ΧΡΙΣΤΌΦΟΡΟΣ bɝːd

just got invited to peer review a paper I'm one of the authors on

@midriffchan @SlopHq A transit professional told that once frequency is below 10 minutes sticking to a schedule loses importance.

@SlopHq In Mexico City and Guadalajara that's why motorcycle usage is so much lower than in Asia. It wasn't really intentional, the local governments compensate being unable to make the buses run in time by sending one every 5 minutes. And it works.

the thing that gets people on transit isn’t free fares it’s not having to check a schedule. a bus that costs $2 and comes every 6 minutes will outperform a free bus that comes every 30 minutes every single time. frequency is the product. the fare is a rounding error

@gmk_julie A high proportion of charismatic, guru-type male leaders are womanizers or "boyizers".

My parents are both gone but I would love to ask them how they knew. My mom was a Prussian refugee and my dad was a Park Ranger, neither were involved politically, we didn't subscribe to any newspapers and we didn't even own a TV. But somehow they just knew. When I came home from school talking about Martin Luther King Jr and Caesar Chavez they told me both those men were corrupt womanizers and not to listen to anything my teachers said about them. Any body else out there have that experience? Did my mom's suffering under Hitler give her special insight into charismatic leaders or did my parents just have crazy discernment?

Mono-culture farming devastates the rest of nature. Farmlands continue to lose much of their wildlife, bees, birds, insects, amphibians. But each generation measures "normal" nature against what existed in their childhood; not what existed before. So we don't mourn the Auroch, Quagga, Eastern Elk, or drained wetland. We never knew them. We each inherit a slightly emptier world & call it normal, a shifting baseline syndrome. Humans are remarkably adaptive... dangerously so.

Reminds me of the infamous description of Marx’s living quarters by Prussian police (in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals). “Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he rarely does, and he is often drunk… There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture…Here is a chair with three legs.”

@marcportermagee He probably meant "supine".

“Look anywhere on the history of the left and you’ll spot the attitudes that undergirded this phenomenon”

@RPLongSW @theronrockstone @CartoonsHateHer @econosopher @Sanilac_J Men making over $200K are likely to care.

@theronrockstone @CartoonsHateHer @econosopher @Sanilac_J Do you think the average man gives a hoot about “presenting their wives/girlfriends socially?” I understand that *some* men are so status-obsessed that it nullifies their own preferences, but how common do you think this is among men in general?

A husband-hunting expert released a guide for how women can look sexier to find a rich, handsome husband--but it was light on proof. I have the proof to back up (and refute) some of her claims. Link in replies.

Activist: "The water usage for beef is obscene. Thousands of litres per kilogram." Farmer: "That's rainfall." Activist: "What?" Farmer: "The figure includes all the rain that falls on the pasture. The cows drink from the stream. The rain falls whether there's a cow here or not." Activist: "It's still water consumption." Farmer: "Should I stop the rain falling on my field?" Activist: "Grow crops instead. More efficient." Farmer: "This is a 35-degree slope in the Welsh hills. Show me the crop." Activist: "Technology..." Farmer: "To make tractors climb mountains?" Activist: "There must be a solution." Farmer: "There is. It's called a cow." Activist: [checks phone]

“In writing about the many books she loved, Virginia Woolf could be a good Johnsonian critic. On Joyce’s Ulysses, she is at her rare worst: snobbish, resentful, a touch frightened. And wrong, absolutely wrong. The Jesuit-trained James Joyce was erudite beyond measure and so gifted as to be almost the fusion of Dante and Shakespeare. That was his vaunting ambition. It was beyond reach.” —Harold Bloom, Bright Book of Life

“The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.” C.S. Lewis

@MemoryMedieval Alexander the Impactful

Why is it call the "GREAT men of history" theory, not the "IMPACTFUL men of history" theory? Reddit dweebs keep telling me that "great" and "impactful" mean the same thing. I guess we will never know why.

@walterkirn I suspect it's a combination of a receptive and engaged audience and cross-pollination between gifted artists.

One of the puzzles I find myself mulling over -- too often -- is the question of why artistic genius springs up in geographic clusters rather than in some broad, roughly predictable way. So many great musical talents from Seattle all at once? Whatever may be behind this phenomenon, it doesn't seem to operate with AIs, whose outputs don't arrive in this irregular, qualitatively "lumpy" fashion.

@HistoryBoomer @TheCut Semi-ethical non-monogamy.

Next week on @TheCut : Non-Monogamous Shoplifters — Is petty larceny good for your polycule? — Who does the dishes when your third husband is spending his second night in Whole Foods jail?

@Tina848Laczko @wrong_speak In 2018, I found German useful as a backup to English in Zagreb.

@CjgbVictoria @wrong_speak I used it extensively in Hungary in 2004. Not many English speakers back then. They understood my bad German, but obviously heard an accent. I had to write USA a lot to help them understand, especially when we left Budapest.

I started learning German years ago, initially by myself and then I got a tutor. I was very close to taking a job in Germany at one point. These days, I don't get to practice my German but when I do come to Germany, I try my best to speak. I'm in Frankfurt now. I ordered a coffee and was complimented on my pronunciation. He made sure to tell me that he understood everything I said clearly. A cool feeling...

@RedaMansour Twitter assures me that all Muslims are ISIS/Hamas supporters ineradicably committed to conquering the world.

Muslim men volunteer for the Israeli Defence Forves IDF. Muslim women volunteer for national service. Muslim family courts are a part of the Israeli legal system.

Sunni muslims are 18% of the Israeli population: 400 mosques all over the country. 200 official mosques financed by the Israeli government. 300 imams and muezzins are government employees with salaries and benefits. The Israeli government buys Quran books for these mosques.

Timely reminder of when this guy reviewed that guy... Iggy Pop on Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Classics Ireland, 1995): Caesar Lives by Iggy Pop In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude. Being in a political business, I had long made a habit of reading biographies of wilful characters — Hitler, Churchill, MacArthur, Brando — with large profiles, and I also enjoyed books on war and political intrigue, as I could relate the action to my own situation in the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental. I would read with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels, savouring the clash of beliefs, personalities and values, played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters. And that was the end of that. Or so I thought. Eleven years later I stood in a dilapidated but elegant room in a rotting mansion in New Orleans, and listened as a piece of music strange to my ears pulled me back to ancient Rome and called forth those ghosts to merge in hilarious, bilious pretence with the Schwartzkopfs, Schwartzeneggers and Sheratons of modern American money and muscle myth. Out of me poured information I had no idea I ever knew, let alone retained, in an extemporaneous soliloquy I called ‘Caesar’. When I listened back, it made me laugh my ass off because it was so true. America is Rome. Of course, why shouldn’t it be? All of Western life and institutions today are traceable to the Romans and their world. We are all Roman children for better or worse. The best part of this experience came after the fact — my wife gave me a beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged Decline and Fall, and since then the pleasure and profit have been all mine as I enjoy the wonderful language, organization and scope of this masterwork. Here are just some of the ways I benefit: I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day. I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective. The language in which the book is written is rich and complete, as the language of today is not. I find out how little I know. I am inspired by the will and erudition which enabled Gibbon to complete a work of twenty-odd years. The guy stuck with things. I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world.

Marx lived in poverty for many years and in 1862 he was in such desperate straits that he tried to get hired as a clerk in a British railroad office. The answer to his application was negative, as he was told that he could not fill that position because of his bad handwriting. Marx's handwriting was very small and almost illegible. After his death, Engels had to train Kautsky & Bernstein to decipher it. This was the beginning of a long work (still going on) that made possible the publication of an imposing mass of unpublished manuscripts left by #Marx.

@life0fStacy13 @jarvis_best Repeat cycle.

@jarvis_best Ummm do we know the same people? I have friends that did this…exact same thing. LoL. Guess where they live!!! 🤣🤣🤣 And here is the real kicker, he got remarried and she looks JUST LIKE THE EX WIFE!!! 🫣😂

I’ve only ever known one poly couple ever in real life. Here’s what happened. I’m not making this up. 1. Guy goes to his much hotter wife and says he wants an open marriage. She reluctantly agrees. 2. She immediately goes out and bangs some guy. 3. He gets all pissed off. 4. He invites me out for coffee and wants me to commiserate with him. Like he’s OUTRAGED. He wants me to agree with him that she was way out of line for … something, I dunno what. I’m like man i feel for you but … to be fair … 5. He divorces her.

@Tina848Laczko @wrong_speak I found my German (picked up as an exchange student) more useful in smaller, former–East German cities like Dresden and Weimar than in Berlin.

@wrong_speak I studied German in grade school and high school. Went to Berlin many years later and ordered in German. I was so proud. The waiter answered me in English. He was not impressed.

How to reverse 20c road widening? On existing streets, large-scale ROW (right of way) reduction is possible but politically and operationally TUFF (to be clear, I think ROW reduction is the longterm goal and worth the effort of pursuing). But you’re dealing with utilities, fire access standards, drainage, and entrenched expectations about parking and lane widths. In most U.S. contexts, a full curb-to-curb narrowing to Asian/european proportions is CHALLENGING in the near term. What is realistic—and already happening—is effective narrowing: •wider sidewalks and tree zones •curb extensions •parking lanes + slow travel lanes (10–11’) •occasional shared streets or woonerf treatments That gets you much closer spatially without touching the legal ROW. Makes roads safer and more pleasant but doesn’t solve larger problem: too much of urban land area is for transit and not enough for buildings and usable green space. But the more important point: you don’t actually need to narrow the ROW to make courtyard urbanism work. The typology’s performance comes from the block interior and parcel structure, not just façade-to-façade distance. Chicago is the proof—wide streets, but still capable of excellent courtyard buildings when the parcels and massing are right. Where you do get true proportion shifts is in: •new streets on large sites (campuses, mall redevelopments, industrial land) •replatting / subdivision where you can reset parcel geometry and introduce narrower local streets or paseos So pragmatically: •retrofit existing streets through traffic calming and spatial tightening •deploy ideal geometry in new or re-platted districts Courtyard urbanism doesn’t hinge on perfect street widths but rather on restoring fine-grained parcels and shared interior space. Here’s Berlin road narrowing projects that restore the courtyard block fabric that had been destroyed when road was widened