In Social Connectedness in Urban Areas (Sci-Hub mirror), a group of business and public policy researchers from Facebook, NYU and Princeton study anonymized, fine-grained location data from Facebook users who did not disable their location history, and find that the likelihood that New Yorkers will remain friends is well correlated with the ease of commuting between their respective homes on public transit. Read the rest
Uber is a wildly unprofitable company with no conceivable path to profitability in any universe, under any circumstances, but the company's founders and early investors (having already taken massive write-downs on their investments) are hoping to get at least some of their money back through the time-honored "greater fool" methodology. Specifically, they're floating the company on the stock market and hoping that naive investors hoping to wring above-inflation gains out of their 401(k)s and avoid being made into dog-food in their old age (we're waaaaay past the era in which impoverished old people get to eat dog-food) take their shares off their hands. Read the rest
Feargu O'Sullivan rounds up the good, the bad and the ugly of public transit seating options.
Seat cover designs, we believe, need to consider four things:
• Memorability. They need to be striking enough to create an instant impression. • Freshness. Moquette needs to be bright enough in color to appear new(ish) after years of wear, but not so pale as to make stains or fade evident. • Intricacy. Large empty monochrome spaces show wear more quickly, and provide too tempting a canvas for vandals. • Anti-Dazzle. Moquette shouldn’t be so bright and busy that it turns stomachs.
Above, behold Pittsburgh's "cosmic spaghetti" seating, as photographed by @CatsBlanchard. Read the rest
This Inception-like moment as all the doorways form a straight line is both satisfying and mesmerizing. Read the rest
Improv Everywhere (previously) keeps on bringing the hits, but seriously, this one takes the cake. Read the rest
The axonometric, not-to-scale diagrams are pretty sweet -- like the castings made of underground ant-colonies, cross with the insane arcology furutism of Paolo Soleri. Read the rest
When a sax player stepped onto this MTA car and started playing Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," he inspired one of the passengers to whip out his own sax and join in. What followed was a jam session/sax battle that is a delight to watch.
SAX BATTLE IN NYC SUBWAY (original duh...)
(via Reddit) Read the rest
This poor rat got stuck on the escalator at the Civic Center BART Station, and there's something infinitely poignant about its treadmill race. Maybe it's the busker playing "And I Love Her" on a Erhu (or maybe a Kokyū?) in the background.
Rat Descending an Endless Staircase
(via JWZ) Read the rest
A nightmarish vision straight out of The Space Merchants: a gadget that purportedly vibrates train windows at the right frequency to beam advertisements straight into your head by means of bone-conduction, should you tire and rest your head against them.
All the references to this point to one video posted by someone with no other videos in her or his account, and there's not much other detail (Adweek attributes it to BBDO Dusseldorf). I'm betting hoax and/or grad project-cum-design fiction, but in this topsy-turvy world, anything is possible. The comments on the YouTube video are even more internetrage than usual, and may be the most interesting thing about it.
