Transportation Library News
March 2009 Archives
March 25, 2009
Starting with Buckminster Fuller
I would like to take a slight departure from my usual subject matter (Transportation periodicals) this week in order to discuss an enlightening--and relevant--exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I visited the MCA this Sunday in order to view the museum's current exhibit, entitled "Buckminster Fuller: starting with the universe"
(http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/exh_detail.php?id=202).
This exhibit, the first of its kind in the U.S., provides an overview of the life and work of 20th century American Visionary Buckminster Fuller.
Fuller was the 20th century version of a Renaissance man, dabbling in fields as diverse as art, architecture, cartography, environmentalism, mathematics, and yes, even transportation. Though the exhibit is hardly visually stunning in the sense we are used to, it is extremely thought provoking, and one can even find a few aesthetically appealing pieces among the various books, sketches and archival photocopies on display. A few items of note are the photos of Fuller himself in the driver's seat of his Dymaxion car, as well as two full sized, aerodynamically engineered boats of Fuller's own design.
The exhibit will remain at the Museum of Contemporary Art until June 21st of this year, so see it while you can!
Take a Look at a Book
The Transportation Library has acquired Conquistadors of the Sky: A History of Aviation in Latin America by Dan Hagedorn. Here is an description of the book from the publisher's Web site:
More than two years before the Wright brothers made the first controlled, powered, and sustained heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont and his experimental dirigibles were celebrities above the boulevards of Paris. Today, Santos-Dumont's many contributions to powered flight are widely forgotten outside his native Brazil, where he is remembered as the father of aviation.
Santos-Dumont's story is not unique. Aviation developed so quickly in Latin America that by the 1930s air travel was more common there than in the United States. The contributions of Latin American pilots and engineers have been astounding and numerous, ranging from military aircraft to hot-air balloons. Now, for the first time, the rich and diverse history of flight in Latin America is presented in one highly readable, well-illustrated volume.
Coinciding with the opening of a new permanent exhibit, America by Air, at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, Conquistadors of the Sky celebrates the aviation achievements of twenty-one Latin American nations over the last 100 years--making this chronicle of heroic ventures and epic flights the best reference available on the subject.
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The title in the first paragraph should be a link to
772nd Time a Charm?
A woman in Joenju, North Jeolla Province, South Korea, has failed a written driving test 771 times since April, 2005. After spending $3,000 on testing fees, she's preparing for her next try. Required to score a 60, she's sometimes gotten as high as 50.
http://www.newsday.com/news/custom/offbeat/ny-bc-as-odd--skorea-aspiri0205feb05,0,5009666.story
Premium or Regular?
Aimed at consumers in California, the Transportation Choices for Consumers website http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/transportation/index.html can be useful to anyone, anywhere, trying to save money and make the right choices to be more energy/environmentally conscious. Although, most of the sections deal with automobiles, the section on "Urban Myths" also explores and debunks household energy saving "myths".
The train goes 'tweet' - Commuter rigs Twitter to distribute Metra's service advisories
Chicago Tribune (IL) - Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Author: Richard Wronski, TRIBUNE REPORTER
If you've ever hurried to the station only to discover your train is running late, veteran commuter Tony Zale feels your pain and offers a free antidote: Metra updates via Twitter.
Working in his spare time, Zale developed coding so the social networking service can deliver Metra service advisories straight to any cell phone that can handle a text message. So far he figures he has about 50 followers who rely on his tweets.
Metra provides advisories on its Web site ( www.metrarail.com), but Zale realized commuters often have no time to sit down at their home computers before going to work.
It's much more convenient to get a tweet about late trains, said Zale, 34, a software developer from Park Ridge who rides Metra downtown.
"Twitter is built for doing things like that, getting real-time notifications and delivering them straight to your mobile phone," he said.
Metra was surprised to learn someone had figured out how to provide the service on Twitter for free, Zale said.
Metra also was surprised Zale did it by working a few hours at night and on weekends, spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet said. Metra plans to award a contract for a train tracker service this year, she said.
To use Zale's service, commuters must sign up for Twitter and search for either metradelays or their particular line, such as metraUPN for Union Pacific North.
Zale, by the way, works for Google, which works with Metra to provide trip planning on Metra's Web site. But creating the Twitter alerts was strictly a personal project, he said.
"I was just curious," he said, "about how Twitter worked and about solving my own Metra problem."
March 16, 2009
NU Transportation Library Menu Collection Noted in Airliners Magazine
The Transportation Library Menu Collection at the Northwestern University Library received special mention in Joel Chusid's column Tailpieces, Mar./Apr., 2009, Airliners Magazine. Mr. Chusid finds that the menu finding aid is another collection to "satisfy the curiosity of airline nostalgia fans." He notes an unusual aspect of the menu collection: that the primary donor to the collection, George M. Foster, made frequent hand-written annotations to the menus on the quality of food and service. Chusid notes that on a Northwestern Airlines flight in 1978 the broiled tenderloin steak was "boiled as usual."
March 12, 2009
Airports on the News Videos
If you are fascinated by the availability of video on the web, you may want to take a look at this CNN.com website http://search.cnn.com/search?query=airport&type=video&sortBy=date&intl=false As of mid-March 2009, it contained 491 videos of CNN news stories: from accident footage to holiday travel nightmares. However, did not find footage of pay as you go airline toilets.
What's next, oxygen?
Irish budget airline Ryanair has said it is considering charging passengers for using the toilet while flying. Read full article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7914542.stm
March 11, 2009
A Touch of Humor
There's a review of the new BMW 7 series in the New York Times Automobiles section (Sunday, March 1, 2009, Sports, p. 9, online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/automobiles/autoreviews/01bmw-750.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=bmw%27s%207%20&st=cse#). The redesigned car is apparently better than its predecessor in numerous respects. What caught my eye was this:
"The latest infrared night vision system highlights a pedestrian in your path by wrapping the person in an animated on-screen border... Some of this technology is of debatable necessity; night vision will have my vote when it can help detect and splatter zombies."
This is clearly what everyone needed mid-February in Austin, Texas, when zombies reportedly invaded the city.
Can we fix Amtrak?
Amtrak isn't perfect, but it's the most convenient travel option for many Americans, especially college students. I rode the train 2 or 3 times during each of my four years of college, and I found that it was infinitely cleaner and faster than taking the bus, and often cheaper than flying or driving. I typically took either the Wolverine or the Blue Water route from Kalamazoo to Chicago, and the California Zephyr from Chicago to Mount Pleasant, Iowa. This got me to within an hour's drive of my final destination, which was good enough for me.
However, for all the positives of train travel in America, Amtrak has its share of problems as well. In this month's issue of Trains magazine, Rush Loving Jr. outlines the problems with American train travel, and suggests some solutions. The first, and perhaps main, problem is an obvious one: lack of government funding.
Loving describes the conditions under which Amtrak was established, in 1971, to rescue the failing passenger rail industry. However, he notes that the Nixon administration only agreed to create the company on the assumption that it would be around for a few years to jumpstart the industry and then disappear as quickly as it arrived. As a result of these conditions, the government never really funded Amtrak sufficiently from the outset, a pattern which has continued to the present, and the company was never able to engage in proper long term planning.
From this, it is likely not difficult to deduce the solutions which Loving pushes for in his article: increased funding, a reform of national transportation policies, infrastructure improvement. Check out his article in Trains
(http://nucat.library.northwestern.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=2616866)
for more in depth coverage of this issue.
Take a Look at a Book
The Transportation Library has acquired Jetpack Dreams: One Man's Up and Down (but Mostly Down) Search for the Greatest Invention That Never Was by Mac Montandon. Here is an description of the book from the publisher's Web site:
Jetpack Dreams chronicles the colorful pop history and science of that most amazing and mysterious of machines, the jetpack. While exploring our collective fascination with flight, the tale takes readers from the first flimsy, shoulder-mounted wings to Bill Suitor's 1984 Olympic flight in front of billions of viewers around the world; from a gruesome jetpack-driven murder in Houston in the mid-1990s to the secret laboratories and government facilities of today.
Journalist Mac Montandon also explores Hollywood's fascination with the subject, from the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men to Lost in Space, The Jetsons and The Rocketeer to the cultural jetpack phenomenon represented by Buck Rogers, James Bond, and Boba Fett. He travels the world to meet jetpack enthusiasts who are readying their own personal flying machines for takeoff. Ultimately, it's the search for an answer to two simple questions: Where is the jetpack that was promised to him, and to all of us, years ago? And if it's out there, can he catch a ride?
Dr. Wernher von Braun Keynote Address
The Transportation Library has recently cataloged and added to its collection Dr. Wernher von Braun Keynote Address: 1st Annual Symposium, 13 September 1966, Huntsville, Alabama. This is a DVD of the keynote address that Wernher von Braun, the rocket physicist and astronautical engineer, gave to the inaugural meeting of the Society of Logistics Engineers. According to Lloyd H. Muller, the president of SOLE, Dr. von Braun "envisioned a future where logisticians would become the foundation upon which many things became possible."
'High speed'? Not with local freight system
Crain's Chicago Business
March 2, 2009
Chicago's men in Washington showed misplaced priorities last week on a transportation issue that's critical to our region.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Richard Durbin swung their considerable clout behind high-speed passenger train service for Chicago but have yet to come through for more important improvements in the area's freight railroad system.
Thanks in large part to Mr. Emanuel's last-minute arm-twisting, the $787-billion economic stimulus plan President Barack Obama signed late last month includes $8 billion for new high-speed rail lines, much of which is likely to be spent on tracks connecting Chicago with other Midwestern cities. ``I put it in there for the president,'' Mr. Emanuel crowed to Politico.com, calling high-speed rail a ``signature issue'' for Mr. Obama.
We'd rather the president put his signature on projects that pack a bigger economic punch. Sure, high-speed rail enthusiasts gush over the prospect of hurtling from Chicago to St. Louis in a time-bending four hours (a plane will get you there in about a quarter of that time). The fact is that high-speed intercity passenger rail service would provide a fairly modest benefit to a relatively small number of people, even if ridership does increase with faster service, as backers predict.
Far more would benefit to a much larger extent from unclogging the congestion that has turned Chicago from rail shipping's hub into its biggest bottleneck. Millions of local residents, businesses and cross-country shippers pay the price as freight trains crawl through the area, blocking car and truck traffic at rail crossings from Elgin to East Chicago.
A joint effort of the rail industry and local, state and federal agencies to untangle the mess has stalled for lack of funding. Chicago's D.C. delegation clearly has the clout to jump-start this project, which is known by the acronym Create.
It won't provide the rush-or ribbon-cutting photo ops-of high-speed rail, but eliminating those long waits at rail crossings will save Chicagoans a lot more time than getting them to St. Louis in four hours.
