan included transit-oriented development (South Miami has a rail rapid transit station by its downtown), protection for historic structures, pedestrian improvements, and adding residential uses to accommodate a diverse range of incomes. South Miami's downtown now has revitalized commercial activity, several new and renovated buildings, wider sidewalks, traffic calming features, and a new municipal parking garage lined with restaurants.

Indeed, just the addition of street trees and landscaping features makes a huge difference to the pedestrian experience.

Before. Courtesy of Dover Kohl.

After. Courtesy of Dover Kohl.

Check out the before and after photos accompanying this article, along with some street views from Google Earth. The Sushi restaurant is on the ground floor of the parking garage.

The planners and the city placed special emphasis on a block of 59th Avenue, known locally as Dorn Avenue. The block leads directly to a crosswalk to the transit station. The planning firm Dover Kohl & Partners, which guided the process for the city, explains why:

To show the potential for a better South Miami, emphasis was placed on demonstration projects. Neighbors, homebuyers, businesses, investors, and bankers needed their confidence restored. The idea was to choose an area (however small) [and] then totally transform it to create as dramatic and visible an impact as possible. Instead of spending precious funding across large areas, public funds were initially concentrated on these areas.

The block, images just below, does indeed look amazingly better to this observer’s eyes after its makeover.

Dorn Ave, looking toward the transit station, before. Courtesy of Dover Kohl.

Dorn Ave, after. Courtesy of Dover Kohl.

Streetscape inprovements, Sunset Drive at Dorn Ave. Courtesy of Dover Kohl.

I can’t say the neighborhood is perfect when measured against all popular urbanist parameters. Noodling around Google Earth, I found a five-lane, drive-through ATM just a block or so off the main commercial street; surface parking lots still abound in the neighborhood; to get to the transit station from the main street or from Dorn Avenue, one must cross a six-lane thoroughfare. 

 
Five-lane ATM, South Miami

But the imperfections are part of what makes this example so important. We must be able to show progress even where we are unable to show perfection. Like it or not, rapid and comprehensive change isn’t available in much of America. In the case of South Miami’s Hometown District, the city has a great master plan that will continue to guide further investment and progress toward walkability as more opportunities come up. Meanwhile, what the suburb has achieved so far is really impressive.

Sunset Drive, South Miami before (inset) and after. Courtesy of Dover Kohl.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC's Switchboard blog, an Atlantic partner site.

Though they may run counter to conventional wisdom, these 10 research-backed policy ideas could reduce crime in the United States. Here’s how—and why.

1. Divert juveniles from the juvenile justice system. Talk of super-predators and the Knock-Out Game reinforce stereotypes of marauding teenagers that need to be locked away for the good of society. But there's no proof that prison reduces future offending; instead, it may harden them as criminals. Many states are successfully moving toward the Missouri Model, which focuses on rehabilitation in the community, and raising the age when juveniles are automatically processed in the adult system.

2. Respect residents of high-crime neighborhoods. Stop and frisk and "broken windows" focus on suppressing crime in dangerous places. But by assuming anyone in a dangerous place is a potential criminal, these policies strain the police-community relationship and make it harder for police to gain trust and, ultimately, solve crimes. A better solution is for police to integrate themselves into neighborhoods and become part of the community.

3. Respect defendants in court. Judges lecturing defendants at sentencing make everyone feel like justice is served, but it is actually counterproductive. Defendants who face judges who listen to them, understand their problems, and assist them into and through therapy are less likely to re-offend.

4. Respect convicted offenders. Getting tough on crime may have reduced crime, but it's come at enormous costs fiscally—and to communities . It is cheaper and more effective to rehabilitate returning prisoners than to incarcerate them.

5. Take bullying seriously. Bullying used to be perceived as a natural part of growing up, a way to toughen kids up to face the harsh realities of adulthood. But being bullied leads to truancy and dropping out of school, which are associated with delinquency and a host of bad outcomes. Whole-school curriculums to combat bullying work and are creating a generation of better-adjusted kids (and are a vast improvement over zero-tolerance policies).

6. Aggressively investigate burglaries. Traditionally, police in busy agencies do not investigate residential burglaries, preferring to save precious resources for more serious crimes. But it's not as though criminals simply graduate from burglaries to more serious stuff—research shows that burglars, particularly those caught via DNA evidence, already have long track records of serious offending.

7. Collect DNA from everyone. Using DNA evidence to aid investigations has been shown to be cost-effective, and expanding databases will only increase that effectiveness. It also has the potential to create a more just system. For example, if you are concerned that minorities are disproportionately coming in contact with the criminal justice system, expanded DNA databases will increase the pool of potential suspects beyond minorities currently over-represented in the system.

8. Encourage immigration. It is a popular narrative in virtually every culture around the world that immigrants are more crime-prone than natives. But research finds that it is not true. Places with clusters of immigrants tend to have crime rates well below what would be predicted based on their socioeconomic status.

9. Encourage gentrification. Research finds that places that are integrated have less crime than places that are economically and racially segregated. And, when a crime-ridden place gentrifies, much of the crime does not follow the residents who leave. It simply disperses. That is because the crime was about an infected place, not about the residents who live there.

10. Provide tips to "violence interrupters." Increasingly, cities are turning models like CureViolence, where civilians—often former gang members themselves—insert themselves into disputes following shootings to try to avoid retaliation. Police resist this model on the grounds that it may reduce the amount of information that flows into a police investigation and that interrupters, to keep their credibility, do not communicate to the police. But, in the long-term, it is likely more productive to prevent new shootings than solve old ones.

Each of these policies has a coherent evidence base to support it. I offer one additional idea that does not, though it does seem logical and adheres to standard economic reasoning.

11. Offer tax credits for gun ownership. Research shows that legally purchased weapons (about 60 percent of all purchases) are much less likely to be used in street crimes than guns bought in secondary markets. Thus, a policy that rewards gun buyers for purchasing through a federally licensed dealer should shrink secondary markets over time, making it more difficult (and expensive) for criminals to acquire weapons.

Top image: SergeBertasiusPhotography /Shutterstock.com

This post originally appeared on the Urban Institute's MetroTrends blog, an Atlantic partner site.

....and since I'm here, here are some little friends of various types (click to enlarge):

As you can tell, this is Margaret! She is almost eleven years old,  and she lives on the Island, the map of which I posted last week. 

You’ll see more inhabitants of the Island soon!

As a recent piece in The Independent notes, “students of literate songwriting” are unsurprised to find references to T.S. Eliot scattered throughout the pop canon: Genesis, Manic Street Preachers, Arcade Fire… and of course, Bob Dylan. Dylan arguably makes reference to Eliot’s masterwork The Waste Land with the line “in the wasteland of your mind” from “When The Night Comes Falling from the Sky.” And in the penultimate verse of “Desolation Row,” he gives us an image of “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower.” As with every other line in the song, this could mean just about anything. But given Dylan’s admiration for The Waste Land, it could easily refer to the editorial tug-of-war between the two poets, as it was Pound who shaped Eliot’s poem into the work we have today. And then there’s the tower image so prominent in Eliot’s great poem, an occult motif Dylan returned to.

Just above, hear Dylan riff on the first four lines of The Waste Land for his XM Radio show Theme Time Radio Hour, which aired from May 2006 to April 2009. On the show, Dylan played records, responded to (fake) listener emails, read poetry, told jokes, and did musical bits, all in keeping with themes like “Money” and “Weather.” (You can catch two episodes a day on dylanradio.com). He reads Eliot in a faux-beat cadence—sounding like Tom Waits—with a juke joint piano banging away behind him. Dylan opens his reading with some brief commentary, telling us that Eliot’s poem “commemorated the death of Abraham Lincoln.” This throwaway line may just give us a fascinating glimpse into Dylan’s literary sensibilities. Knowing that Eliot’s lilacs refer to Lincoln seems almost certainly to indicate that Dylan knows they first refer to Walt Whitman, whose “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” directly commemorates Lincoln.

Of course, he isn’t going to tell us that, if he knows it, just like he won’t give anything away in “Desolation Row,” a song so filled with references to famous figures and works of art that it’s hard to tell how much is “original” Dylan and how much a patchwork of paraphrase. The distinction hardly matters, Dylan seems to suggest in his elision of Whitman. Eliot’s poem is, line by line, so much a collage of allusion and citation that there seems to be no Eliot at all, just a maniacal editor (or two). The first line of the poem—“April is the cruelest month”—traces in part to French Symbolist Jules Laforgue, one of Eliot’s favorites, who begins his “October’s Little Miseries” with “Every October I start to get upset.” And Eliot’s original title, “He Do the Police in Different Voices” comes verbatim from Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. As anyone who’s read Eliot in an academic setting knows, the list goes on, and on.

One of the effects of Eliot’s mastery of other people’s work (hear him read his poem above), which he could disassemble and make monstrously his own, is that his critics and fans will never tire of pulling apart his densely compressed verses and poking around inside them. Likewise Dylan. The latter never passed himself off as a poet explicitly (although he’s often read that way), but as a songwriter he’s spawned a cottage culture industry as productive as Eliot’s. Even his erstwhile radio show, in which he offered his own commentary and criticism, has its commentary and criticism from fans. I may never be convinced that songs—pop, folk, hip-hop, or otherwise—work the same way as poems, but if anyone figured out how to leap nimbly over whatever gap lies between them, Dylan certainly did. Maybe one of the connections he made is this: what seems to set both Dylan and Eliot apart from their peers is their compete disregard for notions of authenticity in favor of the play of “different voices”—impersonation, quotation, and homage to the artists they admire.

Related Content:

T.S. Eliot Reads His Modernist Masterpieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets

Bob Dylan Finally Makes a Video for His 1965 Hit, “Like a Rolling Stone”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Modernist Poem The Waste Land is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Making farts at the bus stop 

Bonaverde’s “Roast-Grind-Brew Coffee Machine” seemed like one of the cooler inventions I’ve recently stumbled upon. But then I came across this: The Copenhagen Wheel. Originally created by researchers at MIT, the Copenhagen Wheel “transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes.” It allows bike riders to “capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost” — like climbing a hill in San Francisco. The wheel also feeds data to your iPhone, allowing you to monitor pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time. After spending several years in development, the wheel can now be pre-ordered online and it will ship next spring. It retails for $699.

Get more background information on The Copenhagen Wheel via this MIT web site.

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David Byrne: From Talking Heads Frontman to Leading Urban Cyclist

The Physics of the Bike

 

Turn Your Bike into an Electric Hybrid with MIT’s “Copenhagen Wheel” is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

David Foster Wallace once came up with this academic definition of the Lynchian: “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” Twin Peaks, the famously David Lynch-created series that ran in ABC primetime in 1990 and 1991, gave American television its first strong shot of the Lynchian. Though the director who had earlier offered up Eraserhead and Blue Velvet would spend most of his creative energy later that decade on cinema — the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me, the twitchy neo-noir Lost Highway, and the seemingly heartwarming but deceptively grim The Straight Story — he followed up Twin Peaks by making more TV shows, expressing varying degrees of the Lynchian, and meeting with varying degrees of acclaim. These include the documentary series American Chronicles, the retro sitcom On the Air (which Wallace describes as “mercifully ablated”), and the more highly appreciated (if even lesser-known) HBO miniseries Hotel Room, all of whose three episodes you can watch above. Lynch directed, and Barry Gifford (collaborator on Lost Highway and Wild at Heart) wrote, the first and third episodes; the second comes directed by James Signorelli and written by Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney.

“For a millennium the space for the hotel room existed – undefined,” pronounces Lynch at the top of each chapter. “Mankind captured it and gave it shape and passed through. And sometimes when passing through, they found themselves brushing up against the secret names of truth.” All of Hotel Room‘s episodes play out in one such space in particular, number 603 of New York City’s Railroad Hotel. Each visits it in a different era, though, in typically Lynchian fashion, the hotel’s ageless maid and bellboy exist outside of time. The first story, set in 1969, finds 603 occupied by a prostitute, her hapless john Moe (played by Harry Dean Stanton), and a shady fellow who knows a bit too much about Moe’s past. The second, featuring Griffin Dunne and Mariska Hargitay, tells the then-present day tale of three fashionable young ladies and how they deal with one’s unstoppably amorous fiancée. The most enclosed and haunting of these chamber pieces happens during a blackout in 1936 wherein 603′s occupants, a couple played by Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt, make their way through a psychologically harrowing confrontation with the death of their son. While little in Hotel Room qualifies as “very macabre,” per se, the series still reflects a distinctive vision of America as a flat and colloquial yet crisply formal interplay of light and dark — one I can only call Lynchian.

Related Content:

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David Lynch’s Surreal Commercials

David Lynch and Interpol Team Up on Short Film

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

Watch David Lynch’s Hotel Room: The Complete Miniseries Featuring Harry Dean Stanton, Griffin Dunne, and Crispin Glover (1993) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

By now, you'd think that McDonald's would have learned the perils of offering its workers financial advice. First there was the PR flap when it handed out a budgeting guide that suggested employees would need two jobs to survive. Then there was the help-line where franchise staffers could learn how to apply for food stamps.

 

But, apparently the lesson hasn't sunk in. Yesterday, as fast-food workers around the country went on strike yet again to demand a living wage, CNBC reported that McDonald's had published an etiquette guide on a company website full of advice from Emily Post on how families should tip their help during the holidays. If you were a McDonald's worker with a pool cleaner, a personal trainer, or massage therapist, corporate had you covered. 

After the story ran, the guide was removed, but here's a screenshot courtesy of Time.

Let's acknowledge the obvious: Someone in the vast universe of McDonald's employees has a landscaper they need to tip. What's bizarre is the tone-deafness. McDonald's says the content was provided by a third party, but presumably someone inside the company vetted it (if not, why not?). And the same way telling employees to apply for federal welfare benefits, while thoughtful in its own way, looks terrible when your entire business model is identified with low wages, telling a cashier how to properly tip their dog walker comes off as callous.  It sounds like human resources telling is telling the company's entire low-wage workforce to go eat cake (bought, presumably, with food stamps).

Top image: A McDonald's patron reads a newspaper while a demonstrator dressed as Ronald McDonald protests for higher wages in Oakland, California. (Noah Berger/Reuters)

This post originally appeared on The Atlantic.

The Thames Barrier might be out of mind to many Londoners, but that doesn't mean it's not actively preventing a catastrophe. The important work of the mammoth, yellow-armed river giant is evident in the chilling image above, showing the vast regions of the city that would've gone underwater today had the barrier suddenly failed.

Of course, it's just a simulation; the barrier closed Thursday right in time for a monster tempest that forecasters said could deliver the U.K.'s biggest storm surge in 60 years. The dire prediction that this gusty weather-socking could be as bad as the dread North Sea Flood, a killer of roughly 2,500 people in 1953, did not come true, although there is a report that sea levels were higher this time around. Right now, the country is painted with flood warnings, and thousands of people are presumably miserable after the government evacuated them so they wouldn't be "swept into the sea." 

The 1953 flood was actually the reason that the U.K. started building storm barriers such as the Thames', which opened for business in the early '80s. The country's Environment Agency tweeted the flood-simulation map to remind everyone of its protective presence, standing calm and steely against millions of tons of frigid water. Explains the Wharf:

The Environment Agency has released a startling image of the impact of the tidal surge on east London if it had not been for the Thames Barrier.

It sees nearly all of land in around Canary Wharf, the Royal Docks and the Greenwich Peninsula submerged by water.

The flood would have also stretched over Rotherhithe.

It's probably no exaggeration. This photo, taken north of London at Whitley Bay, shows the kind of furious natural forces this particular storm generated:

PHOTO: Storm surge hits Whitley Bay - latest on #UKstorm http://t.co/IMSvZ5c9sQ & pic.twitter.com/djg6N12ENX

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) December 5, 2013

The barrier opened a few hours ago, as the worst of the foul weather seems to have passed. Now it's time for cleaning up and inspecting the country's various sea defenses. Let's all take a moment to give the king of them all, the Thames Barrier, a well-deserved salute:

Lambeth porpoises are in for a big surprise! RT @ThamesPics: Thames Barrier is now closed in response to #UKStorm pic.twitter.com/OYAO8bwRkD

— Floodplain (@floodplain_51) December 6, 2013

A round-up of the best stories on cities and urbanism we've come across in the last seven days.

"Thermal Waste May Be the Next Thing Heating our Cities," Adi Robertson, The Verge

Cities are polluting the air, ground, and water around them with heat. Roads and rooftops absorb sunlight, and swapping trees for pavement removes shade. Add all these factors together, and you get something called an "urban heat island," an air temperature increase of up to 22 degrees Fahrenheit as you get closer to a large city. While the average human is more likely to feel this in the air, these changes also create a well of heat below the ground — and that heat, ironically, can be used as renewable energy even as it changes the ecosystem. Now, thanks to a study from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we know just where most of it’s coming from, and how it could be better harnessed to replace traditional heaters and air conditioners.

"My City: Life as a Blind Architect in San Francisco," Alison Prato, TED Blog

On St. Patrick’s Day in 2008, Chris Downey, an architect, planner and consultant who lives in Piedmont, California, some 10 miles east of San Francisco, reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was a success. But two days later, his sight started to fail. On the third day, it was gone.

Remarkably, Downey managed to get back to work within months — and, he says, he never once thought of giving up his work in architecture. In his current role, as a consultant to architectural practices in San Francisco and beyond, he commutes to the city via public transportation four days a week. On the fifth day, he heads to UC Berkeley, where he teaches accessibility and universal design.

"Secret City Design Tricks Manipulate your Behavior," Frank Swain, BBC

When Selena Savic walks down a city street, she sees it differently to most people. Whereas other designers might admire the architecture, Savic sees a host of hidden tricks intended to manipulate our behaviour and choices without us realising – from benches that are deliberately uncomfortable to sculptures that keep certain citizens away.

Modern cities are rife with these “unpleasant designs”, says Savic, a PhD student at the Ecole Polytechnique Federerale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who co-authored a book on the subject this year. Once you know these secret tricks are there, it will transform how you see your surroundings. “We call this a silent agent,” says Savic. “These designs are hidden, or not apparent to people they don’t target.” Are you aware of how your city is manipulating you?

"The Fruits of Providing Cash Incentives for Healthy Eating in San Diego," Randy Dotinga, Voice of San Diego

Local advocates for the needy have warned for years about “food deserts” in poor communities that make it difficult for some residents to find affordable fruits and vegetables. Now, there’s a dose of good news: A new study says San Diego-area low-income residents got a big boost from a government program designed to encourage healthy eating and support farmers markets in poor neighborhoods like City Heights.

Thousands of local residents who get government assistance enrolled in the program and received vouchers to buy nutritious foods like produce, meat, bread and eggs at farmers markets. The participants spent about $330,000 from 2010-2011, or about $93 per person.

There are some caveats. No one knows whether any area residents actually became healthier as a result of the program, which has dwindled from its high point of serving several communities because of funding woes. And participants are only allowed to spend the extra money at farmers markets. They can’t use it to buy food at supermarkets, chain stores like Target or Costco or corner shops.

"Why Run a Slum If You Can Make More Money Housing the Homeless?" Andrew Rice, New York Magazine

Homelessness is a perpetual crisis in New York. Since a judge’s decision created a legal right to shelter in 1981, the city has consistently struggled to find appropriate shelter for its poorest citizens. During Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure, the homeless population metastasized, reaching a record level of 52,000 in September. There are many possible explanations, including policy decisions, such as the elimination of rental-subsidy programs. But the most compelling one is familiar to all: It’s harder than ever to find an affordable lease in New York. Market-rate rents have risen sharply, even as incomes have shrunk and the number of rent-regulated apartments has declined. (And stabilized units can cost as much as $2,500.) This viselike dynamic has squeezed one out of every 150 New Yorkers onto the streets.

Bloomberg’s critics—including Bill de Blasio—have cited this figure as one of the mayor’s most profound failures. To a few, though, it has represented an opportunity. The city will spend almost $800 million on shelters this year, $200 million more than in 2010, and it relies heavily on outsourced providers. “Any of us can look at the data pretty simply,” said one shelter operator, “and say it’s a growth business.”

Top image: Jo Ann Snover /Shutterstock.com

scienceyoucanlove:

Did you know a flower placed in highlighter fluid can absorb the fluorescent ink into its leaves and petals? Shining a black light onto it then reveals a delicate network of glowing veins. The colours in this amazing image by Boaz Ng are natural.

See more of Boaz Ng’s work:http://bit.ly/18xEFpn

source 

Yes.

I think this might be a hollow mask illusion? But I’m not sure. 

fuckyeahmortalinstruments:

Godfrey Gao | New Photoshoot

Perhaps you are a fancy man? A spy? A goth? One who enjoys a nice pipe?

Inside Adam Savage’s Cave: Awesome Robot Spider! (by Tested)

For all the spider lovers out there.

Super keen device. 

A comic about Christmas trees for people who hate Christmas trees.

Korean artist Do Ho Suh has created a life-size fabric replica of a three-story American house, inside of which is a replica of a traditional Korean home, for his large scale installation “Home Within Home Within Home Within Home Within Home.” Each replica represents a home Suh has lived in—the 39-foot-tall American house was Suh’s first residence in the United States (in Providence, Rhode Island), and the smaller structure is his family’s house in Seoul. The installation is on display at the Seoul branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea through May 11, 2014. For more of Suh’s work, see our previous posts.

photos via National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

via Wallpaper* Magazine, My Modern Metropolis

Start your morning right with vomit

medievalpoc:

thescienceofreality:

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[Edited: Make sure to read the full terms and agreements, and like most online course sites, do not expect this to act as a replacement for a real-life class unless any specific course you sign up for states it offers transferrable credits. Make sure you know most online-courses will not be recognized as a replacement for any part of any curriculum by credited educational institutions.]

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Wow! This is actually really great, and most of these classes seem to have sets of videotaped lectures for the classes!

now that is something