Try a whiskey smash for a good warm-weather cocktail. The Breslin makes a good one, if you like whiskey.

If you like images…I’ve been collecting some here.

Once again, I’m in the seasonal pursuit of lobster rolls from Mary’s and the Mermaid…and enjoying cooking some lighter meals at home with the finds from the farmer’s market. And in all of that trying to be disciplined and study.

I’m making plans to visit Paris, and trying to relax more in the evenings – and then waking up to run in the early morning. But i’m also staying outside later and enjoying the long evenings/warm nights. So that whole previous sequence of events gets confusing.

I turn 30 today. Does that mean I’m “old?” Does that mean I should “focus?”

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You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

- General Dwight D. Eisenhower – June 6th, 1944

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- Wilbur “Shooter” Flatch, Hoosiers

Edward Hopper – May 17, 1936 – May 29, 2010

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One of the more interesting pieces of equipment sitting atop the deck of the Intrepid is the awkward, but sleek SR-71. On a recent visit to the ship, my wife said to me, “Now I know what you boys get all worked up about.” She became so enamored with the SR-71 that she now has a little model of it sitting on her desk at work.

Commissioned to fly reconnaissance missions from the 1960′s to the 1990′s, ‘the sled’ could fly 2,664 miles and hour.  The below quote was contributed from Pete Wallace in a story from the pilot’s 400+ hours logged flying the Blackbird:

One day, high above Arizona , we were monitoring the radio traffic of all the mortal airplanes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traffic controllers to check his ground speed. ‘Ninety knots,’ ATC replied. A twin Bonanza soon made the same request. ‘One-twenty on the ground,’ was the reply. To our surprise, a navy F-18 came over the radio with a ground speed check. I knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, he had a ground speed indicator in his cockpit, but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the valley know what real speed was ‘Dusty 52, we show you at 620 on the ground,’ ATC responded. The situation was too ripe. I heard the click of Walter’s mike button in the rear seat. In his most innocent voice, Walter startled the controller by asking for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet, clearly above controlled airspace. In a cool, professional voice, the controller replied, ‘ Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground.’ We did not hear another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.

A brilliant bit of advice from Maj. Walter Watson regarding flying one of these things: “Keep the pointy end forward.”

Note: If you’re into spy planes, read this essay by former U-2 pilot Cholene Espinoza, The Last Days of the Dragon Lady.

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Last year over Memorial Day weekend, New York City had closed off portions of Times Square and reduced traffic on selected stretches of Broadway in order to create pedestrian zones. My concern at the time was that the success of these efforts was going to

“depend on how they eventually begin linking Times Square with Harold Square and by extension Madison Square and Union Square.”

The response to the Times Square changes this past year has been positive overall. Following in the success of these changes, the city is looking to add more pedestrian zones to other high profile areas.

On 34th Street:

Automobiles would be banned on the block between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, creating a pedestrian plaza bookended by Macy’s/Herald Square and the Empire State Building. The result would be a street effectively split in two.

On the west side of the pedestrian plaza, all car traffic would flow west, toward the Hudson River. On the east side, all car traffic would move east, toward the East River. Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier.

The dedicated bus lanes also appear to be taking a cue from a system in use in cities like Curtiba: transit buses using the lane would allow passengers to pay for bus tickets at sidewalk kiosks before boarding, and buses could signal traffic lights to remain green as the buses approach intersections. Be sure to read the comments at the original article.

And at Union Square (a move that will help the Greenmarket and ease confusion at a difficult corner):

Almost all traffic would be banned from the block of Broadway north of Union Square, between 17th and 18th Streets, under a proposal under consideration by the city’s Transportation Department.

Tables and chairs could be installed on the block, which would be open to pedestrians and bicycles in a design similar to the plazas now seen in Times and Herald Squares. A pedestrian plaza would also be installed on East 17th Street, which runs along the north side of Union Square, replacing a lane of traffic.

Again, check out the comments. The comment by Alan is a good one. While I’m in favor of these changes and partial towards developments on Manhattan because this is the borough that I live in, I am increasingly interested in seeing how these and other transit changes can benefit everyone in NYC. Especially in light of the MTA and their continued service cutbacks.

These related entries might also interest you:
Times Square
A Park Avenue
They’re Installing a Stroller Lane?

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Before the revival of the Oklahoma River and emergence of Boathouse Row, before MidTown and the Plaza District, before MAPS and Bricktown, there was the I.M. Pei Plan. The transformation of downtown OKC began, for good or bad, with an ambitious plan drawn up by internationally reknown architect and urban planner I.M. Pei.

He called for the clear-cutting of hundreds of downtown buildings, many historic, to make way for a “city of tomorrow.”  The plan was later reviled by locals, but are there lessons, good and bad, to be learned from this experiment?

Oklahoma City is just past 100, and as the civic leaders continue to define the city’s next phase of identity and growth, it might help to examine the good and the bad of the Urban Renewal experiment. As I’ve been digging into some of the reading and history associated with the I.M. Pei project, I’ve been thinking of other big development plans that promised to give us some version of a better tomorrow.

Intercon wrote a piece about Dubai recently. I’ve alway’s looked at Dubai as a sort of capitalist / developer Disney World. A version of Las Vegas, without a viable reason to exist beyond it being a realized mirage. It almost feels as if an attempt by man to flaunt its desires in the face of the reality of nature. (see my previous post Obtaining Unobtainium.) Islands can be created at will, snow can fall in desert heat and towers can be built on hills of sand. But now mortgages are going unpaid, and there’s a reported 3,000 cars abandoned at the airport as people leave the country and their debts behind.

I look at Dubuai, and its questionable success and I’m wondering about all of the other “dreams,” that got started, but didn’t fully live up to their envisioned glory. One that immediately comes to mind is California City, California. 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, California City and its miles of dusty streets were abandoned before it could even begin. Take a look.

From the Wikipedia entry:

California City had its origins in 1958 when real estate developer and sociology professor Nat Mendelsohn purchased 80,000 acres of Mojave Desert land with the aim of master-planning California’s next great city. He designed his model city, which he hoped would one day rival Los Angeles in size, around a Central Park with a 26-acre artificial lake. Growth did not happen anywhere close to what he expected. To this day a vast grid of crumbling paved roads, scarring vast stretches of the Mojave desert, intended to lay out residential blocks, extends well beyond the developed area of the city.

You can easily waste half an hour on Google Street View looking at what California City has become … a desert home for a prison, a Honda test driving facility, a boron mine, an Air Force Base and miles of spectacular suburbanized Nazca lines.

California City was started 50 years ago, but a more recent development is facing the same fate: In Rio Vista, California, model homes sit vacant in the center of a 750-home housing development where construction was halted November 20, 2008. The northern California city is considering filing for bankruptcy as it struggles to deal with a deficit in its general fund.

But it’s not just in the deserts that our dreams go bust. Lehigh Acres, just outside of Ft. Myers, Florida, has quite an interesting story. Originally started as a tax shelter in the 50′s, the area never took off and as recent as 1997, nearly 90% of Lehigh Acres’ lots remained vacant. A surge in housing prices led to a boom in Lehigh Acres new-housing construction from 2003 to 2007, peaking at more than 7,500 new homes constructed in 2006. But as in much of the United States, the real-estate boom of the 2000s went bust.

The median house price in the Ft. Myers area peaked in late 2005 at $322,300. Three years later, it had plummeted to $106,900. Property values in Lehigh Acres dropped 25% in 2008, and another 50% in 2009. A community that started as a way to cheat the financial system rode the financial bubble and is now collapsing.

The examples all seem focused on the growth of a spreadsheet. It’s become a common, under the breath question of mine to ask, “are we building a building, or a bank account?” What’s the priority, and what is the viable direction to take? The NY Times reported on Lehigh that the common question among the residents is:

“What do we want to be when we grow up?”

“That’s one of the things we struggle with: What is our identity?” said Joseph Whalen, 37, president of the Lehigh Acres Chamber of Commerce.

If a community and its growth is planned on a sound foundation rather than speculation, the outcome can be much different than Lehigh, Rio Vista, California City and even Dubai. In 1811, the New York State Legislature must have appeared crazy when they gridded farmland, marsh and rocky outcroppings for miles above the developed limits of New York City. The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 was established roughly 200 years after New York was settled and set the direction for the future growth of the city. As the basis of growth, New York and its boroughs filled out in less than a century.

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Until you were desperate and mad with suffering;
finally in hunger you would feel his weight.
He lies outside the walls like a countryside.
And he knows very well how to endure
longer than the one that he comes to visit.

Climb up on your roofs and look out:
his camp is there and his morale doesn’t falter,
his numbers do not decrease; he will not grow weaker,
and he sends no one into the city to threaten
or promise and no one to negotiate.

He is the one who breaks down all walls,
and when he works, he works in silence.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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via the amazing TED Talks: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal.” Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today’s reactors as fuel. “In terms of fuel this really solves the problem.” He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky — the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.

And on 60 Minutes: The Bloom Box

The Bloom box is a new kind of fuel cell that produces electricity by combining oxygen in the air with any fuel source, such as natural gas, bio-gas, and solar energy. Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes – each the size of a grapefruit – could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the power grid; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box.

Aside from the sheer far-feched coolness that both of these represent, and the social/political/cultural ramifications that could begin to be discussed, both of these made me recall a passage of C.S. Lewis’s in The Abolition of Man:

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique…

The way I read the selection is that the path of earlier age wisdom was to attempt to live in conformity with the unyielding reality. Modernity, or applied science, has approached reality as a malleable natural world – something we can shape to fit our desires. Our current mindset seems to be generally focused on a search for new power sources, and in the case of the Bloom Box we are truly creating power out of thin air. Now I realize I’m stretching by trying to connect these three things in my mind, but in very general ways C.S. Lewis’s passage is a reminder of the possible split between a mindset of efficient creation of power (using science to coax and mine every last bit of energy from our finite resources in our search for more than we have) versus using science to help us in our efficient use of power (an example would be the extended battery life in our phones due to more efficient software programming/resource allocation).

In the topic of a more sustainable future, I would have to say that I might fall more in the camp of the ‘earlier ages:’ we have a depleting amount of unobtainium, do more with less of it. I feel that the greatest success is going to occur when our advances in efficient creation of power is met with a broader cultural shift in thought away from consuming to conserving.

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Easy things like talking, wandering around or eating is about as equally mysterious as the hard stuff like thinking, creating and career planning. Trying to figure out the mystery only leads one to making weird faces, and its become apparent to me over these last couple of years that I’m pretty poor at planning. I find that its easier on my face if I don’t focus to stringently on it.

For a while, I had had side projects that kept me pretty busy, but a long break over the holidays and the subsequent work load back at the office has proven to me that I need to be spending more time away from the screen, and also more time away from “work” and all that’s related to it.

After a few years of living here in New York, I’ve come to respect it and know it as more than those initial feelings of it being a place of thrilling experiences. There are so many amazing things happening here, all the time, that most of one’s anxiety in the city comes from the over whelming feeling of being in a perpetual state of missed opportunities. And, it takes alot of work to get by here. You need patience, humility and empathy for your neighbor, and yourself. And you have to create time for friendships and hobbies to avoid falling into a work-only lifestyle.

But too often today, I find it easy to forget to stop and breathe. Work late, multiple meetings for multiple projects that become double booked and all of a sudden you are over-organized. It becomes all too easy to forget the simple acts that have been redefined as indulgences.

They should be part of our natural routine.

So, maybe that’s the resolution for 2010. What I’ll do next is focus more on the simple acts.

These related entries might also interest you:
Five Year Plan