Mokka mit Schlag

Yesterday, Peter Dorosh, myself and about 20 other people attended the second of the New York City Parks Dept’s “Listening Sessions” for Ridgewood Reservoir. We learned that $50 million has been allocated specifically to turn Ridgewood Reservoir into a “destination park”; that is, one that will draw people in from outside the neighborhood. This is part of PlanNYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s 25-year plan of which, according to Kim Fallon, the “biggest part is greening the city.” In particular, the plan proposes planting about one million new trees. As Peter kept pointing out, it seems rather strange to bulldoze an area that’s already full of native trees in order to accomplish this.

Seven other areas are up for the same treatment including the beach at Far Rockaway, Dreier-Offerman Park in Brooklyn, Ocean Breeze in Staten Island, Fort Washington Park and the Highline in Manhattan. Mark K. Morrison has already been selected as design consultant. A preliminary plan should be available in a few months. They hope to start construction in Fiscal Year 2009. It’s not clear how far advanced the city’s plans are, or in fact what they are. Other than the statement in the plan that they want to “set aside two of three basins as a nature preserve and new active recreation center” they really haven’t said very much. I hope they haven’t made up their minds yet.

The stated goal of the session was to listen to what local residents want to be done to the park. Roughly 25 people attended, split about half and half between nature enthusiasts like Peter and myself and folks from the immediate neighborhood. (The Parks Dept. employees kept calling the nature folks “birdwatchers”, but the group that was there was quite a bit more diverse than that.) There were also about a dozen Parks Dept. officials. Also in the audience was state assemblyman Daryl Towns.

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Summer Azure, Celastrina neglecta
Ridgewood Reservoir, 2007-06-30
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Anyone know of an equivalent of the SQLAlchemy Python data binding library for Java? SQLAlchemy maps Python classes to the records in a table. What distinguishes it from Java-based ORM tools that I’ve seen such as Hibernate is that in SQLAlchemy you can map any table, not just ones that actually exists in the database.

SQLAlchemy doesn’t view databases as just collections of tables; it sees them as relational algebra engines. Its object relational mapper enables classes to be mapped against the database in more than one way. SQL constructs don’t just select from just tables—you can also select from joins, subqueries, and unions. Thus database relationships and domain object models can be cleanly decoupled from the beginning, allowing both sides to develop to their full potential.

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Sometime last night my Speakeasy ADSL line went down. I could probably check this server’s logs and figure out exactly when that happened. I’m not sure what happened and neither is Speakeasy. I tried the usual tricks: rebooting the computer, rebooting the router, rebooting the DSL modem, plugging a computer directly into the DSL modem without a router in between, verifying router and IP addresses, and so forth; and none of that helped.

What eventually fixed the problem was Speakeasy rebuilding and reprovisioning the circuit. This was something only they could do, and it immediately fixed the problem. Thus the problem seems to have been on their end in their part of the network, not on my end in my LAN. However all their tests from their end showed that the circuit was up and running and the DSL modem was responding properly, so the tech wasn’t sure why that worked.
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Last Sunday, 2007-06-17, Peter Dorosh led a small contingent from the Brooklyn Bird Club to explore Somerset County in New Jersey. The first stop was the Negri-Nepote-Leni Preserve, a grasslands area surrounded by farms. We got there about 7:45 A.M., and almost immediately Sandi Paci heard a Prairie Warbler, which we soon located:

There were numerous other birds in the area: Northern Cardinal, American Goldfinch, Cedar Waxwing, Brown-headed Cowbird, Eastern Towhee, House Wren, Mourning Dove, Blue Jay, Northern Mockingbird, Gray Catbird, Chickadee (probably Black-capped), Eastern Kingbird, and so many Indigo Buntings that we eventually stopped looking at each individual. There were quite a few Chipping Sparrows in the tree line, and numerous sparrows in the tall grass, which we kept hoping would turn into Grasshopper Sparrows, but persisted in remaining Field Sparrows. :-)
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At the heart of modern economics, even apparently contrarian economics such as Freakonomics, is the idea the consumer is rational; that the consumer can be relied on to act in their own best interests. If that’s not true, much of economic theory comes tumbling down. In fact, economists are so incredibly convinced of this dictate that when they observe apparently irrational behavior, they expend volumes attempting to justify and rationalize it, and prove that consumers are indeed acting in their own best interests. Indeed, that’s what Freakonomics is largely about.

The fact is people often aren’t rational. While we sometimes are, we often act directly counter to our own interests for no good reason. We have sensory and reasoning apparatuses evolved to help us find food in the jungle and avoid being eaten by tigers. Our reasoning abilities, as impressive as they are, can be actively counterproductive when applied to the complex, food-plentiful, tiger-free environment we live in today. Bruce Schneier explains this very well in his recent article on Rare Risk and Overreactions. Here’s one relevant portion:
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