Archive for 2011

HEH: I’m The Bigot? Fired NPR Analyst Juan Williams Responds To NPR Sting Video.

“I think it is a look inside what NPR executives really think and for me this is a revelation in the sense that here they are saying exactly how they view the world,” Williams said. “And what’s incredible to me is here they are doing business with people who identify themselves of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Ouch.

HOW TO LAUNCH A CAMERA INTO SPACE. “MIT students Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh stuffed a camera in a cooler, tied it to a helium balloon, and—with FAA approval—launched the rig 17.5 miles into the stratosphere. ‘The results were fantastic,’ Lee says. ‘We tracked the device with a GPS-enabled cellphone and found it 20 miles from the launch site.’ The 5-hour flight, which cost $150 in materials, took photos of Earth every 5 seconds.”

JOEL KOTKIN: “The ongoing Census reveals the continuing evolution of America’s cities from small urban cores to dispersed, multi-polar regions that includes the city’s surrounding areas and suburbs. This is not exactly what most urban pundits, and journalists covering cities, would like to see, but the reality is there for anyone who reads the numbers.” This is why most mass-transit plans are stuck in the 20th Century, presupposing that everyone commutes to jobs downtown. Nowadays they tend to travel around the edges. I wrote a piece on this subject a while back, inspired by Robert Breugmann’s excellent book, Sprawl: A Compact History.

Also, some related thoughts here. But the federal government is still promoting de-suburbanization.

A LOOK AT unrest in Algeria. “Thousands of additional troops and police have been sent to the Libyan border, to provide security among the hundreds of thousands of refugees there, or expected to arrive. There are few pro-Kaddafi border guards there, although that can change from day to day. The Algerian government remains, quietly, an ally of Kaddafi. Military dictators tend to stick together. Kaddafi also has friends in Syria, another decades old Arab dictatorship.”

IS THE CIA PENSION PLAN broke? “This is yet another embarrassment for an agency that is supposed to seek out hidden trends and threats abroad. If it cannot even fathom a threat to its own pension plan, then….well you get the message.”