Mimico waterfront: Another “wall of condos” disaster in the making?

In 1997 Doug Holyday, then mayor of Etobicoke, announced plans for a new neighbourhood: Humber Bay Shores. The former “motel strip” — a seedy area south of Lake Shore Blvd. W. and east of Park Lawn Rd. — saw its first new condo a year later.

Since then, highrises have sprouted like toadstools.

“There’s very large numbers of people in buildings that are just higgledy-piggledy scattered across that area. There’s no coherent pattern of public spaces, there’s no shopping or retail,” says Ken Greenberg, an architect and urban designer who has consulted for Waterfront Toronto.

“It’s one of the most egregious, terrible examples of lack of any kind of decent planning one can think of.”

Some may disagree. But many in Mimico — the next community over, where a massive revitalization plan known as “Mimico 20/20” is underway — look east to Humber Bay Shores as a warning.

“The multi-multi-multi-storey buildings? It scares me,” says Bob Poldon, president of the Mimico Residents Association.

…

Via The Star

Having lived in the area for several years, I truly believe that the high-rise condos on the water are the last thing Mimico needs.

Why can’t our city learn to capitalize on one of our greatest assets (the lake) and instead allows unimaginative, greedy developers permanently change the face of the city? Why are we building a shoebox of a city instead of a tourist destination?

Do you think ten years from now Toronto will take the top spot in National Geographic’s Top Trolley Rides? With a view of hideous concrete and glass – I doubt it.

Toronto doesn’t lack imagination – it lacks leadership to translate it to sound development policy.

New research suggests, however, that rather than describe how humans perform, the bell curve may actually be constraining how people perform. Minus such constraints, a new paper argues, lots of people are actually outliers.

Human performance, by this account, does not often fit the bell curve or what scientists call a normal distribution. Rather, it is more likely to fit what scientists call a power distribution.

The study examined the performance of 633,263 people involved in four broad areas of human performance: academics writing papers, athletes at the professional and collegiate levels, politicians and entertainers.

“We looked at researchers, we looked at entertainers, we looked at politicians, and we looked at collegiate as well as professional athletes,” Aguinis said in an interview. “In each of these kinds of industries, we found that a small minority of superstar performers contribute a disproportionate amount of the output.”

…

Aguinis said the bell curve may describe human performance in the presence of some external constraint — such as an assembly line that moved at a certain speed.

… successful companies and nations would do well to identify superstars, because such performers were disproportionately likely to register new discoveries and achievements.

Via NPR

This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth’s water in comparison to the size of the Earth. The blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas, has a diameter of about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers) , with a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers). The sphere includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.

Via USGS

New York Fire Department demonstration of a steam pumper converted from horse-drawn to motor-driven, at 12th Avenue and 56th Street. Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives.

Indigo-Blue Saké Ewer

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The Swan, the Pike, and the Crab
by Ivan Krylov (1768-1844)

Whene’er companions don’t agree,
They work without accord;
And naught but trouble doth result,
Although they all work hard.

One day a swan, a pike, a crab,
Resolved a load to haul;
All three were harnessed to the cart,
And pulled together all.
But though they pulled with all their might,
The cart-load on the bank stuck tight.
The swan pulled upward to the skies;
The crab did backward crawl;
The pike made for the water straight —
It proved no use at all!

Now, which of them was most to blame
’Tis not for me to say;
But this I know: the load is there
Unto this very day.

The World’s Wit and Humor, Vol. XIV, Russian, Scandinavian, and Miscellaneous Wit and Humor; The Review of Reviews Company; New York; 1906; pp. 19-21.

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