Humanize the Earth!

electricity/train

Anyone know anything more about this? CTA tattler tells us:

Through regeneration, AC propulsion offers power savings. Some of the power used to accelerate the train can be recovered and put back into the power (third) rail when stopping the train. This provides additional power to accelerate other trains and reduces the total amount of energy required to run the system. On trains using DC propulsion systems, the braking energy is dissipated as heat.

Sounds pretty amazing!

register for Blogher

From misbehaving.net: register for Blogher

Blogher 2005 was a complete blast and Blogher 2006 will be even better! Now two days long, Blogher 2006 will allow women bloggers around the world to gather, commune, socialize and revel in the fact that technology participation is more diverse than people think. Blogher 2006 will be held in San Jose, in a bigger location (although space is still limited so sign up now). This year, there will be two days of convening: July 28-29, 2006. Come one come all! Above everything else, REGISTER NOW!!!

No denying that there is a gender gap in blogging. If you agree, go to Blogher!

Emerging Futures Foundation and Julie Caldwell

My good friend Julie Caldwell has a dormant blog for her Emerging Futures Foundation as well as a traditional main website. She’s working on helping people work together to do what they can’t do alone. I’m hoping this post encourages her to blog. :-)

This post is part of my ongoing links series, slowly replacing the blogroll in the sidebar.

Jonas, call me?

Jonas, give me a call, will you?

Got to love using my blog to leave a phone message on someone else’s blog, yes?

edit: And 15 minutes later, he calls! :-)

expanding networks

There’s a pretty new blog at Open Space World.org where I’m contributing. It’s not a place for original content, but to link to happenings of any kind anywhere in the world concerning open space technology. Michael Herman has been running the OSW.org site for 5 or 6 years, with quite a few years of a try at getting the practitioner community to tend a wiki and this blog is the most recent incarnation. There’s a behind the scenes blog where the initial crew of editors is working on expectations, givens, guidelines, orientation materials, vision, etc.

Michael posted there from hugh macleod via euan simple about blogs as being “disruptive.” Hugh was talking about a wineary that doubled it’s sales in one year after Hugh mailed a bottle of wine to 100 bloggers nearby, no strings attached. Hugh explains that it’s not the bloggers themselves running out to buy more wine, not even their friends and families. It has to do with changing the wineary’s relationships with it’s customers.

So anyway, Michael was wondering if this OSW.org blog is being disruptive. Here’s my latest post in answer:

Okay, I get it. We’re doing that.

This idea is important enough to me that I’m going to put it on my own blog, not just buried here in the comments! :-)

I post it here because the most people are blogging, communicating, writing in any way, and the more the readers are also writers and the more we link to others writing about what we care about, the more we weave together larger and more powerful networks.

bike potlatch 28Jan06

Recieved email on the Working Bikes list. No website so giving it all:

Greets, folx,

Got bike tools? Got a problem bike? Bike questions, bike answers?

Bring ‘em!

Yeah, bring ‘em to:

The Humboldt Park Bike Potluck
Saturday, January 28th
12 pm to 8 pm
942 N. California Ave, first floor

This is a dayish-long gathering for folks with all degrees of bike-love.
We’ll be sharing what we know and the tools we have. We’ll be helping
anyone with any degree of knowledge and a bike.

So bring any tools, spare parts, portable stands–especially portable
stands!–you’ve got. Let’s wrench.

Oh, and when I say “we,” I mean “you, too.”

Yours in bikes,
Ben B.

Wikipedia is bound to catch up

I love the idea of human-create and freely-exchanged knowledge, not relying on a stamp of approval from an “expert.” Wikipedia works this way. From RecentChanges.info ⇒ all things .wiki:

NY Times writer George Johnson weighs in on the debate over Wikipedia’s accuracy with a balanced article which actually does some numerical analysis of the accuracy of Wikipedia vs. Britannica. He reports that “A study last month in Nature showed that the decision is far from clear-cut. Calling on experts to compare 42 competing entries, the journal counted an average of four errors per article in Wikipedia - and three in Britannica.” That is not terribly different, but how did they even compute such a number? The article goes on to describe some of the inaccuracies found in both resources and from that description I can only conclude that it’s pretty hard to really measure accuracy, but suffice to say that this should dispell the notion that the Britannica is way more accurate than Wikipedia.
The best part of the article comes at the end, where Johnson talks about the benefits of having many people of less expertise eventually create a better product than a smaller number of experts. He makes a masterful comparison of Darwin and Marx in making this point. His overall take — “Wikipedia is bound to catch up“.

New Orleans

Just in case you’d forgotten about Katrina (I know you couldn’t have, but just in case), from my friend Rose:

Driving is still something which feels perilous. So many of us still have “Katrina brain”, a condition in which once perfectly adequate brain matter turns to mush. It makes driving pretty dodgy. Add to that roads full of potholes and gutted housing materials, traffic lights out of operation, heavy construction vehicles dominating the roadways, utility crews blocking the streets, and tens of thousands of tired, stressed people journeying back and forth from Orleans Parish to the surrounding areas each day, and it’s no wonder traffic accidents have quadrupled in some parishes here since Katrina.

history of Silo

Kind of a biography, I suppose. CRONOLOGIA SILOISTA So if you read Spanish, take a look and fill me in? It’s a history of “siloism” or the ideas coming from Silo (Mario Rodriquez Cobos) that led to the Humanist Movement and now Silo’s Message. I really need to learn Spanish.

Chicago transit on the West Side

Tonight I went to an open house of the Chicago Transit Authority where they presented their plans for transit changes (upgrades, I’d say) in the West Side corridor (Chicago Ave to 26th St). Among the many changes to bus routes (new express buses, extended routes, etc) is a big one to the trains. Currenly trains from O’hare pass through downtown and then split onto two lines as they head west. The plan is to take all of those existing trains onto the Forest Park (the northern spur of the two), basically doubling service on that branch. The Cermak branch, where I live, will go from 4 trains per hour now to 6 trains per hour (a decrease in wait times from 15 minutes to 10) and instead of going by subway to downtown and then O’hare, will use a currently unused piece of track along Paulina to Lake Street and the Green Line tracks, and from there to Clinton, Clark&Lake and around the loop, back to Clinton and our branch (this is similar to what the Brown, Purple and Orange lines currently do, go from their terminal, around the loop and back again. And, during rush hours 2 trains per hour will still go from Cermak branch to the subway and O’hare, so lots more service, in total. Go CTA!

Downside from the event tonight was that the announcements weren’t in Spanish and the initial presentation (only a few minutes long) was also not bi-lingual. They did have a translator there and as soon as they were able to get us spread out around the room looking at posters of the different routes, the shouting stopped. CTA really needs to understand how to reach all it’s populations.

crossposted from http://bikechicago.info/marshallsquare/blog/index.php/2006/01/11/cta-changes-on-west-side/