| dig dug |
[13 Jan 2009|11:28am] |
At long last, the various executives (state, county, and city) have agreed on a plan to replace the aging and damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct on Seattle's waterfront. They've chosen the Bored Tunnel Hybrid Alternative. See this page for more details, especially this PDF.
Highlights:
- A 1.7 mile, 4-lane, double-decker, deep bored tunnel (SR99) from South Lake Union in the North to the stadiums in the South.
- A 4-lane surface street (Alaskan Way) and promenade on the waterfront.
- A streetcar on First Ave between Pioneer Square and the Seattle Center.
- Making Mercer St two-way all the way to I-5.
- Connecting John, Thomas, and Harrison Streets over Aurora.
- Various transit improvements, including substantially increased bus service.
The total will run to about $4.25 billion, with the state putting up a bit over $2.8 billion, the county a little less than $200 million, the city a bit over $900 million, and the Port of Seattle (hopefully) around $300 million. There will probably be some increases in various car-related taxes (but nothing too major).
Construction will start in 2011, with the tunnel open to drivers (hopefully) in late 2015. The streetcar probably won't ready for a year or so after that. Some of the other improvements (such as Mercer St) will probably come year or two sooner.
Although I would have loved to see more public transit as part of this plan, I recognize the desire to preserve a high-capacity connection to the port, and to build such a connection with minimal disruption during construction. I think this is actually a pretty reasonable compromise given all the competing pressures. I even think it has a reasonable chance of getting all the funding it needs and actually being started on schedule.
(I won't make any predictions about it being *finished* on schedule, with a project of this size, but I expect we'll learn from Boston's Big Dig rather than repeat it. I hear some of the people involved in that project are consulting on this one, which is actually a good thing, I think.)
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| number 28? |
[10 Jan 2009|09:12pm] |
So, should we amend the Constitution to change how the office of President works?
Garrett Epps of the Atlantic think so.
What do you think? Is Article II outdated and vague? Should the President:
- be elected by a popular vote?
- have more clearly delineated powers, like Congress?
- be required to form a new Cabinet if their party loses a midterm election?
- share power with an elected Attorney General, who would limit the ability of a President to ignore or reinterpret laws?
Fascinating ideas, and well argued. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Mr. Epps, but some change is probably not a bad idea.
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| historical |
[17 Nov 2008|10:58am] |
“A man without history is a man without humor,” said Galal Amin, an economist and author who has written about Egypt’s modern decline. “A man with history is more likely to have humor, because he is more likely to see the irony in things, how things were and how they turned out to be. And patience.”
-- From a New York Times article on the discovery of the 138th Egyptian pyramid.
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| light scotch |
[24 Oct 2008|08:19pm] |
Sticky tape generates X-rays (Nature)
From a Strip of Scotch Tape, X-Rays (New York Times)
"All of the experiments were conducted with Scotch tape, manufactured by 3M. The details of what is occurring on the molecular scale to generate high-energy photons are not known, the scientists said, in part because the Scotch tape adhesive remains a trade secret."
"Other brands of clear adhesive tapes also gave off X-rays, but with a different spectrum of energies. Duct tape did not produce any X-rays, Dr. Putterman said. The scientists have not yet tested masking tape."
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[01 Jun 2008|12:19pm] |
Science!
"Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension."
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| memristor |
[30 Apr 2008|05:43pm] |
A team at HP has constructed a working memristor.
A memristor is an often overlooked circuit element on par with the more familiar resistor, capacitor, and inductor. It has properties that cannot be constructed from any combination of the other three, and thus the ability to actually construct one (or, many, as the team at HP did) should enable the construction of circuits with novel properties. They're already talking about very dense, high speed, non-volatile memories. (We're talking 100 Gbits per square cm, only about 10x slower than DRAM, and non-volatile for years.)
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| caucus-tastic |
[09 Feb 2008|02:53pm] |
So, I just got back from caucusing. Given that I hail from the Independent Republic of Fremont, I'll give you one guess as to which candidate got five out of the six delegates from my precinct.
Seeing as how I moved to this state just under four years ago, this was my first caucus. I have to say I find polling to be a much saner system. The successive stages of accumulating round-off error inherent to the caucus system is atrocious. And trusting organization to volunteers is chaotic at best.
On the other hand, it was interesting to see and briefly connect with like-minded people from my neighborhood. (I count pretty much anyone going to a Democratic caucus in my neighborhood as sufficiently like-minded, regardless of which candidate they support.) For the first time in a while, I actually feel like I'm living in a democracy.
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[08 Nov 2007|10:35pm] |
From the New York Times article about Benazir Bhutto being put under house arrest:
“I feel confident that President Musharraf heard the president’s message,” she [Dana Perino, the White House press secretary] said, traveling with Mr. Bush to Texas. But, she added, “the uniform is still an issue.”
“The president called on him to take it off,” she said. “He said you can’t be both the president and the head of the army...”
I understand that Musharraf is violating the (recently suspended) Pakistani Constitution by keeping his position as the head of the army while serving as president, but there's something very odd about our Commander in Chief telling another head of state that he can't be both simultaneously.
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| domo arigato |
[29 Jul 2007|09:45pm] |
Robots!
Specifically, a nifty article about them in the New York Times.
From the article:
The word “robot” was popularized in 1920, in the play “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” commonly called “R.U.R.,” by the Czech writer Karel Capek. The word comes from the Czech “robota,” meaning forced labor or drudgery. In the world of R.U.R., Robots (always with a capital R) are built to be factory workers, meaning they are designed as simply as possible, with no extraneous frills. “Robots are not people,” says the man who manufactures them. “They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul.” Capek’s Robots are biological, not mechanical. The thing that separates them from humans is not the material they are made of — their skin is real skin; their blood, real blood — but the fact that they are built rather than born.
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[07 Jun 2007|09:17pm] |
Successful wireless energy transfer experiment confirms theory
This isn't just a toy. It's efficient enough (40%) at the appropriate ranges (2m) and power levels (60W) that only relatively minor improvements are necessary before it becomes commercially viable. Here's to true wireless!
I also like the name: "WiTricity"
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