Slashdot Mirror
In Case of Armageddon, Break Out the GIS
ADiva writes "There's a detailed, three-dimensional, interactive map of New York City which captures the five boroughs down to the square foot, incorporating everything from building floor plans to subway and sewer tubes. Could the city be rebuilt if destroyed? Should it?" As a New York resident, let me say that if something Bad happened to the city, I hope it is built anew rather than trying to recreate the 1910-era buildings that make up half the city's housing. An "Old New York" in the Metaverse might be fun to visit, though.
chances are, we will have bigger problems than building acurate reproductions of the original. There would definitely be wholesale destruction to clean up. And it isn't like the people there couldn't be moved to somewhere else.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Armageddon already happened back in 1998.
Wouldn't it help them plot out escape routes, detonation points, etc if it's that accurate? Not that I believe in censoring it, just wondering.
Would they rebuild the Bronx as it is now? :)
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
I want this to be put to good use, namely as a FPS with the actual city. It would obviously be too big for 8 players, so maybe 200. Call it a MMOFPS?
Somewhere along the way, modern industrial culture lost the ability or the desire to build anything that isn't a piece of crap. If anyone can explain why that is exactly, this thread might not be a totally useless fluff magnet.
blogging is one, and I'm not sure the best buzzword for the other, though it's probably something close to "disintermediation."
Point is, I want to be able to walk through the NYC metaverse and read notes posted like "THIS RESTAURANT SUCKS! Despite being in Chinatown, this place is slow, and serves vomitous food with slow, resentful service. And not even the vomitous food that you ordered."
Or "Landlord here is a sucker; if one of your housemates is a cute girl, have *her* do the rent negotiations."
Or "This museum is worth the price, especially on Wednesday (half-price day)"
Or "This park is dangerous between the hours of midnight and the next midnight."
(details facetious, idea serious.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
A friend of mine went to Columbia University and actually went a little insane in his time there. When asked by a local TV reporter (in a man-on-the-street interview) what could be done to improve the quality of life in NYC his reply was, "level it, and start over again".
Needless to say, his response was not featured on the 6:00 news...
Assuming that the data was compiles from public records, it's unfortunate that the data is not freely available. In fact, they seem to be treating it like as an extremly sensitive collection. Is data easier to use for evil if I can do a regexp on it??
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I can see it now... Quake IV will be designed to handle huge maps with amazing detail... I can just imagine fragging someone as they jump off of the Empire state building... or being a sniper from the torch of the Statue of Liberty :)
So I should get someone to alter the model and give myself a bigger unit and then pray for a disaster? Or maybe be proactive and dig out my copy of the anarchist's cookbook to find out how to make a blow up my block
Every day, everywhere else, and doing it better almost every time.
--Blair
Well, what if New York was destroyed by a nuclear device, it might take a while before anyone could even step foot in the area without some sorta protection.
The Yoko Ono quote reminded me of this verse by Phil Ochs:
"Show me the country
Where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins
Of the buildings once so tall
And I'll show you a young land
With many reasons why
There but for fortune
May go you or I"
Am i the only one who got really excited thinking they were going to break out another episode of geeks in space!?!? damn you all!
With the advent of these new standardized 3D file and render formats (see here) I would think that there would be plenty of room in the virtual museum business, along with maybe virtual architecture, virtual chamber of commerce, etc, to construct virtualized cities from the past and present for everyone with a copy of Mozilla 2.0 to view and enjoy.
Granted, it is a lot of work...
I really like this one, a temple in ancient Thailand reconstructed for walktroughs and everything. It's only a small area, of course, but this sort of thing would at the very least change the way history is taught in the future... especially if it is easily editable.
Of course, being able to play 2nd generation and later online multiplayer games in super-accurate virtual cities from around the world would be pretty cool, to say the least.
are they gonna rebuild flushing as it is now? :)
Would they call it Newer York?
And what happened to the plans for the original York?
In you already didn't know, there are a lot of scenarios regarding rebuilting cities (and New York in particular.)
* Rebuilt New York as a maximun security prision and plot out a flight path for Air Force One right over the city.
* Rebuilt New York a mile away. Motocycle gangs will battle each other, gray skinned wrinkly children will roam the streets, and a teenage boy with a red cape and a "Da Da Da" theme will wreak havoc.
* Dinosaurs. 'nuff said.
* In case of flood: Lease out above water skyscrappers to robotics manufacturers.
* In case of attack by phantasmal alien beings: Erect a "Barrier City" and make everyone look like a Doom III screenshot.
* In case of attack by 200' tall lizard or ape: Air force to the rescue, barbecue for the civilians.
As you can see, you can rest easy knowing that every possible scenario regarding NYC has already been covered.
Warning: NYC rebuilding scenarios may require several poor thought out and executed "sequel" scenarios should the first scenario be received well by the population.
I wouldn't want to live there. On first approach to the city, the city blocks look like rows of beer bottles in the distance. The benefit of green space, front or back yards, and less cramped living quarters would make for a much happier city the next time around. When a city is so big that when one section of the population decided recycling is not a good idea, and forces that decision on a huge amount of people, you know city design and sprall is damaging and needs to change. John
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I'll take the 1910s buildings in an instant before the so-called modern stuff, and as real estate prices show, most agree with my opinion.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
While the technical angle is pretty cool -- a detailed map of an entire city! I don't quite understand why anyone would use it to exactly rebuild the city should it be destroyed. It would cost a lot more to try to rebuild everything exactly as it was than to just build a new city on the site. Not to mention the fact that urban planning as an art/science has come a long way since NYC became the large city it is today -- why remake all the same mistakes just for the sake of nostalgia?
and Finnegans Wake. He knew that cities are so much more than the physical substructure -- they are the dense social network of interdependencies that forms a contingent and situated exchange of countless metaphors between the narrative human animals that scamper and discourse in and through the physical strata. And of course, there's a small cottage industry for papers that explore the proto-hypertextuality of Finnegans Wake.
So, yeah, maybe you could re-create New York physically using a Holy Grail GIS device that stored all the physical parameters. But after you'd done that what you'd have would be an archeological model of New York, dead as old bones and stripped of its meaning. People invest physical objects and locations with meaning and then reproduce, evolve, and disseminate these meanings through culture.
To really re-create New York, you'd have to take an instant brainmap of all the inhabitants of New York, and anyone in the world who "knew" New York. And then recreate those minds and bodies. And then you're into the whole postmodernist problem of inter-textuality and non-finiteness. Or, if you will, the soft vs hard AI debate of whether a map of a brain can really re-create consciousness...
Da Blog
I live in the West Village, and the illustration of the atomic bombs going off in Manhattan and Queens at the top totally freaks me out. Really puts the potential devastation into perspective. Yikes.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
it would be New New York. and it would be built over the ruins of the old one.
I know I should think this cause it will be spattered across the papers tomorrow, but...
What are the chances that the bad guys want/need/have got this sort of FINE detailed maps of where you live.. and plan on using them ??
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Exactly. Don't "re"build mistakes. Keep the cool stuff on the outside, but make "guts" work better on the inside.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
You should look up sometime the japanese governments' emergency plans to build Megatokyo
The plans would be perfect, if they just hadn't allocated so fricking much money to those useless Olympic stadiums..
Wow.
This could be the basic structural data for a TRULY EXCELLENT large-scale online or gaming environment - either as a self-contained world like Liberty City in GTA3, or as an online multiuser environment for gaming...or just as a huge 3D cool-ass online "place to go". I'd love to live in NY and be able to invite folks to visit my online apartment....hell, that's something I wouldn't mind paying 5-10 bux a month rent on, just to have. And the client feature possibilities are sooo cool - you could have a software agent that monitors visitors to your online pad, and pretty much extend any other environmental metaphors to cool features and interaction possibilities. Furnishings, lighting, parties...entirely too much coolness.
And this is ignoring the excellent possibilities for gaming - from missions, to large-scale team based warfare, and suchlike.
*droooool*
Given enough hydrogen, just about anything is possible.
It'd never be rebuilt, even if there was no permanent damage.
We'd have to make the whole *@&#ing city a memorial, because the 'families want it that way'
There's a detailed, three-dimensional, interactive map of New York City which captures the five boroughs down to the square foot, incorporating everything from building floor plans to subway and sewer tubes.
It seems this would make tunneling into/robbing/terrorizing buildings easier if it fell into the wrong hands (perhaps ironically helping to instigate the "need to rebuild" scenario).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
but the rebuilding I could care less about.
"Could the city be rebuilt if destroyed? Should it?"
Naw, just build a layer on top of it and leave the old ruined city underground for the mutants...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Oh man are we in trouble
Seriously. How was the city destroyed? Conventional bomber attack? Nuclear weapon (of what yield), Earthquake? Biologicals? Come on, throw us a bone here...
Using New York as the example, lets assume an ID4 level of armageddon... Y'know... Where a giant UFO brings his destructo-beam of fun to bear on the city, causing wide-spread "conventional" damage (if you can call a giant destructo-beam of fun conventional). Anyway, you'd be facing an engineering debacle of the Trade Center proportions, but on an epic scale. Any structure that hasn't been leveled would probably be dicey in terms of structual support. That goes all the tunnels beneath the city as well. It'd be a grim task to have to sift through all the damage, clear it out and rebuild... An entire city... Hell, the refugee camps set up to take survivors would probably become full cities before New York was even habitable again. I'm also assuming this would be the senario for carpet bombing and earthquake/giant tidal waves.
Nuclear? We all know the answer to that, though the yield of the weapon makes a hellva difference. Biologicals and chemical devistation could hopefully be delt with after the inital blow and loss of life, as the city would be realitively intact. You'd just have to watch out for masive decay and the diseses it spaws if you go in within a few weeks.
In short, assuming your New York sized city suffered a major conventional casulty, you'd probably be better off writing it as a loss for the next decade. Of course, that's nothing compared to a good Slashdotting...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Could the city (New York) be rebuilt if destroyed? Should it?"
Woah, don't get ahead of yourselves; Boing don't make city-sized planes yet.
...the book (also later a miniseries) that had a huge earthquake levelling much of NYC?
Not a bad read. The plan to rebuild what was destroyed was interesting... It's been years since I read it, but IIRC there were ideas something like, make it a city for the people, a social and cultural mecca even moreso than it was, packed full of parks, museums, libraries, etc. No internal-combustion vehicles allowed on the island, just people-powered and non-polluting vehicles. Subways would be repaired, but used to move freight, not people, with the rationale, "why force people underground to travel quickly and clog the streets above with trucks full of cargo?"
I'm just kinda rambling here, and that's all I remember now, so time to click "Preview" and "Submit."
~Philly
Let us hope that neither New York or any city experience a large scale disaster, again. However, do not think that even a large scale disaster is necessarily the end.
[Insert pithy quote here]
'nuff said
You can't do that. We're talking urban planning here. If you want a really fascinating read on how Robert Moses fucked up New York traffic while screwing the indigent, read Robert Caro's most excellent biography The Power Broker an extraordinarily detailed and well-researched book about the making of New York City.
As a few examples of how fucked Robert Moses was, when he built some of his highways/access roads he specifically built the overpasses to be so low that buses couldn't fit beneath them. This is because he didn't want poor people driving on them. He built a lot of parks, let's say order hundreds. Of these parks, approximately order one of them was in an area which was predominantly African American. He specifically designed several of his bridges to exclude mass transit, such as subways or trains, even though after EVERY bridge was built, traffic in New York only increased.
In order to avoid rebuilding mistakes, you have to change the fundamental infrastruture. This means that the outside's gonna have to change fundamentally.
Of course, if New York is destroyed and rebuilt, it'll probably be done by committee and it would be even worse than its present incarnation.
Read Bujold. Free (as in
Agent Smith (staring out the window): Have you ever stood and stared at it? Marveled at its beauty... its genius?
Yeah! Why let it go to waste? You could build a museum on top like in Demolition Man... Or a game arena ala The Running Man... Or a prison, like Escape from New York... Or etc. etc. etc...
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I think a more interesting question is, if you could built a large metropolis completely from scratch, what should be done for this modern-day Brasilia?
We ran this experiment in San Francisco ... its not feasible.
almost 100 years ago now -- the whole city
burned down, just about. Any hopes of
redoing the street grid when out the window
quickly
Managing and engineering operations and solutions for the existing infastructure. GIS is a engineering, surveying(geomatics), civil management tool. For example in most of the US GIS is used for emergancy planning, tracking existing systems. GIS is a incredibly fast growing area of civil planning and management. Everything from fire danger levels, population, tax evaluations, water consumption,telecom connectivity, Income levels, ariel photos. Its all there. It is the perfect dbase. Especially since xml.
They won't even rebuild the towers...
Knowing the state of public opinion, they'd probably wind up lobbying to turn the whole damn island into a memorial...
"Beautiful buildings are more that scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived works of art, using the best technology and inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind." -Frank Lloyd Wright
the nihilists who despise our culture, as unholy as they are ...He wouldn't be biased, would he? Come on - "unholy"? That's beginning to sound like rhetoric from the mouth of bin Laden.
"The trains in Hiroshima were actually running a few hours after the bomb went off," Weinstein says. "That may be a testament to Japanese efficiency, but it's also a testament to the difficulty of damaging infrastructure."
Has this guy seen photos of Hiroshima after the blast? Those trains certainly weren't running 'a few hours after the bomb went off' if they were anywhere within a kilometer of ground zero.
Haven't you guys read:
Newer York, New York: After the Great Blaze of 2015, Manhattan went green - thanks to Bill Gates and bambootekture.
by Bruce Sterling?
Detailing a new ecologically sound/networked New York City...
Good read if you have the time.
// The fastest Alt-Tab in the West
Sheesh - sounds like a game blurb. :)
Anyway, a real-time CAD map of a city is sweet for a lot of reasons. Not just civic. Virtual tourism, interactive maps, and the obligatory Quake levels.
An Urban Data Goldmine from govtech
Is any effort being made to ensure that this information is stored in some kind of time-capsule or something?
Assuming they can understand our encodings, this is the kind of information that, well, if there's any life in this universe in ten million years, if it becomes aware we ever existed, it would love to have that data to understand us better.
We have all these "shadow government" underground bunkers, seems like one of them could have a scale-model replica of NY put down there and the room sealed off for someone to find someday? I can think of things the gov. is doing with its money that are far far more wasteful than that..
Just saying, yeah, i realize that this data could do bad things if placed into the wrong hands. Just don't think as if this information needs ONLY to be recovered in case of an emergency. Hide it if you want, but keep in mind if that proverbial coffee jar of CAD data just someday happens to slip through the cracks and get lost, it will be something of a great loss to mankind's self-knowledge..
The primary component I'm worried about is all the very tall buildings and the underground network that runs beneath NY and cities like it. I'm sure it's not entirely insurmountable, but neither do I think it'd be livable for quite some time, decades perhapse.
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I mean, wouldn't the blast that produced the mushroom cloud already have leveled all the buildings? Reminds me of Akira, though.
Can't you basically do that with some GPS's now?
matguy(.com)
Yep. Any popular citiy as had terrabytes of video and pictures taken of it at various stages of it's life. Accurate reproduction would not be a problem in todays age. Clean up would be hellish. I'd even think such cities would become metal mines over time as there'd be so much to salavage from them...
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Dammit, I naively expected the link to lead to an *interactive* NYC map, which would have been extremely cool. But I suppose making it public would make it too easy for terrorists to find all the best places to plant bombs. Stupid me.
Actually, since 1933 the HABS project has been documenting everything about various historically significant structures. They note everything from building materials, to decorating details (your wallpaper pattern choices noted for the benefit of future generations) to detailed drawings of how those structures were used, and then all that is preserved in the Library of Congress. (Check out the section of the site on production notes to find out the meaning of the word detailed.) So, the way I figure it - if they raze the city (or anywhere else) tomorrow, even if it isn't rebuilt there is at least good documentation for some of the more important structures, and what they were used for. Of course, I'm not sure how that will work if someone destroys the Library of Congress instead.
... What makes you think that the computer holding this "detailed, 3d, interactive map" would survive too? If NY blows up, I'd say we're a bit too fucked to care about some map data :/
I'm sure the people who use the GIS data care more about its usability on a daily basis rather than to rebuild it if it gets destroyed. In fact, as someone who works in GIS (I write pieces software for use with Arc/Info and Autodesk Map), the value of having the whole city layed out with associated attributes is extremely important when it comes to utilities and roads are much more useful during or just after a disaster in compairson to long after the disater is over.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I guess living in Canada changes my perspective some, but a lot of this seems to hold true in any city I visit (American or Canadian):
:), and these large gaping ducts which always seem to trap the most useful things - including pets.
For the most part, I'd much rather live in a newer building than one built 100 years ago. I don't know if people have grown, or we just need more space, but a lot of old buildings are VERY claustrophobic. Hell, some of the doorways are barely 6' high. Never mind the rambling tenements built to house immigrants back at the turn of the century, where having an 8'x10' bedroom was considered a luxury (this trend seems to have continued at least into the 1960's - most houses over 30 years old here have TINY bedrooms).
A building constructed 100 years ago may not have originally had much in the way of central heating, let alone air conditioning. Retrofitted, most of these buildings have atrocious heat efficiency (so sue me, I live in a -40 to 100 degree climate
Older buildings often are very difficult, if not impossible, to get modern appliances and/or furniture into - especially if they have any staircases, ESPECIALLY if those staircases try to 'save space' in the house by turning once or thrice. A lot of these places were designed for people who owned essentially nothing, or nothing that wouldn't fit into a suitcase - I've spent many an hour trying to navigate a 3-seater couch around turns, whereas it would take all of 10 seconds straight down a modern home stairway.
Obviously I'm over-generalizing, and can only speak from my own limited experience, but unless you radically alter the interior designs of most of the older buildings (let's try avoiding the mud basements from now on, eh?), I'd much prefer living in something designed with how people actually *live* nowadays.
Asthetically though, I have to agree - older is better. New houses and apartments look like utter crap.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
i live in times square and i just have a few details for the metaverse keepers:
;-P
yes, there are dishes in my sink, but when you rebuild could you replace them with an empty sink?
i have a pile of laundry as well. see what you can do about that. thank you.
i'd like a bigger tv for me in new york 2.0, please? oh and more windows! i don't know why there isn't one on the west wall, it's a perfect place for it.
move that hotel over a few feet so i get a better view too.
thank you! much appreciated!
ps: can you fix the bedroom window? it lost it's spring and doesn't stay up when i open it, thank you very very much.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
All I know is I wouldn't wanna be the delivery boy responsible for dragging heavy cargo from the subway line to its destination...
The only way that a virtual NYC will ever be constructed from these bits is if it is wiped off the face of the earth, so that there's no real world analogue to be concerned about anymore. I'm not particularly interested in that scenario.
Call me crazy, but the link promises a map of some time. Where is the craptastic map?
Read "Warday" by Whitley Strieber (yes, the same guy who went a bit crazy and insists he's been abducted by aliens) and James Kunetka. It is the story of two journalists travelling across America after a nuclear war. Whitley Strieber's character lived in New York at the time of the war, so the book starts with a flashback description of the immediate aftermath. The city is written off. Later on they both visit the "present day" (several years after the war) New York and describe the decay of the city and the salvage operations working to pull all the raw material out.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Tempting as it is to post "Let's build Gotham City, complete with the Rodan's ``The Thinker''/Heroic Soviet Industrial style public statues!"...
The information is archival in nature; it would not be used to rebuild the city, any more than the plans and photographs of the World Trade Center are now being used to rebuild the World Trade Center, instead of something new.
The value it has is as a tool today, as described in the article, makes it just that: a tool. And the security concerns aren't over its value in rebuilding, they're over it's value to someone who wants to raze the place, or model a "Cobra Event" style drop of a bioagent.
Massive datassemblies are probably some of the few valid objects for protection via security through obscurity.
-- Terry
in 50-100 years if not sooner a city will be built in one year. a whole city. nano technology
New York city archives all blueprints and contractor schematics for construction within the city limits. Periodically these are shipped to the national archive. There is on online index of the archive here.
just put some big stilts and build a new city on top of it like futurama!!! hmmm call it NEW New York!
all the zealots were overseas. Guess I was wrong.
Thank you for listening to my rant.
I'm working on "muggerbots" to give it that ol' authentic feel. The beggarbots are almost complete.
Table-ized A.I.
I love 3d worlds. Just a maystery to solve in NYC would be fun!
Paris has had an interactive "You want to see it, tell us the address" site for a few years now. It's not 3D, but it's available to the public.
It's nice to have this digital replica. It will provide a sort of "memory" so that we will still know what the city was like even if the unthinkable should happen.
But it is laughable to think that it would be used as any sort of blueprint for reconstruction. I mean, they can't even decide what will replace the single building complex that was destroyed on 9/11. Even though they still have the blueprints of the original, and could rebuild it floor for floor if they wanted to. Why should the entire city be any different?
I'm reminded of Detective Ross Sylibus's (Armitage III) derisive comment on seeing the Statue of Liberty replica on Mars. "They think they can just build that kind of thing anywhere."
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
If they really want to make sure the data is safe from attack it should be put on a web site and GPL'd. You can find thousands of places to download Linux, why not thousands of places to download New York City.
Think of the simularities:
1) Works 24/7
2) Constantly changing
3) Multi-user
4) Multi-tasking
5) Users of both have irrational expectations
6) Quick and dirty
7) Flashy
8) Babes love it
9) Open to everyone
10) Long way from Redmond
I shudder to think at what they might do with lighting on the Empire State Building...I won't mind if the Chrysler Building includes the MIB city memory flasher, just like the original's.
A city is no more valuable than it's citizens, the people that live there. If someone nuked New York, and 70% of the population died, what would be the point of trying to recreate the physical structure? The new people coming in wouldn't know the difference anyway. And if most of the population were dead, even if it wasn't contaminated, why even try to rebuild there? On the other hand, knowing where the gas lines and water mains are might help in such a case, but it would seem that there would be more important things to worry about than floor plans should such a thing actually happen. This kind of time would be better spent on making sure that no one knocks out NY or another major city in the first place.
I'd be a lot more worried about that GIS information being useful to terrorists who want to destroy the city in the first place. Not that the possiblity is all that likely, but it seems to me that if someone or some entity manages to level a city like New York, rebuilding it is going to be one of the last things on our minds...
Will we have to install Flash 9 or RealThree to view it? Or is it "safely" tucked away in a Visio document? I just hope it's not built with FrontPage.
Or is that supposed to be in there?
Anyhow, I seriously think that after being reduced to burning rumble, there will be more serious problems than deciding if NY should reconstruct the old houses or build more modern ones. So I'm thinking, maybe the author's priorities are so skewed that the TMBG paragraph isn't a content management bug, but put in deliberately.
I propose collecting DNA samples of all NYC residents and storing them (the samples) in large off-site databases, so they to can all be reconstructed after "The big catastrophe". Oh wait, they're already doing that!
I hope they convert the 3D maps over to
quake3 levels so I can do some fraggin
in all 5 boroughs!!!!
GTA3+ levels would be even better!
muhahaha
Slashdotters need to get out more...
Cool.. Can someone import this into a 3D shooter? Perhaps id could include this map with Doom 3? :-P
It could even be used in a driving game. I've always though it'd be cool to race around you local area with an accurate level of detail...
Considering that the USA and the rest of the world lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation from
pretty much the fifties to the dismantling of the USSR, you're letting this pissant terrorist threat thing get to ye far more than it should. It's hard not to wonder if you aren't in fact just being cynically manipulated to distract you from the ridiculous amount of domestic problems your current administration is causing and/or ignoring.
It's about time you got over it, either built a Ground Zero memorial park or used the space for buildings, stopped beating up on random eastern countries, implemented decent accounting laws, and returned to being the arrogant but lovable bunch of tech-obsessed golden boys that we all remember from the 90s.
And ratify Kyoto already - have you seen the weather lately? Can't you take a hint?
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
GTA3+ levels would be even better!
You mean, you can't just play it in a real NYC? ;-)
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It is called the Chrysler Building and it is a famous piece of architectural work. You lack of knowledge about it's existence proves only that:
A. You have no interest in architecture
B. You are a hick
C. You've never been to NYC (hence you are a hick)
Good day sir.
I live here.
Eight million NYC residents take up a lot less land than eight million humans just about anywhere else in North America except for Mexico City. NYC is high density, a lot of people on a small amount of land. Sprawl is low density, a small number of people on a large amount of land.
50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center, an office complex with its own subway stops and train stops (40% of all New Yorkers take the subway to work). You go out to Silicon Valley and the office space for 50,000 people plus the parking lots for their 48,000 cars are a hell of a lot larger than the footprint of the WTC. And those people commute from 50-100 miles away (Gilroy + points east, San Francisco, over the hill from Santa Cruz). That's sprawl.
The green space you are looking for is all the land around NYC where the people of NYC do not live because we don't sprawl out.
If you don't like it, you don't have to live here. Personally I like human beings and I enjoy living with lots of them.
Much of the infastructure of New York is like an immense network that can never be taken offline for repair. Tracks, piping, roads, and the like cannot be ripped out and replaced like copper for fiber....
New York City's subways originally were above ground. But running trains down the middle of the street 24 hours per day generates a lot of noise.
The best place for the subways is under the streets. Go down to, say, Bowling Green at Rush Hour, where trains with 800 people pass every 90 seconds, and imagine all that traffic at grade level or on an elevated track.
How long before someone converts this into the world's largest Quake arena?
I think this map of theirs would be viewed as invaluable to historians to see exactly how NY was "way back when in '02" ...
For example in London there's a new Globe Theater to honor Shakespeare (interestingly enough it was an american actor that built it) but since no one has the plans to either of the original two Globe Theaters they had to guesstimate the new one. Luckily they found the foundations of The Rose theater and were able to use the info they gleaned from there to make the new one (e.g. a strange mixture of dirt and nut shells with cement to make the flooring...!?) Anyway, if they hadn't found the Rose they would not have been able to achieve their desired level of authenticity. Plans would have been invaluable.
The two most unlivable places on the face of the Earth.
Yep, that's the way to go.
sPh
I don't disagree completely with you. Naturally the roadways, and Transit systems would look different, but I was talking about the faces of the buildings. The roadways could be optimized, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be a building like the Chrysler building put up, just with a different interior. I consider infrastructure like roads and rails, to be the guts of a city.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
There's a short article in the latest National Geographic about the use of GIS and other cartographic data in the rescue effort after 9/11. Cartographers provided rescuers with information such as building support structures and fire locations.
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
The issue of cities dealing with massive devastation has already happened many times throughout history. Whether from earthquake (Lisbon, San Francisco), fire (Tokyo, Chicago), war (Berlin, Dresden) or even nuclear attack (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) the goal was never to make a cookie cutter duplicate of the previous structures like the city was some sort of museum piece.
Cities such as Dresden picked those structures that were the most distinctive and historically/artistically significant and rebuilt those (opera house, great churches) but didn't try to rebuild 1800s housing. The rebuilt cities actually benefited from the opportunity to rebuild from scratch, eliminating decades of patchwork utilities and building. Of course the key is to have a plan that is human in scale, fitting with the culture, and for the benefit of residents and not just for state (East Berlin's Stalinist concrete apartment blocks) or commercial interests.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You create the "New York anti-terrorist campaigns" quake mod... and we'll play it! Make sure to include some reference to Bin and amourous involvement with a camel or two...
There is no fucking Metaverse, you idiot!
'Alpha Complex'
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Rebuild it Planet of the Apes 2 style with decrepit subway systems below ground and ape villagery above ground...or like...abandon it and call it the Forbidden Zone...bet that increases tourism. hey, I saw the looks on the 2 astronauts faces..."forbidden zone? where can I get some forbidden zone action?!"
-binky.
The environment is already built so why not use it to creat a cool (???) multiplayer RPG? I mean it sure would beat actually going outside ;) Plus NYC could get royalties on the game.
Lived in a refurbed Brownstone in Boston in college. Most beautiful home I've ever seen. I'd love to live in one now. Too bad Phoenix (AZ) only has easy-to-put up trash housing. On the upside, it keeps the lawyers distracted on builder liability suits.
This has to be the strangest place I've seen reference to the greatest band on the planet...
Rebuild New York, but underground. Then restore the above-ground city as a decoy for the mystical space aliens. Hire some thirteen year old twitch gamers to defend humanity in their giant mecha, and we're set!
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I guess I'm kinda assuming that the rest of the country hasn't undergone the same armageddon and emergency services can be brought to bear in the form of refugee camps. You're probably right-- A lot of the population would be casulties, so just for kicks and grins I'll say we're only left with... a quarter? Is that fair? It's still a hella lot of refugees to take care of. On second thought, the shelters would probably be a temporary fix until the wound/homeless are organized and dispersed to the neighboring major cities. But I'm betting the shelters would also become a launching point for long term recovery operations into the city.
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This reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's radio series (Maybe the books too). Zarniwoop, the president of the HHG publishing company, was in his office on an inter-galactic cruise. He was inside a private copy of the Universe. The reason was something about not missing the great parties on Ursa minor or somesuch.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Anonymous Cowards, of course.
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An interesting gaming aspect was covered earlier in Slashdot with this article in which a University was modeled into a Quake map. They ran around with GPS backpacks and had monsters coming out of the faculty lounge! The biggest problem was the refresh rate, as GPS isn't the 40 fps we all hope for.
Another interesting application is face recognition which would then pull up necessary info on the person -- a must-have if you meet lots of people.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Insanity from going to Columbia? Holy shi'ite! Well I never.
Pretty much any form of attack that would destroy a significant part of new york outright would kill the population as well (a nuclear bomb). Who in their right mind would want to move into a rebuilt reproduction of a city where everyone had persished? Not to mention the rubble would still be radioactive.
For that reason, its doubtful whether the world trade center really will be rebuilt right back as it was, and even if it is; if anyone will tenant the place.
Break out the beer!