Requiem for a Station Wagon

Andrew Dederer:

One of the rare examples of altruism in pistonheads concerns the (nearly extinct) American station wagon. They passionately defend the one automotive genre that the vast majority of American consumers wouldn’t be caught dead in (excepting a hearse). Why so much love for a car shape that’s been fading from the American scene for the best part of 25 years? The passion comes from recognition. The reality we’ll have to blame on Darwin and his stupid birds.
Wagons increase a car’s cargo space without altering the donor car’s fundament shape. They’re a bit heavier and generally a little shakier than their sedan sibling, but still offer car-like driving dynamics. This is important to enthusiasts, who value driving dynamics sur tout. Ironically, pistonheads hate compromises; generally speaking, they don’t buy wagons. But they recommend them to others– especially SUV owners– based on the combination of handling and hauling.

Mayor Dave’s 2007 Property Tax Letter


Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:[72K PDF]

Enclosed you will find your 2007 property tax bill. While the City of Madison processes your taxes, the property tax bill is actually made up of five parts. The Madison Metropolitan School District has the largest share, followed by the City, Dane County, and Madison Area Technical College. A small amount is also levied for the state forestry tax.
The primary concern in our community today is the quality of life and safety in our neighborhoods. This summer and fall, I attended eight listening sessions across the City on these issues. People told me they wanted their City government to make sure their neighborhoods are safe and healthy. In response, the City budget makes the following investments:

  • Increasing Police Resources. In addition to 30 new officers, the City budget includes two additional crime analysts to make sure we’ re not j ust stronger, but also smarter, in use of our resources.
  • Targeting Bad Landlords. The addition of three new building inspectors and our new nuisance abat ement ordinance give us the tools we need to get after landlords who don’t maintain their properties or adequatel y screen their tenants.
  • Strengthening Neighborhoods. We doubled the Emerging Nei ghborhoods Fund to $200,000, giving us quick-access resources to prevent small problems from becoming bigger, more expensi ve ones. We’ re launching a Neighborhood Indicators Project to give us statistical early warning signs of neighborhood decline. The budget also funds another graffiti elimination crew to keep our neighborhoods free of gang-related messages.
  • Programs for Young People. We are increasing Communi ty Service programs by over 7%, funding initiatives for after school and youth programs, and doubling the number of youth conservation corps crews.

The City budget also includes park improvements, expanded library hours at some branches, road
projects, energy efficiency initiatives, a new effort to clean our beaches, and other programs to maintain and improve Madi son’ s quality of life.

These words are a useful look at the Mayor’s perspective on local taxpayers.

If robotics technology now stands where computing did in the ’70s, what can we expect in the future?

Tom Abate:

Fremont resident Rakesh Guliani likes to say that a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner saved his marriage.
Messy floors had been causing friction, says the 41-year-old Guliani (pronounced Goo-liani). His wife, Kavita, 35, was particularly annoyed by the footprints he and their daughters, Ashna, 10, and Rhea, 6, tended to track through the house.
“I am soccer coach to both of them, and when we come in with our dirty cleats, I am more tolerant of that because I am tracking dirt, too,” says Guliani, vice president of the job-placement firm Park Computer Systems. He vacuumed several times a week but it never seemed enough to satisfy his wife, a technical writer for Google.
“I was sucking the thread out of the carpet,” says Guliani, who bought a Roomba last fall and programmed it to scour the carpets for dust, dirt and grime. Regular cleanings by the Roomba restored household harmony. “It never gets bored and it never complains,” he says.
The Guliani family is at the cutting edge of what may be the next technological revolution – the emergence of software and hardware capable of performing tasks once reserved for that race of toolmakers called Homo sapiens.
“Sometime in the next 30, 40, 50 years we will have human-level machine intelligence,” predicts Marshall Brain, a computer science teacher turned author and technology forecaster.

Everyone’s Poop


Nate Blakeslee:

“Down the drain, off the brain” is how most people think about it, but human waste—or effluent, as the professionals call it—has a lot to tell us about how we live, what we eat, and who we are.
They say that shit runs downhill. This is commonly understood to mean that the world is an unfair place, except among those few people who actually work with the substance, for whom it is considered something of an article of faith. This is because municipal sewerage systems are powered almost entirely by gravity, which means that when working properly, they move millions of gallons of sewage a day across considerable distances with only a minimum expenditure of energy, a feat of efficiency virtually unparalleled in the annals of engineering. When sewage stops running downhill, as it inevitably does from time to time, very bad things indeed can happen, as they did on Pecan Springs Road, in the Austin neighborhood known as Windsor Park, one morning last September.
I was spending the day with an Austin Water Utility emergency-response crew when dispatch got a call from a woman reporting that two rooms of her house were flooded with sewage. Our crew consisted of a TV truck, piloted by a twenty-year line-maintenance veteran named David Eller, and a flusher truck, driven by another longtime utility employee, named Dale Crocker. At the house, Eller, who wears wraparound sunglasses and looks a little like the country singer Dwight Yoakam, unspooled a thick red cable from the back of his truck. On the end of the cable was a camera about the size of a roll of quarters, which Crocker shoved down into a PVC clean-out pipe near the curb in the front yard. The woman leaned on a walker in her driveway, looking worried.

Excellent Article.

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

Mark Pilgrim:

Act I: The act of buying
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

An Extraordinary VR Journey – The Latest VRMAG

vrmag122007.jpg

Editorial Director Marco Trezzini, via email:

Since I believe we have created the best issue of VRMAG ever, I’m writing you with the hope you will accept to dedicate 5 minutes of your time to explore our online magazine dedicated to photographic virtual reality exploration of people, places and events around the world. Almost forgot to mention, VRMAG is a no profit publication, with no ads.
This issue features the closed zone of Chernobyl, Wired NextFest in Los Angeles, Cuba’s capital city La Habana, Red square in Moscow, the Palaces where European Royalties lives, New York’s Tribute in light, the island of Cyprus’s Aphrodite beach, Valentino’s exhibit Ara Pacis museum in Rome, the Mayan ruins Chinkultic and Tenam Puente in Mexico, Vienna, the Copenhagen Opera House, Seattle, RedBull AirRace Abu Dhabi ….
For VRMAG showing panoramas of the physical world is not enough,
so we’ll take you to Second Life in order to visit Anshe Chung’s Picture Gallery Dresden, and to DanCoyote’s Full Immersion Hyperformalism and get behind the scenes on the creation of next generation interactive screenshots for the gaming industry, take a visit to an “wellenkreis” an art installation of an endless sine curve in real space …
You will experience the view a sleeping pill has from it’s medicine bottle,
watch the world as a coca cola would do, transport you into a washing machine and feel like your sock. Be a fish and be intrigued by a guy ironing underwater,
enter the head of Hermann’s sculpture, chat with Jonathan livingston, experience a bubble party, feel the thrill of extreme canyoning, and much more …

Visit www.vrmag.org now.

Top 100 Wines – 2007

Jon Bonné:

A dash of the old, a dash of the new – that’s the theme of this year’s Top 100 Wines.
The Chronicle Wine section tastes wine from all over the world, but our Top 100 Wines are a showcase for the most compelling winemaking on the West Coast. We tasted thousands of wines this past year from California, Washington and Oregon. We recommended hundreds. You may recognize some of the lucky 100 from our weekly Wine Selections, but instead of simply choosing the best of what our panels tasted, we sought out a balance between quality, price and innovation – particularly innovation. So while many of our top contenders are familiar names, this year we also kept an eye out for new faces, new locales and new types of wine.
Consider, for example, the Pinot Noir made by Stewart Johnson of Kendric Vineyards in San Anselmo. A few years ago, uttering “Marin County Pinot Noir” would have prompted the same stare as “San Francisco suntan.” Now Marin has proven its potential as a wine region. (No such luck on the San Francisco suntan part.)