Last year I blogged about the ciclovía in Bogotá, Colombia, asking: “What if Ciclovia caught on in America?”
It appears a form of that has happened, here it is in New York City:

It’s interesting how much better the streets look when they are full of people, not noisy vehicles. And look at the smiles.
A little Googling reveals that such events are being held in El Paso, TX, Baltimore, MD, Portland, OR, among other cities.
I hope this movement continues to spread to other cities, including Knoxville.

A segment from the CBS News’ Sunday Morning show on “freedom machines”:

The piece discusses the increased interest in bicycling that has accompanied higher gasoline prices. I have noticed more people riding on the roads this summer; unfortunately, a few of them appear to have not yet mastered safety rules on riding with traffic.
As a cyclist who rides in a city that essentially has no bike lanes, it’s fascinating to see what Portland, OR, has done in establishing a 300-mile bike network. I wonder what kind of cultural changes we could experience in Knoxville if we had a similar commitment from community leaders?

The Sunday Times has a lengthy writeup on an interesting guy: “Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Prophet of Boom and Doom.” It concludes with ten of his life tips (video link):

1. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.
9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

I’ve been wanting to read Taleb’s book The Black Swan; perhaps I’ll get to it sooner or later.
Via The Big Picture.

Here we go again:

CRUDE oil prices above $US120 a barrel are “abnormal” and could fall to about $US78 under the right circumstances, OPEC president Chakib Khelil said in Jakarta yesterday.
“If the dollar continues to strengthen and the political situation (regarding Iran) improves, then the long-term prices will be about $US78,” Mr Khelil said, adding the market was well supplied with oil.

One could argue that the qualifying ifs make this prediction meaningless. Who really thinks the US dollar will continue to strengthen, or that we will all hold hands with Iran? But putting that aside, just consider the silliness of his last assertion:

“There’s a balance in the market,” Mr Khelil said. “I would say stocks are at a good level and there hasn’t been any disruption in demand.”

Yes, there has been a “balance” in the market . . . at $130. Why should we expect it to return to $78? Because an OPEC official says so? One only need consider the performance of recent past comments to gage their credibility. For instance, less than a year ago we heard this:

The $80 record high reached by crude oil prices is not sustainable because it is not supported by market fundamentals, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) said.
Abdalla el-Badri, Opec secretary-general, linked the price jump on Thursday to US refining bottlenecks, the hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico and attacks against several natural gas pipelines in Mexico.
“We don’t think this is a permanent $80 a barrel. The fundamentals do not support the price at this time,” Mr El-Badri said.

So one year ago an OPEC official said that $80 was unsustainably high, now $78 is considered to be an achievable “normal” price, if the all bad stuff works itself out.
It’s interesting that these insiders are continually missing their price targets on the downside. What will OPECs stated price floor be next year? $90? $100? Time will tell. But it will undoubtedly be higher than what it is saying today.

An interesting talk by Mr. Kunstler on tragedy of suburban design:

I’ll leave it to others to debate the aesthetics of modern architecture. But with energy prices surging, his point about suburban sprawl is even more salient than it was four years ago. The mile upon mile of McMansions and strip malls we’ve been building around American cities is simply not economically sustainable. Moreover, it may be bad for our health:

A new study found that the year your neighborhood was built may be just as important as diet and exercise for shedding pounds. Those who live in neighborhoods built before 1950 are trimmer than their counterparts who reside in more modern communities, the study reported.
“The older neighborhoods had a reduced level of obesity because they were generally built with the pedestrian in mind and not cars,” said Ken Smith, a co-author of the study and professor in the department of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah. “This means they have trees, sidewalks and offer a pleasant environment in which to walk.”
In the study, which appears in the September issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the researchers found that on average men weighed 10 pounds less if they lived in older, more walkable neighborhoods while women weighed about six pounds less.
The older neighborhoods also tend to have a variety of stores and businesses located within walking distance, so people wind up traveling by foot to do errands, go to local restaurants or other activities, Smith added.

This is the model to which our cities must return: high density residential housing, scattered mixed retail/commercial businesses, sidewalks, greenways, modest-sized public spaces, and revamped public transportation.