palewire

While walking to work this morning, I came upon Gasoline. Bike courier by day, graffiti artist by night, he told me his cold-blooded companion, an unnamed snake, enjoys soaking up the sun on warm days here in downtown Los Angeles.

Gasoline said his buddy is a python. I’d like to believe him, but I’m not sure. Palewire massive, what say you?

This afternoon I experimented with my first effort at photo stitching, using a program called Hugin to piece together the view from my window. Click for greater detail.

As you can see, it’s hardly a perfect job. But I think it fits together well enough. The most obvious flaw seems to be the shift in color that splits St. Vibiania’s in half. I’m a long way from a photo expert, but I suspect that’s caused by the automatic adjustments my camera makes as it saves images in jpg format. There’s probably some easy way to avoid that (shooting all of the photographs in a manually selected adjustment scheme, or RAW format), but I’ll leave figuring that out for another day. But if you are an expert, or if I’m totally off base, please feel free to chide away. I’m eager to learn.

Today our A1 features Rich Connell’s look at the effectiveness of all those automated red light cameras positioned around Los Angeles. Here’s the nut:

In Los Angeles, officials estimate that 80% of red light camera tickets go not to those running through intersections but to drivers making rolling right turns, a Times review has found.

…

One of the most powerful selling points for photo enforcement systems, which now monitor 175 intersections in Los Angeles County and hundreds more across the United States, has been the promise of reducing collisions caused by drivers barreling through red lights.

But it is the right-turn infraction — a frequently misunderstood and less pressing safety concern — that drives tickets and revenue in the nation’s second-biggest city and at least half a dozen others across the county.

Our web package includes some hot tape put together by Rich, an awesome interactive explainer by Raoul Ranoa, the now perfunctory Google Map, and my own little goofy idea: portable downloads for TomTom and Garmin GPS devices (check out the roadblock halfway down the main story).

Loading the points into your device will not only map them on your dashboard monitor — but you can also easily program your system to give you an audio warning as you approach upcoming lights. And in that same soothing computer voice that already tells you when to turn.

I’m not sure how interested readers will be in this sort of product, but it seemed like a fun experiment. And since Rich had put in a great effort collecting the data from LA’s many fragmented municipalities, it seemed like we had to look for some extra yard to go for.

The technical part is pretty easy. Both manufacturers have handy developer guides that — once the data is prepared — only take a couple hours to suss out. Here’s TomTom. Here’s Garmin.

Any thoughts on other newspapery data projects that might work for GPS? The most dangerous intersections? The location of famous landmarks around town?

Today we sprung what might be the LAT’s first ever data app plugged directly into the front page. Some new foreclosure numbers came and we were able to quickly turn around the data so users could pop in their zipcode, or drill down and browse around the vast five county area we call “SoCal.”

Anyway, with a little free time this evening, I ferried the data over to Many Eyes and cooked up a couple data visualizations. They’re too much fun to keep to myself.

First, a visual version of the zipcode search, via ME’s “block histogram.” Try popping in “LA” or “Santa Monica” or 90210. The data isn’t adjusted to account for variations in population, but you can see what a cool spin on the classic search-and-return mechanism this gives you. Not only can you easily learn more about a particular locality, you can — at the same time — see where it falls on the distribution curve.

The second is a bit fancier. It’s a three-dimensional scatterplot charting foreclosure frequency on the Y axis against median household income on the X axis, with the size of the zipcode dots determined by the number of foreclosures per 1000 households (the Z-axis), a number that gives you a nice angle for comparison. Try flipping the Y and Z around, for a fun twist. It gives a quick way to explore the richest and poorest areas hit by the foreclosure boom, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun to mouse around with.

Or at least I think so. What do you think?

Tonight I attended my first world-class classical music performance (I’m guessing my teenage vist to the Cedar Rapids Symphony probably doesn’t count). It was up Bunker Hill at the Disney Music Hall where I saw András Schiff perform four of Beethoven’s sonatas, including the famous no. 14, the Moonlight Sonata. My seat had a clear view of Schiff’s gliding hands, an enjoyable sight. I’m not sure I was ready for two hours of piano playing, but it was definitely an impressive show.

For your enjoyment, here’s a YouTube recording of Schiff performing a Schubert sonata.

And, if you’re into this kind of thing, the Guardian has published a series of lectures Schiff gave on Beethoven’s work, including the four sonatas I saw tonight.

The news out of the political circus yesterday was that Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, had been booed during a speech honoring Martin Luther King Jr. on the 40th anniversary of King’s assassination.

As Steve Benen and others have recorded, McCain has followed a serpentine path on the issue. And I’m not sure I can clearly reconcile their accounts of the candidate’s past actions with his current position.

MLK holiday angst is hardly a new story in American politics (Remember Public Enemy’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona”). What caught my imagination this weekend for the first time was the possibility that we might be one day playing out an identical drama, but in a different color.

Less than a week before the anniversary of King’s death, another notable date passed. March 31 is the birthday of union organizer and Hispanic-American hero Cesar Chavez. With Hispanic participation in the Democratic party vaulting, Sen. Barack Obama took the opportunity to make a point of supporting a national holiday, which dovetails with a fledgling resolution in the House of Representatives offering to make the same idea law. Meanwhile, an array of prominent union organizers have signed on to the lobbying effort.

If the Democratic leadership ever brings the measure to a vote, I wonder if a ‘Nay’ might one day come back to haunt a future presidential candidate, just as McCain’s 1983 vote haunted him yesterday. Voting against Chavez Day might not be so politically beneficial four or five election cycles from now if you’re running for president in an America where Hispanics are a larger, more affluent and more political active segment of the population.

While it was a new thought for me — living only blocks from Los Angeles’ Cesar Chavez Boulevard may be having an effect — the concept of Hispanic demographics as destiny certainly occured to Chavez himself. In the course of kicking around the web this afternoon, I found the following passage from a 1984 Chavez speech that offers a strong prediction. You can read and listen to it here.

I am told these days farm workers should be discouraged and pessimistic. The Republicans control the governor’s office and the White House. There is a conservative trend in the nation. Yet, we are filled with hope and encouragement. We have looked into the future and the future is ours. History and inevitability are on our side. The farm workers and their children and the Hispanics and their children are the future in California, and corporate growers are the past. Those politicians who ally themselves with the corporate growers and against farm workers and the Hispanics are in for a big surprise. They want to make their careers in politics; they want to hold power 20 and 30 years from now. But 20 and 30 years from now, in Modesto, in Salinas, in Fresno, in Bakersfield, in the Imperial Valley and in many of the great cities of California, those communities will be dominated by farm workers and not by growers, by the children and grandchildren of farm workers and not by the children and grandchildren of growers.

…

Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards, which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians will do the right thing for our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism. That day may not come this year. That day may not come during this decade, but it will come someday. And when that day comes, we shall see the fulfillment of that passage from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament: “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.” And on that day, our nation shall fulfill its creed, and that fulfillment shall enrich us all. Thank you very much.

It’s a little eerie how closely it mirrors MLK’s famous last speech in Memphis, but with a stronger nod to the virtues of bare-knucked, union-style politics than King’s offer of divine revelation. What do you think of the comparison?

If you checked out the front page of latimes.com today, you found an investigative story about the low wages paid to some of LA’s carwasheros, which, for those blog readers who don’t do Spanish, is roughly translated to “a dude or dudette who works at the car wash.”

There’s a certain “no duh” element to the story. I doubt many people are surprised to learn that SoCal carwashes offer low wage jobs to Spanish speakers who may or may not be, to indulge in the parlance of our times, “documented.” But it might still be a bit surprising to learn just how little many workers claim to be paid, regardless of where you stand on the immigration thing.

From Santa Monica to Westwood to Koreatown, many workers said they received only tips for some or all of their shifts. Labor division inspectors estimated that about 10% to 20% of car dryers are not paid by owners.”

Tips only” is a requirement for some new workers until owners are satisfied that they can properly dry a car, laborers said.

But, issues of newsworthiness and government regulation aside, the Times story is interesting to me for a different reason. Included in the online package that accompanies the paper’s effort is a Spanish language translation, also published on the Web site’s front. Take a look.

Last month a Times blog posted a Spanish quote from the paper’s sister publication, Hoy, and took a little flack for it. So this certainly isn’t the first time across this particular ford in the stream.

But I wonder what the response will be like to this. Any thoughts? Is this the sort of thing a newspaper in a place like LA should be doing? If not, why not? And, if so, how can a Spanish language story here or there on a Web site that’s primarily English be effective and reach an Spanish speaking audience?

And I can’t read Spanish, so I’m unable to discern whether there are any significant differences between the two stories, but I’d be curious to hear comparisons from people who can.

So I’m out on a casual stroll in downtown LA the other night, and what do I bump into? If you guessed an illegal rock show put on by a group of chicks armed with fireworks and dressed in bikinis, you guessed right. Photos below the fold.

The crowd wandered over after a show at the nearby indie club, The Smell. The noise brought down an angry loft-dweller from the nearby Higgins Building, and eventually the LAPD officer pictured below, who advised the musicians to considering holding future events a few blocks further down, away from residential developments.

For their part, the band — who go by the name Josh Taylor’s Friends Forever — played dumb, telling the cops that they didn’t realize so many people lived downtown these days.

Here are some photos of my new apartment in Los Angeles. As you can see, it’s completely unfurnished. So if you happen to have any decorating expertise or — one better — free high-quality furniture, just drop me a note about when it’s convenient to be exploited.

So I’m looking for a new car out here in LA. To give you an idea of what I’m going through, consider the following Cars.com ad.

Yes, that’s right. The asking price for a 1992 five-speed hatchback Honda Civic with 278,942 miles is $5,800.