If you've ever played SimCity, you have probably encountered the Arcology, a massive self-contained building that houses thousands of people. They're almost here:
BSC is going to stuff 30,000 people into these self-contained skyscraper communities—a resident of Sky City will use up 1/100th of the land used by a typical Chinese citizen.
And it really is a city in and of itself—4,450 apartments, nearly 100,000 square feet of indoor vertical farms, 250 hotel rooms, 92 elevators, 30 foot courtyards for athletics, and a six mile ramp that can be used to walk or run around the entire city.
Once again, BSC intends to build this thing in seven months. How will that work? Treehugger's Lloyd Alter explains: "16,000 part-time and 3,000 full-time workers will prefabricate the building for four months and assemble on site in three months." (For a closer look at all of the design specs, see Alter's in-depth piece on the project.)
Imagine 7,000 apartments between 50 m² and 225 m² in size (as one variation calls for), and you've got either a really cool vertical city or Cabrini-Green to the third power.
When complete, the first one will be 828 m tall—10 m taller than the Burj Khalifa, but presumably better integrated with local water treatment and the local real estate market.
If they built it in Streeterville, it would look this scary:
I do not know whether this is a welcome idea or a truly horrifying one.
(Via Sullivan, of course.)
If you're a geography nerd, whatever you do, don't try playing Geoguessr. It will take hours of your life away.
The idea: it puts you down at a random spot on Google Street View, and you have to figure out where you are. Here's one of my attempts, before I realized I needed to do some work today.
I blame Randall Munroe.
Via Sullivan, Max Fischer at WaPo found an interesting proxy for racial tolerance:
Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society.
Here’s what the data show:
Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.
Here's the map:
I'd love to see this data mapped at the U.S. county level...
Via Kottke, a few fascinating minutes color footage of London shot in 1927:
Want more 1920s UK footage? Voilà.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield transferred command of the International Space Station to Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin yesterday afternoon. As a parting gift, with a little help from his friends (including David Bowie), he made this:
I've followed Hadfield's Facebook page for a while, enjoying his photos, observations, and occasional scoops (he did, after all, know about Saturday's space walk before anyone in the press). I hope Commander Misurkin continues Hadfield's habit of posting stuff. Here, as just one example, is London in February:
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Sadly, Canadian budget cuts make it unlikely Hadfield or any other Canadian will return to the ISS for a while.
Welcome home, Col. Hadfield!
Via Atlantic Cities, this is cool. MapFrappe allows you to draw a geographic figure in one place and superimpose it on another. Like, for example, my neighborhood over London, or Chicago's Loop over the Vatican.
I just listened to a This American Life segment by Andrew Forsthoefel, a 23-year-old from southeastern Pennsylvania who walked across the U.S. for a year. Fascinating.
He wound up, after walking 6,000 km, in Half Moon Bay, Calif., about 800 m from my family's house. I have to say, if I were to walk across the U.S., I'd want to wind up in Half Moon Bay, too.
What a start to this kid's life. I'm looking forward to hearing more from him.
I had a few hours of free time yesterday, so I went up to the Gloria Ferrer winery in Sonoma. I don't know how people can live like this:
From Randall Munroe, an especially brilliant comic this morning:
