Demographic Boundaries

There are some interesting features in the Cooper Center’s 2010 census demographic map in my neighborhood. Overlaying the basic street map on the demographic map, and setting the street map opacity to fairly low, lets us see the demographic dots and still see the feature names accurately (in some areas, I wasn’t sure I was reading the dot map right; doing this imposition lets me be more confident).

MplsMerged

Note that Nicollet Ave. is still something of a demographic barrier, and 35W even more so.

But even more, look up at that narrow green area just west of Blaisdell Ave. a few blocks each way from Lake St.  And then the fairly intensely yellow (hispanic) area just west of it. Those have sharper boundaries and higher intensities than I would have expected (I believe the green area there is mostly recent African immigrants; I think that’s centered around the place I think of as the African Mall on Grand Ave.).

There are also some very strange things out in the suburbs—sharply bounded areas of a few blocks that are intensely Asian (red), for example.

It’s amazingly easy to match up the lakes, parks, and freeways — nobody lives there, so they stand out on both the demographic map and the regular map.

So Long, Alta Vista!

The first good-enough web search engine is officially shutting down in a few days.  I remember when they popped up—they had about an order of magnitude more pages indexed than their competition, and they frequently actually returned relevant pages!

They were eventually displaced by Google.

Alta Vista was started as a demonstration of DECs relational database technology, and was pretty impressive from that point of view, too.

To memorialize my first favorite search engine, I’ve made screen captures of what they return for a number of personally relevant searches today.

Alta Vista: pdp-10
Alta Vista: pdp-10

Alta Vista: Minn-Stf
Alta Vista: Minn-Stf

Alta Vista: dyer-bennet
Alta Vista: dyer-bennet

Alta Vista: digital equipment corporation
Alta Vista: digital equipment corporation

Alta Vista: David Dyer-Bennet
Alta Vista: David Dyer-Bennet

Silly Old Recycling Rules

With luck, this is our last recycling week on the old system where we separate our recycling into categories. Apart from the fact that it’s a small amount of work, the thing that makes that really annoying is that the tubs they give you can’t hold half the categories you’re supposed to divide your recycling into (in the mandated paper bags).

I’ve managed to get the large majority of the recycling out of the house, and get a photo. This is not the amount we produce every two weeks, we’re not good at getting to it each and every recycling period, so we tend to do a big pile and then miss a few. The point here is that even if it was just one period (which is two weeks), the bags wouldn’t all fit in the bins.  And we have three times as many bins as usual—one extra new style because we’re a duplex, and one old style because we haven’t destroyed it yet.

ddb 20130516 010-018
Our recycling pile today

Just for the record, here’s the city’s list of categories we’re supposed to sort into right now:

Minneapolis recycling categories, captured 5/16/2013
Minneapolis recycling categories, captured 5/16/2013