Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

• Last weekend’s Trib had a good article about the need for the city to work with architects and developers to ensure a proper sense of aesthetics is maintained, and I saw a good example of its lack today. On a stroll to the bank, I noticed that the stretch of Wacker across from the Merc is now dominated by four consecutive glass-and-metal towers. (Um, yeah, I’ve worked in one of them for several years and the remainder have been up for at least several months now. It’s not really news. Just you nevermind that.) Individually, each one is fine: all but 111 S Wacker have setbacks and/or curvilinear profiles, and they all have decent landscaping and atria at ground level. Yet it struck me today how overwhelming it is to have a two-block wall of polished metal and glass, it’s a bit much. Okay, so I’m biased in that I strongly prefer masonry, matte metal, and window divisions to the glass-box look, I’m sure there are those who really like the shiny-streetwall effect. But it’s hard to argue that variety is good, and it just seems a shame that the builders plunge forth with their vision without really considering how it will connect with it surroundings. Ever notice that the renderings for the next great skyscraper, office tower, or condo block always show the structure with little else but a few trees and cars about? Maybe that’s plausible downstate or in the sprawling west, but urban developers should be a bit more honest.
• Found some impressive imagery over at Antonia Cidadao’s Lunar and Planetary Time-lapse Animations page. Definitely check out the one entitled Lunation–definitely gives the sense that the Moon is an entity, a place, not just a light in the sky.
• More economists like this, please:
  

  the link between cause and effect is often not easy or obvious. Economies are constantly being affected by a myriad of economic forces, both external and domestic. As such, it is dangerous to casually say that any one particular economic force must be causing any one particular economic outcome. The world is extremely complicated, and there’s no reason to think that economic relationships are anything but extremely complicated as well.

  Is it foolish to hope we’ll every get to the point when people will stop believing the pol who claims that propserity was caused–or will be restored–by the amazing grace of policy X?
• Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science

Time to clear out some links I thought might be worthy of commentary…

• Blue Ball Machine Stupid and pointless, but oddly mesmerizing. Just like much of the world wide web.
• Tinfoil hats attract mind-control signals, boffins learn Uh…the title is quite enough.
• Screwcap Savvy. On one level I’m perfectly aware that good screwcaps are no longer an indicator of cheap wine, but I do remember being momentarily suprised during our Sydney vacation when waiters in a couple of restaurants opened our bottles with a twist of the wrist rather than a corkscrew. However, the reason I posted this link was that it’s the first time I’ve seen wine and light sabers discussed in the same story.
• History’s Worst Software Bugs; Some Technologies Will Annoy. Evidence against the movement towards all-wired, all-in-one, always-connected technology. As if incessant cellphones and inexplicable ‘check engine’ lihts weren’t enough of a reminder.
• Gravity-Powered Asteroid Tractor Proposed to Thwart Impact. The realities of astronautical physics and technology aren’t nearly as slick as the movies, but it’s still impressive that we’ve got a plausible method for redirecting an asteroid. Too bad that promising glitz and glam, rather than the slower plod of reality, is the better way to get decent science funding.
• NASA Axes Space Station Research. Yep, to be effective ISS needs to be safe. (And, well, completing the damn thing wouldn’t hurt either.) Yet it seemed obvious to me back in the late ’80s that, despite the promises, ISS would be so expensive to build and maintain that it wouldn’t be cost-effective as a platform for cutting-edge science and technology. And now here we are.
• Repairing Journalism. Sydney H. Schanberg suggests that journalists should consider promises of anonymity null and void upon discovery that the source was disingenous. Good idea. We need to go further into a wider examination–for journalism, law, and politics–regarding the proper conditions for putting names and statements out of public view.
• Pump Some Seriousness Into Energy Policy Wow, I never thought I’d read such a staunch conservative advocating higher taxes on anything, let alone the gasoline. His arguments for ANWR drilling don’t persuade me, but some of the others aren’t half bad.

• The rumblings began again today about the CTA’s desire to raise the standard fare to $2. Anyone surprised? Anyone not see this coming last May, or January, or last fall? Just raise the damn fare like should have been done last year and be done with it so we can at least have a couple years of peace before the CTA faces its next budget catastrophe! At least that way there may be some time to actually put some clueful management (and government officials) in place.
• A Wine of Character, but How Many Miles to a Gallon?
  This wouldn’t be much of a story except for the mental picture of the French getting all tied in a knot over sandbagging some wine (and of course blaming it, at least in part, on those damn Americans). How is it that a bottle of cote-du-rhone goes for $1.40 there and $9 here? Anyway, I also found it amusing–althought slightly exasperating–to read descriptions of putting chardonnay, champagne, and pinot noir into the fuel tank, nevermind that all the good tasty bits that make any of them wine are completely removed by the time the ethanol comes out.
• A Time For McCain?

  So the small-government right and the big-government left are equally exhausted. The only appealing political platform is good government.

  A great idea to rally behind. Unfortunately, between the legions of what’s-in-it-for-me voters and those who aren’t savvy enough to differentiate good public officials from bad (whether by analysis of rhetoric or performance), I fear that there won’t be enough collective gumption to vote proper people into office and accept the necessary sacrifices to move us from current state to ‘good government’.
• ArchitectureChicago Plus Blog Overrun - The Death of Marshall Field’s and the Dissolution of the Sense of Place
  What saddened and irritated me about the Field’s decision was the absolute triumph of cold corporate mentality over any sense of cultural goodwill. The management decided that the intangible specialness felt by generations of Chicagoans simply couldn’t compete with the possiblity of the masses of non-Chicago management and shareholders could save a fraction of a penny per share in advertising costs. Instead, they absolutely know that I would rather save $1 per year with a much more nationally homogenized set of offerings. Wow, in the face of such amazing consideration of the wants and desires of the Chicago consumer…why would I want to give these people my business again?

• An idea doesn’t have to be right to be important, so long as it gets people thinking in a new way.

  – Michael S. Turner on Alan Guth’s original inflation theory, S&T, November 2005
• Cassini-Huygens flyby of Tethys and Hyperion
  Once again, Cassini provides us fantastic imagery!