Urban Design and Vogon Poetry
via Boing Boing, Stating the bleeding obvious: if you drive instead of walk, you get fat. Well, duh!
But the alternative is, if you walk or cycle instead of drive, you’ll get killed. ‘American pedestrians are roughly three times more likely to be killed by a passing car than are German pedestrians - and more than six times more likely than Dutch pedestrians. For bicyclists, Americans are twice as likely to be killed as Germans and more than three times as likely as Dutch cyclists.’
However, Irvine has some of the best cycling infrastructure (and weather) I’ve ever seen — except nobody uses it, apart from the weekender recreational cyclists.
Can’t figure out why — I guess it’s just a cultural thing; everyone drives, and people cycling or walking near some cars seems to give the drivers heart attacks. (Seriously. The other night, a driver honked and slowed to a crawl after spotting myself and Catherine walking along — on the sidewalk, 10 feet from the roadway. And not making any sudden movements, either.)
As Kasia said, s/Connecticut//:
You can do all sorts of weird things in Connecticut suburbs, from walking your cat on a leash to painting tiger stripes on your car — but strap a camera to your back and take out the two wheeler for a spin and you’re the weirdest thing since the Keebler elves.
The EU Software Patent protest makes Indymedia. interesting intersection!
But I think they could have looked into the translation issues a bit more; ’software patents kill efficient software development’ isn’t exactly urgent enough ;) Also — is the idea of the software patents song and mime a sort of ’stop patents through Vogon poetry‘ thing?
Baghdad Burning scraped RSS, via Sitescooper RSS feeds.
Tags: alternative, boing, car, cycling, duh, rss, software, stating, thing, walk
