More upscaled, century-old footage! This time a little closer to home, featuring shots of SW Portland, the US Custom House building, and a sneaky shot of the second Oregon State Capitol in Salem. Related: my previous post on the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, featuring upscaled footage of the suspended railway in Wuppertal, Germany operating in 1902.
Category Archives: Link
Historical Context of Racist Planning in Portland
Buried in a Planning and Sustainability Commission meeting from September 2019 is this excellent presentation from BDS planning assistant Jena Hughes on the “Historical Context of Racist Planning in Portland”. (Hughes’ presentation begins around the 48:57 mark.) It’s a great primer on how we’ve historically used city planning mechanisms like zoning to continually prevent communities …
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The Map
New York City has a new “live” digital subway map, designed by Work & Co. The new map attempts to combine the style of the classic Vignelli map with the Tauranac/Hertz map that replaced it, becoming more geographically accurate as you zoom in; revealing the real-time location of trains, the actual location of lines in …
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
A month after receiving a fatal diagnosis in January 2015, Oliver Sacks sat down for a series of filmed interviews in his apartment in New York City. For eighty hours, surrounded by family, friends, and notebooks from six decades of thinking and writing about the brain, he talked about his life and work, his abiding …
The Science Behind Nike’s New Marathon Shoe
A surprisingly fascinating deep dive by Wired into how Nike’s new “ZoomX Vaporfly Next%” shoes make runners more efficient, which might finally open up the possibility of an athlete like Eliud Kipchoge running a sub-2 hour marathon.
Bad Bridges
According to a new study conducted by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, 1 in 3 of America’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, including the Brooklyn Bridge, the Teddy Roosevelt bridge in D.C., and the San Mateo-Hayward bridge—the longest bridge in California. ARTBA also estimates the cost of the necessary repairs at …
The Wuppertal Schwebebahn
Earlier this year, MoMA released film shot in 1902 from a suspended railway system in the German city of Wuppertal. The footage has since been color corrected and upscaled to 4K by YouTube user Denis Shiryaev, making it look like it was shot in present day. The Wuppertal Schwebebahn is the oldest electric elevated monorail …
How US Public Transit is Like the Postal Service
From transit planner Jarrett Walker, Public Transit and the Postal Service Have the Same Problem. Postal and transit services have the same problem. We want them to attract high usage and we want them to go everywhere, but those goals imply opposite kinds of service. Pursuing either goal will cause outcomes that look like failure …
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Under Central Park
From earlier this year, Vox producer Ranjani Chakraborty shares the story of Seneca Village, the Black neighborhood that was razed to provide land for the construction of New York’s Central Park.
It’s Rain in Games
My pal Jez Burrows put together a 30 minute long supercut of rain in videogames. Related: his previous effort to collect every time the McElroy Brothers say “boy” in the first 420 episodes of My Brother, My Brother, and Me.