The artist Christo is in the news again with his proposed art installation ‘Over the River’. The New York Times reports:

Assessing a work of art using in-depth technical analysis sounds a bit like writing a scholarly treatise about a joke. If you peer inside too deeply, armed with numbers and equations, does “Mona Lisa” still dazzle? And is “A man walks into a bar…” still funny?

But that, in a nutshell, is the question that faces the artist Christo and a giant federal agency called the Bureau of Land Management. On Friday, the bureau issued what may be the first ever draft environmental impact statement purely about art — specifically a project called “Over the River,” which Christo has proposed building along a stretch of the Arkansas River in southern Colorado.

The project involves laying fabric panels along 42.4 miles of the river. The environmental review analyzed that notion to its nub — from the projected size of the crowds, to the specific spots for anchoring fabric pieces, to what the document described as “temporal considerations,” specifically the timing of the phases of construction and operation of the artwork.

Christo, whose outsize environmental constructions have made him an internationally known, but not always well-understood, figure in the art world for decades, expressed delight. An environmental assessment, he said in a telephone interview, and the struggle to get permission to make his art are in fact part of the artistic vision itself for “Over the River.”

From ‘Over the River’:

The artist.

‘The Gates’ in Central Park.

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Only ten years ago China consumed roughly half the energy consumed by the United States. Fast forward to 2010 and China has now surpassed the United States in energy consumption according to some studies. For more than 100 years the United States led the world in energy consumption. The Wall Street Journal reports on the staggering Chinese growth and what it all means for China, the USA, and the rest of the world.

China’s ascent marks “a new age in the history of energy,” IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in an interview. The country’s surging appetite has transformed global energy markets and propped up prices of oil and coal in recent years, and its continued growth stands to have long-term implications for U.S. energy security.

The Paris-based IEA, energy adviser to most of the world’s biggest economies, said China consumed 2.252 billion tons of oil equivalent last year, about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2.170 billion tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear power, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower.

The Wall Street Journal opines:

China’s rapidly expanding need for energy promises to have major geopolitical implications as it hunts for ways to satisfy its needs. Already, China’s rising imports have changed global geopolitics. Chinese oil and coal companies have been looking overseas in their quest to secure energy supplies, pitching the Chinese flag in places like Sudan, which Western companies had largely abandoned under international pressure.

The most ambitious effort to secure overseas energy supplies was the failed 2005 attempt Cnooc Ltd. to take over California-based Unocal in an $18 billion bid, which was trumped by politics and rival Chevron. Despite a short pullback in the aftermath of that failed deal, Chinese companies have expanded overseas, buying assets in Central Asia, Africa, South America, Canada and even small stakes in the Gulf of Mexico. While their overall overseas footprint is still small compared with that of big international oil companies, these companies are expanding with access to cheap credit through China’s state-owned banks.

Voracious energy demand also helps explain why China—which gets most of its electricity from coal, the most polluting of fossil fuels—passed the U.S. in 2007 as the world’s largest emitter of carbon-dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases.

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Wired magazine profiles New York City traffic guru Charles Komanoff:

Charles Komanoff has spent three years building a model of the traffic patterns in New York City. The result is an exhaustive accounting of every mile traveled, every slowdown encountered, and every hour wasted. (Above), a rundown of traffic on an average weekday in Manhattan’s central business district.

Komanoff is a dyed-in-the-wool stats geek, and the BTA demonstrates his faith in data. By measuring the problem—the amount of time and money lost in traffic every year—we can begin to solve it, he says. We can turn the knobs on the entire transportation system to maximize efficiency. Komanoff’s model suggests a world in which everything from subway fares to bridge tolls can be precisely tuned throughout the day, allowing city planners to steer traffic flow as quickly and smoothly as a taxi driver tooling his cab down Broadway on a quiet Sunday morning.

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Advertising Age has an interesting article about the declining percentage of teen drivers on the road:

In 1978, nearly half of 16-year-olds and three-quarters of 17-year-olds in the U.S. had their driver’s licenses, according to Department of Transportation data. By 2008, the most recent year data was available, only 31% of 16-year-olds and 49% of 17-year-olds had licenses, with the decline accelerating rapidly since 1998. Of course, many states have raised the minimum age for driver’s licenses or tightened restrictions; still, the downward trend holds true for 18- and 19-year-olds as well (see chart) and those in their 20s.

Hat tip: Tom Vanderbilt

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Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, writes at Slate about the evolution and possible future of stop signs as a traffic device. It’s good to remember that all of these traffic elements we take for granted  (stop signs and drivers licenses to name two) evolved and changed over time.

Like many forms of traffic instruction, the stop sign has murky origins. It was adapted from railway controls but without rigorous scientific testing. As Kenneth Todd has pointed out, “the traffic control system developed piecemeal. … [W]hen large numbers of automobiles burst on the scene early in the century, political pressures, guesswork, and panic measures served as substitutes for scientific expertise.”

Indeed, historian Clay McShane writes that in 1914, “Detroit police sergeant Harry Jackson cut the corners off a square sign to create an easily recognized octagonal shape for first red stop sign or ‘boulevard’ stop.” (The signs were controversial: McShane notes that “Illinois courts briefly ruled stop signs illegal in 1922 as a violation of the rights of individuals to cross streets.”)

By 1927, a rough standardization of the sign was set in place by the American Association of State Highway Officials. An octagonal shape, with red letters on a yellow background. It wasn’t until nearly three decades later that the current design—white letters on a red background—was settled upon, in a 1954 supplement to the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the operative rulebook for traffic engineers. Is the current design as good as it could be? There are two ways to think about that problem. We must ask: Do drivers see stop signs? And, more importantly, what do they do when they see them?

Vanderbilt’s own blog is an excellent transportation resource.

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From TED.com:

Robin Chase founded Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business. That was one of her smaller ideas. Here she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a mesh network vast as the Interstate.

Fast Company magazine profiles the new ‘Flipper’ bridge that joins Hong Kong to mainland China:

One of the most vexing aspects of traveling between mainland China and Hong Kong is the car travel: People in the former drive on the right side of the road; people in the latter drive on the left (a vestige of the British empire).

So to quell confusion at the border and, more importantly, to keep cars from smashing into each other, the Dutch firm NL Architects proposed a brilliant, simple solution, the Flipper bridge.

The bridge does exactly what the name suggests: It flips traffic around. The key here is separating the two sides of traffic, using a figure-eight shape. One side of the road dips under the other, funneling cars that were traveling on the left to the right (and vice versa), without forcing them to encounter head-on traffic at an intersection. The bridge makes what should be a disorienting switch exquisitely easy.

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Tropical Storm Alex is the first named cyclone of 2010.

From CNN International:

Tropical Storm Alex could strengthen into a hurricane Monday but is heading away from the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Hurricane Center said. The storm could become a major hurricane and could make landfall anywhere from Port Lavaca, Texas, to Tampico, Mexico, the center said Monday.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale Summary Table is official tool for measuring the five categories of hurricane activity and is an excellent online resource.

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Our friends at the MSCRecon Blog highlight a recent study of commercial truck seat belt usage:

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) released a study showing seventy-nine percent of commercial truck drivers in the Western US were using their safety belts in 2009. This region has the highest percentage of safety belt usage in the US. The lowest rated region in the US was the Northeast with only sixty-four percent.

Commercial Safety Belt usage by region:

• Northeast 64%
• Midwest 68%
• South 75%
• West 79%

Overall, commercial truck drivers increased safety belt usage from sixty-five percent in 2007 to seventy-four percent in 2009.

Chris Bangle, the chief of design for BMW Group, shares his thoughts on cars and art. From the TED website:

American designer Chris Bangle explains his philosophy that car design is an art form in its own right, with an entertaining — and ultimately moving — account of the BMW Group’s Deep Blue project, intended to create the SUV of the future.