The newly launched Monocle Magazine, created by the founder of Wallpaper*, takes on urban villages. Very, very badly. I suppose I should’ve figured it out by the title of the piece, “Perfect High Street,” but talk of what constitutes a good urban village should be followed up by discussions of why certain cities do so well with their urban centres, and what pieces of the recipe they manage to get right. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Jane Jacobs, but I was under the impression you construct a “perfect” urban village by paying attention to stuff like pedestrian and traffic patterns, mixed-use zoning, where to put parkland and street furniture, and other considerations big and small.

I suppose the mix of businesses you’d want to attract plays a role as well, but to watch the video Monocle put together you’d think all you needed to put together a great urban village was a nice Australian bookshop, an Apple store, and a fancy Italian laundromat. The feature is, in essence, a giant advertisement for a bunch of boutiques around the world. Urban planning this ain’t, unless your urban plans look suspiciously like shopping mall directories. I’ve been told that there are other features about great cities in the issue, but as it’s all locked behind a pay wall and I don’t have a copy of the print magazine, it’s hard for me to say whether the rest of the magazine is as useless as this feature is.

Things I like: companies that make it easy for you to find print-quality product images to include in articles you’re writing for magazines. There are a lot of companies like this and they are a joy to deal with.

Things I don’t like: companies that make it difficult to find print-quality product images, or just plain don’t have them on their website. Bonus stupid points for not including PR contacts on your site, either.

Things I absolutely hate: companies that lock up their print-quality product images behind restricted media sites for Media Professionals only, and then reject you when you don’t fit their definition of Media Professional. What the hell else could I possibly be if I’m looking for access to your media site? What, you think I’m going to Photoshop penises and unicorns into your photos and get giant posters printed so I can distribute them across the city? Just how stupid do you have to be to turn away free PR, however limited, just because you don’t like the looks of the people that want to download your precious 300dpi images of portable electronics most people couldn’t give two shits about?

Hilariously, I just posted the image to a message board I’m on, but somehow I’ve managed to find myself on a Wired blog. I guess this means I should post the video at some point, eh?

P.S. BBC World is my new favourite channel.

The United States puts out as much greenhouse gas emissions as the UK, Brazil and China combined. That’s a pretty damning statistic in itself, and it’s something people should think about. But there’s also something Science magazine and the World Research Institute should think about: bad infographics.

Unfortunately, the Science article that contains this map is behind a pay wall, and the Climate Analysis Indicators Tool requires registration and possibly affiliation with an organization. In any case, very few people are going to take the extra steps to register and sift through the raw data to figure out what the map means. That’s the whole point of infographics like these—to distill mountains of data and highlight the main findings. The map is supposed to give you an idea of how the United States stacks up against other countries when it comes to emissions.

So tell me this: what fraction of the United States’ emissions does Brazil represent?

Not so easy to figure out, is it? Here’s some questions that pop into my mind when I see this. First, the map is split into states, and each nation’s footprint fits neatly inside state lines. Does that mean that Brazil’s emissions footprint is equal to exactly the emissions from the specific midwestern states it covers? Or is it equal to the fraction of the United States represented by the area those states cover? After all, the World Research Institute claims California is one of the top 30 emitters in the world, and it’s included in the UK’s footprint. Comparatively, the midwestern states probably produce fewer emissions (based solely on my assumption that population density is lower and thus emissions are lower—I may very well be wrong, but that’s somewhat besides the point). So, even though Brazil’s footprint appears larger on the map, is its emissions footprint perhaps smaller than that of the UK, whose footprint includes California? Who knows? The map gives you no way to tell.

That one issue makes the whole map harder to understand. When China is shown to take up more than half of the United States, does that actually mean China produces half the emissions of the United States? But China’s footprint includes all of the high-emission states except California, so does China actually produce substantially more? What about Canada, stuck in the dense northwestern states. How does its emissions footprint compare to, say, South Korea? Are they, in fact, roughly equal? Are they each only about a fifth of Brazil’s footprint? The map implies relationships that may or may not be there; it’s ambiguous, a very bad thing when you’re trying to clarify a complicated issue.

It’s nice to be able to slap together some fancy graphics in order to make a point, but this is one of those cases where a simple bar chart would’ve told you so much more about where each country stands compared to the States. All I get out of this graphic is the message that the States produces a lot of emissions—an important message, but blindingly obvious. Once you get past that revelation, the map gives you little idea of just how bad things are. Since that’s sort of the whole point of the map, it can be classified a failure.

“They told us they didn’t have good news,” said one man who was at the briefing. “Everybody is stunned and sick to our stomachs. We feel like we’ve been lied to, we’ve been lied to all along … This is probably the most horrible thing that’s ever happened to me in my lifetime.”

Late last evening, the story out of West Virginia was being described as a miracle: 12 workers trapped in Sago Mine survived 41 hours underground, despite high levels of carbom monoxide and the discovery of a body closer to the mine entrance. Early this morning, something unthinkable had happened to that story. A horrible mistake had been made: there weren’t 12 survivors, there were 12 dead.

People cling tightly to stories of hope. In the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center towers, rumours and wild stories surfaced about people who had survived against the odds. One such story that I’ve never forgotten involved a man who managed to walk away from the collapse of one of the towers by surfing on a wave of rubble as the tower came down. It’s the sort of story that, in earlier times, might have become a legend: an ordinary man performing an unthinkable feat in the face of overwhelming horror. It was also the sort of story that couldn’t possibly be true, except that it very well might have been.

But people also remember stories like this one, the exact opposite of the man who fell to earth and lived. It’s almost too perfect in its reversal of fortune, in the way it has stripped an entire community so thoroughly of the belief that they had been spared. Few stories have a final act so cruel and devastating as this, and Tallmansville is doubly stricken for it.