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Eric Fischer
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| I knew for a while that there were web sites that would show you the current locations of planes in flight, but I only recently found out that some of them also have archives going back several years where you can look up the routes of old flights if you can dig up the flight number and date. So, thanks to fboweb, here is where some of the planes that I've been on went:
I had no idea I had flown between northern and southern California so many times. Apparently I used to be a lot more comfortable with flying than I am now. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| One of the reasons I'm such a packrat is that every one in a while, something that I read a long time ago will percolate to the top of my mind, and it's nice to be able to be able to grab whatever it was off the shelf and read it again. But that doesn't help me if what I read was in somebody's blog somewhere and I can't find it any more.
What I'm thinking about right now was somebody's blog entry about how the UK has regulations about what hours grocery stores can be open that are intended to help little mom-and-pop stores at the expense of big chain supermarkets. But since you can't write a law that says exactly that, what they have instead is one saying that stores under 2500 square feet can stay open late and stores larger than that have to close early. Actually it used metric units instead of square feet, but you get the idea.
The blog entry went on to say that the unintended consequence of the law is that it does not actually cause mom-and-pop stores to automatically do better than big chain supermarkets; instead it causes the chains to try to operate stores smaller than 2500 square feet so they can stay open late too. And, says the blog, it is very difficult to run a full-service supermarket in a space of this size (even a smallish normal supermarket is about ten times as big), so inventory management is very important, so the chain that does the best is the one with the best computers. Naturally I can't remember which chain it is that has the best computers.
Does this ring a bell with anybody else? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| It was a nice weekend to be walking around San Francisco. Sunday afternoon I tried to reproduce the angles of a bunch of pictures I took 8 or 9 years ago. Some things have changed, others haven't.
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| Maybe the ultimate new-old bicycle is the Flying Pigeon. Apparently this is the classic Chinese bicycle, cloned from a 1932 Raleigh (down to the "The All-Steel Bicycle" label!) in 1950 and built nearly unchanged ever since. This one (apparently from 2003 or 2006) is chained up outside work:
I can't get over the rod-operated brakes! There is a hole in the basket mount for the front-wheel brake rod to go through, and it seems amazing that the one for the back wheel can work while being flexible enough not to get in the way of steering. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Last night was Safeway's open house for their planned rebuilding of their 51st and Broadway store in Oakland.
Basically they want to tear down their existing strip mall and build a new strip mall with more or less the same layout, but minus the enormous and extremely useful 24-hour Longs Drugs, and plus a row of new buildings atop a parking garage turning their backs on the street.
It's got to be a hard site to actually design something good for, with its weird deep L shape, bordered by cliffs, a reservoir, two traffic-sewer streets, and two commercial buildings they don't control, with a slope that puts part of it above the street and part below. But what a disappointment, especially in comparison to all their efforts to do something good at College and Claremont.
Meanwhile, there are new pedestrian-hating traffic lights going up at MacArthur and Broadway. Bah. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| In case anyone was wondering whether traditional Raleigh handlebars are exactly the same as the "North Road" handlebars you can buy today, the answer is... not quite.
Well, to begin with, the Raleigh handlebars are steel and the modern ones are aluminum. But aside from that, the modern handlebars (on top in the picture) are slightly wider than the old ones, don't come forward quite as far on the curves, and come back a little further at the ends.
The modern ones are the Sunlite 3306 Alloy Touring Handlebar, also known as the Pyramid Touring North Road. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| ... is an old bike. Because one way to find a bike that feels like the ones they used to make in the old days is to get one that they actually did make in the old days.
(1974 Raleigh Sports) | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| | And of course I should have searched a little more. The 1917 Indianapolis Municipal Code enumerates all the street renamings up through that date, and it turns out that it was May 14, 1915 when Bellefontaine was renamed to Guilford north of Fall Creek. The section north of Kessler must have survived with the old name even after that date because Broad Ripple was not annexed to Indianapolis until 1922. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| One of the random oddities in the world when I was growing up was the sidewalk inscription "Bellefontaine" at some street corners along Guilford Ave. (They're all gone now, after some reconstruction.) Indianapolis still has a Bellefontaine Street, much further south, and the story went that once upon a time it had run all the way to Broad Ripple.
IUPUI, it turns out, has scans of a bunch of old maps online, and the 1927 Baist Atlas shows what is now Guilford being called Bellefontaine, but north of Kessler, while it was already Guilford to the south. But maybe the two Bellefontaines did connect even longer ago.
Other things that jump out at me on this map: Carrolton north of Kessler is called Ashland. Kessler is still called 59th east of College. Fall Creek Parkway by the Fairgrounds is called Allisonville Free Gravel Road! Part of Westfield is also called the Westfield Gravel Road. Winthrop ends between 60th and 61st, and then picks up again as Cornell. There are two Coil Streets -- the present Coil and also the block of 62nd between Guilford and Winthrop.
Hardly any Forest Hills houses had been built yet. The crazy scary big compound between Guilford and Carrolton north of Kessler was there: "E. J. Jacoby, 2 1/2 A." The name of the restaurant "Mustard's Provincial Kitchen" that used to be in the old lumber yard must have been a reference to Mustard's Addition, the name of the subdivision it was in. Broad Ripple High School already had its current site.
The northwest city limits were at the White River. Kessler ended and Spring Mill Road began at the river crossing. You can still see the old diagonal route of Spring Mill east of the river in the planting pattern.
By the 1941 edition, Bellefontaine was gone and the area was pretty much built up. The Meridian and College bridges had been built.
From 1941 there is also a Sanborn map, which reveals that the Indiana Bell building was built in 1937. More Sanborn maps: southern Broad Ripple, northern Broad Ripple, southern Forest Hills. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This is a Huffy Cranbrook, one of many scattered around at work to help get people to distant buildings and back.
By most rational standards, they are terrible bikes: they creak and groan, the pedals threaten to fall off, the brakes barely work. It's about what you would expect from a bicycle that you can buy for $75 brand new. But at the same time, as you ride one, the bike seems to be quietly saying: You could do this all day. And I think I probably could.
I don't think most bikes say that. I think most of them say things like: You could be going faster if you pushed a little harder. And I think I probably could, but I think I like the other message better.
I suspect that somewhere there exists a bike that has this endurance-enabling feeling *and* is made with quality materials. Maybe I will be able to find it. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zdashamber asked how the new handlebars are working out. They are the Wald 803, by the way.
The most objective thing I can say is that they are very wide. The original handlebars were 23" from end to end; these are 28". It feels kind of clumsy now trying to go through confined spaces.
On the other hand, I feel like I am having an easier time going up hills. I don't know why this should be. Maybe it puts me in a more vertical position for pushing on the pedals when standing up, but it also seems to help when seated. For flat surfaces, I don't think it really makes a whole lot of difference. I feel like I am pushing a little harder to go the same speed, and maybe I am. But at the same time I think I am putting less pressure on my wrists. I'm not sure if it's a good tradeoff.
I think maybe I should also try out some North Road or similar handlebars that don't have so much of a rise but do come back further and aren't so wide.
Bonus picture: homemade bike route stencils on Shafter at 42nd. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I'm kind of amazed no one seems to have posted this before, but, well, then let me be the first. This is the photographic density (the number of unique locations photographed per unit area of surface) of the world, based on 18 million geotagged photos from Flickr and 9.5 milion from Picasa. Click through for larger versions.
In the absence of some sort of insightful analysis, let me just say that Europe is amazingly well photographed, the United States somewhat well photographed, and, with the exception of some coastal areas, the rest of the world not so much. Sorry about the distorted-looking map, but an equal-area projection seemed like the right thing for a density plot.
Edited to add: Oops, David Crandall did already plot this. Oh well, it's not like it was a particularly original idea. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Long long ago I looked at the Census journey-to-work statistics and concluded that the only cities in the US where anyone actually walks anywhere are New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC. I still think that's probably pretty close to the truth. Today in the New York Times, Witold Rybczynski agrees that there are only six viable places to go without a car in the US, except he thinks that two of them are in Manhattan! | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| May 8 will, of course, always be best known as the date of the 1985 School 84 Carnival. I had to be prompted for the date when announcing it on the Janie Show, but I'll never forget it again.
But it also turns out that it was ten years ago today that I bought my bike, from Rapid Transit Cycleshop in Chicago. So it's a nice coincidence that it was last night that I finally installed a kickstand on it and got everything mounted and hooked up again on the shiny new handlebars.
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| | I hereby declare "what we talk about when we talk about" to be the Snowclone of the Year. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| The news today is abuzz with reports that you can make maps from the metadata of geotagged photos. Good thing I already posted some very similar-looking maps so I don't feel like a copycat.
But before anyone beats me to it, let me declare what appear to be the 10 Best Places in North America, based on small-scale clustering of these same photos (combining Flickr and Picasa data sets). The premise is that people take pictures when they are engaged with their environment and feel happy, safe, and interested, and that the larger the contiguous extent of such areas, the better. (I am considering two photos to be contiguous if they were taken within 200 feet of each other, but not at exactly the same place, by different people.)
| 1. New York City |
| 2. San Francisco |
( Places 3-10 ) | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| Two years after the construction of a sidewalk along the road into Google, somebody thought to move the Stop line back and paint a crosswalk there so people in cars will know that they should stop before the crossing instead of on top of it. Thanks, whoever did that.
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| | If I ruled Oakland, I would build some sort of ramp between the southern dead end of Richmond Ave and the eastern dead end of 28th Street, so that there could be a back-streets bike route from downtown Oakland via Kaiser Plaza, Valdez, 28th Street, Richmond Ave, 29th Street, the Grocery Outlet parking lot, 30th Street, Richmond Blvd, Warren/Westall Ave, and Piedmont Ave. Or maybe it's not worth the trouble. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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Eric Fischer
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