I’m not sure that the commander-in-chief proves his mettle by getting everyone at his rallies to set their signs in the same typeface, but as someone who knows how hard that is, I’m very impressed.
That’s graphic designer Michael Bieruit on the typographical choices of the Obamanauts. It’s an interesting article overall.
Take a look at this video of a recent Obama speech.
In the background on the left, right at the start - isn’t that Louis Theroux?
Buala bos to Mark and Associates for coming up with these proposals for transforming the stretch of coast from the East Pier to Sandycove. Having lots of fond memories of the place I’ve probably got an inbuilt wariness about any major changes, but after looking a bit more closely I think they’d both be big improvements, particularly in making the water actually accessible. I think I prefer the first one (with the lagoon rather than the big beach) at the moment, any thoughts?
Funny coincidence: just yesterday I was reading the bit in the script for Annie Hall where Alvy finds a copy of the National Review in Annie’s apartment and suggests she gets William F. Buckley to come round and kill the spider in her bathroom. I thought “Hee hee, brilliant! Wait, who’s William F. Buckley?”. Well, now he’s dead, but apparently he was a leading conservative intellectual in the days before that was a contradiction in terms. Tyler Cowen links to some interesting YouTube clips, including this interview with Chomsky. Buckley’s persona is pretty odd: he’s obviously clever, but (to me, anyway) he comes across as a pompous and somewhat oleaginous bullshitter who in this case has his rhetorical ass handed to him by young Noam.
Update: some considerably less superficial analysis here
Blimey, this got a bit scrappy, didn’t it?
CHAIRMAN: You are a former chairman of the Bar Council. You should have, if you had views about the tribunal counsel that you are suggesting that you have, that is unprofessional conduct on their part. And the proper course was for you to make a complaint to the Bar Council. You know what those rules are better than perhaps anyone in this room. You should have gone to the High Court long ago and said this tribunal is engaged in an agenda.
It’s a most - it’s the most - of all of the allegations that have ever been made against us, and many have been made, that is the most serious allegation because it is the one which, if it was established as being true, would completely undermine the work of the tribunal.
MR MAGUIRE: Now, chairman, you have magnified out of all proportion what my submissions to you were . . . I am making an application to you about a matter which is in contention between us and the tribunal counsel that one side of the argument has an access to you.
Now, you have used emotive words to describe what that means. I am not going to use whose words. And I haven’t used them. And I know that you are doing the best that you can in all of the circumstances. But unfortunately it’s the situation that we find ourselves here in, is that when there is controversy and you are the person that makes the decision, one person, one side of the argument has access to you and the other doesn’t.
Now, that cannot in any sense of the word be fair and reasonable or be fair and equal treatment.
CHAIRMAN: The substance of what you are suggesting to the tribunal, is that in some way we are influenced to a degree that the decision that is we make are dictated by our counsel. They are not. And we exercise, we exercise absolute independence and we are most careful that we do that . . .
What I absolutely deplore is this constant theme that we have from you, that in some way we are on some sort of a twisted illegal corrupt frolic. We are not conducting an agenda.
MR MAGUIRE: I did not say that, chairman.
If Billy Bragg can fix the House of Lords I see no reason why Lilian Thuram cannot bring peace to the Middle East. And I’m sure there have been worse reasons for deciding who hosts past World Cups.
Peace through Superior Football
by Pascal Boniface and Lilian ThuramWhen it comes to wishing for peace in the Middle East – virtually a New Year’s tradition – one needs to be careful. So many hopes have vanished in the bitter failure of so many negotiations. But we have a wish for the Middle East – one that, while perhaps not bringing peace, can create one of peace’s preconditions: goodwill. Israel and Palestine should jointly bid for, and be awarded, the Football World Cup in 2018.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has lasted far too long. The Annapolis peace conference ended a seven-year freeze on negotiations, with President George W. Bush asking the conflict’s main protagonists to reach an agreement by the end of 2008.
Nothing prevents us from hoping that a fair and just peace can be achieved by then. There is no curse that keeps Israelis and Palestinians from living side by side peacefully. Where there is a will, there is a way.
But nurturing the will to achieve long-lasting peace depends on more than political negotiations. Israelis and Palestinians need an underlying source of solidarity if they are ever to settle their large disagreements and prevent their small ones from erupting into violence.
Although football cannot solve the region’s major strategic problems, it has much to contribute in this regard. Football mobilizes energies and unites enthusiasms. After the 2010 World Cup in South Africa – a country where peace has taken root – and before the 2014 tournament in Brazil, it will be time to select the host for 2018.
If a peace agreement is concluded before that choice is made, a 2018 World Cup jointly staged in Israel and Palestine would be a fantastic opportunity to consolidate the gains for both sides. Infrastructure investment would then follow.
The joint organization of the 2018 World Cup in a place where two peoples were once at war would serve as a powerful symbol of the way that sports can serve the cause of peace. Indeed, the prospect of hosting the football World Cup might constitute yet another incentive for Israelis and Palestinians to reach a settlement. Let us imagine that they could then work hand in hand to host the biggest sporting event in the world.
I think it would also help if we could send Peter Crouch to the West Bank for a while - the people there would be so distracted by his lanky frame and paradoxical lack of aerial threat that they would soon forget about their political grievances.
This article about Heath Ledger is actually quite good. Like:
But contrary to the binary thinking of the media’s Ledger debate, his drug use doesn’t negate the “good Heath” story line. The arbitrary distinctions between good and bad drugs, and good and bad star behavior, obscure the fact that there likely was no bad Heath Ledger. As it happens, he might have been better off if he had behaved more horribly, if he weren’t so widely adored. An addict’s best hope for recovery is being an intolerable asshole when he’s using.
There’s also a healthy respect for the unknowableness of some people, appropriate to somebody who has just starred in a decidedly fractured biopic called “I’m Not There”. Todd Haynes, the director of that film, says:
What’s so hard about this is that there is not a real character arc—arguably, there never is, no matter how long someone lives.
I do enjoy the deliriously clichéd style of much American political commentary:
The cheeseheads have spoken. And the message they delivered in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin was loud and unequivocal. There are fancier (or gentler) ways of interpreting it, but what the hearty souls who braved the subfreezing temperatures to cast their votes from Milwaukee to Menomonie announced was this: Virginia and Maryland weren’t anomalies; Barack Obama has the Big Mo; and Hillary Clinton is close to being forced from the stage by another lady — the fat one who likes to sing.
The Clinton campaign is laboring mightily to stuff a sock down that corpulent old dame’s throat.[continues…]
This numbered list does exactly what it says on the tin.
Straight in at number 50, well whaddya know, it’s Irony.
The FAI has secured the services of Giovanni Trapattoni as Ireland manager with the financial aid of Denis O’Brien.
Well now. And isn’t that far preferable to him paying tax?
Unfortunately, O’Brien has not asked for anything, such as competence or success on the field, in return.
We were at the Black Francis (AKA Frank Black, ex The Pixies) gig in Dublin on Saturday night and, outside Vicar Street before the gig, Mark heard the ticket tout say: “I thought this was a Frances Black concert. Now I don’t know what I’m going to get for these tickets. I thought I could get 50 quid for them but now I don’t know what I’ll get.”
The answer to that question only a woman’s heart can know.
Only a woman, only a woman, only a woman’s heart can know.
(Sorry)
It’s the old “skiing makes you wealthy” phenomenon again. It’s not NECESSARILY that the more cyclists are on the road, the safer it becomes. The more intuitive and obvious explanation is that the safer it is, the higher percentage of people who will cycle.
So rather than saying that Copenhagen is safe to cycle because so many people per head of population choose to do so (thereby changing driver behaviour), we could say that huge numbers of people choose to do so because there are safe, wide, separate cycle lanes separated from both pedestrians and traffic by raised curbs.
Of course there’s also the element of high cyclist-demand leading to better safety facilities. That’s quite different to hoping that sheer numbers of cyclists on the roads will lead to more careful driving by would-be cyclist-killers.
She’s right, of course - correlation does indeed not prove causation. And I’m sure it’s true that safer cycling facilities persuade more people to cycle. I was going to write a longer post talking about how there was probably causation in both directions and measures to boost cycling could set off a virtuous circle of increased cycling -> safer cycling -> increased cycling, but decided not to bore you with all the details. Well, never again.
Fionnuala says it’s more intuitively obvious that “the safer it is, the higher percentage of people who will cycle”. Sure, but I can think of good reasons why more cyclists on the road may change driver behaviour. At the most basic level, larger groups of cyclists make each individual cyclist more visible. With more cyclists around, drivers become more aware of how cyclists behave and better able to predict their movements (see the ‘Shared Space‘ concept, based on the idea that the more visible pedestrians are the more carefully drivers drive). More cyclists on the street can also mean that car drivers are obliged to actually respect facilities for cyclists such as green boxes, staying safely behind a group rather than crowding dangerously around an individual. And drivers in areas where cycling is common are more likely to know cyclists personally or be occasional cyclists themselves, which should create a less oppositional climate than one in which cyclists are mostly younger men.
There’s also better evidence around than the simple cross-national averages I posted about. In “Safety in numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling” P.L. Jacobsen cites two interesting studies comparing accident rates at individual junctions in the same city:
Research at specific sites has shown that collisions between a motorist and a person walking or bicycling diminish where more people walk and bicycle. Ekman examined numbers of pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists, and serious conflicts among them at 95 intersections in Malmö, Sweden. He found that after adjusting for the number of bicyclists, the number of conflicts/bicyclist was twice as great at locations with few bicyclists compared with locations with more. In fact, the number of conflicts/bicyclist decreased abruptly with more than 50 bicyclists/hour. With pedestrians, Ekman found that although the number of conflicts/pedestrian was largely unaffected by numbers of pedestrians, the conflict rate was still affected by numbers of motorists.
Leden also reported a non-linear relationship in two examinations of intersections. In a before and after study, he examined changes in numbers of bicyclists and collisions between motorists and bicyclists in response to changes in physical configuration at 45 non-signalized intersections between bicycle paths and roadways in Gothenburg, Sweden. The total number of collisions increased with the 0.4 power of the increasing use of the intersections by bicyclists. He also examined police reported injuries to people walking at approximately 300 signalized intersections in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The number of collisions increased with the 0.32 to 0.67 power with increasing numbers of pedestrians.
I find this pretty persuasive, because (a) cycling facilities are unlikely to vary as much within a city as between countries, (b) the incidence of cycling at a particular intersection relative to others in the same town is to some extent a given based on its location and independent of its characteristics - in other words, it seems unlikely to me that quiet intersections will suddenly become busy ones just because they are made safer.
All of which is not to say that intervening to make cycling safer isn’t a good idea. It’s a very good idea, especially because it can give a big boost to the kind of chain reaction that appears to have taken hold in Denmark and the Netherlands.
Imagine Keith Richards gratuitously calling Amy Winehouse a “bitch” because she takes drugs, and pretending that he wouldn’t have taken drugs 40 years ago if he had known about “the effects”, and certainly wouldn’t have continued taking them if there was such a thing as “rehab”.
If anyone knew about the effects of drugs 40 years ago, it was Keith Richards.
The stupid fucking bitch.
Lots of interesting map-related stuff around recently.
WOWblog, 3rd February:
It’s clearly pretty challenging to move from a car-based equilibrium where only the most foolhardy cycle to a bike-based one where only the most determined drive, but Pucher and Buehler’s research suggests it is doable (and includes proposals for how to do it). Oh and it also puts the ambitions of Transport for London to increase cycling to 5% of trips in London by 2025 into perspective: levels of cycling are far beyond even that target in many European cities, e.g. 29% in Copenhagen, 22% in Freiburg, 13% in Munich. Sure, none of that happened overnight - in each case it was the result of years of deliberate planning and careful implementation, but given two decades we can surely do better than 5% in London.
The Guardian, 9th February:
City’s two-wheel transformation
· Livingstone maps out 12 bicycle ‘motorways’
· £400m plan includes suburban networks
Matthew TaylorLondon is likely to become one of the most cycle-friendly places in the world, with a series of two-wheeler superhighways cutting a swath through traffic and congestion. Plans for the super-cycleways will be unveiled next week as part of an initiative to stimulate a 400% increase in the number of people pedalling round the capital by 2025.
At a cost of £400m, the 12 routes are intended to be the motorways of cycling and are likely to be emulated by other cities across the UK. Londoners without bikes will be able to use one of the city’s free bicycles.
“We want nothing short of a cycling transformation in London,” said the mayor, Ken Livingstone. “We are announcing the biggest investment in cycling in London’s history, which will mean that thousands more Londoners can cycle in confidence, on routes that take them quickly and safely to where they want to go.”
The cycle scheme is one of several environmental announcements expected in the capital over the coming weeks, including a decision on plans for a £25-a-day congestion charge on the highest-polluting vehicles and a proposal to re-fit 900 civic buildings across the capital to make them more energy-efficient.
The superhighways will link popular residential areas such as Hackney, Clapham and Kilburn to the city centre. The routes are based on a 12-month study of the most popular roads already used by cyclists and will have continuous, wide cycle lanes, dedicated junctions and clear signs.
That’s more like it! I’m hoping the ‘dedicated junctions’ includes something like traffic lights with a dedicated cyclist sequence, or even ‘green waves‘ timed to cycling speeds.
Yo!
If I was less lazy I’d find a way to cut this down to the bits I want you to hear, but I’m lazy, so here.
Caoimhghín ó Caoláin’s “analogy” doesn’t quite match up to Martin Mansergh’s Beef Tribunal
Go to http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0131/news1pm.html and click on
“Ahern insists no special treatment for Turner - Caitríona Perry reports on this morning’s colourful Dáil proceedings”
Do it! Do it!
So Philip Morris is supposedly pioneering bold new strategies in an attempt to maintain its hold on established markets while reaching out to millions of new victims in less nannyish climes. The Wall Street Journal has this video on two new products apparently put forward by PM, both of which strike me as surprisingly unsinister - endearingly goofy, even. Or is that the point??
I also like the way the (American) journalist grinningly informs us that neither will catch on Stateside because Americans are too lazy and stupid. Thanks for the insight!
The New York Times is interested in Ireland’s plastic bag tax. The story shows up in a Google search under the marvellous headline ‘With Irish Tax, Plastic Bags Go the Way of the Snakes‘, but the page itself is more mundane. This bit struck me as a bit odd, though:
In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.
Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.
“When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack.
Hmm, I’d be surprised if she really said “roommate”. Isn’t the NYT meant to be scrupulous about not fabricating stuff these days? Also, the reporter (Elisabeth Rosenthal) also says that “the environment minister [unnamed] told shopkeepers that if they changed from plastic to paper, he would tax those bags, too”. Is that right? I thought paper bags were exempt, and that this was considered by some a weakness of the policy?
It makes some sense that the more cyclists there are on the roads, the safer each individual cyclist is, because (a) more people cycling simply means less people driving and thus knocking over cyclists, and (b) greater numbers of cyclists on the road means a much stronger signal to car drivers to adjust their behaviour and drive in a less lethal fashion. But I’m still struck by the apparent strength of the association, in data reported by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler. The chart below compares cycling rates and fatality rates per kilometre cycled for the five countries with numbers in both categories:
It’s clearly pretty challenging to move from a car-based equilibrium where only the most foolhardy cycle to a bike-based one where only the most determined drive, but Pucher and Buehler’s research suggests it is doable (and includes proposals for how to do it). Oh and it also puts the ambitions of Transport for London to increase cycling to 5% of trips in London by 2025 into perspective: levels of cycling are far beyond even that target in many European cities, e.g. 29% in Copenhagen, 22% in Freiburg, 13% in Munich. Sure, none of that happened overnight - in each case it was the result of years of deliberate planning and careful implementation, but given two decades we can surely do better than 5% in London.
