Desire Lines

From Wikipedia:

A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. The term was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space.[1] Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.

They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g., as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel. Explorers may tread a path through foliage or grass, leaving a trail "of least resistance" for followers.

The lines may be seen along an unpaved road shoulder or some other unpaved natural surface. The paths take on an organically grown appearance by being unbiased toward existing constructed routes. These are almost always the most direct and the shortest routes between two points, and may later be surfaced. Many streets in older cities began as desire lines, which evolved over the decades or centuries into the modern streets of today.

A short piece in the New York Times entitled "Ploughing Detroit into Farmland" points to this nice post from Sweet Juniper that explicates the emerging desire lines around the vacant urban landscape of Detroit and which can be seen in the photo above, also from Sweet Juniper.

It's not a term that I was familiar with, though one that I'm now glad I know as I've always been a bit of an intrepid desire path follower. If you've spent any time in a developing country, and Africa in particular I think, you know that desire lines are as ubiquitous as feet and you've no doubt seen vast stretches of forlorn untrodden sidewalk as everyone wisely follows their own much more efficient and no less demarcated desire paths across, around and over it. My own favorite encapsulation of the difference between desire paths and paved roads always came when asking if I was following the right road from one village to another village in the Botswana bush, the reply would inevitably be: "This is a road but it is not the road."

Links: Random and Assorted

1. Add this to the list of things not to tell your children: bunnies being shot, frozen and burnt for fuel in Sweden. (via)

2. Uganda: A ticking population timebomb.

3. An Interview with Dr. Cruelty regarding the supervillian sense of humor:

No, I'm sorry, I still don't—

They're stuck in a pit! They can try to get out but they can't! They will surely die down there, poisoned by snakes! They're trapped!

Right, I understand that but—

It's hysterical, come on! They. Can't. Get. Out.

4. File away for New Years, how to make the McNuggetini (via and recipe)

5. In case you missed them: Gapminder added FAO agricultural data to their visualizer; the FAO's Hunger Report; IFPRI's 2009 Hunger Index.

6. Steven Rattner's behind the scenes account of the auto bailout is worth a read.

7. Charlize Theron one ups Bill Easterly and makes out with the highest bidder to raise money for Africa. Now there's a slippery slope . . . .

8. Coin toss not 50/50?:

Here's what the researchers concluded: Using a high-speed camera that photographed people flipping coins, the three researchers determined that a coin is more likely to land facing the same side on which it started. If tails is facing up when the coin is perched on your thumb, it is more likely to land tails up.

How much more likely? At least 51 percent of the time, the researchers claim, and possibly as much as 55 percent to 60 percent — depending on the flipping motion of the individual.

In other words, more than random luck is at work.

Comedians Solve World Hunger (Again)

Sarah Silverman makes a suggestion for solving world hunger. The NSFW should be a given, but if not, well, the language is NSFW.



Silverman, of course, isn't the first comedian, nor is she the funniest, to take aim at solving global hunger, here's the classic Sam Kinnison piece from the 80's.

Religion Matters in the Hood

While fatherhood hasn't left me much time to blog of late it has left plenty of odd moments (i.e., the wee hours of the night) to read blogs and one I've been especially enjoying of late is Tales from the Hood. Today's post is a good example why as it deals with a topic near and dear to my heart, the intersection of religion and development, here's an excerpt:

I am saying that we need to see religion as more than a curiosity or a barrier. I am saying that I see significant room in the aid industry to expand our understanding of the ways in which Religion affects people, broadly speaking, and the ways in which religions are powerful forces in the communities where we work. If the statistic is right and 85 percent of the recipients of aid that we deliver are religious (it’s actually probably higher than 85 percent), then we see a necessarily incomplete picture by sticking with the concrete, the tangible, the scientific. I’m not saying that we should all embrace religion (this is a very personal choice for everyone), but I am suggesting that we need to move beyond arm’s-length tolerance: It is not enough to simply know intellectually that communities in southern Laos are Theravada Buddhist: we need to know what that means specifically in the life of that community and in the lives of those who are to benefit from what we do there. It is not sufficient simply to know that recipients of aid in rural Afghanistan are Muslim; it’s not even enough to overtly make the link between that fact and what it means for us and how we structure and run programs there…

The aid programs that we design and implement and monitor and evaluate nearly always take place in contexts where religion is a central part of peoples lives. For us to be less than complete in our understanding of what that means necessarily limits our ability to fully comprehend the impact of those aid programs.

The whole thing is recommended. My previous posts in a similar vein are tagged under "religion matters."

2 Videos

Beautiful video of food prep at Alinea via Eat Me Daily:

Bill Streever was on NPR today talking about his new book Cold and talking about hibernating arctic ground squirrels. Full transcript isn't up yet but here's the gist:

"As [the squirrel] hibernates, he begins to cool off. In fact, he cools off to a temperature that's just below the freezing point of water, so around 30 degrees Fahrenheit," says Streever. "When he hits that temperature — when one would think this animal is, for all intent and purposes dead ... he spontaneously starts to shiver," and his temperature rises.

Of course, You Tube has you covered with this video of the process which is great on many, many levels:

The Million Dollar Book

From Eat Me Daily comes word of the planned publication of a book on wine expected to retail at a cool million dollars:

The book, weighing 66 pounds, will highlight the top 100 wineries in the world and come with six bottles from each winery, presumably driving up the astronomical price tag. But is it worth it?

Assuming the Wine Opus costs about the same amount as their other titles, it would cost approximately $2000 without the wine chaser. Divide what's left of the $1m between the 600 bottles of wine, and you get an average of $1663 per bottle. For comparison, the most expensive, standard-sized bottle on wine.com, a Dom. de la Romanee Conti La Tache Grand Cru 2004, retails for $1,579, but the second priciest, a Château Mouton Rothschild Pauillac 2005, is a comparative bargain at $749.

Feel free to browse the other titles available from Kraken Opus, the self-described maker of "the most luxurious series of publications ever created." Hint: the Prince one comes with an iPod - cha-ching!