A Trip to New York

Thursday I rode the train up to New York City for a meeting about a big project in which I have a small role. My journey started at the BWI train station.

Farewell Baltimore.

At high speed through the land of chemical plants around the Delaware River.

Hello Philadelphia.

Arrival in New York at the new Moynihan Train Hall, which is way nicer than the welcome you used to get from Amtrak.

Ah, Midtown.

Actually I had two meetings. First was a pre-meeting meeting in our corporate offices, which are right by Penn Station. But that only took ten minutes, leaving me nearly two hours to kill before the main meeting. So I took a walk. 

The sort of thing you see on the street in New York, a photographer taking pictures of a girl doing ballet in the street.

I walked from up 7th Avenue, past the center of the worldwide liberal conspiracy,

To Central Park. Which was 24 blocks, but I was tense about the upcoming meeting and walking fast.

The playground just inside the park was completely empty on a rainy Thursday.

I think those new towers are what they call Billionaire's Row

Then back to my office to meet the rest of our team and ride the Subway out to Queens for the main meeting. But our subway stop was right across the street from All Faiths Cemetery, a huge place founded in 1852 with 588,000 "permanent residents." So after the meeting I bid said my goodbyes and went off exploring.

Interesting group of recent Chinese graves.

Awesome, athought photographs can't do justice to the feeling of walking through a cemetery on a rainy day.

And then the three hour ride back home to Catonsville. An amazing, tiring day.

Links 19 April 2024

Thomas Maybank, The Court of Faerie,  1906

Detailed look at how three works of art came to be made, from Adam Moss's new book, The Work of Art.

The 17th-century garden maze at Bufalini Castle in Italy re-opens after years of closure, looks amazing.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons closes a women's prison in California that was notorious for the sexual abuse of inmates; four new wardens in four years had been unable to halt the abuse. Sometimes organizations get so corrupt that there isn't anything to do but shut them down. (As with the Camden police.)

Interesting glimpse of a US Marine strategy called "Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations," involving drones, fighter jets, and small Pacific islands.

Update on the progress of 3D-printed houses; still not cheaper than balloon framing.

Via Marginal Revolutions, an article describing the astonishing gains in the production of strawberries via selective breeding and other techniques. Of course for a while they were kind of tasteless but I find that in recent years the strawberries in my grocery store have been pretty good. (I used to grow my own, so I know what they're supposed to taste like.)

How a sophisticated attempt to hack millions of computers was exposed almost by accident.

Murder rates are falling in US cities, back to the levels before the pandemic or even lower. Still puzzles me that the pandemic led to a surge in murders in the first place, especially since it was mainly concentrated in certain urban neighborhoods.

The crazy house of Isaiah Robertson, who called himself the second coming of the prophet Isaiah and said God guided his hands to make his art. The Kohler Foundation recently put up money for conservation.

Interesting NY Times feature on how argeli is grown in Nepal for use in Japanese banknotes; Japanese people love their paper money, and it is paper made from argeli bark that gives their bills their crisp heft. Shorter version at the Times of India, and a story on the same topic at Global Voices.

Solid, balanced review at Vox of the evidence on social media and teen mental health.

Just to show that obsessing about politicians' clothes isn't pure sexism, here's a NY Times feature on how Joe Biden – always a natty dresser – "dresses young." This presumably costs a lot, since the White House refuses to comment on where the president gets his clothes. And did you notice that the blue tone Biden favors for suits matches the blue in the American flag? Nerds like me think politics is about policy ideas, but pros like Biden know its really about how you look with flags behind you.

Interview with David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect. 

The social lives of viruses.

More on those alleged mafia-style Neolithic human sacrifices.

Spitalfields Life visits the roof of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, amazing graffiti.

Historically Taiwan has recorded an increase in births of at least 10% in each Year of the Dragon, the most auspicious year to be born; but not even that helped this past year, when births still fell by 6.1%. 

Maryland teenager, who has already spent time in a psychiatric facility, is arrested after writing a 129-page "fictional memoir" about his school shooting. The police called it a "plan."

During Iran's missile and drone attack on Israel, the US Navy finally got to use its 20-year-old anti-ballistic missile interceptor, the SM-3, and it worked fine. Relatively old-fashioned weapons like ballistic missiles and subsonic cruise missiles could only hurt a US carrier group if they were launched in overwhelming numbers. Which explains China's focus on hypersonic weapons. Honestly I have the impression that a lot of warfare in the near future is going to be countries throwing huged piles of money (in the form of attack missiles or interceptors) at each other to see who runs out or blinks first. The Navy recently said it has used a billion dollars worth of weapons this year shooting down missiles and drones in the Middle East. 

Noah Smith admits he was wrong about missile defense, which he wrote many times was an expensive boondoggle. In a new essay he asks why he and so many others were wrong; basically, the people who knew how good the weapons were getting couldn't talk about them, leaving the field to loudmouth outside critics.

The Telegraph says our global conflicts are part of one "world war," very much like Tom Friedman's take here. (Brief summary of Friedman's position here.)

A drone pilot is the US Marines' "Aviator of the Year."

Article at Foreign Affairs (free when I checked) on the failed peace negotiations that took place early in the Ukraine war. Shashank Joshi summarizes: "Russia continued to make new & unacceptable demands that would have turned Ukraine into a weak & undefensible vassal state." Also, they discussed security guarantees from western states that had not ever been mentioned to those states.

Population Peaks

Via Birth Gauge on Twitter/X, a map showing when each US county peaked in population. Dark blue means the population is still rising. 

Lots of people have left the plains.

You have to love Nassau County in western Long Island, where the population would be booming if it were legal to build any kind of housing there.

The Prepper Dream

Stephen Marche in the NY Times:

When I attended prepper conventions as research for my book, I found their visions of a collapsed American Republic suspiciously attractive: It’s a world where everybody grows his own food, gathers with family by candlelight, defends his property against various unpredictable threats and relies on his wits. Their preferred scenario resembled, more than anything, a sort of postapocalyptic “Little House on the Prairie.”

I think this fantasy lies behind a lot of apocalyptic thinking; people want our system to fall because they imagine it would fall into a rural idyll rather than a real post-industrial wasteland.

The First Hot Day

I was back on the Potomac today for what turned out to be our first hot day of the year, 88 degrees (31 C).

It seemed like I could feel green leaves bursting out all around me.

I was startled by these pinkish new oak leaves.

I was not feeling so great after an exciting weekend meeting with a kidney stone, but I did take one pleasant walk. Besides the garter snake I saw an Osprey very close, and then three pairs of crows squabbling over territory.

Every time I read that wisteria is a destructive invasive species I find myself wishing that all our problems were this pretty.

And then back in my neighborhood, the season of pink trees.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Bologna

Bologna has had a rough history.

Founded by Etruscans, it was conquered by Gauls, then Romans. The Goths sacked it when they conquered Italy, and during Justinian's reconquest of Italy they sacked it again. Tradition records that after those slaughters the city had to be refounded by a certain Bishop Petronius, who also founded the Basilica of St. Stephen and is still the city's patron saint.

Then it was sacked by the Lombards, then by Charlemagne's Franks. Charlemagne attached the city to the papacy, which ruled it for a significant part of the time from then down to 1868.

Factional fighting in Bologna, from a 14th-century chronicle

But that didn't make the city's existence peaceful. It was caught up in wars between Popes and Emperors and developed stubborn Guelf and Ghibbeline factions that fought each other and regularly betrayed the city to their favored outside power. 

The leading families of each faction built the crazy towers that defined its image in the Renaissance.

Bologna was also fought over during the Napoleonic Wars and the wars of Italian independence, and during World War II big parts were bombed to rubble. After WW II it became known as the Red City because it was dominated by the communists; Italy had Western Europe's largest Communist Party in those days partly because while many Italians hated the fascists, the communists were the only ones who actually fought them.

The University

Yet, and this is an important point, the city nonetheless thrived, especially in the high Middle Ages. The university claims to have been founded in 1088, making it the oldest in the world. It was for centuries Europe's leading center for the study of Roman law.  

Across the 1100s and 1200s the economy boomed. One result of the medieval boom was the famous sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca, the construction of which began in 1193. It sits on a hill 1000 feet (300m) above the town, and the climb is a famous walk. It is now surrounded by a 17th-century collonade with 666 arches, which puzzles me, but then I freely confess that I know nothing about 17th-century Catholicism.

Map of the city in 1575, installed in the Pope's dining room in Rome

Construction of the current Basilica began in 1390. It was paid for by the townspeople in defiance of the Pope; the first stone bore the communal coat of arms. But it turned out that the city's leaders dreamed bigger than their purses could reach, and the unfinished shell was shut up for a century; it was not formally opened until the 1700s.

The Basilica holds several works by Michelangelo, including a famous image of Saint Petronius.

Bologna is particarly proud of its many porticoes; the local tourist authority has helpfully laid out a walking tour to help you sample them.

The 18th-century Villa Spada has a famous garden.

Bologna is not high on the list of Italian cities people want to visit, but I have always been intrigued.