The Brunch Table

If you’ve ever wanted to know the financials for Pittsburgh-area public transit, here they are. Interestingly, the state provided 62% of the year 2000 operating expenses, which helps explain why the impending state funding cuts are triggering fare increases and service cuts. There will be a public hearing on the matter on June 12 (see the afore-linked article). For comparison, you can also check out the numbers for other transit systems.

Yesterday’s LA Times has an article about the trend toward fake gated communities. Shockingly, residents are finding that there are disadvantages to actually seceding from the surrounding city; for example, hiring their own trustworthy security forces, and maintaining their own streets. Still, people want the illusion of security:

Residents of Harbor View in Newport Beach recently remodeled the unmanned white guard shacks that stand at several entryways to the community. The shacks imply a private community, but anybody is free to come and go.

“They provide a sense of identity,” said Richard Gollis, a real estate consultant who lives there.

No comment necessary.

Apparently, you don’t even need to cut off someone else’s finger to fool one of those high-tech fingerprint scanners–fingertip copies made of gelatin will do the job. Japanese cryptographer Tsutomu Matsumoto was able to reliably fool eleven different commercially available fingertip scanners using $10 worth of readily available materials. He was even able to use fingerprints to make gummi fingers that fooled the readers. Oops.

The NHTSA is considering changing the classification rules for cars and trucks. If SUVs, minivans, and other weirdo things like the PT Cruiser are reclassified as cars rather than “light trucks”, automakers would likely be required to improve their fuel efficiency under CAFE.

Monkey Crisis! The US is apparently facing a “monkey deficit”; rhesus monkeys (the favorite flavor of mad scientists of all stripes) are getting harder to come by these days. They used to go for $100 a pop in the old days, but India clamped down on the supply in 1978 after they realized that we were using them for nefarious purposes. These days, the street price of a healthy female has ballooned to $6,000 – $14,000. The government is working to ease the pinch with eight federally funded primate centers.

Sony finally drops the price of the Playstation 2 to $199; Microsoft expected to follow suit.

A bunch of scrappy and creatively-spelled upstarts are competing to provide cheap intra-European fares: Ryanair, easyJet, Go, bmibaby, and buzz.

According to this article, the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency has partnered with area banks to offer regular transit riders home loans with no down payment. It’s nice to see real economic incentives attached to transit usage. The cynical part of me expects people to buy transit passes for a year (and keep driving) just so they can qualify for the better loan terms–after all, $420 for a year of subway passes is much less than a typical down payment. Still, I hope that it’ll enable some of Boston’s many transit riders to settle in good homes near transit.

I had finally gotten around to playing with this “blogging” thing the kids are all talking about these days, and I was chatting about it with Mike H.

[03:40] sui66iy: is there an auto-blog? it could digest other blogs and automatically generate new ones…

As it turns out, a Salon article that I was reading pointed me to something similar–a site which uses blog references to determine the flavor du jour.

One of the interesting recent blog-memes has been the idea of exposing HTTP referrer logs in a way that allows the readers of an article to see who’s been linking to it, and what they’re saying about it. One of the primary vectors of this idea, disenchanted.com, has a discussion of how it relates to its Memex/Xanadu ancestry. I think their browser plugin idea is too wonky, but I do think they (and all these other guys) are on to something–that bloggers are chomping through the info-space like so many earthworms, leaving a rich trail of organization and context in their wake for those who know how to look for it (to torture a metaphor or three).

Is blogging anything more than the democratization of content management systems? Maybe not, but by making content creation less of a pain, it makes it a lot more appealing for the hoi polloi to create (or at least contextualize) on a daily basis. Has Google already cornered the means of extracting the value from all this distributed work?

This is probably all obvious and/or worthless, which is why I’m posting it to my own blog.

Here’s a Washington Post story with a negative spin on Baltimore’s bid for the federal maglev project. Naturally, Pittsburgh’s bid has its share of detractors as well. Still, I’d rather have commuters riding this than the beloved Mon-Fayette Toll Road.

Man, I loved this game back in the day–though maybe not quite as much as some people. The most charming design elements were the little “nibbley pibbleys” that your snake was trying to eat. They were basically little spheres with a means of locomotion attached–in one level they’d be flying around with little propeller tops, in another they’d be sporting fish fins.

One of the things that really bugged me about A.I.‘s vision of the future lifestyle was that it was like today, only more so. The family lived the idealistic suburban lifestyle, in a house surrounded by lush vegetation (no McMansions in sight), and their wacky little future-car never got stuck in traffic. Well, thanks to the private think tank that Spielberg assembled to dream up the future of Minority Report, he seems to have wised up a little. Here’s an excerpt from the advertorial content in this month’s Wired:

One of the things that excited me the most, though it was off the subject of Minority Report, was the transportation system. Certainly, as a country dependent on Arab oil, we’re desperate for alternative forms of energy. How do you most efficiently transport people from the workplace to home? Home to school? Home to shopping? And what kind of cities would be in our future? Based on ideas from this group, we devised a system where all the vehicles are crawling up and down the sides of buildings.

You mean, like this? Plagiarism or no, I’m curious to see what they came up with. If you’re interested in radically different designs for future cities, you might want to start here.

So, did a dirigible ever dock with a skyscraper? Well, apparently one got hitched to the Empire State Building for a few minutes in September 1931. (You can even get a souvenir poster of the event.) It didn’t work so well, partly because of the crosswinds at that height, and partly because the dirigibles of that era weren’t such a hot idea. Actually, airships do work pretty well, as long as you don’t paint them with rocket fuel.

Huzzah! I’ve finally jumped on the stupid blogging bandwagon. Hello, world.