Yes, of course they practice. But I’d never noticed that one of the practice points was right there in the middle of it all. I’d just got off the Blue line train, using a different route on my way to USC for a change, and about to jump onto my bike.
In other public transport news, I remain disappointed in the USC “Air Quality […] Click to continue reading this post
Breaking news! On Monday evening, while heading for the bus stop I saw a lovely and welcome glimpse of the future. A train on the new Expo line tracks!!!! They are just testing, but it was exciting nonetheless. It is going to be so exciting and transformative when this line is done, and phase one opens later this year! (November, perhaps?) I’ll be able to use the subway/metro system to get all the way from my neighbourhood (on the red line) to the stop 5 minutes from my building, after one change downtown. I’ll feel a bit of a deserter if I stop using the bus to do the journey (assuming that the schedule is such that it it quicker than the bus!), but I’ve got to support this line too! After all, by 2015 or so, after phase two opens, I’ll be able to take this train from my office all the way to the beach…! […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, it is not often I get to say this, but Sunday’s CicLAvia event was, for me, completely perfect. It was simply about community, family, and enjoying the streets. It did not have an overtly political or activist vibe to it (as is often the case when you try to do some things a little differently from others in this town, like ride the bus or walk to the grocery store), and I saw a lot more people simply enjoying (and remarking on it out loud) the fact that they were out on the streets of the city than I saw people proclaiming rabid anti-car sentiments, as I’ve seen at bike-centric events before. I think the former feeling will go a lot further in making lasting change than the latter in the long run. There was some political content around, but it was largely confined to the steps of City Hall, where (when I passed) there were endearingly naive chants being led by a bloke with a microphone about “LA saying no to oil!’ and “no to coal!”. Don’t get me wrong – naive is not necessarily used as a derogatory term here. Noble dreams begin with a heavy dose of naivete, I believe. Hope, against the odds, for significant change, and so forth. (I could use the fully decorated version, naïveté, but it looks a bit pretentious to me today…)
So the event was mostly about people getting out there and enjoying the city streets, and sharing their enjoyment by doing it together. I was impressed with the turnout […] Click to continue reading this post
Getting ready to disappear off to explore. the route. Should be fun, although it is a tad too hot a day for it to be perfect for cycling and wandering long in the sun. On the other hand, that will bring a lot of people out to enjoy their Sunday outdoors, I hope, walking, cycling, rollerblading, skateboarding, running, etc. […] Click to continue reading this post
The first CicLAvia is this Sunday! Don’t forget! The sudden Winter weather we’ve been having will have vanished by then, and it will be a lovely day. There’s a seven-mile route of city streets for you to walk, bike, run, etc. Should be fun!
See my description of one I saw in Morelia, Mexico, here. More information on this first LA one here. […] Click to continue reading this post
It all happened so fast, I did not even get to take a picture for you. Yesterday morning, I woke up with the thought that I should clear some space in the, er, batcave/lab/hideout in order to make room for a lot of stuff that is currently in my campus office that is taking up vital room. I’ve a tiny office, so from time to time I have a space crisis. (I need to bring myself to discard tons of the old preprints (pre-publication papers) from the 80s and 90s that I keep mostly out of sentimental value, and then I’d be on top of things more easily, I expect. Lots of them are tied up with old notes on various projects, and so I sort of want to make time to archive those notes, separate them out from the preprints, and then discard the latter.)
I found that I could generate a huge amount of space down there by getting rid of a ton of old electronic devices. (Let’s just say I dismantled one of my doomsday devices and had lots of spare parts left over.) I looked up the one recycling centre I knew about for sure (remember me filming there last year, illustrating supernovae? See here, and here, for example) and found that one could only deliver things there if one was a Burbank resident, which I am not. So I did a wider search and found that there are various electronics recycling collection events arranged periodically in the region, and one of them was happening that very morning over in Sierra Madre! Inspired, I spent the next half an hour loading up the car, and after a quick breakfast was on the road at about 9:00am, carving a nice slice of road up the 2 toward the spectacular view of the mountains one gets, especially that time of day (it is something about the morning sun, I think, along with the rush of zipping up the pleasant slope of the traffic-less 2).
I anticipated an interesting scene, with lots of stations of different sorts for various types of items (computers there, VCRs there, doomsday device components there, […] Click to continue reading this post
Perhaps ironically, since I tune into BBC Radio 4 every day when in Los Angeles, I’ve not been listening to it or any other UK radio or news source while here in London at all. So imagine my pleasant surprise on Thursday when I came across what clearly looked like a docking station for bikes (as opposed to super-fancy bike racks, which I thought it was at first)! Sure enough, once I got closer I confirmed it – a bike sharing scheme was starting in London. By the next day I saw some more stations on my walks, and a truck driving along full of the bikes, presumably going to load up the stations. As it turned out, I learned later that the scheme started that very next day, and today I saw several people out riding on them!
I am a little disappointed about one thing. I wanted to try them out and be out there seeing the streets of the city from one of these bikes instead of on foot (as I have been doing a lot in the last several days), but guess what? […] Click to continue reading this post
On Sunday in Morelia, Mexico, I was walking along the main street near my hotel and it seemed that something unusual was going on. The street was empty of cars, and some sort of event was going on. I saw a few cyclists here and there in the distance, but not the sort that look all hardcore and determined to go fast and determinedly on their way, but instead the more leisurely stop-and-smell-the-flowers sort. I wondered almost immediately if I had run into a local ciclovía, and a few minutes later, a sign confirmed this. Wonderful!
I’ve been waiting for such a thing to come to LA for a while now, since I heard of it last year when I part (and presented) in a public discussion downtown at the Artwalk about bike issues in the city, and had heard that it was becoming more widespread (it started in South America – Colombia) but it was an unexpected treat to find one right outside my hotel room! Here are three more picture. Click for larger view.
It was great to see lots of people out and about just using the streets with no cars […] Click to continue reading this post
In recent years there was all the nonsense about how scientists were going to accidentally make a black hole with the Large Hadron Collider that would runaway out of control…. we would not be able to stop it. We scientists would have tampered with the murky depths of Nature and awoken a monster we could not control. Naughty scientists that we are. The LHC has been colliding away at unprecedented energies, and last time I checked (you can too – click here) we’re ok.
I just realized something. Now we do have a runaway black hole! But it was created by naughty engineers, tampering with the murky depths of Nature and awakening a monster they cannot control. That gushing well 5000 feet below in the gulf of Mexico is a black hole […] Click to continue reading this post
It is Earth day today, the 40th anniversary, in fact. Have you had it in mind at all? I was pleased, in following the leadership debate that took place today over in the UK, to hear very interesting and serious content in the answers about what the various party leaders were doing on environmental both personally and in terms of policy. Over the years we’ve rapidly come to a point where it’s no longer a trendy or fringy issue in front line politics, but a mainstream one with impact in all aspects of policy.
On the left (click for larger view) is the rather elegant flower (two of them) of one of my several aloe vera plants. They’re quite unexpected and rather lovely I’d say. Several different types of bird have been attracted to them and it is a pleasure to look over at them (and others) and see what birds are settling on […] Click to continue reading this post
Don’t forget Earth Hour tonight! Starting at 8:30pm local time. More here. What will you switch off? -cvj
It has been a pleasure to see the large number of bikes in use in London, and particularly pleasing that it is a wide range of types of people using them as well. 
There are many things about London that make it feel even more comfortable to me than ever (high prices of everything not being one of them) and the heavy bike use has to be one of them. Things in that department continue to improve over in my home city of Los Angeles, although I think it’ll still be a bit of time before you get bunches of cyclists routinely clustered at the lights waiting for the green, as in the photo on the right.
Also great to see, sending a shiver of pleasure down my spine each time I’ll admit, has been the huge number of Bromptons in use in London. (See photo left.) I know it is true statistically that they are among the most popular single type of bike here (of any type, folding or non-folding) but it is still great that there are so very many sightings of them as you walk along the street especially at peak times. That’s something that really still has not taken off in LA. I’ve seen fewer than a handful of Bromptons in almost seven years on the streets here, relatively few folding bikes in total, and maybe only twice have I seen someone else using them in combination with the subway (and I remain the only person I’ve ever seen bringing them on to the bus). It […] Click to continue reading this post
This is a fun poster I saw at the Grove the other day. (Click for a larger view.)
The good fairy (Tinkerbell, apparently) speaks the truth!
It’s nice to see such a campaign, and aimed at the younger set (who in turn might bug their parents into thinking about it too). It is sponsored by the Department of Energy (the same people who sponsor most of my research), and you can look at the website here. Maybe you’ll direct some others to it too! There’s an energy action checklist, and lots of useful tips and guidelines for everyone (young and old) to follow in order […] Click to continue reading this post
This is exciting! Today I decided to explore the new extension of the Gold line for a little while. 
There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing a prominent public works project of such obvious value to the community finish the construction phase and begin regular service. I was away in Europe at the opening of it in mid-November and so today was my personal little inauguration ceremony. It runs South and then East from downtown’s Union Station to Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. Yes, you can take it all the way from Pasadena to East LA without changing trains (and similarly in the other direction) and so there’s an incentive to explore. (I’m hoping this will motivate some of the people I know in Pasadena who rarely leave it to actually get out and explore Los Angeles for real…)
I wandered the streets a little bit at one or two of the stops and of course I also sat on the trains looking out of the window and at the people around me. As with many […] Click to continue reading this post
Somehow I forgot to point this out last Fall. There was an interesting article by Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker on James Cameron, creator of so many giant films you may know of, and of course, of the recent juggernaut Avatar. It is definitely worth a read, as is Goodyear’s related chat online with readers here.
I went to see Avatar in its proper setting (late night showing in the Dome at the Arclight of course) a fortnight ago and can report a few things of interest:
* The cheeky alternate name Smurfohantas (I heard this name on Kermode and Mayo’s BBC Radio 5 show) is not far off the mark if you are in a cynical mood. It’s a very standard story, rather straightforwardly told, but using striking tall blue people. (There is nothing wrong with re-telling stories, by the way, so don’t get me wrong. Arguably, most stories are in large part old stories). I just don’t see this version as particularly well told, just merely functional. There’s a slightly more interesting angle buried under there somewhere about the whole idea of avatars, and maybe even something about disability, and so forth, but only if you really really dig for it.
* It is not a great film, but it is an interesting and entertaining film to watch. I have a soft spot for Cameron’s work since I do like his use of strong female characters in the genre as well as his anti-war, suspicion-of-corporation, and environmental […] Click to continue reading this post
