From How We Drive, the Blog of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: I was intrigued by this line from a new paper by John N. Ivan, Norman W. Garrick, and Gilbert Hanson titled “Designing Roads That Guide Drivers to Choose Safer Speeds”: The aesthetics or “beauty” of a road environment has also been investigated in relation to traffic safety. Drottenborg (1999) studied the impact of speed on streets that appear as “beautiful” due to the blossoming of cherry trees along the streets in Lund during springtime, and similar streets that lack such beautification. She found that the free-flow mean speed decreased by …
Share:
Almost 20 years ago I was a part of pioneering something and I had no idea I was doing that. Gathered under the creative eye of Rob Winslow at The Union Theatre in Peterborough Ontario, a small cast of us put on a weekly improvised soap opera called “The Cactus Hotel: A Western Philosophy” (My God! Here is the brochure for it!) Every Sunday night all summer we improvised a one hour show that advanced the story of a number of characters who found themselves in an imaginary world that owed its existence to the marriage of the Hotel California, …
Share:
My friend Norah Rendell is a traditional musician of the highest calibre. She is a beautiful singer and a gifted Irish flute player and a curious and lively human being. To be around her is a delight and to make music with her is to be carried away in a space of grace and beauty where we can find out what it means to be truly human. I’ve just spent the better part of last weekend visiting with her in St. Paul, Minnesota, making music and sharing lots of story. For me the social production of music is a deeply …
Share:
A cafe today, with littler preparation on the ground and a tricky issue in a community, but a good result today and some good learnings about harvesting. Here are my notes: Before we began the chief invited us to stand in a circle to pray and to have some introductions. I was introduced and invited the group to find beauty in the work here, identifying what they really cared about for the education of their young people. We stayed standing in the circle for a half hour while some of the Elders talked about how hurt they had been over …
Share:
Check this quote: Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971 IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. via Green sandbox: Since 1971. It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us. Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what …