paradife-loft

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The elite belief in Uberized, Muskized cities is at odds with fundamental, irrefutable facts of geometry

The appropriately named Jarrett Walker is the author of Human Transit, a seminal text on transportation and cities that draws on his decades of experience in urban planning; he has the distinction of being called “an idiot” by Elon Musk on Twitter, when he pointed out that Musk’s Boring Company tunnel proposals could not possibly work due to their low capacity.

Walker’s overarching thesis is that city transit is undermined by “elite projection,” where rich people pretend that the way they like getting around – in private vehicles that go from door to door – can possibly work at urban scale, despite the fact that simple geometry shows that this is a physical impossibility.

As in, “It doesn’t matter how tightly you pack self-driving Ubers together on our roads. If all the people who make your coffee and empty your wastebin are in private vehicles rather than on buses and trains, the roads will be at 5 or 10 times their physical capacity.”

This emphasis on private vehicles leads people to seize on technological fads to defend the indefensible – hence the vogue for describing the smartphone as the key technology for transportation, or self-driving cars, or data-driven custom shuttle routes that re-route themselves based on demand signals from riders’ phones.

These all share the geometric flaw: even the smallest cars, packed as tightly as possible, multiplied by all the people who rely on buses and trains, will overflow all the roads we have now and all the roads we could ever build.

There is another flaw: when you make it cheaper to ride private vehicles (rather than public transit), you siphon transit riders out of the buses and trains, and put them on the roads, increasing congestion: so adding “efficient rideshares” actually makes transit worse, not better

Walker tried to explain this to Elon Musk on Twitter, discussing how his proposed Boring Machine tunnels’ narrow bores meant that on the one hand, they couldn’t carry enough people to make an appreciable difference in traffic, and on the other, that his proposal for allowing private cars to run through the tunnels is nuts: “The amount of the city that you would have to level to create enough of those elevators to get everybody’s car into the tunnel at 5:30 in the evening, it’s preposterous; it cannot help being. Anything that is that inefficient has to be only for elites.”

Musk called him an idiot.

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/26/elite-focus.html

#oh hey #so it's 6 years after I reblogged this post & learned about/read this book #and last week Jarrett Walker came to my public transit class and ran an exercise for us on designing bus networks #I'm not normally a 'look at the passage of time and where I am now compared to then' person but #that's kinda neat

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When people get a little too gung-ho about-

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

That’s…wild. What was I talking about?

#language #english borrowings from chinese are truly the most bonkers batshit cultural-ignorance-fueled nonsense imaginable

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it's funny, I was talking to someone last night who didn't really know what an illustrator was. so when I introduced myself as one, he gave a speech that would've probably gone over well with a gallery artist, but which was precision-tailored to make any illustrator within a 50 mile radius go into eyes-glowing-red kill mode.

his speech was about how there is a difference between craft and art, and how people can practice craft (as in, skillfully execute a painting) without it having any artistic merit.

so I'm someone who gets paid to paint waffles for restaurant menus and dinosaurs for museums exhibits, and AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH! you can't make art without it being something something you've made. does that make sense? like every illustrator I know has an individual way of approaching any given imagery that is informed by a lifetime of inspiration, and of passive intake of culture, and of the specific mistakes they make because of whatever their particular mass of grey matter deems as important thing to render or unimportant, just fuck it up.

I can make something that is informed by both a century of Canadian print-making and by my own particular neurosis, and it can also be commissioned commercial imagery that I regurgitate without care because I want to pay my mortgage. everything is art, nothing isn't art, art is something sticky and impossible to shake off of you.

anyway he got very wide-eyed and said "I'm sorry if I offended you," so today I feel a bit bad for having gotten so, uh.... excited.

#1. truly how on earth can craft be Not art when it's literally a built-up cultural construction?? it doesn't just exist in the aether??? #it's literally the product of humans' cultural legacy and all the layered meanings therein?? #2. SICK-ASS WAFFLE PIGEONS 10/10 would absolutely put in my house #art #artwork

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✨️ calling all Star Wars fans ✨️

Hello there tumblr!

While we Star Wars fans are anxiously waiting for the bad batch finale, I could use your help! In fact...

I am currently in the process of writing my master's thesis. My research is about age & Star Wars characters. The research is trying to investigate whether there is a difference in fans of different ages liking or disliking certain characters that appear throughout Episodes 1-9. The survey takes about 5-10 minutes to complete, is completely anonymous, and you must be 18+ to participate.

It would be ✨️ wizard ✨️ if you could share it with your friends, parents, siblings, or any other Star Wars fans you might know! Or even just reblogging this post for others to discover here on Tumblr 😊

It would mean the world (or galaxy hehe) if you would fill it out. If you did THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU, ALWAYS! ✨️✨️✨️

#survey #Star Wars

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another variation on a theme ☕️🫖🫧✨

[Image Description: The image depicts a still life painting of a tea set, rendered in a modern, impressionistic style with visible brush strokes. In the center of the composition lies a glass teapot with a yellow and red design and a translucent appearance, casting a shadow to the left. To the lower left of the pitcher sits a glass tea cup, echoing the yellow and red color scheme, with a shadow cast to the lower left. A metal teaspoon with an ornate handle rests to the right of the pitcher, with reflections suggesting a shiny surface, and its shadow extends to the lower left. All objects are placed on a pale blue surface, seemingly in natural light, with a small yellow tea bag string tag positioned in the upper right corner of the image.]

#major awe for anyone painting such vibrant realistic glass <3 #and the SHADOWS #artwork #tea

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Canada goose dragon! HÖNK

-2618

#yes good #birds #dragons #artwork #HONK

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i can never write a soulmates au cause i very quickly stop thinking about romance and start thinking about the sociological implications of a world where soulmates are a confirmed verifiable thing

#one soulmates story allowed: protagonist detests the entire thing & gets their ~mark removed & fucks around casually #fiction #catch me in the 'cosmic horror/futile struggle and rage that's still better than the alternative' aisle ✌️

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#oh hey a cool and nuanced discussion! #history #labor #sexism #agriculture

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sleepy Baby.

#BABY CHILD. BABY. UNDER 3 KILOGRAMS. #cats

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So Fox News ran a story about how they think libraries are turning into drug-infested sex dens and I am shocked, shocked that I was never offered any drugs during my 15+ years working in libraries.

#'average library becoming a drug-infested sex den' actually just statistical error. reed college library georg - #(to be clear. this too is a joking exaggeration out of fondness.)

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What I learn from Science & Technology Studies is that you shouldn't blindly trust science because there's a fair amount of fuckery (mostly unintentional but sometimes not) going on in the background, but you also shouldn't *not* trust science in the way that most people who don't trust science don't trust science.

Anyways, hope that helps!

#THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS #catch me descending shrieking from the ceiling about statistical literacy and subject definition and measurement design #science #academia

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The Beast that Bothers

#i love and support this cat #artwork #video #cats

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Do you have any cool bird facts

female raptors (eagles, hawks, falcons, etc) are larger than male raptors in pretty much all species. this happens even in groups not closely related to each other (ex: hawks and falcons), so its beneficial enough in their niche that its evolved independently a few times, though its unsure exactly what that benefit is atm (bc unlike males being larger in a lot of mammals, female raptors dont make a habit of fighting each other or using size to attract mates as far as we know). ex: heres a male and female Cooper's Hawk

somewhat mentioned above but falcons are more closely related to parrots than they are to hawks

Gray Catbirds and American Robins have been witnessed raising young in the same nest at the same time. In one instance (reported by Mulvihill and Murray), they were recorded caring for the young of both species in the nest, and when the Catbird young fledged, the adult Catbirds continued to provide food for the not-yet-fledged Robins. heres a pic of the nest from the report

the worlds oldest known bird as of 2024 is a wild Laysan Albatross named Wisdom who's 72-73 years old (at minimum, we dont actually know her birth date, just that she was at least 5 years old when she was banded in the 50s) and still raising chicks. here's her with one of her chicks

also Albatrosses have wingspans of up to 3.5m/11.5ft and have been recorded flying 49,700 miles without touching land (they do land in the water to eat tho)

this is from personal experience but if you walk around in a north american grassland for long enough, you Will get jumpscared by a Mourning Dove bc they make their nests on the ground in the grass and like to hang out on the ground in the grass and they also like to wait until youre right overtop of them to freak out and fly away from you

Bald Eagles don't get their fully white heads and tails until theyre about 5 years old

A lot of birds have been observed incorporating cigarette butts into their nests, and a study in Mexico on House Finches found that this actually results in drastic decreases in parasites affecting young compared to nests without them

Cedar Waxwings (and Waxwings in general) just look so smooth. they look like someone airbrushed them. look at this shit

in Jacanas, females lay eggs in multiple males' nests, and then the males raise the young by themself. Also they carry their babies under their wings like this

Horned Guan. Theyre endangered and live in a small area of central america. both the males and females have the little horn fez, the males just have taller ones

#ohhhhh my gosh I've been looking for that sort of picture of a jacana + kids for ages #they're perfect. flawless. will not hear a word against them #birds

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#!!!!! sexy beefleaf art hours on my dash apparently! #love love love <3 the expressions #the poses #the atmosphere #so good #artwork #TGCF #He Xuan #Shi Qingxuan

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truly nobody else is doing it like beefleaf. the most iconic. living in my brain so rent-free that we're single-handedly tanking the housing prices on the block. my beloveds <3

#content is for other people #hua cheng's ghostly down with cis bus #(is iirc my custom tgcf tag? something like that anyway)

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Poor unfortunate soul

#👀👀👀👀 #.....also (tangentially related) this reminds me of the post-canon beefleaf drowning fic I started writing a while back #it was... kind of exhausting being in the headspace to write it but g-d. it'd be great if it were finished some day #anyway looooove hx's sleeves here <333 #TGCF #He Xuan #Shi Qingxuan #artwork

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#extremely important poll #ancient rome