Chez Chesler

Not just another phrase for the Googlewhackers, this describes a phenomenon I've observed in how I navigate. I've been taking the bus to work. The bus stop is at the corner of State Street and Devonshire Street. Congress Street is one short block east of Devonshire Street. I find that in the mornings, I consistently head south on Devonshire Street, and go the two blocks to Milk Street where I turn left and go into the building where I work; in the evenings I consistently cross Milk Street and go a few yards east to Congress Street and walk north to State Street before going a block left to the bus stop. When I was working near the Cambridgeside Galleria, on both trips, garage to work and work to garage, I would walk along Land Boulevard first, and cross late, and this had little to do with traffic. At home I sometimes go out the kitchen door, but return through the front door. Normally I'm an inveterate optimizer, counting steps, counting average minutes from various optional exits, counting fares between a 10-ride bus pass, a monthly pass, or a weekly Combo+ plus the makeup rate. But when I'm walking I seem to come and go differently, following a path similar to a hysteresis curve. I wondered why I do this. My best guess is that when I get off the bus I want to head mostly south, so I take the street (Devonshire, not State) that is closest to the direction I wish to go; similarly when I leave the office I want to head mostly north, and Congress, not Milk, allows me to head in that direction. If I were carrying a GPS, or playing a video game, there might be an arrow pointing to my desired destination -- I'm just doing the best I can, in a greedy algorithm sense, to follow that arrow. Is this a known phenomenon in the study of human behavior?

An American dream denied - By Steve Bailey, Boston Globe Columnist, October 18, 2006

John Walsh thought he was living the American dream. Until, that is, he ran head-on into Jonathan Winthrop. The two men come from very different worlds -- and Jonathan Winthrop has every intention of keeping it that way.

Turns out that Winthrop (direct descendant of Governor John Winthrop) doesn't want to approve rags-to-riches Walsh, CEO of Elizabeth Grady, for the purchase of a unit in the co-op whose board he chairs. Walsh says Winthrop doesn't want him and his wife in the building because "we are not their kind of people", but admits the co-op board itself wants to buy the space. Winthrop may be being a jerk and a snob, but that's his right. Bailey quotes Walsh "What kind of example do I set if I walk away?" The example he sets is that he respects the rights of others. He should buy a Louisberg Square townhouse instead.

Yet another job switch (and a much better economy for programmers :-) ) has me working in downtown Boston for the first time (and the first time I've engineered in any city since my very first professional gig at 26 Broadway, over Bowling Green, during the year I took off from college switching from pre-med to anything else.) I've got a bus commute from the other side of the house next to mine to about 2 blocks from the office -- that's nice! I've long known that "once you leave New York it's all Connecticut" and "Boston is nice, if you like small towns" but I hadn't realized just how true it is. Here I am in Post Office Square, the heart of the downtown financial district, the closest Boston has to concrete canyons, with a mix of pre-war buildings (this section was rebuilt after the great fire of 1872, and has served finance since then) and modern skyscrapers, and I'm not impressed. The non-rectilinear streets (the theory is that Boston streets were laid out either by cows or taxi drivers) give it a smaller scale, but it simply _is_ small. All of Boston proper (excluding the assimilated towns like Charlestown and Dorchester) and most of Cambridge would fit in the area below 14th Street; all of the inner suburbs (the Route 128 belt) would fit in the area of the 5 boroughs. But a lot of it is the people, instead of the New York mix of serious business people, all sorts of cutting edge fashion and urban culture, and all sorts of crazy (from those who march to different drummers to the outright delusional) we've got suburbanites, tourists, students, and the rare homeless beggar. I could make myself at home in San Francisco. Chicago felt like home. There are some suburbs here (Medford) that feel a lot like the north central Bronx. But as the song says, "Massachusetts is a long cry from New York."