Some bummer neighborhood news: Kmart is closing our local store. Here’s the article in the Plain Dealer. Not that Kmart is a great chain, or that this store is anything special, but this situation is a perfect example of the problems Cleveland faces. With the population declining pretty much everywhere in the city, if a new store opens then an old store has to close. There’s just not enough business for both of them. No matter how well these new stores do, the net effect is, at best, neutral.
In this case, a Target opened up about a mile to the west (on W 117th at I-90) and both a Target and Wal-Mart opened up in the new Steelyard Commons development about 2 miles east. Since they’re right on freeways, both new shopping centers are easier for suburban commuters to hit on their way in or out of downtown. This neighborhood Kmart simply couldn’t compete.
And so there’s another large strip mall in Cleveland that’s effectively empty now. It will probably sit there indefinitely.
On a more positive note, the Ashbury Towers development at 53rd and Walworth Run is apparently back in play with a new name: Kierland Commons. Nothing going on yet with the former factory portion of the property — now owned by Doug Perkowski — but the standalone condos are finally getting repaired and sold after sitting there boarded up for something like four years.
In the comments to this post there are a lot of suggestions of language learning sites and software. Much insistence that they are all better and/or cheaper than Rosetta Stone. Both seem possible. Rosetta Stone is OK, but it’d be easy to imagine something more effective. And one thing for sure: It’s expensive!
Here are all the links:
http://langlearner.com
http://wp.me/pAnF7-1x
http://www.spanishdict.com
http://www.arabicollege.com
http://www.edufire.com
http://www.livemocha.com
http://www.smart.fm
http://www.babbel.com
http://www.busuu.com
http://www.italki.com
http://www.phrasebase.com
Pen F
When I was a kid we did a lot of traveling including some big trips to Europe while my dad worked over there, but also trips down south and out west.
One of the things I remember most about those trips was taking pictures.
We took half-frame slides using an Olympus Pen-F. This was a small SLR that took “single frame” photos on 35mm film. Of course since most other SLRs took “double frame” photos, the common way everyone referred to the Pen F’s photos was “half frame”. The cool thing about this half frame stuff was that you could take twice as many photos per roll of film. I think this just meant we took twice as many photos as everybody else. We took a lot — and most of them are still in trays at my parents’ house.
E-P1
I thought about this again today, because Olympus has just come out with a new camera that has much of the look and feel — and maybe some of the spirit — of the Pen F. It’s called the E-P1. There’s no viewfinder, so it’s not exactly an SLR, but it does have interchangeable lenses and a lot of “SLR”-like features, including the fancier video recording capabilities that higher-end cameras are getting. But like the Pen F, it’s significantly smaller than all SLRs and even than many other point-and-shoot cameras without changeable lenses.
And of course with digital cameras, you don’t end up with trays full of slides you’ll never look at.
There’s been a lot of whining lately that President and Michelle Obama shouldn’t have gone to dinner and a play in New York the other day, and definitely shouldn’t have taken any time out of their European trip to do any sightseeing.
Predictably, these complaints went nowhere. I’m pretty sure that most folks could not possibly imagine going on a business trip to, say, Paris, and not take some time out to see the town.
Lance Knobel over at Davos Newbies has an interesting take on this. He points out that not only did the Obama family choose to visit a modern art museum (the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Center) while in Paris, they apparently like going to museums and looking at modern art! Quite a change from some recent Presidential office holders. (But right in line with most Americans: there were about 850 million museum visits in the US last year.)
(I’ve got more to say on this very American “all work/no play” attitude. It has huge impacts here in Cleveland. But I’ll save that for another post.)
So there’s this “Green Dog” company called Olive. They specialize in eco-friendly stuff for your hound.
Well, they realized that it was dumb to pick up dog doo-doo in a plastic bag that will outlast all of us.
So they came up with this.
Cool, eh?
On a somewhat related item, here’s some catfood I know our halfway-wild cat Wink would love.
Atul Gawande’s had quite a ride recently.
First he wrote an article in the New Yorker that demonstrated how certain communities spent twice as much on health care as other similar communities but with no corresponding improvement in outcomes. (I linked to that article recently. It really is compelling.)
Then his data got picked up by Peter Orszag, the White House Budget Director, who used it as an example of why it was important to talk about health care costs now, and as way to show that there was plenty of fat to cut in the system. (Orszag has now returned to the topic in his blog a couple of additional times. The first post has a ton of background data that shows exactly where the extra money is going. The other post is essentially a response to complaints about the focus on this topic.)
Recently, President Obama started using Gawande’s research and much more extensive and long-term research done at Dartmouth College as the basis for a whole series of policy speeches, including a “town hall” event on health care in Green Bay on Thursday. Obama is convinced that correcting these health care cost issues is the most important issue he can be working on.
And now, Gawande was invited to give the commencement speech at The Univeristy of Chicago Medical School. In the speech, he focuses on the same topic, but also tailors it to his audience by highlighting some of the lessons he’s learned in this area and giving them some advice on how to start to make a difference.
Here are his closing remarks:
Along the way, you will sometimes feel worn down and your cynicism taking over. But resist. Look for those in your community who are making health care better, safer, and less costly. Pay attention to them. Learn how they do it. And join with them.
If you serve the needs of your patients, if you work to ensure that both overtreatment and undertreatment are avoided, you will save your patients. You will also save our country. You are our hope. We thank you.
At lunch today one of the guys ordered General Tso’s Chicken. This reminded of me of an article I’d read recently on how, in most of the world, ethnic food is pretty much the same dishes immigrants would have made back in the “old country”. But in the US, the ethnic foods change, sometimes significantly, to meet American tastes. And in a lot of cases, the dishes are completely American.
In the case of Chinese food, you simply cannot go over there and order most of the stuff that’s served in the US. General Tso’s Chicken is a great case in point. It’s not exactly clear where it was invented — perhaps in the US, perhaps in Taiwan — but it is clear that nobody’s ever heard of it in mainland China.
One other interesting example from the article: Fortune Cookies. In China, these are considered “American” food.
An interesting linguistic cartogram from Strange Maps today. The most common language in Ireland is English. Then Gaelic. But what language do you think is third? Guess before you click though.
I was chatting with my wife about this great article I’d read about how to teach your kids to argue and she asked, “Can I just search your blog for the link?” Of course, I hadn’t blogged it.
Obviously I have not been keeping up with my commitment to myself to post something here every day. I promise to do better on that. There are tons of cool things to talk about.
Anyway, back to that article. I was telling Laura how it covered the three basic tools of argument, Ethos, Logos, and Porthos. And she asked, “Was this article about arguing or about The Three Musketeers?”
Hey, I thought it was funny.
There are several tabs in my browser that have been sitting out there waiting to be noted for a while. I think I saw most of them on Kottke, but at this point I’m not sure. If he didn’t post them, I’m sure it was just an oversight on his part!
First of all there is a new series of articles by Errol Morris in the NY Times called “Bamboozling Ourselves“. In the past he’s written in the Times about some famous photos from the Crimean and US Civil Wars. Now he’s moved on to paintings, and in particular, forged paintings. If you recall, one of the photos he wrote about previously was “forged” in a way, so Morris hasn’t changed his focus, just his medium. Morris uses art forgery to explore why folks ignore all sorts of red flags that would normally tell them not believe something. In this specific case, he looks at why the most preeminent art historians of the late 1930’s believed that some incredibly kitchy — and Nazi-inspired — paintings were actually painted by Vermeer.
Secondly, there were several articles on introverts that various folks have linked to. The most interesting is “Caring for Your Introvert,” from The Atlantic. There were also a few posts on introverted travelers and traveling. Now, I’d like to believe that I’m one of the noble introverts portrayed in these pieces, but I’m afraid the truth is that I’m just anti-social.
Finally, there is an incredible article in the New Yorker about huge differences in the amount spent on medical care in different cities. The example, the cost of health care is twice as high in McAllen, TX than it is in El Paso, at the other end of the Texas/Mexico border. After considering and discarding a whole bunch of possible reasons for this disparity, Dr. Atul Gawande, the author of the article, presents an extremely compelling argument as to what the real cause is and what we need to learn from the situation. I do find it hopeful that Peter Orszag, the White House Budget Director, has taken to quoting Dr. Gawande’s article to help explain why the Obama administration is bothering with health care reform during a time when so many other things need attention.