Yesterday at the office, we celebrated a birthday with this “Hello Kitty” cake:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
We ended up cutting it with a nice sharp metal knife, which meant that the cheap plastic cake cutter that came with it went unused. While clearing off the table in our kitchen, I noticed the warning on the packaging for the cake cutter, and I had to stop what I was doing to appreciate its beauty:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Sound it out, either in your head or say it out loud:
DO NOT REFRIGERATE WITH CAKE AS IT WEAKENS THE STRENGTH OF THE CUTTER
That’s pretty much poetry. Or metal lyrics. Or a cryptic tattoo, t-shirt slogan or bumper sticker.
A smart city is one that makes use of information, communications, and internet of things technologies to manage infrastructure and service assets such as its water supply, transportation systems, power plants, law enforcement, hospitals, waste management, schools, and so on. It uses these technologies to interact engage directly with and improve communications its citizenry, monitor and control the city infrastructure, reduce costs and resource consumption, and adapt to changing circumstances.
A prime example of a smart city initiative is Amsterdam, which has a smart city initiative collaboratively developed by local residents, government and businesses. There are street with “smart lights” that adjust their brightness to current conditions and pedestrian usage, real-time traffic monitoring that’s broadcast to drivers so they know which routes to take and avoid, and a resident-developed app that allows parking space owners to rent them out for a fee and allows the city to determine parking demand and traffic flows.
Panelists include a private developer from Tampa working on a large re-development in downtown Tampa and trying to make it WELL Certified; the sustainability lead from the University of Florida to discuss their smart, sustainable buildings and curriculum on campus; a vice president of a large technology company who will share the completion of one smart community in Japan and one in progress in Denver; a local Sustainability Manager from City of St. Petersburg, a leader in City of Orlando Smart City effort, and a vice president from Metro Development. Quite the list of experts!
There will be lots of time for questions and robust discussion.
Here are the panelists:
Bahar Armaghani, LEED Fellow, LEED Faculty, Director, UF Green Building Learning Collaborative, and Lecturer, Sustainability and the Built Environment College of Design, Construction and Planning
There’s a certain pattern in pop music that I started to notice a couple of years ago. I mentally referred to it as the “Fifth-third uh-oh’s”, because it’s the lyric “uh-oh” sung repeatedly with the “uh” using the fifth note in the song’s key, and the “oh” using the third note. Patrick Metzger came up with a better term for a pop music pattern that’s been bugging me for the past decade: the Millennial Whoop.
Rather than describe it to you with words or show you the notes (both of which are meaningless if you haven’t studied any music theory), I can simply show you several examples of the Millennial Whoop in recent pop music:
(I find it amusing that the theme music at the end of the video also follows the Millennial Whoop pattern.)
Here’s a compilation of pop tunes that use the Millennial Whoop:
Here’s a follow-up compilation:
And here’s the song that features the most self-aware use of the Millennial Whoop (along with every other over-produced pop song trick): Andy Samberg’s Justin Bieber parody song, Fuck Off (warning: super-sweary; it even uses the “c-word”.)
And ads have caught onto the Millennial Whoop. Here’s an Uber ad, which I’ve set to start at the 25-second mark. You’ll hear the Millennial Whoop at 0:32:
And now, like me, you’ll never be able to unhear it.
I decided to take a look at the map for the question “Would you feel comfortable if your of your children was in a relationship with an Asian person?”, and wouldn’t you know it, I was totally taboo-ing it up a couple of hours outside Prague at André Fenton’s “Millennipalooza” party on December 31, 1999 / January 1, 2000:
