In LA

The flight to Minneapolis was delayed, and switched to some recent model Airbus. Ah look at that sink. Someone at Airbus Put a lot of effort into that lighting scheme, and the faucet’s controls.


After i’d finished admiring the facilities and had stitched together my first airplane bathroom panoramic photo, I attempted to return to my seat. I say attempted, because the mother and cute toddler seated next to me had fallen sound asleep in my absence. It took 5 tries to wake her enough for me to get past so that I could become wedged once again between her and the wide-shouldered teen on the other side. This guy was not exceptionally large, he just happened to be slightly edging into football player range. His shoulder was constantly pressed against me.

I understand the need to fit large numbers of people onto planes in order to increase capacity and control costs, but I don’t think that this particular plane is large enough to have 8 seats across (2 on each side, 4 in the center).

I think it’s time for airlines to explore new options. I’d be happier to lie down for the course of a flight. Think how many passengers could be packed in more comfortably if everyone was horizontal, and there were several layers of ‘em stored within the same space that now supports one layer of people; masses cramped and folded into indeterminately seated positions –unable to recline enough to relax. If such an option were ever adopted, it’d be best to make sure the illustrations on the safety card didn’t resemble certain 18th century engravings of certain types of human cargo vessels.

During the flight I watched ‘Adventureland’, which was a reasonably mature comedy. I was a little put off by the fact that the lead female character was supposed to be extremely great and cool but this was expressed as a function of her appreciation of the lead male character’s qualities rather than that it be due to her own intrinsic merits. Then again, that’s the virginal boy to studly man heartfelt comedy genre for ya. I appreciated this one’s ambition. It could’ve use a few less montages, set to 80’s rock ballads, of somber teens staring out windows; But that problem didn’t start with Adventureland. To address the issue one would have to send a terminator back through time to disrupt production of a few Cameron Crowe films and maybe Lost in Translation.

Arrived late to MSP, but my next flight was delayed, so there was no rush. I walked around the Nazi Supporter Terminal¹ and took a panorama of a line of shops. At right can be seen a downsized version of The Mall of America. Why would anyone build a tiny store themed after a mall that is famous only for being extremely large?


The clouds outside the airport’s windows were fantastic. Its rare to see dramatic stormy skies in LA.


The image above is a stitched image composed of several photos I shot while traveling along a conveyor belt, one of those flat escalator things. They probably have an official name. Stitched panoramas are typically made from one nodal point around which the camera is rotated between shots. To do otherwise introduces all sorts of errors in the result. I was hoping these errors would be interesting.


I ate airport Chinese food and charged my iPhone at the same time. The boost in battery power made the food taste better.

My cousin Andy was all set to drop by the airport for a brief visit, but I figured with his travel time and my time going back through security, we’d barely have time to say hello. So I talked him out of it. With any luck I’ll have a longer stopover on the way back.

1. MSP has a terminal named after Charles Lindbergh, who I hear was an anti-Semitic Nazi supporter -are there other kinds of Nazi supporter? [↩]

You have received new photos from Zach Fine.
 

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It’s a lovely evening here in Studio City, and the sunset inspired me to attempt a quick sketch in Brushes. I got lazy after a while and stopped sketching in streetlights, there were hundreds more. More interesting to me were the sky and smog, and it was fun to try to evoke their colors through the application of tons of overlapping semitransparent brushstrokes.

I added this .brushes file to my gallery, along with a full-resolution and a quicktime export. Here’s its entry:

16.brushes
Jul 23 2009
Brushes (77.56 K)	Tiff (15.8 MB)	MOV (13.2 MB)

Having a good Sunday with Essie and Ken down in the OC.

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There was a nuttily-amazing sunset out here a few days ago.

As an aside, it’s kind of amusing and cute that people get all excited about the sky turning orange. Would we also love sunsets if instead sky turned to striped and polka-dotted patterns of purple and green? Something to think about, or not.

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Ken says,”It’s a security measure. If anyone steals my bike they’ll get about a mile before the pedal falls off.”

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I just received the famed “black olive” foam earbud sleeves that I’ll be using with the Shure earbuds I mentioned in a previous post. It would appear that the smallest box Best Buy uses to ship items is 8″x12″x9″. So I received a box full of cushiony air pockets, with the tiny earbud sleeve package pressed right up against the top of the box. What a waste. The earbuds likely could have survived the trip just in their original packaging, or wrapped in a single strip of bubble wrap.

I didn’t realize that these earbud sleeves do not fit the i2c’s without modification (their inner tube is too narrow), but they fit my Future Sonics Atrios perfectly. I tore out the tubes and stuck a couple of ‘em on the i2c’s, and the sound is much improved over the stock silicon sleeves. When I wear this pair out, I’ll try using a small needlenose pliers to enlarge the tubes in the next pair rather than performing that more-damaging tube-ectomy.

Fuel consumption during my 20-minute drive to work this morning along the semi-clogged 101 freeway. The y-axis at right is miles-per-gallon. After years of wasteful, 28mpg LA driving, it’s refreshing to do wasteful, 50mpg LA driving.

Technorati Tags: auto-eroticism, driving, environment, environmentalism, fuel economy, graphs, infographics, my miles-per-gallon is bigger than your miles-per-gallon, petroleum, prius, commuting

A busy intersection in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. 5/2006

Yesterday I walked to lunch along a busy street in Hollywood, having a very difficult time hearing my friend on my cell phone as busses and trucks rattled past. I marveled at the amazing amount of noise I encounter on a daily basis, and thought of how peaceful the aural landscape of the future city will be if one day all internal combustion engines are replaced by electric equivalents.

There are a ton of Toyota Prios¹ zooming around the streets of LA fairly quietly using their electric motors, the first wave of the new sound of transportation. Sounds like progress to me.

So I’m hoping that a new piece of legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives, the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2008, doesn’t result in a mandatory minimum noise level for all vehicles. Here are the details on the Act, courtesy of its supporters at the National Federation of the Blind (NFB):

The bill requires the Secretary of Transportation, within ninety days of its enactment, to commence a two-year study to determine the best means to provide the blind and other pedestrians with information about the location, motion, speed, and direction of vehicles. Upon completion of the study, the Secretary will report the findings of the study to Congress and, within ninety days, establish a minimum vehicle safety standard for all new vehicles sold in the United States. Automobile manufacturers will have two years to comply with the vehicle safety standard.

Some folk over at treehugger.com wonder if such concern is overkill, asking How Many Blind People Have Been Hit By A Prius? One answer can be found in an LA times article on the bill, “While the organization is not aware of people being struck by cars they couldn’t hear, NFB President Marc Maurer has said he fears it’s only a matter of time.”

I’d like to think that the desire for a quiet environment and the desire for blind people to be able to freely and safely navigate the streets don’t have to be at odds. Hopefully if the bill passes, the required study will show that tire and electric engine noise alone will suffice to warn pedestrians (especially given that as more and more hybrids take to the streets the total level of road noise will go down, so that the sound of approaching electric vehicles will be less masked by the din). Or maybe someone can develop a wristwatch for the vision-impaired which would use sonar or transponders built into every car to notify them of approaching traffic?

I’d prefer any solution to one that results in a future of roads filled with chirping, whistling, or beeping cars.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, ambient sound, Legislature, safety, sound pollution

1. the plural of Prius if treated as a 2nd declension Latin noun [↩]