Interesting Links for 27-01-2012
Jan. 27th, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Depression makes it more likely you'll do overtime
- Cars Kill Cities
- Android and iPhone neck and neck in the US smartphone market
- Apple still dominates the tablet market, but Android narrows the gap
- Pressure is being applied to raise the tax threshold for low earners further and faster
- Do the weather forecasters used by the Daily Mail actually exist?
- This is how I feel about people on minimum wage paying tax
- Why McDonald's second biggest market is...France
- Neil Gaiman on Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton
- Tetris Furniture
- Douglas Adam's letter to the studio exec responsible for getting Hitchiker's to the screen.
- US government covering up an epidemic.
- I laughed a lot at this video of programming language strangeness. If you're a geek you might do too.
- Mail Online overtakes NY Times as top online newspaper. Now that's terrifying.
- Graphene can now distill alcohol. Is there anything it can't do?
Of course, I'm still waiting for anything graphene related to make it into the shops.
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no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:40 am (UTC)"Cars kill cities" chooses an annoying example. (Is there a term for that rhetorical trick?) Instead of mentioning important errands which involve moving a substantial amount of mass (buying food, taking babies and toddlers anywhere), the example repeatedly given is picking up dry cleaning.
In re the hidden epidemic-- damned if I know. Sometimes real problems (agent orange, fibromyalgia) get ignored.
I'm not a geek, but the programming video was still pretty funny, even if I probably missed some of the fine points.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:47 am (UTC)And yes, it looks like people who do overtime get depressed later. No proof of causation, but burnout is far too common.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:55 pm (UTC)My city deliberately uses a zoning system to ensure that residential, business, retail, and industrial areas all be as separate as possible. You cannot live near where you work, nor buy food near either your home nor your job.
Then they provide bus service between the zones only on the hour, and not before 7 am nor after malls close. They can't understand why the bus system is lightly used, so the keep withdrawing routes and runs.
Lately they've been on a kick to try to reduce car/pedestrian fatalities - a problem that better urban design would have greatly prevented!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:25 pm (UTC)*buy small amounts often, say by stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work and getting dinner. Thus the amount bought fits easily onto a bike.
*order online, get food delivered. Yes, this uses a van, but one van delivering to ten people is less than ten cars.
*own a bike trailer. Now I can fit a whole LOT of shopping onto a bicycle.
I don't myself have a child but I know people who do and who get them places on foot (child in buggy/sling/etc), public transport, and bicycle (many ways of attaching children to bicycles exist).
I think that it is a failure of city planning if it is not generally possible for an able-bodied person who lives and works in the city in good health to walk all the places they regularly need to be (home, food shop, child's school, work, gym, wherever else you go) and a failure of public transport policy if it is not generally possible for anyone who is capable of moving around outside at all to move between those places. The prevelance of car-use where it is not strictly needed leads to cities being designed with car-use in mind, making them ever harder to use without a car.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:42 pm (UTC)Yes, thank you!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:52 pm (UTC)Also I assume that if you have a large family it is harder; but at the same time I would tend to assume that a large family contains more people who can go to the shop and carry things home from it.
(these days we are totes lazy and get that nice Mx Ocado to deliver our noms direct to our door; the main advantage of which is that I no longer buy a big bag of pasta when there are already two bags of pasta in the cupboard).
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 06:42 pm (UTC)I couldn't imagine my life if I lived in a modern new build car centred suburb but I suspect I would have been hospitalised by now.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 01:23 am (UTC)people who drive tend to swear that things are very difficult without a car.
people who do not drive tend to point out that they manage those things perfectly well without a car.
I am of the latter camp.
as a career cyclist with one successfully raised child, I can assure you that those things can be done extremely easily without a car.
I'm also [as a student of both civil and mechanical engineering] horrified by the amount of space devoted to parking in the given example. Especially having designed car parks.