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Where New York City Begins

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One of my favorite ways to drive into New York is via Jerome Avenue in the Bronx.

01

As you head south from Yonkers, both sides of the road are overgrown with beautiful green foliage. To the west is Van Cordlant Park…

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…to the east, Woodlawn Cemetery.

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It’s so pretty, you might almost start to wonder if you’ve taken a wrong turn. I mean, The Bronx isn’t supposed to look like this…right?

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And yet, the road continues on, with lush trees completely surrounding you.

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One of my favorite bits along the drive is this one tree, whose branches create a canopy extending more than halfway over the street:

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And then, as Jerome Avenue starts to curve, you notice something up ahead…

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…the first signs of civilization…

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An elevated train station comes into view…

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And then, as abruptly as could be possible, New York City begins.

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After the jungles of Jerome Ave, passing underneath this train station is almost like going through a portal into another dimension.

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Immediately, all the hallmarks of New York suddenly appear: delis, pizza places, run down shops, and of course, the elevated tracks…

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Before long, auto repair shops start and brick office buildings begin springing up…

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…and within seconds, you’re in as archetypal a block as could be found in any of the five boroughs.

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I’ve never come across as defined an entrance to a city as Jerome Avenue (besides shorelines, of course). Most of the time, traveling from a city into the next town over is more like a gradual dissolve. The buildings get shorter, the roads thinner. Here, it’s like a doorway into New York.

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As I pass through, I always find myself glancing over my shoulder at the lush, green world I’m leaving behind.

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Then I head into the city.

-SCOUT

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jkap
4188 days ago
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Minneapolis
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joaozitopolo
4185 days ago
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excelent tour in the US
ashtonbt1
4187 days ago
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This is cool, I love city entrances like this. Being from Pittsburgh I enjoyed the Ft Pitt tunnel entrance, but this is such an immediate and surreal experience, I'll have to drive it myself one day.
satadru
4187 days ago
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This was my experience entering the city every morning on the bus my first year in the area.
New York, NY

Bowling Ball

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Bowling Ball

I've been told that if the Earth were shrunk down to the size of a bowling ball, it would be smoother than said bowling ball. My question is, what would a bowling ball look like if it were blown up to the size of the Earth?

—Seth C.

A good, professional-quality bowling ball is smoother than the Earth.

Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy, took a look at the claim that the Earth was smoother than a billiard ball. He concluded that the Earth was smoother but less round, based on published billiard ball roundness tolerances. However, he couldn’t find any information on the size and shape of a billiard ball’s pits and bumps.

Fortunately for us, there are people who digitally scan bowling ball surfaces.

These scans (along with various measurements of ball roughness[1]) tell us that a high-end bowling ball is quite smooth. If blown up to the scale of the Earth, the ridges and bumps[2] would be between 10 and 200 meters high, and the peaks would be between one and three kilometers apart:

By Earth standards, this is quite smooth; our highest mountains are 40 times higher.

What would this bowling ball world (we’ll call it “Lebowski”) be like?

For starters, bowling balls are a lot less dense than rock, so Lebowski’s surface gravity would be a quarter the strength of Earth’s:

It would also (at first) have no atmosphere.

The finger holes would be about a thousand kilometers across and a few thousand kilometers deep.

On Earth, holes this big would expose the molten interior. But Lebowski doesn’t have a molten interior.

The Earth’s core is hot for two reasons: It’s still glowing from the heat of all the dust collapsing together when it formed, and it’s full of radioactive metals. Lebowski wouldn’t have either of these, so its core would start out cold.

The holes would be far too big to hold themselves open against gravity; On that scale, the polymers in the bowling ball would behave more like a liquid. In the space of about half an hour, the holes would undergo a slow-motion collapse.

As they collapsed, the material around the holes would heat to a glow. At the center of the hole, a white-hot jet of charred hydrocarbons would fountain outward into space.

When it was over, Lebowski would be left with massive scars, each marking the location where an abyss collapsed to form a molten sea.

And now, thanks to this question, whenever I look at the Moon, I’ll notice the Sea of Tranquility, the Sea of Serenity, and the Sea of Crisis, and I’ll think: Finger holes.

But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

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jkap
4221 days ago
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Minneapolis
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dc3
4221 days ago
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Nice
Carlsbad, CA
Michdevilish
4221 days ago
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Holy Finger prints! :0
Canada
rclatterbuck
4221 days ago
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This is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.

Like gravity, material plasticity, and oh-my-god those gutterballs are huge!
MotherHydra
4221 days ago
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Another solid 'What If?' Complete with a Lebowski reference? Today was a good day.
Space City, USA
mikesena
4221 days ago
haha

Modder Runs SimCity Offline, Maxis Remains Silent

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Two days ago, RPS published an article in which a Maxis insider revealed to us that SimCity does not, in fact, require the servers to run its non-regional game. Maxis reps had repeatedly insisted to the press that the game had to be online as it ran local computations on their own servers – a feature our source told us doesn’t exist at all. Extraordinarily, we’ve still yet to receive a statement from Maxis on the matter. Nor indeed have any of the rest of the games media who contacted EA for comments at the time of our story.

And now, if any further proof were needed, a modder has hacked the game to run entirely offline, and even play outside of the game’s ridiculously small borders.

(more…)

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jkap
4289 days ago
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Minneapolis
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