City of Big Data
Newcity has published an edited transcript of a conversation I had with writer Phil Barash about design, data, and urban systems. It’s a lotta words, but does, in a way, capture more fully my thinking on data-informed urban design than anything that’s previously been published. So I’m glad for that.
Here’s the full piece: Bright Lights, Big Data: How the Hog Butcher became the Data Cruncher.
The story is timed to coincide with the opening of the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s City of Big Data exhibit. If you live in Chicago — or are visiting (the CAF architecture river cruise is the most popular thing to do in the city) — you really should check it out. Answer questions such as: What does information architecture have to do with the built environment? How did the fire of 1871 kick off Chicago’s obsession with urban data? And, just what in the hell does Carl Sandburg have to do with big data?
Bonus: it features a 3D-printed monochrome cityscape used as a “canvas” on which data visualization is projected. Spectacular, immediate, and physical.
The exhibit also features a custom dashboard of city vital signs, developed by my old IBM City Forward team. Two special panels face Michigan and Jackson for data-flâneurs and other passersby.
Optional caption of above photo: self-portrait with all professional pursuits to date, 2014.
Hi, I’m John Tolva!
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Gravid With Decay
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Marginalia
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Ring the bell to let the fish pass through the boat lock in Utrecht. This is what the Internet was made for.
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"It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does."
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I'd watch a modern day Western flick based on this.
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This fossil is 100 yards from my old house. A welcome friend on the walk to/from the L. (But it's a squirrel impression!)
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How do you make sense of a world sloshing around in AI-generated content? The liberal arts.
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Estimating the size of YouTube by "drunk dialing" URL strings.
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Is it urban form itself that makes ghosts or the lack of community?
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If they can pull this off in Phoenix, it can be done anywhere.
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"Our universe's history, fossilized in light."
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Thinking like Africa is a solution.
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The hack that made my summer camper trip possible.
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Live air traffic audio from the world's airports overlaid on ambient tunes.
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See where any living thing exists in a beautiful interactive taxonomy visualization.
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Flipping between channels of my childhood.
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More impressive than tool-usage.
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Type at work in the real world.
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You're probably not prepared for how enthralling this is.
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Anti-bird spikes as nest material, keeping other birds out!
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B♭ C A♭ 8vb A♭ E♭.
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Trains, automobiles, and rocket ships, basically.
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"The act of simplifying reality for a machine results in a great deal of complexity for the human."
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Sara Benincasa on the beauty of The Bear.
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Two writers facing one Turing test: A dialog in honor of HAL between Richard Powers and Bruno LatourPrescience for our current world from 1998.
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"History is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it. We will concede this trivia game (after a very long run as champions), and find another in which, aided by our compounding prosthetics, we can excel in more powerful and ever more terrifying ways."
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AI neologisms. Could just link #termsfromtoday to this and never manually post again.
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Science fiction becomes reality for fossil literature.
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So much worse than the passive voice.
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AI-generated imagery in the service of mythopoeic storytelling on a small town scale. (Follow via Instagram.)
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"Dark magic box": The unique design opportunity of designing a marine ecosystem experience for visitors.
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"A book with feedback"
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Matt Kirschenbaum writes his own words about the "ongoing planetary spam event."
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Meaning isn't 100% transitive.
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A one-shot music video performed using only the reel-to-reel tape recorders.
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Just because it was inevitable doesn't mean it isn't glorious.
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Dan makes me nostalgic for Twitter 2007-2013.
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Incredible instrument made from two Commodore 64s, floppy disks, tape and a giant dose of nerdery.
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‘Oh, that’s tennis for non-athletes.'
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Answer: barely, with a few modifications.
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Some behind-the-scenes of my work life.
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The All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club!
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"Hell's Aquarium"
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"Before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive."
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"The problem wasn’t that Sisyphus had to roll his boulder up a hill forever; it’s that he had to roll it alone."
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Same with me, clowns, same with me.
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I'm here for the needless politicization of tennis versus pickeball.
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Biomimicry meet reclaimed waste product.
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"Cities are where we see each other. People who don’t want to see hate that."
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How much do you know about lines?
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Documentary on Minnesota's failed attempt at a city of the future in the late 1960's.
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"Humanity, how are you doing on this beautiful Monday?"
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Amazing visualization of European lighthouses showing light color, actual pattern, and radius of visibility.
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An interesting data point, for sure, but this metric may be the best part: Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score.
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The exact time of day, pulled from books.
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Einstein confirms.
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Mapping magnetic fields to the audio spectrum.
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So pretty you often don't stop to listen.
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The greatest tribute ever penned by a child for a parent.
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Humans walking through a city don't take the shortest route but the one that physically points them at their destination most consistently.
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Placing this here to remind future me.
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LIght pollution of course ruins this.
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Clever. Would be even better using LEGO's bioplastic bricks.
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It doesn’t solve the problem to buy a hybrid and retrofit your house if all of that takes place 20 miles from your job.
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Eno on urban design is masterful.
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Railroad marketing ploy. But it's still quite nice here.
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Particularly proud of this project from the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance.
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"'There is an Italian phrase,' said Marco after we ordered our food. '"Li ti avvelenano", which translates to "there they will poison you." This is my prediction for the night.'"
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Bringing together a few things I'm working on.
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The condiutions and accomplishments that this story described laid the foundation for the beginning of my career.
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“And so those fish are then left with less information about when it's safe to go out and eat and control these algae. And this feedback has these ecosystem-level consequences.”
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"It’s not Columbus’ fault that industry promises about the imminent arrival of self-driving cars were way overblown." ← Actually, it is Columbus' fault.