Mark Vanhoenacker, on the experience of arriving in the US. "Tourism promotion is common sense. But we might reconsider the wisdom of requiring travelers to subsidize it in exchange for a grilling about their sexual health and genocidal activities." "Americans may be surprised by the conclusions of a 2006 survey by the U.S. Travel Association, which found that foreign travelers were more afraid of United States immigration officials than of terrorism or crime."

One of my favourite - and most London - authors for, of all publications, the New York Times, with a scathing look at the city in the age of Tory-driven austerity. Well worth a read.

"If you had to make a snap judgment about a Londoner, how would you do it? Start with the newspaper he or she is reading." More handy hints are within this New York Times magazine article, such as "Frequent apology is one of an arsenal of clever tricks Londoners employ to obscure their true feelings and remain opaque to outsiders and possibly even to themselves."

'“The public realm is what we own and control,” he told me the other day when we met to look around Midtown. More than just common property, he added, “the streets, squares, parks, infrastructure and public buildings make up the fundamental element in any community — the framework around which everything else grows.”'

'On Tuesday, Taser will announce a camera, a half-ounce unit about the size of a cigar stub that clips on to a collar or sunglasses of an officer and can record two hours of video during a shift.' '“Once video is up in the cloud, why not photos? Why not all sorts of evidence? It will make it easier for different agencies to collaborate.”'

"I obtained a smart leather rope with weights in the handles and, waiting until it was almost dark, went out into the street. Making sure that no one was coming, I started bouncing on the pavement. I must have skipped a bit as a child, I guess, because I could remember how to do it." Hanif Kureshi on distraction.

"Venture deep inside the new skyway of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and it becomes clear that the bridge’s engineers have planned for the long term." A good read, and it's worth going to the interactive feature part too.

"Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore." A thoughtful essay by Evgeny Morozov that captures some of my dislike for the modern web. (Having said that, on editing my pinboard bookmarks, I find a disturbing number recently are from the NYT. So much for me flaneuring.)

‘"Strike another two songs from the Republican playlist: “Eye of the Tiger,” by Survivor, and “Wavin’ Flag,” by the Somali-born musician K’naan. “When you think about every iconic song that has emotional resonance for millions and millions of Americans, in almost every instance, Republican candidates can’t use the song because the artist is not supportive,” said Steve Schmidt.’

Interesting, but the best bit is right at the end: ‘“People are watching TV,” he said. “Kids don’t go to theaters. They’re streaming it, downloading it. They don’t see any difference between television and movies. So if you want to get people to go out to the movies, to pay a premium price for some kind of premium experience, it better be damned premium. It better be extraordinary.”’

"Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all. Do pictures provide evidence? And if so, evidence of what? And, of course, the underlying question: do they tell the truth?" Worth a read. From 2007.

"This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data." "Losing data is not the same as forgetting. It happens all at once, not gradually or imperceptibly, so it feels less like an unburdening than like a mugging."

"it was coined in Germany only in the second half of the 19th century and was first used in English several decades later with the classical sense of “hetero” (“other, different”), making it initially a term of opprobrium. Only in the first decades of the 20th century did it settle into its present niche, cushioned with overtones of romance, pleasure, health and normalcy."

The captions on the photos are hilarious, and there are some good laughs in the first few paragraphs, but there's a good deeper point in this post about minimal and perfect homes.

"Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction." Interesting stuff on Arxiv et al.

"Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place."

"It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again."

"The idea that people actually wear themselves on their faces seems to me to be less real than what life actually is, which is a series of concealments and containments. These surfaces and veils exist. We take off one for one person, and several for another. But there is always a difference between what you show to others and what you show to yourself in the mirror."

Reviews of Otto Neurath, Symbols and Ex Libris, a collection of bookplates. Useful if your coffee table needs a refresh, probably.

On Beats headphones, which are expensive and (some say) terrible but popular despite that.

Alice Rawsthorn on BERG, in the IHT (and on the NY Times site).

"It believes it can save time and money by simply leaving [the tunnel boring machine] behind, dormant and decayed, within the rocky depths of Midtown Manhattan. The drill’s final resting place: 14 stories beneath the well-tended sidewalks of Park Avenue."

"Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour from September 2010 to July 2011, I accidentally collected about 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the nytimes.com." "As a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It's all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we're no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis."

"Weekend trips have doubled in the past 20 years, far outpacing the growth of ridership during the workweek. Last year, the subway had 5.36 million rides on average during weekends, one of the highest counts on record." I wonder if the same thing's happening in London; there's certainly always grousing at weekend engineering works.

From the article: “In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”

"It has something to do with the ideal of the American Everyman. As with the military or medicine, so with museums, we are by national inclination meddlers. Europeans are not, which is why they have reacted to the Smithsonian flap with the same mildly appalled bafflement that they express toward American opposition to the health care bill. It all seems inexplicable to them." The NYT on Wojnarowicz, Sensation, Tate, the Smithsonian, and attitudes. 

I've climbed Bernal Heights, but haven't visited Glen Canyon yet. Next time there's a nice weekend, perhaps?

"Other initiatives have recruited volunteers online, but the Bentham Project is one of the first to try crowd-sourced transcription and to open up a traditionally rarefied scholarly endeavor to the general public, generating both excitement and questions." Digitising Jeremy Bentham's papers, the communal way.

'“We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,” West says. “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.”' Possibly flawed, but definitely interesting, and the NYT article sets the research in an interesting context. I'm looking forward to what comes out when he tackles companies.

'How did a 153-year-old magazine — one that first published the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and gave voice to the abolitionist and transcendentalist movements — reinvent itself for the 21st century?' A profitable magazine, partly due to ignoring the split between online and print ads.

The New York Times reviews the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art's 75th anniversary exhibition. I'd certainly recommend it.

"Every architectural style falls out of fashion [...] but after spending a generation in exile, it’s usually welcomed back." "A similar reconsideration is under way for Brutalism, that brawny mix of concrete walls and soaring cantilevers that first appeared in postwar Europe."

On exposed live cables (or "stray voltage") in New York. "Since the start of 2008, only about eight shocks per month have been recorded, down from almost 24 a month in 2004, according to the foundation’s Web site. The number of electrified objects has risen steadily, to more than 900 per month this year, the data show." America is a bit broken.

I liked the photos of the AT&T war room ^W^W control centre ^W center in the New York Times article, but Ben Fry takes the time to do write a great response.

Interesting. Depressing. Hopeful. Well worth reading.

"Recently, camera companies have begun diverting their research efforts from 'how to get more megapixels' to 'how to get better photos.' They’re working on things that really do matter in a consumer camera, like sensor size, stabilization — and fixing low-light photography." David Pogue reviews interesting Fuji and Sony compacts.

A review of 'Anthony Flint’s well-carpentered but breezy “Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City.”'

'Started in March by Lyon’s urban regional authority, the tour spotlights four avant-garde housing projects and one priory, all within easy reach of central Lyon. Along the way, it traces “the development of a new language in architecture,” said Gilles Ragot'

Quotes a PRS survey: "Of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs."

"Mr. Fresco ... has spent the last six decades working on the Venus Project, a futuristic society where machines would control government and industry and safeguard the planet’s fragile resources by means of an artificially intelligent “earthwide autonomic sensor system” — a super-brain of sorts connected to, yes, all human knowledge." Ah, standard Get Humans Out Of Jail Card #3.

Suzanne Vega in the New York Times on Tom's Diner, its remixes, and its position in technology history. It's a good read.

The NYT tech blog on the prospects of the iPod touch becoming just one of a family of devices. My (utterly worthless) feeling is that you're far more likely to see a 7" "iPod" than a Mac smaller than the Air.

Probably the best overview of past and upcoming US primary results I've found. I wonder how the NY Times and AP delegate counting techniques differ, given the disparity.

A good article about the Swiss moving freight and passengers from the roads to newly-tunnelled railways through the Alps.

Some lovely photos of bikes in movement here, although they also remind me why I could never go anywhere near a fixed gear bike myself.

"How can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?" Micahel Pollan goes in search of the farm funding that provides an answer. Wonder how the CAP compares?

I orignally read this back when it first published, but keep needing to find a paywall-busting URL. It's a good, long piece on food, nutrition, science and diet. If you've not read it, please do.