penguinchris

Jay-walking

2009-05-13T02:35:00.000-07:00

Two interesting jay-walking incidents occurred today as I was walking back to my car after class, around 9:45PM. That got me thinking about how much jay-walking I do, not to mention other traffic violations.

When not driving a car, I, out of necessity, do not entirely regard traffic laws. Traffic laws (and the way people drive) are clearly not designed to be helpful or safe for walking or bicycling.

When bicycling, I do ride in the street, but my decision to stop at red lights or stop signs is based on whether or not I think cars will be going the other way. Stopping means a lot of extra effort to get going again - at one point in my commute, there is a stop light at the bottom between two fairly steep hills. The connecting streets are residential, so there isn't much traffic, but about half the time I go by there (either driving or bicycling) I get stopped at the light. When in a car, obviously you can't just run the red light. Not because I think it's unsafe, though. When bicycling, I have no problem running through it if there aren't cars, although I usually don't even though it means a ton of extra work to get up the hill.

Anyway that's not the point - I could write another entry about bicycling on the street and how it really is pretty awful. This is about walking. There are many intersections that seem poorly designed when you're driving - the lights have a weird pattern (usually installing sensors fixes that) or there's a stop sign where there should be a signal, or whatever. When you really think about those, though, they usually have chosen the best option. Honestly, if you go to your favorite poorly designed intersection, try to come up with a solution that is better for all possibilities - you probably can't (see xkcd #277. Of course, some truly are bad, but those often get fixed.

Look at any intersection's handling of pedestrian crossings, though, and you'll much more likely find something that can be improved. That's why there's so much jay-walking (and why I do it so much) - the legal option is poorly engineered.

I park on the street about 3/4 mile from my office and where all of my classes are on campus, because I don't drive every day and live close enough to bicycle if I want so I don't feel like paying hundreds of dollars for parking. I've never not been able to find a place to park on the street for free, and I don't mind walking, so it's not a big deal. However, this leaves me with 6-7 crossings to make, depending on where exactly I park, three of which are fairly dangerous, and three of which (a different three, except for one) I regularly jay-walk across.

The first one I jay-walk across has a completely predictable signal pattern, so I know for sure if a car is going to come, and the end I cross across goes into a residential area so there's little traffic from that side. As long as you look both ways first, it's safer to jay-walk here than it is to cross legally at any of the other crossings I make on my route.

At the second crossing (which is part of the same intersection as the first) I never jay-walk because it's a busy street and not many people cross, meaning no one expects pedestrians. And, there is a very narrow window where crossing is allowed, which actually makes perfect sense considering the signal rhythm here, because most of the cars coming from the opposite direction make left turns for some reason, across the walkway.

Anyway - the third and fourth crossings are an on-ramp and an offramp of the 57 freeway. The onramp is pretty dangerous, because cars are converging from three different directions onto it, and there are always a lot of them. I know the signal pattern exactly, though, and will cross when I know it's safe, not just when the signal tells me I can. Here's where one of the interesting jay-walking incidents happened today, though - I was walking much of the way leading to the crossing a few feet behind this girl who looked like she was texting on her cell-phone. As we approached the crossing, I knew at which part of the signal cycle it was, and hit the crossing button knowing I would have to wait just one part of the cycle (people making left turns onto the on-ramp). The girl, however, put her cell phone up and started talking to someone, took a quick look to see that no cars were driving toward her at that one instant, looked forward and started walking... just as all the cars started turning left straight at her. Two of them honked and she didn't speed up - I don't think she noticed at all.

The freeway offramp is easier because traffic only comes from the offramp. This is a badly designed signal - it is always safe to cross here if it is green going the perpendicular direction. However, the only time the signal lets you is when people are turning left onto the on-ramp on the other side of the street. This is actually the time people are most likely to make hasty decisions to turn right on red, and is probably the least safe time to cross. There is about 5 seconds of time the signal lets you cross, and then easily 15-20 seconds or more of a green light but a do not walk signal. Really, not the greatest design.

Finally - there is a six-lane crossing in the middle of campus. This is a no-brainer - it's impossible to jay-walk, as you *will* get run over. Even if you do have the signal to cross, you can still easily get run over as there are two right-turn lanes where people don't look to see if anyone's crossing. This one has a timer to tell you how much time you have left to cross, which is helpful if you want to cut it close.

Here's where the second interesting incident happened, this one my fault. As I approached, about 30-40 feet away, the light turned green, at which point normally the walk signal would come on. There were 7-8 people there, but apparently no one hit the button to cross, and the walk signal didn't go. Two cyclists went through it first, and then everyone else decided to cross anyway. I was 4-5 lanes worth behind them, and hesitated for a few seconds before deciding to cross. Halfway through the intersection, the lights suddenly changed and the waiting cars all lurched forward a bit with me still right in front of them. I had no way to know this would happen, because the usual count-down wasn't there. I held my hand out in apology and kept walking. This shouldn't have happened - this walk signal should not be dependent on people hitting the button, because there are *always* people crossing here, and the walk signal does not add time to the cycle or prevent anyone from driving a certain way (unless there are people there, obviously).

So, traffic engineers: you usually do pretty well with signals for driving, but take a walk sometime and see if you can't make crossing intersections easier for pedestrians.

Nunavut

2009-04-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

I recently watched a Top Gear special where they become the first people to drive an automobile to the north magnetic pole. They start out in Resolute, Nunavut Territory; which in my mind always seemed to be the extreme northern part of Canada. Which of course it is, but I mean relative to where I've been. I was looking at google maps today and noticed that Nunavut includes all of Hudson Bay - which actually comes pretty far south.

I've been in a boat in Hudson Bay, which means I can add Nunavut to my list of states, provinces, and countries I've been to, for my fifty states set on flickr. I even have a picture of myself, taken with a disposable camera out on the bay, which I will have to dig up - at which point I will likely write much more about it.

Film Noir Review - Dark Passage (1947)

2009-04-19T03:08:00.000-07:00

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in Dark Passage, directed by Delmer Daves, 1947.

The plot: Vincent (Bogart) escapes from San Quentin (in a garbage can, which he rides off the truck and down a hill, leaving us with the great shot looking out of the barrel above), gets picked up by Irene (Bacall), who coincidentally is painting nearby and also coincidentally fought for Vincent during his trial by writing letters to the editor of the paper because she thought Vincent didn't actually murder his wife, just like her father who died in prison and also didn't actually murder his wife.

Vincent meets a cab driver who recognizes him from the papers, but instead of turning him in the driver introduces him to a doctor friend of his who does under-the-table plastic surgery. Vincent gets a new face, but instead of getting out of town right away decides to figure out who actually killed his wife, so he can set things straight. A few other characters and a couple of plot twists are thrown in as well, of course.

Director of photography Sid Hickox provides a very well executed gimmick to make it easy on the special effects department at Warner Brothers - instead of actually changing Bogart's face or having him be played by a different actor (which would have been very unconvincing - there's a lot of character in Bogart's body language), we simply never see his face until after the plastic surgery - much of the first 1/4 to 1/3 of the film is seen from a first-person perspective. Vincent's "new" face is simply Bogart's real face. If you want to see the world the way Bogart did, here's your chance.

It may sound a little bit silly, but it works very well here. If this film were being made today, they would have used CGI or a lot of makeup. Not showing his face really turned him into a mysterious character, which is quite fitting for noir. It's not a perfect illusion; upon hearing his voice one immediately thinks of Bogart - he's pretty iconic and recognizable. It's hard to believe that he's supposed to look like this, when Bogart's real appearance is burned into memory:

I mean, he's instantly recognizable even in covered in full facial bandages:

Overall, though, it works very well, and the camera work is done nicely. It's awkward a couple of times as Bogart must've really been stretching to get his arms in the right place, but overall is convincing. There are some other interesting cinematography tricks here too - like this trippy anesthesia-induced scene while Vincent is being operated on:

Maybe it looked cool at the time, but that didn't age so well. It's really not that bad and it works in the film; it's a hallucinated montage that's necessary. It's only a problem because sixty years later it looks pretty lame. I don't mind things like this - I watch so many old movies, poor technical effects don't normally stand out to me. I think they just went a little over the top here.

Anyway, here's a trick that they pulled off flawlessly - deep focus:

Notice how both the foreground and background characters are sharply in focus. In the second shot, notice how the door behind Bogart is out of focus, while the guy standing right next to it is in focus. They combined two frames with different focus distances, splitting them down the middle. The first time I saw this effect was in Reservoir Dogs - kind of ironically because it was executed rather poorly there. I don't think most people would notice it in Dark Passage unless it was pointed out. In the first shot here they did it through back projection; the effect is not as good but it still works.

Of course, deep focus had been done previously to great effect in 1941's Citizen Kane and even before that. They weren't trying to be the first with the technique, they just applied it masterfully in a film full of camera tricks.

Also, there are a lot of great on-location shots of downtown San Francisco, circa 1946/7:

(of course the Golden Gate Bridge is included; it would be hard now to imagine a San Francisco film noir without it, especially after Vertigo)

Well, I guess I should actually give a review of the film. The acting here is great; not legendary like in some of Bogart's films, but then again this has a completely different feel from those films and the same kind of acting wouldn't be appropriate. Despite the ridiculous contrivances of the plot and the characters, the acting here is probably a little more realistic than in most film noirs. The supporting cast should be mentioned in particular; there's no Peter Lorre or Edward G. Robinson - in fact I didn't really recognize any of the supporting actors - but they are all excellent and really put everything into their parts. Having any of the supporting characters played by someone well known would probably have detracted from the film in some ways, even. It's worth seeing for the supporting characters alone.

As I mentioned, the plot is ridiculous, and not in a good way - the plots in most film noirs are pretty outrageous, one must admit, but that's part of the fun. It works here as a way to move the film forward, but not as a way to provide tension. It kind of works because we don't necessarily care how the plot twists turn out, we really only care about if Vincent gets with Irene in the end. I think it would have been more effective if it was such that we could actually care about the plot, though. I feel as though they would have needed to add another hour or so to the film to make it all make sense - it was based off of a book and they must have left a lot out.

The music by Franz Waxman (there's a name I do recognize) mostly serves its purpose as pretty predictable dark, dramatic overtones. It turns unfortunately melodramatic during a fight scene where it really stuck out like a sore thumb. It's really just background music everywhere else. A lovely rendition of "Too Marvelous For Words" is an important part of the plot and sort of becomes Vincent and Irene's song, but doesn't really stand out. It's unfair to compare - although there were direct references to it - but it's nothing like As Time Goes By in Casablanca.

So while there's great technical work here and great acting all around, the film ends up falling a little flat. There's little tension, largely because the plot is so contrived; the plot twists end up being not expected, but not important. It doesn't matter what happens because they will contrive their way out of it. I won't give away the ending, but it was horrible.

Is it a bad film, then? Not at all - it's definitely worth seeing... once you've seen The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Key Largo first (in other words, there are a lot of better Bogie-Bacall films to see before this one).

Here's a shot showing Bacall, since I failed to include one elsewhere:

I give it a hesitant recommendation. It's fun in a campy way, and the acting really is good. They must have had a good time making this, with the excellent technical cinematography and the location shooting, with a great cast. There are a lot of much better Bogart films than this, though - if you want an underrated, lesser-known one, try In A Lonely Place.

BibTeX .bst style for Geological Society of America publications

2009-04-18T23:10:00.000-07:00

I spent the past couple of hours figuring this out, and figured that others might benefit from it. If you find it useful or if you find problems with it, please leave a comment here.

The file: http://mail.rochester.edu/~chacker/gsa.bst

This gets you references that look like this:

Dewey, J.F. and Bird, J.M., 1970, Mountain belts and the new global tectonics: Journal of Geophysical Research, v. 75, p. 2625–2647.

It's proper Geological Society of America-style references, as in journals like GSA Bulletin and Geology, in BibTeX and LaTeX. Note that it's only really set up for journal articles; if you have other types of references, which I suppose is possible, it may or may not give correct output.

BibTeX is a pretty good open-source alternative to EndNote. Though EndNote might be easier to use (at least, easier to get set up I presume), it does not run on Linux, and it costs money. The proprietary, expensive nature of software like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

BibTeX is the reference database format of LaTeX. I now use the LaTeX frontend LyX, managing my reference database with pybliographer.

I originally created my reference database with WIKINDX, a web-based bibliography manager that I ran off of localhost. WIKINDX works pretty well and has a built-in word processor; but as you can imagine for a web-based app the word processor is quite limited, and there is no integration with external word processors. It seems like it could be a good way to manage a reference database to be used by multiple people, allowing easy collaboration on documents. I don't really need that, and I prefer a non-web-based solution. It exports to BibTeX format, though, so I didn't have to build my database again.

There are several applications designed for managing BibTeX databases, but for some reason none of them seem to have very active developers. I settled on pybliographer because it seems to work (though it is a gnome app and I use KDE so it looks a little weird to me). There is a comparison and list of reference database software on wikipedia; of those pybliographer is the best for what I need, for others it may be different.

I can now write my documents in LyX, which as a LaTeX frontend uses my BibTeX database internally to manage citations seamlessly. LyX is pretty great because it does all the formatting and typesetting for you (in whichever way you specify, of course) so once you figure out how it works you can focus on the writing and not the formatting. That is the most annoying thing to deal with when writing documents in Word or OpenOffice - formatting things the way you want is always a struggle.

More on why I like Art Deco

2009-04-16T02:50:00.001-07:00

I did some more thinking about art deco.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in "Top Hat", dir. Mark Sandrich, 1935.

Art Deco is extravagant, but elegant. Almost every design characteristic that we consider elegant has elements of art deco. The elegance is key to this being a successful aesthetic - there is a lot of extravagance in design and pop culture today (at least, until the recession), but zero elegance.

Top Hat (along with most other earlier Astaire films) is interesting cinematography-wise. It's all about the motion and dancing - the set is spectacular art deco extravagance, but the camera is never focused on it. There are only a couple of wide shots, and they show only a part of the set. Consider these two shots of dance sequences - they are almost identical in terms of framing, but they are from different scenes.

For certain types of dance scenes, in any movie, you always see the same or very similar framing, it's true. With Astaire and Rogers it's different, though - each dance scene they do transcends the costumes, the set, and the cinematography. And yet, each one is distinct. The costumes and the set, of course, are usually outstanding and are important; I don't mean to belittle those. Anything fancy done with the cinematography would only get in the way here, too, though it works in later musicals, such as those with Gene Kelly (that will be for another post!).

Of course, part of the reason for focusing solely on the actors is the fact that if you look at the set for more than a second, it becomes obvious that it's all built on a sound stage - but it's obvious as soon as they get to Italy anyway; they aren't trying to be realistic. It's art deco fantasy. Deliberate in order to hide the set or not, though, the utilitarian cinematography really adds to this film. I'm going to guess that there was nothing accidental about how it was filmed.

Besides all that, of course, Top Hat has a great script and a lot of surprising humor. This is one of my favorite movie lines - it makes more sense in context and it's better if you actually hear him say it, naturally (and if it seems like a lame joke, keep in mind that, as you can see, he may literally have his tongue pressed in his cheek...)

"What is this strange power you have over horses?"

"Horsepower"

Circum-navigation

2009-04-09T00:59:00.001-07:00

I was almost going to have an epic multi-stop trip circum-navigating the globe - Los Angeles, Tokyo, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, London, Orlando, Los Angeles. Then I realized that it would cost $5-600 more to go that way rather than to go LA - Thailand - LA - FL - LA. Oh well, maybe next time.

So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright (but what would Frank Lloyd Wright say?)

2009-04-08T01:34:00.000-07:00

Another music post immediately after the first one - I am listening to music and have nothing else to do (make that nothing else I *want* to do) right now so this is what happens.

Songs about architects (of which I can think of only two at the moment) are particularly evocative for me, but I'm not sure exactly why. I appreciate great architecture and design but it's not something I spend time thinking about in great depth. It is a subconscious thing, though - I do notice myself regarding such things as architecture and civil engineering design quite frequently.

I'm not necessarily even interested in knowing that much about it; I don't keep track of things like who designed which buildings or what the main design philosophies are, and I'm not that interested to know about specific architects. Frank Lloyd Wright designed several buildings in the Buffalo area, but I was never inclined to go out of my way to see them while I lived there (which is not to say that I wouldn't like to some time - I would certainly be interested.)

The essence of architecture is not those things. It's what the building says visually, and also of course how it functions (I sometimes appreciate useless architecture - which is basically just sculpture - but I am much more impressed with architecture that is both visually appealing and completely functional). I want to see buildings that look cool and are evocative of a variety of things appropriate to the context. Like this:

Buffalo's City Hall looks plain awesome, and makes one envision the grand metropolis Buffalo once was (which is depressing, knowing it is nothing like it used to be) and also exudes a feeling of power, appropriate for a government building (or not appropriate depending on your views ;) ). There's actually a lot of great architecture in downtown Buffalo, though there isn't much there besides that.

Of course one can't help but notice the similarity to Los Angeles city hall:

Interestingly, both were completed in 1931, and both would make my list of favorite buildings (though the Buffalo one is clearly superior - and not just because that's where I'm from, just look at it!) Basically, Art Deco is my favorite style by far.

There is some great architecture at the University of Rochester (not to mention downtown Rochester itself), particularly Rush Rhees Library:

(this is the only one of these photos that's mine)

But there are mistakes at Rochester, too (as there is everywhere), like the sorta-impressive I.M. Pei-designed Wilson Commons. I say it's sorta impressive, but I don't consider it a great building. It's greatly lacking in practicality, and visually is a bit of a mess besides the certainly impressive glass walls and ceiling:

I do like those curved pipes, though.

Anyway - the problem is that modern design, while great for modern things, doesn't really work for buildings. Can you think of any truly great buildings (not just interesting ones) that were built recently? I can't, and the ones that would top my list were probably all built prior to 1960 or so at the latest (though I would include the Sears Tower, from 1973). I realize sensibilities have changed and a lot of the design extravagance of the first half of the 20th century (which is central to the Art Deco style) may never return, but can't we try to bring it back a little bit? Most like it and are impressed by it, so why do modern designers completely avoid it?

It's the same with other things, like cars - there is not a single car from the past couple of decades that I would desire because of its looks, yet any random car - not just the fancy ones - from the 1950's looks awesome. There was good design in cars at least up until the 1970's and 80's, where we saw such awesome looking cars as the Lancia Stratos (which I admittedly only know because of The Spy Who Loved Me and Project Gotham Racing) and the Delorean.

Lancia Stratos - Michael Ward Photos, used without permission (click to see his flickr photos)

By the way, the two songs I know about architects are So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright by Simon & Garfunkel on the album Bridge Over Troubled Water, and Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect by The Decemberists on the album Castaways and Cutouts. Edit: also, "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" by Sufjan Stevens on "Illinoise" - also (probably not that coincidentally - he's probably the most well known architect around) involving Frank Lloyd Wright.

Overs

2009-04-08T00:20:00.000-07:00

I put on Simon and Garfunkel's 'Bookends' to listen to while doing some administrative TA duties. When the song Overs came up I was instantly brought back to Carlson Science & Engineering Library at the University of Rochester, third floor, shelving books in the mathematics section.

There are a lot of songs/albums that I connect with times and places and periods of my life, but I didn't know until now that Simon and Garfunkel was connected to my time working in the library shelving books.

I think I spent two or three months listening almost exclusively to them (I had all their albums, and Paul Simon's solo albums, on one HI-MD minidisc), and at that point I only really extensively listened to music while shelving books, so it does make sense.

I have other photos of Carlson, but the only one I have up on flickr at the moment is this one: