MITPressLog

R.I.P. Ralph Pred

We note, with sadness, the passing of our author Ralph Pred on May 15 at the age of 72. Pred was the author of the 2005 book Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience, an account of the nature of consciousness that brought the work of Alfred North Whitehead and William James into an original synthesis.

He led an unconventional life for a philosopher, as you can read in this warmly revealing obituary sent to us by his son, Noah Pred:

Ralph Pred • July 9, 1939 - May 15, 2012

Philosopher, scholar, activist, author, and community organizer Ralph Pred passed away, unexpectedly and without suffering, Tuesday, May 15, in the presence of his wife, Mallory. His was a life of books, deep listening, thoughtful conversation, and mindful walking among the flowers, trees and birds.

Born in the Bronx in 1939, influenced by his father's linguistic skills, his mother's musicianship, and the death of a great aunt in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Ralph set upon a path of social justice and life-long learning. After attending Bronx Science High School, his passion for illuminating the mysteries of experience led to studies at Antioch, NYU, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ralph took a break from university studies to work in numerous community organization initiatives, notably as director of poverty programs in Boston and Cape Cod, and spent several summers as counsellor, then director of a children’s summer camp in Massachusetts.

Returning to school in 1975, Ralph earned a masters degree at San Francisco State, and later, a PhD in Philosophy from UC Berkeley. His thesis contained the seeds of his later independent scholarship, where his enduring alignment with the work of Alfred North Whitehead and William James would bloom.

In 1990, Ralph relocated from Berkeley to Salt Spring Island in British Columbia with Mallory and their son, Noah. During this period he worked variously as a consultant and technical writer for PARC and EPRI. Over the years, Ralph made many contributions to the local community; his reverence for Pacific Northwest ecology and its natural beauty lead to his active engagement in preservation of the island's habitat, inhabitants and culture.

The culmination of decades of scholarship, study and rigorous observation, Ralph's book Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience - his treatise on an unbroken, process-oriented account of a monism of pure experience - was published by MIT Press in 2005. Left unfinished, his second book was well underway.

Ralph leaves behind his loving wife of 38 years, his son, and an extended family in Berkeley and New York, including his stepson Martin Jones and wife Suzanne, his sister Suzanne Pred Bass and brother-in-law Lane Bass, his sisters-in-law Linda and Hjordis, nieces Michele, Emily, Becky, and Willa, nephews Joseph and Tobias, grand-nieces Linnea and Emma, and his grand-nephew Sebastian. Ralph’s brother Allan, with whom he was very close in thought and feeling, passed before him in 2007. Kind, careful and gentle, yet not afraid to stand for what he knew to be right, Ralph was a private man who is dearly missed by his family and all who knew and loved him.

Monday Eye Candy: America Starts Here

Happy Memorial Day! In honor of this patriotic holiday, today’s Monday Eye Candy features the cover of America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, edited by Ian Berry and Bill Arning. This book contains descriptions and images of Ericson’s and Ziegler’s works, which conceptualized America’s history in art. One example is the cover image—a house camouflaged in the municipally-approved “authentic colors” of Charleston, South Carolina, with the historically-related names of the commercial paints written on the patches. The title of the book comes from another piece of art done by the duo—old windows taken from a factory in Philadelphia, arranged in their original placement, cracked in honor of the Liberty Bell and Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, and named after a slogan used to promote Philadelphia tourism in the 1980s. To see more of their eye-catching work, take a look at this truly American book.

 

Memorial Day Reading

Happy Friday! Kick off the long weekend by adding Why America Is Not a New Rome to your Memorial Day weekend reading list.

This Monday is Memorial Day—a day to honor America’s past and the people who fought for its future. As with many other countries, America’s past has had its ups and downs; its moments of grandeur and its moments of turbulence. And because of its relative youth, America has garnered many comparisons between itself and places with deeper, richer pasts. Vaclav Smil discusses the most notable comparison in Why America Is Not a New Rome.

After the Cold War, America’s economic growth and strategic dominance led to it being pronounced the New Rome, compared to the ancient empire when it was at its most powerful. But now, with America in an economic crisis and its turn to celebrity worship and violent “sport” spectacles such as professional wrestling, similarities are again struck between America and latter-day Rome, this time in a negative light.

Smil, however, argues against the America-Rome analogy and challenges the ever-growing parallels between the two that are played up by the media. As a scientist and student of Roman history, Smil is able to look closely at why these comparisons exist and what they mean to the way people look at America. The sometimes spooky similarities do not make America another Rome, however, and Smil cautions against expecting America to experience the same outcomes as Rome.

Why America Is Not a New Rome urges us to look beyond the common America-Rome analogy to think of America as its own country, forging its own path.

 

Monday Eye Candy: American Urban Form

Happy Monday! Today’s eye candy is from American Urban Form: A Representative History, by Sam Bass Warner and Andrew H. Whittemore. This book discusses the evolution of the American city, but does so using a hypothetical “City”—a city constructed by combining the histories of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. The illustrations in the book are pen-and-ink drawings done by Whittemore (click on each image to enlarge).

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1.1 The City as it appeared in the late seventeenth century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 2.2 Long Wharf and King’s Road, mid-eighteenth century. From the Long Wharf, visible at the bottom of this picture, a street ran inland to its intersection with the “Broad Way.” 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3.3 At the harbor, 1820. Nineteenth-century brigs, quite a bit higher than all construction in town except for church steeples, docked at a crowded waterfront to unload their cargos of molasses, turpentine, and manufactures of Europe and the Far East.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6.4 Amusement park, 1925. On the shore of the bay, at the terminus of several transit lines, a privately run recreational park thrived from after the Civil War until the 1950s. At first it was modest, consisting of groomed beaches and bathhouses. By the 1920s, however, it featured a boardwalk, numerous commercial stalls, a Ferris wheel, and a rollercoaster. With suburbanization and the availability of home entertainment, the park’s popularity declined, and it eventually closed in the 1960s.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 9.1 The City as it appeared in 2000.

A Bicycle Revolution & a CONTEST

Happy Friday! We've told you our bike stories all week and now we're turning the tables. Tell us your bike story for a chance to win a copy of John Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition. Share your story in the comments section or on the MIT Press Facebook page and we'll enter you in a drawing to win a copy of the book. Please submit your stories by 5 pm Eastern on Monday, May 21st. 

And now, without further ado, James Lynch, Marketing Associate at the MIT Press, wraps up our Effective Cycling, seventh edition-inspired National Bike to Work Week series.

I’m a daily bike commuter, although perhaps I should say I’m a daily car door avoider. This past week (on bike to work week no less), I witnessed a biker get doored in front of me.  It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this occur, or, sadly, the last. Thankfully he walked away, but as I helped him up off the pavement and made sure he was okay, I noticed tears in his eyes. “This was only my second day riding a bike,” he muttered.

Bikers live in a dangerous world— a world where giant 1,000-lb creatures are constantly trying to maim and kill you. Forester’s Effective Cycling is a handy guide that helps us navigate these dangerous waters. While the book contains a lot of useful maintenance tips, the more important sections focus on how to properly share the road. Bike lanes are well and good; however, they often don’t avoid the dreaded “door-zone” (our biker friend from my previous paragraph was riding in a lane) and are often littered with obstacles. Forester teaches us to ride safely and to not let ourselves be regulated to the gutters.

I’ll end on a positive note. Every day I notice more and more people picking up the bike and putting down the keys. We are in the midst of a bicycle revolution and as our numbers and visibility grow, so does our safety. It’s important to remember that when all is said and done, biking is really fun!

 

A Happy Medium

Here's another post inspired by Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition for our National Bike to Work Week series! Doug Sery, Senior Acquisitions Editor, discusses the need for cyclists and automobile drivers to reach a happy medium when it comes to sharing the road.

As an avid cyclist, I can’t yet decide whether this is a book I’d wish I’d known about 20 years earlier or not. At that time, I was a bicycle messenger in Washington, D.C., and I can’t remember any of us using official bike lanes or, for that matter, whether there were even bike lanes. We ran stop signs and red lights, bunny-hopped curbs, split lanes and played tag with taxis. The more aggressive riders were known to use their u-locks or LifeHammers if they felt a car or bus was crowding them. There was definitely a philosophy of offensive biking for safety. Unlike Europeans, Americans, generally speaking, don’t know how to handle bikes in “their” automobile lanes and the best way to get people in cars to back off was to show them that you were present, obnoxiously so if it was warranted. At the same time, though, I did get “doored” more than once and threatened a number of times by drivers while attending Critical Mass events in San Francisco and Boston. There has to be some sort of happy medium, a medium that’s probably not going to be reached until America gets rid of its fixation on cars ruling the road. I live in Sweden now, just across from Copenhagen, and while there are still plenty of cars, there seem to be just as many bicycles, seemingly the preferred mode of transportation in the city. There are a plethora of bike lanes, but at the same time I can take my bike out onto the roads and feel completely safe knowing that the people in their cars have become acclimated to bikes. Perhaps, in reality, it’s the bicyclists that have become acclimated to the cars. Whatever your level of expertise might be -- beginner, riding centuries every weekend, or just commuting -- Effective Cycling is a superb resource to have next to your bike pump, tire levers and truing stand.

 

The Debate over Urban Bike Lanes

To continue our celebration of National Bike to Work Week with posts inspired by John Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition, Justin Kehoe, another bicyclist and MIT Press staffer (acquisitions department), discusses the lively debate over bike lanes:

Today, the government program for bicycle transportation pretends to make cycling so easy, by bikeways, that cyclists no longer need to learn how to operate as drivers of vehicles.-–John Forester on “The Why and Wherefore of Traffic Law” in Effective Cycling

After 12 years of bicycling in Boston, the seemingly inevitable caught up with me last month: I was doored. It was silly: I was half a block out from a stop light, so I hadn’t really built up any significant speed; I was on a particularly narrow stretch of Broadway St. in Cambridge, and against my own better judgment (and that of author John Forester), was hugging the right hand side of the road. The driver carelessly flung his door open, and for both of us it was just the unlucky confluence of two otherwise isolated moments of inattention. This is exactly the kind of situation that John Forester fears is the unfortunate bi-product of bike lanes—a false sense of security for bicyclists who instead of having to deal with antsy drivers behind them, must now contend with motorists trying to edge past them on the left when they perhaps don’t really have the room, and doors flung open from parked vehicles on the right.

John Forester’s opposition to urban bike lanes has made him a polarizing figure in bicycle policy debates. It has put him at odds with many of the more notable bike advocacy groups, who tend to see mileage of urban bike lanes as one of the best measuring sticks for effective urban transportation policy. For instance, this week’s Boston Phoenix features an article on the resignation of Boston’s Bike Czar, Nicole Freedman, who, the article boasts, since 2007 has increased Boston’s bike lane mileage fifty-fold. Forester, on the other hand, believes that bicycling as a mode of transportation functions best when all vehicles behave the same. This means following the same rules, which would preclude the inclusion of separate lanes for bicycles. He advocates “lawful, competent bicycling” and most advocacy groups with any real voice in transportation policy debates would also stress lawful bicycling. However, for Forester, truly lawful bicycling requires that bicycles be treated as vehicles the same as automobiles. This means that they incur all the same rights and restrictions, rather than having their own bastardized sub-set of laws—laws which are, to Forester’s mind, an unworkable hodge-podge of pedestrian and motorist policies. But it is the issue of competency that raises the most ire. Where transportation policy is geared toward making it easier for anyone to get on a bike and get out on streets, Forester thinks that a base level of competency is necessary for the safety of all—and knowing the laws is only part of that competency. This is one of the reasons why Forester opposes bike lanes, and it is one of the things that has put him at odds with other advocacy groups.

Charges that emphasizing this level of competency amounts to a kind of bicycling elitism, along with his public defense of the automobile (he’s a member of the pro-auto group American Dream Coalition), have set him at odds with many of the most vocal and visible bike advocacy groups. At a time when advocacy groups are trying to get more people out on the road, Forester’s opposition to bike lanes has been disruptive to the current thrust of transportation policy, especially in urban environments. Yet the 46 page pamphlet Bicycling Street Smarts, which is one of the most widely distributed works of bicycle education in the U.S., is culled from an earlier version of Effective Cycling. And his arguments about the relationship between safety and competency, however unfashionable they are among urban transportation planners, are hard to dismiss. I for one, despite an occasional lapse (see getting doored above) try to keep Forester’s recommended distance of five feet between me and the cars parked to my right. If this is on a narrow stretch that invites motorists to pass me when they don’t really have the room, for my own safety I will take up my right of way in the middle of the road along with the other vehicles on the road. Dealing with the occasional irate honk from impatient motorists is trumped by the off-chance of being laid out on my tailbone by a fool who can’t be bothered to check his side-view mirror before opening his door. And while I myself, unlike Forester, am a fan of bike lanes, I think his opposition serves an important function in the debate about bicycle policy. Honest acknowledgment of the limitations and shortcomings of bike lanes is an important step in making bicyclists more aware of others as well as of their own visibility.

How to Budget Time to Commute by Bike

Happy National Bike to Work Week (May 14-18)! Miranda Martin, an acquisitions assistant at the MIT Press, recently started biking to the office. Here, she shares what John Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition has taught her about cycle-commuting:

 

Of the handful of us in the MIT Press office who commute to work by bike, I’m the least experienced by several years: this is my first cycling season. I had no experience riding a bike in traffic or farther than a couple of miles until this spring, but I had an urge to try it. (That urge by the way, sprang up in part from my work on MIT Press’s books about bicycling.)

So, I set off with a more experienced partner one Saturday a few weeks ago to test what would be my ten-mile ride to work. The distance initially daunted me, and according to cyclist John Forester in the brand-new edition of Effective Cycling, endurance is a common concern: “When most people consider cycling for any distance, they worry about getting tired.”

Forester goes on to explain that “the cycle-commuting distance problem is not fatigue but time. You know that you will feel better for any daily cycling exercise for which you can afford the time; the question is whether you can afford the time to get it.” I did feel great after that first ride, both because of the exercise and the boost in confidence I got from cycling—effectively—20 miles in one day for the first time. But is there time to fit that ride into a regular workday schedule?

To kick off Bike Week here in Massachusetts, LivableStreets Alliance, Somerville Bicycle Committee, and Cambridge Bicycle Committee hosted a Rush Hour Race: a competition for one cyclist, one motorist, and one public transit rider to find the fastest way to travel the three miles between Davis and Kendall Squares in Cambridge. The cyclist won, showing that at least sometimes, in some places, it’s quicker to go by bike.

Here’s how it works out for me: on days I take public transit to work, I typically spend about 55 minutes total walking to my neighborhood commuter rail station, riding the train, transferring to the subway, and arriving at the office. Last week, I used Google’s My Tracks app to gather some statistics about my bike commute. Total time for the ten-mile ride to work: one hour and one minute.

So, on average, I’m getting an hour of cycling at a cost of only six extra minutes of my time. And on days I happen to avoid even a small public-transit delay by riding my bike instead, I come out ahead and have a much more pleasant experience.

As Forester sums it up, “If you enjoy cycling, whether for itself or because you like the exercise, cycle-commuting is a bargain” when it comes to the time costs.

 

The British Gas Industry Turns 200

2012 is the 200^th anniversary of the British gas industry. Leslie Tomory, author of Progressive Enlightenment: The Origins of the Gaslight Industry, 1780-1820, reflects on how this industry’s creation marked the beginning of a new phase in Western industrialization. 

 

The gas industry in North America has seen dramatic changes over the last few years as it expands rapidly with supplies of shale and coal-bed methane becoming available, thanks to new exploration and extraction technologies. This energy industry, however, has seen many technological shifts since the industry was created with the incorporation of the world’s first gas company, the Gas Light and Coke Company (GLCC), 200 years ago in London. The most important of these changes was the switch from manufactured to natural gas. Rather than relying on gas extracted from the ground, the GLCC operated by manufacturing gas through the gasification of coal. This process produced a gas which was a mixture of mostly methane and hydrogen, together with many impurities, some of which, like hydrogen sulfide, were quite toxic. The gas produced in the GLCC’s three London gasworks was then purified, stored, and finally distributed through a network of pipes to lamps spread throughout the city, mostly in streets, public buildings, and shops, but also in homes of wealthier people. From its founding in 1812, the GLCC expanded rapidly, with its pipes supplying 30,000 lamps in many parts of London.

The founding of the Gas Light and Coke Company represented more than the creation of an important new industry. It also marked a beginning of a new phase in the industrialization of the West because the gas industry presented some characteristics that set it apart from technologies and the industries based on them that had appeared earlier in the Industrial Revolution. These were to become more common later in the nineteenth century. Specifically, the gas industry was science-based; it required capital beyond what family firms or small partnerships could muster; and it had a degree of complexity as a large scale technological network that required a host of business and technological measure to stabilize and control. The combination of all of these characteristics together in the gas industry meant that 200 years ago, a new wave of the Industrial Revolution had begun.

 

Don't Get Doored!

To kick off National Bike to Work Week (May 14-18), Anar Badalov (who bikes to the office every day and works in the MIT Press publicity department) shares some tips that he's learned from John Forester's Effective Cycling, seventh edition, which is hot off the presses.

There are some heated debates surrounding cycling today. If you ask me, John Forester, whose ideas are at the center of many of the arguments, and who I’m learning is considered a radical thinker in some groups, is convincing in his campaign against poorly built cycling infrastructure and unsafe biking habits. Above all, in Effective Cycling he urges us not to be afraid to cycle in traffic, and to resist being shunted off into government-sponsored bike lanes (which are often more unsafe than riding in traffic).

A recent Boston Globe article cites the following statistics: in 2009, 2 percent of Boston’s commuters cycled to work and school; in Copenhagen, where bike lanes are designed to accommodate avid and weekend cyclists alike—they’re mostly separated from car lanes altogether—cyclists make up for 35 percent of commuters. 

Clearly, there is a lot of work to be done here and in other major US cities when it comes to building safe and practical lanes. But what are we supposed to do in the meantime? John Forester and other vehicular cycling advocates believe that cyclists and drivers should share space. Perhaps if Boston resembled Copenhagen or Amsterdam in its bicyclist infrastructure, this book wouldn’t be necessary—although it does also have some useful maintenance tips. Unfortunately, that’s not the case and it likely won’t be for many years. 

I tried to photograph a small portion of the sole bike lane on my route home from MIT Press, but there were too many cars in it to get a good shot. Luckily there’s Google Maps:

 

 

 

Broadway and Hampshire

I’ve seen at least a handful of trusting cyclists who actually assumed traffic in the left lane would slow down and let them cross, and luckily none of them were seriously injured. There are dozens of others like this popping up all over the city, and rather than learning the rules of the road, new commuters are depending on the lanes to do the protecting for them.

More regularly, cyclists are hit by swinging car doors while they are riding in the designated bike lanes (according to Forester, this accounts for as much as 8 percent of total car-bike collisions)!

Hopefully Boston will become a bicycle-friendly city one day, but meanwhile we have to learn the rules of the road. Here are just a couple of pointers I picked up from Effective Cycling:

-Avoid getting doored! Door Zones are the areas where car doors can potentially hit you. Oftentimes, cyclists swerve into traffic to avoid getting hit, and this is how serious injuries can occur. Unfortunately, bicycle lanes are often painted in door zones, which is why Forester encourages us to ride just outside of the door zone. Always keep at least five feet of distance between you and the edge of parked cars. Don’t let this be you:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-13 percent of car-bike accidents occur when cyclists fail to yield when changing lanes! Learn your signals and use them:

 

 

 

 

 

 

-25 perecent of car-bike accidents occur when the cyclists fails to yield to crossing traffic. Don’t run lights!

-If the road narrows, take the entire lane after negotiating with the driver behind you—make sure the driver agrees to let you in by giving you room, slowing down or taking some other positive action.

I could go on, but it’s Monday morning and you probably just need a good laugh:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ