A Long Deep View Into the Heart of a City

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Photo #528: Chicago SunsetLocation Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: January 2008

Ah, the beautiful sight of the Chicago skyline bathed in a marvelous winter sunset.

I may have had many things I didn’t care for about living in Chicago, but the view out my apartment window was never one of them. I could look south to the heart of the city just fine, and wonder how many people’s lives this one glance touched. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Maybe all the way up to a million people in this one glimpse into society?

That, of course, counts places people live, work, shop, and visit. But well, this view does look across the most densely populated stretch of the city, all the way to the massive skyscrapers downtown. And Chicago has 2.7 million residents, and far far more visitors and commuters. So getting up to a million isn’t that far of a stretch, if you think about it…

  

Security is only as secure as the weakest link in the chain. Which is usually human nature, but hey…

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Photo #527: Security FenceLocation Taken: Caseville, Michigan
Time Taken: May 2008

I injured my thumb earlier this week, bad enough that it might end up with a small scar. I’ve had to wear a bandaid on and off for days, since this one has a tendency to tear open again, and isn’t healing fast. It’s been interesting discovering what I can and can’t do with a painful thump tip. Reading, using the computer, eating? Quite easy, don’t even notice the wound. Cutting things with knives, washing dishes? Painful. Opening packages of chips? That’s what tore open the wound one time.

But it has gotten me thinking about the human factors of security systems again.

Ok, I should explain the segue. Back in college I took a class in a building that had biometric locks to protect the computers from theft. You registered your hand the first day of class and the system would check various measurements each time to see if there was a match. Nice, simple, tough to spoof, right?

Well, the day before the first session of that class was the last time I seriously injured a finger tip. I’d caught my index finger in a heavy freezer door at work, and it made a serious rip that ended up leaving a scar you can still see today (if you know what you’re looking for, at least. Fingertips heal up well.) I had to wear a bandaid for weeks to keep it from tearing itself open again like my current wound is doing.

And, well, of course one of the things the biometric lock measured was shape of the fingers, and well, the bandaid changed the shape. I couldn’t be registered since my metrics changed every time I swapped the bandaid.

So for the weeks until my finger healed enough to be registered, I had to stand around outside the classroom and wait for someone else to come and open the door so I could slip in behind them. Which they were quite willing to do, of course. It’s only polite.

Now, in this case there was the added security layer that they knew I was in the class, but people did use this classroom when there was no class going on, to work on projects using the special programs installed on the computers, which meant a mix of people who didn’t know each other and thus no double check. And I really doubt the polite holding of the door habits changed during those times.

Theoretically all you’d have to do to steal those computers is wear a bandaid on a finger, claim you can’t get in so someone else holds the door for you, and then futz around on the computers until no one else was there. And then, of course, haul stuff out.

That’s probably why biometric locks didn’t really catch on that well. They’re a great concept. There’s nothing more secure than registering the exact people who can enter, right? Well, unless you’ve got some fancy device to prevent two people from coming in on one unlocking, you’re working against human nature. Both politeness and efficiency will lead to people holding the door open.

And really, as long as you’ve got that large of a weakness, you might as well go for the cheap option and just install a lock with a key.

  

There’s nothing tastier than a berry you pick yourself…

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Photo #526: Wild RaspberryLocation Taken: Mystery Cave State Park, Minnesota
Time Taken: June 2010

There are a large number of semi-wild berry plants scattered throughout my Grandparent’s place. And I being a little girl running semi-wild myself for many years, would occasionally check to see if there were any ripe berries. And then eat them. Of course.

I should insert the standard warning to not eat berries you can’t identify, since there are a lot of poisonous ones out there, but well, these plants were ones pointed out to me by relatives, so they were, shall we say, previously tested.

Most of them were probably escapees from the large garden my Grandma still has, and I raided that garden with glee as well. She has had raspberries and blackberries and redcurrants and a whole lot of other tasty things in there over the years.

…I haven’t had a redcurrant in forever. They don’t package at all well, and aren’t popular in America anyway, so they aren’t sold in stores, but they’re really tasty…

Speaking of fruit that doesn’t package well, there’s also a large mulberry tree on the property, which I also raid with glee. They produce copious amounts of fruit each year, coating the ground in soft, squishy black fruits. So it is of course my moral duty to reduce the number of berries that rot on the ground. Of course.

There’s also a scattering of blackberry plants in the meadow by the garden, which seem to do better wild than in the garden. They’re either some of those escapees or were potentially intentionally seeded by my Grandma (or any of the many local animals). I haven’t asked.

The rarest berry plant is a black raspberry bush tucked away near the old barn. They look fairly close to raspberries, and are a bit less sweet but more flavorful, so they’re a favorite of mine.

Mind you, this is the Eastern black raspberry. There’s a related species on the west coast that’s also occasionally called black raspberry. That’s more commonly referred to as whitebark raspberries or blue raspberry, though.

Huh, blue raspberry… *checks* Yup, apparently that blue raspberry artificial flavor you find in a lot of places is based off of the whitebark raspberry instead of the standard raspberry. And here I just thought it was clever marketing to keep from having too many red flavors of things. Though that probably is why it’s colored such a bright blue rather than the nearly-black blue of the fruit itself…

  

A Rose by any other Name Smells as Sweet. How about No Name at all?

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Photo #525: Pretty Yellow FlowerLocation Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

My Mom loves gardening, and has build up a rather impressive amount of plants over the years. She’s also rarely around during summer, heading off to far away (and much cooler) places for a month or more. And she’s got some health issues that mean she’s not at all reliable when it comes to maintaining her garden even when she’s here. Put together, this means she’s not exactly going for the standard set of plants.

Annuals, well, only a few, and only if they’re cheap. Stuff that keeps coming back year after year means she has a lot less of her garden to fill in each spring.

And nothing that blooms in high summer. She’s not around to see it anyway. Her garden peaks in late spring.

Forget any that can’t handle being crowded by weeds, too. None of the rest of the household has any inclination towards weeding, not even to keep the place looking pretty while she’s gone. The large quantities of mulch Mom uses help keep them down, but things grow voraciously around here.

Oh, and thanks to the quirks of our place, all her gardens are at least partially in shade, and a lot of the yard is always in shade. That cuts out about 60% or more of the options, since so many of the prettiest flowers need sunlight. And our ground is heavy on the clays, too, and it takes a lot of work to adjust the soil to match finicky plants. Which means easy to grow is the way to go.

And of course, there’s the personality factor. My mom likes variety in her plants, and enjoys the oddballs for their interesting shapes and colors.

Add it all up, and you get a garden where I don’t have a chance of naming most of the flowers. It’s not your standard roses and petunias and pansies, it’s bleeding hearts and rice cake plants and tiger lilies and oh so many daffodils. Daffodils grow very well in Mom’s garden, it’s the perfect soil and maintenance patterns for them, wouldn’t you know.

But well, between the obscure plants and my own indifference towards flowers, I haven’t a clue what this one is. I’m sure Mom will comment with the name, she tends to do that, so if you need to know there’s that. But to me, it’s just a pretty yellow flower made up of lots of little flowers. Which works fine for me, it’s just as beautiful without a name.

  

The Old Buildings By The Old Falls, Dreaming of Old Days

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Photo #524: Old Falls BuildingLocation Taken: Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Time Taken: June 2010

It’s really easy to forget just how much of a role water plays in where cities grow and flourish. These days, cities spread out across a wide area, and any rivers or bays or whatnot, well, unless they’re large enough for a major port, they’re all fancied up into parks and the like. It’s tough to put anything along the edge of a river, thanks to the rough terrain and the risk of flooding and the ilk.

The pretty parts of the rivers, like the waterfalls that oh so many places are named after, they have the best parks, with fantastic refurbished buildings from a century or more ago forming a picturesque scene right near the waterfall. They’re great places to take your mind off work and relax.

Which is the exact opposite of what these buildings started as. In the days before electric power, the best form of power for factories was waterfalls.

If you found a waterfall, especially in areas like eastern South Dakota, solidly part of the rather flat Great Plains, well, you settled there. And build power plants on the river, and factories right next to them. And houses all around. The best places, you could build a small dock a little downriver from the falls and ship out your goods by boat all the way to New Orleans and beyond.

It’s that last aspect that really made the difference for the largest cities, especially on the East Coast of the USA. If you look at a map, you can see that all the large cities from New York City to Atlanta are all on a rough line that parallels not the coast, but the Appalachian Mountains. They’re all located right at the furthest spot you could take a boat up whatever large river each city is associated with. Well, with a few exceptions. There’s some that are port cities, such as New York, Baltimore, and Wilmington. Where’s Wilmington, you say? It’s just the largest city in Delaware, right next to Philadelphia. It’s got a much better access to the sea than Philly, but it’s the smaller of the pair. It’s the City of Brotherly Love that has the better mix of sea and river travel, so it grew powerful in the days when the boat was king. As for New York and Baltimore, well, they both are at a spot that’s both a great port and right near the waterfalls coming off the mountains. New York also has the Hudson, which literally cut its way right through the mountains, with its waterfalls far far away from the port at its mouth.

These days, it’s tough to find some of the waterfalls that formed these cities. They’re tucked away in a corner, out of sight. There may be a canal system dug to allow boats to travel even further upriver. Even these days a large amount of goods get hauled on barges, despite all the advances in rail and road and airplanes. It’s all a matter of what route is best for the goods involved, and the port cities on both ocean and river still reap benefits from these small threads of water running through their midst.