Silver Wedding Anniversary Cruise

Ellen and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary with an 11-day Caribbean cruise. The time went by as fast as our first 25 years of marriage.

Squeezing Out Transit-Oriented Development

Source: City of Richardson.

With four DART stations on the Red Line, Richardson is well-situated to take advantage of the benefits of transit-oriented development (TOD). Richardson has talked a good story on this front, but recent actions by the city council raise doubts about the city's commitment to carrying it through.

First, it was the gas station that was approved at the entrance to the Brick Row development at the Spring Valley DART station. Now, the city council was faced with another threat to TOD. It's a proposal for a new apartment complex on vacant land just north of the Arapaho DART station. The City Plan Commission approved it 4-3.

Those DART stations, instead of serving as catalysts for TOD spreading outward from the stations, are instead being slowly strangled by traditional, suburban-style development encroaching inwards.

After the jump, how the city council responded.

Japan Journal

Scott is spending the summer in Japan, participating in NanoJapan , a ten week research program in nanotechnology sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Rice University.

After working in the lab at the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo, Scott remembered a video he had once found on the Internet. Sure enough. Same lab. Looks like a fun project! (Video version 210T is the best version.)

The following journal records his experiences...