Robert Reads

Thursday, May 26, 2005

gladwell dot com / The Vanishing

This book review is doubly fun for me. I'm still trying to finish Diamond's Collapse, which I love, and the book review here is done by Malcolm Gladwell, whose The Tipping Point I had just read previously to Diamond's Collapse. What's great about this review is that Gladwell really gets what Diamond is up to and uses his review to basically slap contemporary thinking upside the head. This head slapping centers on a quote Gladwell pulls out of Diamond's Collapse, a quote that might be one of the key ideas of our age:

"The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity."

gladwell dot com / The Vanishing

posted by Robert Baird # 1:45 PM 0 comments

Observer Blog

What is cool about The Observer Blog is that this is a newspaper that has been in publication since 1791, and they now have a blog and they are having fun with it and also (sort of) serious about blogs as something new that they recognize as "competition." Anyway, the Brits have a good sense of humor and I take it that The Observer Blog lets its hair down more than THE OBSERVER.

best

Prof. Biff

Observer Blog

posted by Robert Baird # 9:56 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

GREEN Merging with Traffic / San Francisco bicyclists become part of the City's transportation establishment

GREEN Merging with Traffic / San Francisco bicyclists become part of the City's transportation establishment:

"'My first Critical Mass was really an eye opener,' Leah Shahum told me. 'I had never thought of bicycling as a political thing, as a part of a social movement. Riding with a
thousand people just felt so empowering. It felt different: I felt safer, I felt more confident. These were good feelings.'
That was 1996, shortly after Shahum had moved to San Francisco a few years out of college. It was the period when Critical Mass established San Francisco as the epicenter of militant bicycling culture, as thousands of bikers swarmed in a usually joyous and always chaotic monthly leaderless parade. A decade later, Shahum is executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and the public face of a new kind of grown-up bicycle activism. "

My friend Rick Langlois pointed me toward this article about bikes in San Francisco, a contrast with the rather limited encouragement of bikes in our own college town of Urbana/Champaign, Illinois. Rick and I both ride bikes to work and wish others did. I tend to ride on sidewalks because, once off campus, it's hard to find bike lanes. Hopefully, San Francisco points toward a larger pendulum swing that is going on nationally, away from car-only or car-centric planning and toward pedestrian and cycling-friendly planning.

best

Robert Baird