Paris, France

Paris, France Paris, France Paris, France
Photos of Paris, France.

March 31 – April 2, 2007

If I were to pick a city to move to in Europe, Paris would probably be at the top of the list. The city has the same exciting energy that New York has, but doesn’t feel like it would burn me out. The buildings and parks are gorgeous, the people watching is some of the best around, and the wine is cheaper than soft drinks. Food isn’t half assed. All meals seem to take at least two hours, which is both wonderful and frustrating (when you just want to eat and run – how very unFrench of me).

The city and Seine are built for walking around, the density is nicely mixed to keep it interesting. La Tour and Jardin des Tuileries were wonderful, and held up well. The city seemed to have the same fog/smog mixture as LA – it made for wonderful sunsets. Watching the moon rise over Les Invalides is an image that will stick with me for a long time.

If you are leaving the city by rental car, make sure you have rental car reservations before you get to the airport… more on that later.

Catacombs of Paris

Paris Catacombs Paris Catacombs Paris Catacombs
Photo album of the Catacombs of Paris

April 1, 2007

Ever since reading about the dark world beneath the city of lights in Infiltration some years ago, they have been digging away at the back of my head. The catacombs are a maze of 170 miles of Roman era tunnels – quarries, really – under one of the world’s most famous cities. Add in the bones of six million Parisians, war time occupation, artists, and illegal cinemas, and I fail to see how one cannot be fascinated.

On our trip to Paris, I knew the place I wanted to visit first. Much of the interesting bits of the system are blocked to casual visitors. You need to be ready for spelunking, avoiding getting lost in the labyrinth, and paying a fine if you get caught in the system. I wasn’t. So we did the next best thing, the walk through tour at Place Denfert-Rochereau.

The tour starts at an unassuming building where you pay your entrance fee and climb down about 100 stairs. After zipping your jacket up – it is about 14 C and wet – you walk a ways before you reach some museum style information signs on the people you are about to see. The path winds through a maze of stacked femur walls inlayed with skulls. These femur walls act as a dam wall to hold back an ocean of smaller bones. Most walls are about five feet high, with three to five feet of smaller bones piled behind them. Plaques and tablets state the year and cemetery where the bones are from. Occasionally they also dabble in the classification – good, bad, or innocent.

I walked slowly at first, soaking up all the details and straining my highschool french to decipher the old plaques. But after a kilometer of bones, one becomes a bit overwhelmed. Near the end, it was more of a stroll through a macabre park than a careful exploration. But our peek at the Paris underworld well worth it. One comes out feeling a bit more awed about the efforts that went into the city bellow ground, as well as above.

The UE folks would say we took the Disneyland tour of the Catacombs. I highly recommend checking out these other sources for a better look:

National Geographic Adventure’s Underground Paris
Guerillaphotography’s Les Catacombs
UrbanAdventure.org’s Paris Catacombs

Seadragon and Photosynth demo

I’ve linked to the Microsoft Photosynth project before, but this tech demo of Seadragon and Photosynth at TED is worth another link. As Blaise Aguera y Arcas says, they are creating a three dimensional world of hyperlinks between images using metadata and analysis of the photos themselves. The possibilities are really very cool.

Try it out yourself – they now have a Photosynth technology preview on the web.

The biggest gas producer

NPR has an interesting story about trying to find the biggest greenhouse gas producer in the US. Canada makes that easy, they have a reporting system. But there is no mandatory reporting system in the US. It seems a bit silly to say the US is serious about greenhouse gas reduction, when EPA doesn’t even know who is producing it. Clearly we need a reporting system.

While the story was good, I found the goal a bit flawed. Even if you do find the biggest producers, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are the ones that need the most attention. For example, the top producer in Canada is a coal fired power plant. Probably the same in the US. But that top spot doesn’t take into account how many people are being serviced by that power plant. If the plant is huge, and a lot of people get power from it, it is going to understandably go up on the big list. But it could be that the plant is also a model of efficiency compared to other plants, and the per capita generation is much better than other power generators.

While lowering of all emissions is the goal, what we really need is some sort of public and broad measurement of gas output per work unit. The efficient businesses should get credit, and the wasteful ones a healthy heaping of scrutiny or regulation.