almost 6 year ago (on the first of january 2007) i started taking an interest in the use of Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs) as exterior lightening. I first noticed this use of this type op lightbulbs on a new years day stroll to the recently bombed out southern suburbs of Beirut. A large number shops [...]

so apparently time travel has finally arrived. Walked by the bus shelter opposite of Berlin Hauptbahnhof this morning and was greeted with a ‘Willkommen in der Zukunft’ (‘Welcome to the future’) message scrolling across the LED display. Have not entirely figured out how the future is different from the present nor how i can get [...]

the New York Times has a longish article portraying the Operations Center of the City of Rio that has been build by IBM’s smarter cities unit. In the article both the city of Rio de Janeiro and IBM portray the operations center as some kind of magic wand that enables the benevolent city government to [...]

this was mentioned in passing in an item on carbon trading that ran in today’s NOS evening news: the delhi metro is now transporting more passengers per day than the dutch national railways. a quick check on wikipedia shows that this is a bit of an understatement: daily ridership of the delhi metro system is [...]

just found this picture in the ‘the year 2010 in 100 pictures’ issue of the NRC magazine. probably my favorite picture from 2010. the NRC magazine shows a tiny little version, click on the image above for high-res.

speaking about required reading: head over to sleepycity.net for wonderful (and long) write-up by a guy who has spend the last years exploring (at night on foot) the Paris Métro system. The article is illustrated with a bunch of terrific photos. Reading this makes me jealous. Personally i have never come any further than maybe [...]

kimon pointed me to this impressive article by Parag Khanna in which he argues that (mega)cities are slowly emerging as the dominant international actors replacing nation states along the way. His article titled ‘Beyond City Limits’ is well worth a read and a refreshing take on the subject of urban growth. Ever since the publication [...]

the city of Kabul (and Afghanistan in general) is still pretty high on my list of places i want to visit. Unfortunately, the closest place to Kabul that i got to so far is Delhi. Fortunately, however, there is the fabulous internet where Safi Airways ‘the international airline of Afghanistan’ is publishing PDF versions of [...]

couple of days ago boingboing ran a post about a SF bike messenger who claims to work while tripping on LSD. today i finally read the whole text (as opposed to just the short quote on boingboing which focusses on his cycling while tripping experience). turns out that the his entire rant is rather amusing [...]

yesterday i raced in the 11th edition of the annual Anniek van Hardeveld memorial race (see my pervious reports here and here). this race is held annually on the 4th of may in remembrance of Annick van Hardeveld, a 21 year old courier for the dutch resistance who was shot dead on the 4th of [...]