Via PLANetizen: The Los Angeles area is the most densely populated metropolitan area in the country. Surprise! San Francisco/Oakland and San Jose are #2 and #3. (Why they are counted separately, I don’t know.) New York/Newark (which also includes parts of Connecticut) is #4. A climatologist says that sprawl in Dublin, Ireland has resulted in …
Author Archives: Jimmy Lin
Cryovacking our way to the future
Sous vide, sometimes called “cryovacking,” is a method of food preparation where food is put into a bag and vacuum packed. The bag is sometimes cooked later at low temperatures, or the process itself is used to infuse the food with flavor or to change its texture. When I heard Alton Brown explain sous vide …
NY Times: City Seeking Rich Designs Instead of the Lowest Bids
If only more city governments would do this: hire architects based on the quality of their work instead of the competitiveness of their bids.
Shiny happy redevelopment
The malls in Cupertino and Sunnyvale have been in the dumps for a decade, with promises of redevelopment come and
NY Times: To Woo Students, Colleges Choose Names That Sell
When Cal State Hayward changed its name to Cal State East Bay, there was a big uproar, especially in Hayward, but the name has stuck. Looks like it’s not the only one — more colleges are changing their names to something more marketable. (Goodbye Beaver College…)
A few books I’ve been reading
Nothing deep here, just some stuff that interests me: The Golden Ratio: The Story of Φ, the World’s Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio. An entertaining account of the golden ratio, the author spends some time deflating the myths surrounding it, and then talks about its true significance and beauty. Language Visible (hardcover), aka Letter …
Easy-to-use phone from Motorola?
Motorola announced a new cell phone, the E895, to be available in the last quarter of this year. It uses a combination of Java and Linux called JUIX, which Motorola claims is easier to use than other smartphone OSes. But Motorola doesn’t have a good history of easy-to-use phones — one of my friends said …
Tour de France
This is the first year I watching the last two weeks of the Tour every day. On the west coast it’s perfect timing: wake up at 7, watch the last hour of the stage on OLN, then get to work by my usual time. And I got totally sucked in — even when it was …
Standards war over pet tags
You think HD-DVD vs Blu Ray is pointless: there are two competing standards for microchipping pets. If you have the wrong scanner, you cannot read, or even detect, the implanted chip. This has caused anger, confusion, and animals to be accidentally put to death. Yikes.
Longhorn -> Windows Vista
“Windows Vista“, eh? It’s an okay name — more meaningful than “XP”. Dan hopes Windows Vista’s fate will be like AltaVista‘s: technically it still exists, but no one uses it. I’m more inclined to believe it’ll be more like my old high school, Monta Vista: still going strong.