Multisensory Control of Hippocampal Spatiotemporal Selectivity

Not suprising that many senses assist in mapping. Smell can have strong,  long lasting location associations.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/05/01/science.1232655

The official last ride — A Funeral Car Named ‘Descanso,’ or, When Death Rode the Rails in America – Sarah Goodyear – The Atlantic Cities

http://m.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2013/05/funeral-car-named-descanso-or-when-death-rode-rails-america/5478/

I always enjoyed the many stair streets in Los Angeles and the many found traveling from Istanbul to Paris. Stairs and alleys creates great moments on serendipity. Spring in Our Steps | Enhancing community connections in Cincinnati, by reclaiming alleys, sidewalks, and steps for the pedestrian.

http://springinoursteps.com/

Urban Ecology

A frightening study on the melding of urban ecologies across the U.S. as told in the New York Times

Necropolis

Atlantic Citiespost on the looming burial crisis reminds me of Colma, the official Necropis of California. Have you noticed there are no grave yards in the City and County of San Francisco? As a development scheme the city moved all the (known) bodies to Colma. This is not as strange as it seems. In Los Angeles County there are a string of graveyards just east of the city, where people were reinterred to make more room for the living near downtown. I suspect many of the graves in Queens may contain people originally buried in Manhattan. As for the Atlantic Cities post, I like the cemetery in Hong Kong that bring the ashes to you.

Fabulous Maps

Hard to believe I lived a block away and never knew: old maps found in Mt. Washington home.

Not one but two variables

From Pacific Standard Time a reference to a 1909 Congressional report on the end of oil (by the 1930s) and a 1926 technology that allowed for increased production. The history of oil is the balance between the cost of recovery, demand, and technology that changes both the cost of recovery and the demand.