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Like the McMansion, the McMain Street attempts to mimic the complex roof massing of many buildings in a single building. Here are ideas on better ways to preserve or create Main Street character.

The emails and campaign ads of this year's election have exposed a "creative crisis in the Democratic Party"

Before you throw away that broken toaster, consider stopping by your local repair cafe.

I didn’t sleep at all after we lost to Columbus.

I didn’t think losing would hurt as much as it did. Everything was new this year for me — the country, the city of Atlanta, the club. Even though I’d been here 10 months, I felt like I was still settling in by the time the playoffs came around. But I didn’t know how connected to Atlanta I had become.

And by losing that match, I felt like we let the city down. I’m sorry for that.

That night, lying in my bed, I kept thinking about what our coach, Tata Martino, had said to us before the match:

“Be calm, tonight. But don’t be afraid. Know what you’re playing for and know who you’re playing for. Be aware of the chance we have and the expectation that comes with it. Play for Atlanta.”

Play for Atlanta.

Disruptions and delays have roiled the system this year. But the crisis was long in the making, fueled by a litany of errors, a Times investigation shows.

#budgets and budgeting

John Kass: Harold Washington, Chicago’s charismatic first black mayor, died 30 years ago, and Chicago’s black politics tore itself apart

Where Are the American Cities That Aren't Struggling?

To James and Deborah Fallows, “flyover country” is more than just the part of the U.S. the media often forgets. They’ve found that these areas are home to cities that work, thriving communities, and an abundance of jobs.

nasa

Why Webb Needs to Chill

Our massive James Webb Space Telescope is currently being tested to make sure it can work perfectly at incredibly cold temperatures when it’s in deep space.

How cold is it getting and why? Here’s the whole scoop…

Webb is a giant infrared space telescope that we are currently building. It was designed to see things that other telescopes, even the amazing Hubble Space Telescope, can’t see.

Webb’s giant 6.5-meter diameter primary mirror is part of what gives it superior vision, and it’s coated in gold to optimize it for seeing infrared light.

Why do we want to see infrared light?

Lots of stuff in space emits infrared light, so being able to observe it gives us another tool for understanding the universe. For example, sometimes dust obscures the light from objects we want to study – but if we can see the heat they are emitting, we can still “see” the objects to study them.

It’s like if you were to stick your arm inside a garbage bag. You might not be able to see your arm with your eyes – but if you had an infrared camera, it could see the heat of your arm right through the cooler plastic bag.

Credit: NASA/IPAC

With a powerful infrared space telescope, we can see stars and planets forming inside clouds of dust and gas.

We can also see the very first stars and galaxies that formed in the early universe. These objects are so far away that…well, we haven’t actually been able to see them yet. Also, their light has been shifted from visible light to infrared because the universe is expanding, and as the distances between the galaxies stretch, the light from them also stretches towards redder wavelengths.

We call this phenomena “redshift.” This means that for us, these objects can be quite dim at visible wavelengths, but bright at infrared ones. With a powerful enough infrared telescope, we can see these never-before-seen objects.

We can also study the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. Many of the elements and molecules we want to study in planetary atmospheres have characteristic signatures in the infrared.

Because infrared light comes from objects that are warm, in order to detect the super faint heat signals of things that are really, really far away, the telescope itself has to be very cold. How cold does the telescope have to be? Webb’s operating temperature is under 50K (or -370F/-223 C). As a comparison, water freezes at 273K (or 32 F/0 C).

How do we keep the telescope that cold?

Because there is no atmosphere in space, as long as you can keep something out of the Sun, it will get very cold. So Webb, as a whole, doesn’t need freezers or coolers - instead it has a giant sunshield that keeps it in the shade. (We do have one instrument on Webb that does have a cryocooler because it needs to operate at 7K.)

Also, we have to be careful that no nearby bright things can shine into the telescope – Webb is so sensitive to faint infrared light, that bright light could essentially blind it. The sunshield is able to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Earth and Moon, as well as the Sun.

Out at what we call the Second Lagrange point, where the telescope will orbit the Sun in line with the Earth, the sunshield is able to always block the light from bright objects like the Earth, Sun and Moon.

How do we make sure it all works in space?

By lots of testing on the ground before we launch it. Every piece of the telescope was designed to work at the cold temperatures it will operate at in space and was tested in simulated space conditions. The mirrors were tested at cryogenic temperatures after every phase of their manufacturing process.

The instruments went through multiple cryogenic tests at our Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Once the telescope (instruments and optics) was assembled, it even underwent a full end-to-end test in our Johnson Space Center’s giant cryogenic chamber, to ensure the whole system will work perfectly in space.

What’s next for Webb?

It will move to Northrop Grumman where it will be mated to the sunshield, as well as the spacecraft bus, which provides support functions like electrical power, attitude control, thermal control, communications, data handling and propulsion to the spacecraft.

Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope HERE, or follow the mission on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

todaysdocument

Now You See Me, Now You…..Still See Me? Hand-Painted British Dazzle Camouflage Templates from WWI

During WWI, 1914-1918, the Fleet Admiral of the British Navy had a problem. German U-Boats were sinking British ships at an astonishing rate. Something had to be done to halt the destruction of the fleet and the loss of life, and that something was what would come to be known as Dazzle Camouflage. Unlike other types and styles of camouflage, it was not intended to hide the ship, but rather to visually disrupt the outline of the ship to the degree that an observer would have no idea what they were looking at.

The German Navy had a well-deserved reputation for having a very low margin of error when it came to sinking British ships, but it was reported that dazzle camouflage could throw an experienced submariner’s aim off by multiple degrees, meaning a harmless miss rather than a devastating hit.

Dazzle camouflage was pioneered by British naval officer Norman Wilkinson and was based on the theory that, just like stripes on a zebra and spots on a cheetah, stripes and odd patterns on a battleship would make it harder to target by breaking up its outline. Dazzle camouflage utilized oddly angled lines and very bright colors including green, yellow, pink, purple, blue, and black to make it impossible to determine the size, shape, speed, or heading of a ship. Also, for added confusion, no two ships were painted alike so that the Germans would have nothing to latch onto as a template for the patterns on the ships.

Type 8, Design A, Starboard Side (NAID 46740258) RG; 19, Camouflage Design Drawings for U.S. Navy Commissioned Ships, U.S. Merchant Ships and British Ships.

This type of camouflage enjoyed great success and was eventually adopted by the United States navy, prompting an unnamed American journalist at the New York Times to write, “You should see our fleet, it’s camouflaged to look like a flock of Easter eggs going out to sea.”

By WWII, this type of camouflage was becoming less and less effective because of inventions like radar and range finders and the fact that torpedoes were no longer hand guided.

All of the images shown above in addition to the over 300 other templates in the National Archives holdings are available for viewing online at https://catalog.archives.gov, search “British Camouflage Type” and then choose which “type” (1-20) you wish to view.

More on Dazzle Camouflage at Now You See Me, Now You…..Still See Me? Hand-Painted British Dazzle Camouflage Templates from WWI | The Unwritten Record

Fired Up! Ready to go!

CAMPBELL, OHIO — Forty years ago, on Sept. 19, thousands of men walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River before the early shift. Like every fall morning,…

Forty years ago, on Sept. 19, thousands of men walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River before the early shift.

Like every fall morning, they were armed with lunch pails and hard hats; the only worry on their minds was the upcoming Pittsburgh Steelers game on “Monday Night Football.” The only arguing you heard was whether quarterback Terry Bradshaw had fully recovered from the dramatic hit he took from a Cleveland Browns player the season before.

It was just before 7 a.m., and the fog that had settled over the river was beginning to lift. As the sun began to streak through mist, the men made their way into the labyrinth of buildings where they worked.

In the next hour their lives would change forever.

From then on, this date in 1977 would be known as Black Monday in the Steel Valley, which stretches from Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio eastward toward Pittsburgh. It is the date when Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 workers all in one day.

The bleeding never stopped.

Within the next 18 months, US Steel announced that the nation’s largest steel producer was also shutting down 16 plants across the nation including their Ohio Works in Youngstown, a move that eliminated an additional 4,000 workers here. That announcement came one day before Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. said they were cutting thousands of jobs at their facilities in the Mahoning Valley, too.

Within a decade 40,000 jobs were gone. Within that same decade, 50,000 people had left the region, and by the next decade that number was up to 100,000. Today the 22 miles of booming steel mills and the support industries that once lined the Mahoning River have mostly disappeared — either blown up, dismantled or reclaimed by nature.

If a bomb had hit this region, the scar would be no less severe on its landscape. [...]

Three years ago, I wrote about how American urban elites propose public monuments in lieu of providing public services. My topical example was an article by Larry Summers, whose proposal to reduce inequality was to invest in nicer-looking airports – per Summers, the rich have private jets, the poor fly commercial. The post overall focused on government projects. But in the last few days I’ve seen two examples in the same direction, involving thinktanks and the private sector, and no government projects at all. One is from a panel headlined by J. D. Vance, which Pete Saunders and Aaron Renn both sat on; I can’t find a link to the video anymore, but here is a recap (update: here is the video). The other is from a Brookings report about Philadelphia. In both cases, the elite speaker (Vance, or Brookings) looks at a region that’s not as wealthy as it would like to be, and proposes everything except better services. [...]

These plans are reminiscent of alchemy. Medieval alchemical texts were never clear about what to do exactly; they couldn’t be, because then readers would try to replicate the results and see the recipe doesn’t work. So they can’t give an exact recipe for how to grow, because that wouldn’t work. Instead, they propose ten nebulous items. A city that succeeds will get praised for how it implemented six of them; a city that fails will get criticized for how it only implemented six and did so in the wrong way.

Nor can these plans offer services. They cannot talk about investing more in education and in hospitals, in improving social services, etc. That’s political. If they do talk about education, they talk about it in the same terms as a self-important tech entrepreneur or venture capitalist: attracting excellence, enterprise universities, global talent, anything to avoid talking about school segregation or funding disparities.

[...] Elite institutions and pundits who, to look like they’re above the political fray, propose non-solutions and irrelevant brand-building exercises, come up with both private and public programs.The biggest enduring fad, charter schools, is funded by the public, just not run by it. Brookings and Vance are proposing private programs, and New York and Providence both wasted money on public enterprise programs, but the principle is the same: branding is cool, social services are dirty.

The political problem is that the consultants need to justify their own existence. This requires them to exclude every solution that has a political address. [...]

ON A CLEAR, sunny day at a vineyard in the northern California town of Ukiah, a most unusual train chugs through a field of barely budding syrah grapes. Well, it doesn't chug so much as whoosh because this train—actually, a one-sixth scale train—doesn't rely upon a diesel engine or electricity to get around. It uses vacuum power and heavy duty magnets.

The 89-year-old man who built it believes it could change how the world moves.

That man is Max Schlienger, an accomplished engineer who owns the vineyard and leads his family-run company Flight Rail Corp. Its sole product, the “Vectorr” system, uses a propulsion method like no other: Between the rails lies a PVC pipe, 12 inches in diameter, connected to a pump that can draw all of the air out of the pipe or fill it. Within the pipe you'll find something Schlienger calls a thrust carriage, which is connected to the train with powerful magnets. This carriage is about the size and shape of a large watermelon and moves back and forth through the pipe under vacuum power, bringing the train with it.

This weird but clever product works something like the vaunted hyperloop, but rather than shooting a pod full of people through a tube, it shoots a carriage through a tube. And, like the people behind hyperloop, Schlienger remains convinced it represents the future of transportation. "We’ll get someone, somewhere, to say we want to do it,” Schlienger says. “And we’ll put all our energy into it.” [...]

Flight Rail Corp

#transportation #high speed rail

[...]Tiny Homes Detroit is a way for low-income individuals to become homeowners. Other tiny home communities have developed in the country, notably in Austin, but Detroit’s differs in a few ways. This is the only rent-to-own model in the country. Austin’s is located on the outskirts of the city, while Detroit’s is well within the city. Austin also uses a variety of trailers, tents, and tiny homes, while Detroit is only building tiny homes here.

Reverend Fowler says that this model gives residents an asset, which will help them borrow money in the future.

The houses vary between 250-400 square feet and each is architecturally different. Some are studios, while others have a loft, and some have a separate bedroom. Herman Miller and Interior Lifestyles donated furnishings and time.[...] [Curbed Detroit]

#urban renewal #tiny homes #economic development #detroit #wealth

"The Nevada legislature passed a bill Friday that would allow anyone to buy into Medicaid, the public program that covers low-income Americans. It would be the first state to open the government-run program to all residents, regardless of their income or health status. The bill is currently sitting with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican. His office did not respond to an inquiry about whether he would sign the bill or veto it. [...] “Medicaid for all” offers an alluring alternative to those proposals. For one, Medicaid coverage generally costs less than “Medicare for all” because the program pays doctors lower rates. This might make it a more alluring option for price-sensitive consumers worried about their monthly premium.[...]"

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