A quick guide to visiting Downtown Los Angeles

When friends have visited LA, I used to give them a list of pieces of advice. Since then I've shifted to stating that I would collate my advice-to-visitors into a blog post, and forward it to each new visitor. I have yet to do that. But since this coming week is the week of SIGGRAPH, and many people I know are likely to be, not only in LA, but in the one part of LA I know well enough to give advice about, I feel it is time to finally write this up.

One of the problems to giving visiting advice for LA is that the "city" is actually comprised of many different subcities, visitors will want to visit sites scattered among many of them, the realities of traffic mean that one should not plan to visit sites in two different sub-cities in the same day, and the only areas I'm sufficiently familiar with to give advice on are Downtown, East LA, the San Gabriel Valley, and Orange County. This completely omits Hollywood, Mid-City and the Venice / Santa Monica areas, all of which are places any tourist should visit. Luckily SIGGRAPH (held next week) takes place in Downtown LA, meaning that I have a whole raft of acquaintances who primarily care about downtown.

Transit If all of your LA destinations, other than the airport, are downtown, you can get by using public transit alone. General schedule and route information can be found at a variety of places, but the first thing you're going to want to do is to travel from your airport of choice to Downtown LA.

If you are flying into
1. LAX : You should take the LAX Flyaway bus to "LA Union Station" LAX flyaway bus
2. Ontaria Airport : Take a cab to the Rancho Cucamonga Metrolink Station. From there, take Metrolink to "LA Union Station"
3. Burbank Airport : I have no idea.

By car If you do choose to arrive by car (and brave parking and traffic), you will spend a good chunk of time stuck in traffic. My only advice to you is to reprogram your car radio such that one of the stations is FM 89.8 KCRW. LA has other radio stations as well, pick them according to your musical tastes. But prepare to be disappointed by those that purportedly play the genres of music you like (unless you are into hip-hop, which has historically been big here).

Getting around downtown If you're pressed for time, there is a nearly-constant swarm of Uber cars. I'm sure the same is true of Lyft. Downtown is the part of LA that is best-served by public transit. You'll probably want a TAP card if you're doing this. I personally prefer to explore downtown by bicycle, but locking up one's bike safely can be a bit of a nightmare.

Things to visit downtown. The following points of interest are worth stumbling into once or twice.

1. LA Union Station. I wouldn't go out of my way if you're going everywhere by car : but if your'e going by public transit, you'll probably end up here anyway. Take a look around. It is a beautiful building with fascinating crowds.
2. Grand Central Market : A variety of food and grocery stands embedded within a larger building downtown. Great for lunch. It has moved slightly beyond the "gentrification sweet spot" into the edge of "upscale banal", but still beats the convention center for lunch.
3. LA Centra Library : Kindof a nifty old building. Closer to the convention center than the other places I'm mentioning : http://www.lapl.org/branches/central-library.
4. Last bookstore LA : Don't pretend you don't have a use for a stack of used sci-fi novellas for your plane flight back to wherever you came from. http://lastbookstorela.com/

Where to eat. Lunch near the convention center is likely awful : but LA is emerging as a bit of a foodie city. Here are neighborhoods and destinations I can recommend.

1. Grand Central Market : Google maps says this is a 33 minute walk from the convention center. I'd advise using public transit instead, which Google tells me takes 15 minutes. I don't know what the intervening neighborhoods are like, as I rarely travel near the convention center.
2. Little Tokyo : If you're stuck at the convention center, it can be kinda tight to get here for lunch. But the ramen joints are well worth the effort, and it is an extremely compelling place to have dinner. I will not reveal my favorite ramen joint unless you are visiting me for dinner (partly because I only know its location, not its name), but my runner-ups include "daikokuya" and "shin-sen-gumi". Sushi is also available in this neighborhood.
3. Boyle Heights : Famous for Mexican food. Food destinations should be clustered around "Guisado's tacos", near the "Mariachi Plaza" stop on the LA Metro Gold Line. Parking is plentiful.
4. San Gabriel Valley : By public transit : The San Gabriel Valley is LA's suburban Chinese-American enclave, and arguably has some of the best Chinese food in North America. If you are going by transit, you probably want to take the 487 bus (or 489 bus) from LA Union Station to Del Mar and Marshall (or Del Mar and Valley). There are quite a few shopping plazas around there that are full of Chinese restaurants, very few of which are bad. I particularly recommend "Sam Woo". The third floor of the shopping plaza containing a "Daiso" store and a "Focus" store has an excellent dim sum restaurant (whose name keeps changing). Bear in mind that dim sum stops being served at the end of lunchtime. Those wishing for dim sum for dinner are likely out of luck. An alternative to the 487/489 is to take the LA Metro Silver Line express bus to El Monte Station, and then to take an Uber or a Lyft to your final food destination, which is an excellent way to reach Din Tai Fung. The area around El Monte station itself is not too interesting : it will take a car trip to get from there to where you want to eat. The 487/489, on the other hand, drops you immediately in the middle of a dense shopping-district full of restaurants.
5. San Gabriel Valley : By car : If you are going by car, different parts of the SGV open up. For instance, one of the best dim sum restaurants in the area, "Ocean Star Seafood" in Monterey Park, is difficult to reach by public transit, but is easily accessible by car. Parking nearby, while non-trivial, is free, and normally feasible.
6. Koreatown, mid-city, Hollywood, whatever -- I know there are good places to eat in these neighborhoods, but I don't know where they are. Sorry. The best I can do is advise you to look up whatever Jonathan Gold has had to say about these neighborhoods
7. LA's so-called "arts district" -- a better destination for drinks and entertainment than for food. If you're headed there and you know me, give me a call. Get there the same way you would get to "Little Tokyo". It has a sausage restaurant as well as vegan and vegetarian options.
8. Chinatown : If you have a car, don't bother. It'll probably be just as quick to hop on the 10 Fwy headed east, skirt around downtown, and wind up in Monterey Park, which has better food (take the Atlantic Blvd exit off the 10 and head south). Plus Monterey Park has parking! If you wind up here anyway, "Empress Pavilion" has decent dim sum, there is a Sam Woo, although I'd almost advise going to Olvera Street or Phillippe's instead.

Folding bicycles, wheel size, stability

One of the problems with public transportation in many American cities is the problem of how to get the last 2 miles from where your train / express bus / CalTrain stops to where you're actually trying to go (equivalently, how to get from your starting position to your train/bus stop). In some cities the solution is to take a different bus/train line and transfer : but in Los Angeles County and in Silicon Valley this is often untenable, and can turn a 20-minute ride on an express bus into a multi-hour transit saga.

A frequently proposed solution is to take one's bicycle on the train/bus. This works somewhat well for trains, but busses (I live close to an express bus line) in Los Angeles County tend to have only two slots on the front of the bus for carrying bicycles. If those are full when you catch the bus, you're out of luck. At certain times of day, even trains will restrict the number of full-sized bicycles that can be brought on board.

One way around this is to use a folding bicycle, such as the one pictured above. Conceptually it is great, and it makes a bike-and-bus commute feasible for me that would otherwise be difficult or unreliable. But it has issues.

On the one hand, it is difficult to fit under the seat. The Metro web page states Folding bikes with 20 inch or smaller wheels can be taken on board. Make sure your bike is folded and stored under a rear seat so as not to block aisles and doorways. . This is difficult and awkward. The size of the bicycle when folded (as can be seen from the pictures above) is dominated by the size of the wheels.

On the other hand, the stability of the bicycle (and its ability to handle rough terrain) affect its ability to go fast. Already riding my 20-inch-wheeled folding bike feels sluggish and unstable compared to my full-sized bicycle

So how might one try to go about making a folding bicycle more stable while reducing the size of its wheels? Here is a proposal.

For lateral stability it turns out there has been some interesting recent work on what makes bicycles stable. This video shows a small-wheeled bicycle that rides stably, without the help of trail or angular inertia. Further details on this work can be found. The authors even mention folding bicycles in their excellent TED talk.

For stability going over rough terrain, potholes and curbs : NASA has already faced the problem of making a lightweight vehicle that can be folded into a tight package and retain the ability to traverse large obstacles. Their solution for many of the Mars rovers was the rocker-bogie suspension system. It is not designed to go at high speeds, and may have neglected dynamic stability : but it may be a good start. Note that a "bicycle" designed with such a system might end up having far more than 2 wheels.

Neither of these, by itself, constitutes a "solution" to the problem of making a stable folding bicycle with small wheels capable of riding over rough terrain. But hopefully it provides a direction. And maybe it'll bring us one step closer to Richard Register's desire for cities built around transit and bicycles.

P.S. for graduate students, inventors and entrepreneurs in the United States it may not be completely implausible to get funding from DARPA to develop better folding bicycles

RSS / humans?

This is a post that I had meant to publish 2 or 3 years ago and had forgotten about. Having found it in my unpublished drafts, I decided that it was still interesting, even if the "demise of Google Reader" is no longer fresh news

The original post follows

There has been some noise, since the demise of Google Reader, about whether RSS is "dead." I think much of the discussion on the topic is somewhat missing the point : even if RSS feeds are not something that normal humans want to collect, curate, subscribe to, and aggregate, RSS is still a great interchange format for computer programs that collect, curate, subscribe to, aggregate, and repackage RSS feeds.

Case in point:

• http://alumni.soe.ucsc.edu/~mds/?Other=expand&blog=expand#blog
• http://mikeschuresko.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

A nice thing about using RSS for such a purpose is that the content emitters don't have to run the same software or the same systems or even be run by the same people as the computer program reading the RSS. Now, of course, not all content emitters want their content to be scraped, collected,curated and repackaged. But, for those that do, RSS (or Atom) provide ideal means of interchange. Note, also, that the example above is probably not anywhere near the most efficient or scalable way to repackage a feed from one source in order to re-display in another.

I believe that this is a corollary to the idea that Twitter is the ideal medium for machines to broadcast short updates to one another and to humans in a medium that is authenticated, but not private.

Homebrew solar battery charger

A neighbor of mine recently build a solar-powered battery charger out of a variety of parts, including an old computer monitor stand as the stand for the solar panel

He was particularly proud of his energy efficiency, his use of predominantly analog components, even for tasks that seem akin to "logic", and the various clever tricks he used to achieve zero quiescent current

He admitted that a more digital (and, particularly, microprocessor-based) design would have been easier and more flexible, but contended that the level of efficiency he achieved would have been impossible to reach with anything other than analog design

His device had a serious of modular adapters for different levels of power, including USB, Sony laptop, an extra laptop battery, and a household-voltage AC adapter (capable of running a fan

Unfortunately he didn't have circuit diagrams to share, having designed most of the thing primarily in his head, and directly in circuitry.