For years, I've been good heartedly losing the blog SEO ranking fight to a great developer and writer who has the same name as me. A football player eclipses us both if you just google our shared name, but if you add any sort of "developer" or "programming", he's clearly got me beat for the top marks. It makes sense — he writes about tech much more consistently than I do, and his articles are likely much more helpful than my sporadic and eclectic posts.
Naturally, being vain, when I saw this post, I immediately looked up my own blog and was chuffed to see it at #292.
Funnily enough, I have a very common name and take quite a bit of relief in knowing that were someone to even attempt to look me up, they would see a number of authors, artists, politicians, etc. long before anything of me ever appeared. I've gone searching once or twice out of curiosity, and didn't find anything relevant on at least the first two or three pages of Google, Bing, etc.
I suppose the difference is that when I make any sort of professional blog, etc. I do so under online handles in place of my legal name because I see the content as being the important bit, not the person it's coming from; the credibility flows from the information provided, not the name it's tied to.
...Well, provided it's not xXx_DongMaster6969_xXx or whatever. :)
In the future, our names will simply be a cryptographic hash of our genome and we’ll all enjoy unambiguous identity and individuality as we express ourselves solely with Unicode Emoji.
> It was in this context that the city decided to demolish the neighborhood known as Scollay Square and build in its place what would come to be called Government Center.
It’s interesting (and sad) to imagine what Boston could have been like without the damage of urban renewal. These neighborhoods could have easily become the quaint North Ends people love today.
People who opposed demolishing the neighborhoods would be called NIMBYs today and would be blamed for the housing crisis. I'm not saying this to be snarky, just that there is a real push and pull there that I don't think is appreciated. There are some beautiful old neighborhoods near me which are at risk of being torn down and replaced with multi-unit dwellings. The residents say 'save our neighborhoods' and the activists cry 'greedy homeowners' and in the meantime the developers are rubbing their hands in anticipation of mountains of cash.
That particular urban renewal didn't create a lot of new housing. On the other hand, that whole general area of Boston was pretty crappy back in the day. (Not just what's now Government Center but all along Washington Street.) It mostly didn't result in more housing; I'm guessing less. But burying the central artery was almost certainly a lot more positive overall.
According to the West End Museum site, the project created more housing units, but also led to a population decrease, most likely due to the decrease in the number of people living in each unit.
Some of parcels in the doc on page 58 (K) in particular are interesting. The city ended up widening the road there pretty significantly. When they built https://maps.app.goo.gl/7yVzp4vm72Js3w618 back in '22, there was just one tower. The original plan had two towers instead of one (https://bpda.app.box.com/s/lsw68tzgu4g788h9dr4zvorlc6ohy0oy). The resulting sub area is only two buildings now, where there were tenements before.
Thanks. I can believe that easily. I assume a lot of what, if not exactly tenement housing at least adjacent, was torn down while generally high-end often waterfront condos were built.
Why would people be called NIMBYs today for being against replacing a heavily residential neighborhood with a bunch of government buildings? It would be different if the discussion was about keeping the neighborhood residential and just making it more dense in terms of housing.
Oh please. Take a look at the pictures of “redevelopment” back then and tell me it mirrors modern practices. We’re talking wholesale bulldozing of entire neighborhoods. Not a block or two, the entire damned thing.
There's a WGBH podcast about the Big Dig and the first episode I think helps you appreciate why some of the interstate connections and routings around Boston are so weird. https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig
I'll never forget my first bus ride in Boston: going through a tunnel that suddenly narrowed by 1 lane deep underground, driving 2km past our next stop to reach a u-turn to the other side of the highway.. It has the craziest road infrastructure I have ever seen.
Although Boston driving can still be a bit crazy in areas you're not accustomed to, the combination of the Big Dig and GPS has taken some of the rougher edges off, especially for the main highways and getting to and from the airport.
A fun evolution would be to format it into a newspaper format, complete with headlines, front page, and "continue reading on page N", then print it out on large paper, fold it, and mail it to you.
There's probably no money in it, but a physical weekly customized RSS feed highlights newspaper would be neat.
This definitely puts it into context — it has been ten years since this list came out, and at that time, it had been ten years since the MapReduce paper came out.
Just the other day, I was checking to see if there were any active ones in the Boston area. I'd definitely be up for one, and I'd be more than happy to do a talk and/or help organize.
I don’t think that’s the same at all. Nobody could ever actually understand that sentence without breaking it down.
Semantic satiation can come up when you’re having a conversation and use the same word often enough (not necessarily back to back) that it feels like that word is wrong, or doesn’t mean anything. You start to pay attention to the sound of the word instead of the meaning.
Naturally, being vain, when I saw this post, I immediately looked up my own blog and was chuffed to see it at #292.
But, guess who I see just above at #289.
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