@hammersklavier - Tumblr Blog

Rail Advocacy in a Nationalized Environment

If we're serious about nationalization, we need to get serious about what happens after nationalization. Using examples, I propose a need to advance strategic freight and passenger rail corridors within existing infra

Needs to Identify Preferred Passenger Corridors The East Palestine rail disaster is once again igniting calls to nationalize America’s freight railroads. Over the past year, American rail advocacy has coalesced around nationalization as the best policy option for dealing with the major problems endemic in the industry, with the Class I railroads’ horrendous labor policies becoming front-page…

View On WordPress

#advocacy #east palestine derailment #freight corridors #nationalization #passenger corridors #trains

Hankyu Operations: A Case Study

The Hankyu Railway is one of Osaka, Japan’s “Big Four” private railways. It operates three routes out of its Umeda Terminal in central Osaka: the Kobe, Takarazuka, and Kyoto lines. It does so with extremely high throughput, operating roughly twelve trains an hour all day, every day on its Kobe and Takarazuka lines. (It operates trains on the Kyoto Line with even greater frequency.) This is a…

View On WordPress

The Many Faces of Joker

Joker is one of the greatest villains of the 20th century, but the same things that make Joker such a great villain also make him difficult to portray properly. It has often been thought, since Joker’s primary role in the DC universe is as Batman’s foil, it is impossible to even understand Joker in the absence of Batman. Yet 2019’s Joker does just that, exploring one of Joker’s possible origin…

View On WordPress

Lorelei...

Lorelei…

Heinrich Heine’s Lorelei is one of the classic texts of German poetry. However, I am unfamiliar with the rules of German poetics, so let’s take a look at the text to try and figure them out.

Prosodically, German is often described as consistently stressing on the first syllable, which a predictable and consistent stress pattern. Like English, German is a stress-timed language, and as such, we…

View On WordPress

Convention Center Hotels

Introduction

The Pennsylvania Convention Center has historically been seen as something of a white elephant in the City of Philadelphia. Despite having a million square feet of space (some 680k of which is exhibit space, making it the third largest convention center by exhibition space in the Northeast), the Convention Center has long suffered from the curse of relatively few bookings, an issue…

View On WordPress

Hiatus.

I’ve been overworked lately. Pulling 60+ hour workweeks.

I don’t have the time to write for this blog at the moment, and as a result, I need to put it on hiatus for a while.

–Steve

View On WordPress

Anatomy of a Character: Sir Samuel Vimes

Long-lasting series are built from great characters, since, in a sense, every great story is character-driven, and this is as true for Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series as it is for any other. Indeed, given the complex and sprawling nature of Discworld, composed, as it is, of several discrete arcs set in the same overall setting (i.e. the Disc), one can assume that Pratchett is uniquely gifted…

View On WordPress

Terry Pratchett's "Snuff"

Terry Pratchett’s “Snuff”

The late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my personal favorites — hilariously witty, sardonic, and occasionally accused, justifiably, of literature. The Disc is both world and mirror of worlds, and in this vast and rangy series, Pratchett deep and complex themes in what is above all his fun way of writing.

Discworld is not best tackled as a unified series, but rather as groups of…

View On WordPress

Terry Pratchett's "Thud!"

Terry Pratchett’s “Thud!”

The late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my personal favorites — hilariously witty, sardonic, and occasionally accused, justifiably, of literature. The Disc is both world and mirror of worlds, and in this vast and rangy series, Pratchett deep and complex themes in what is above all his fun way of writing.

Discworld is not best tackled as a unified series, but rather as groups of…

View On WordPress

Terry Pratchett's "Night Watch"

Terry Pratchett’s “Night Watch”

The late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my personal favorites — hilariously witty, sardonic, and occasionally accused, justifiably, of literature. The Disc is both world and mirror of worlds, and in this vast and rangy series, Pratchett deep and complex themes in what is above all his fun way of writing.

Discworld is not best tackled as a unified series, but rather as groups of…

View On WordPress

Terry Pratchett's "The Fifth Elephant"

Terry Pratchett’s “The Fifth Elephant”

On a personal note, The Fifth Elephant is the first Discworld book I read, and the one I’ve reread more than any other.

The late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my personal favorites — hilariously witty, sardonic, and occasionally accused, justifiably, of literature. The Disc is both world and mirror of worlds, and in this vast and rangy series, Pratchett deep and complex themes in…

View On WordPress

Terry Pratchett's "Jingo"

Terry Pratchett’s “Jingo”

The late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my personal favorites — hilariously witty, sardonic, and occasionally accused, justifiably, of literature. The Disc is both world and mirror of worlds, and in this vast and rangy series, Pratchett deep and complex themes in what is above all his fun way of writing.

Discworld is not best tackled as a unified series, but rather as groups of…

View On WordPress

Terry Pratchett's "Feet of Clay"

Terry Pratchett’s “Feet of Clay”

The late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my personal favorites — hilariously witty, sardonic, and occasionally accused, justifiably, of literature. The Disc is both world and mirror of worlds, and in this vast and rangy series, Pratchett deep and complex themes in what is above all his fun way of writing.

Discworld is not best tackled as a unified series, but rather as groups of…

View On WordPress

Terry Pratchett's "Men at Arms"

Terry Pratchett’s “Men at Arms”

The late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my personal favorites — hilariously witty, sardonic, and occasionally accused, justifiably, of literature. The Disc is both world and mirror of worlds, and in this vast and rangy series, Pratchett deep and complex themes in what is above all his fun way of writing.

Discworld is not best tackled as a unified series, but rather as groups of…

View On WordPress

Terry Pratchett's "Guards! Guards!"

Terry Pratchett’s “Guards! Guards!”

The late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my personal favorites — hilariously witty, sardonic, and occasionally accused, justifiably, of literature. The Disc is both world and mirror of worlds, and in this vast and rangy series, Pratchett deep and complex themes in what is above all his fun way of writing.

Discworld is not best tackled as a unified series, but rather as groups of…

View On WordPress

Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem"

Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem”

The Three-Body Problem is one of the more popular sci-fi works to have come out in recent years. Set in a near-future, slightly cyberpunk universe, the work is fundamentally a first-contact novel — a common sci-fi theme (e.g. Stranger in a Strange Land is also a first-contact novel) — but what makes it different, and interesting, is the mode of contact: through, in a complex way, a video game…

View On WordPress

Homosexuality in the "Divine Comedy"

Homosexuality in the “Divine Comedy”

One of the Divine Comedy‘s most shocking moments, as Anthony Esolen points out in his introduction to Inferno, is when Dante meets his mentor, Brunetto Latini, in the seventh circle of Hell, with those who are sexually violent against God — traditionally given as the Sodomites.

To understand the context of this scene, Brunetto Latini was Dante’s mentor in his youth and adolescence, and at the…

View On WordPress

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs