NYNE Hundred Thousand
I keep having tabs open in my browers, on both my home and work computers, thinking I'll do something with them later -- and then "later" stretches on to days, weeks, maybe even months. At work, occasionally, it's with the idea that I'll mention it in a journal entry.
How about I get rid of one of them now? Long one to be interested in population statistics, this page about ten of America's fastest-shrinking cities truly fascinates me. They range in percentage decline from 46.1% (Dayton, Ohio, since its peak in 1960) to 62.7% (St. Louis, Missouri, since its peak in 1950 -- when its population was nearly the size of San Francisco today). You might expect that Detroit would be #1 on that list, but actually they came in at #1, with a 64.4% decline since its peak in 1950. That said, in hard numbers, Detroit's reduction over the next 60 years is the highest -- 1.1 million people have fled that city, as compared to 537,500 (about half the amount) fleeing St. Louis, which was much smaller to begin with. So by that measure, Detroit still wins by a long shot.
Bear in mind the "current" population figures on that page are based on the 2010 census. Current population estimate of Detroit is just under 673,000, which takes its number of people fleeing the city in the past nearly seven decades to right around 1.2 million.
Seattle, by pretty stark contrast, surpassed 700,000 for the first time ever in 2016. That's always been a little surreal to me, realizing that Seattle is now larger than Detroit, which was the fifth-largest city in the U.S. in 1950 (behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles) but today stands at #23 -- with Seattle having cracked the top 20 at #18.
Looking at the current list, I see that the country's top ten cities all have over a million people. That was not the case (albeit barely, only one city missing the mark) even at the 2010 census.
Another thing that fascinates me about U.S. cities: the disparity in population between just the #1 and #2 cities. L.A. has less than half the population of New York -- 3.9 million versus 8.5 million, respectively. Although the two cities are often grouped together as the U.S.'s "two massive cities," that's quite a contrast. Granted, when you compare metropolitan populations -- the only way to make worldwide comparisons due to different countries different uses of criteria for defining borders -- the disparity is still great, but not to quite as severe a degree: New York metro population 20.3 million versus L.A.'s 13.3 million. By that measure, New York is 1.5 times the size of L.A., as opposed to over twice the size, when comparing cities proper.
Seattle is, of course, just a fraction of the size of either city by either measure so not capable of any meaningful comparison. But okay, what the hell: with Seattle's metro population of 3.7 million -- slightly less than that of Los Angeles proper -- New York is five and a half times our size; Los Angeles three and a half times. That makes no difference to my own perception of Seattle as a major city, though, in spite of my extensive time spent in both New York and L.A. People used to think I'd come back and think Seattle seemed small, and that has never happened. It's all relative anyway, right? Seattle is by a significant margin the largest city in the entire Pacific Northwest, the biggest city within an 800-mile radius (the distance needed to hit San Francisco), and these are details that give Seattle greater significance than it would have at the same size in, say, the Northeast, or even the Midwest. We are "the gateway to Alaska," after all. Not only that, but we have a still-exploding skyline, one nearly rivaling that of L.A.'s in visual impact (although Vancouver, B.C., only 143 miles to the north, has us handily beat on that front: they rank #68 on Emporis.com's world skylines rankings, compared to L.A.'s #85 -- Seattle's no longer even in the top 100, although it used to be, and at the current rate may yet be again).
Well, anyway. I guess I've got all that out of my system for now -- for this week, I guess -- and I can close that browser tab.
Shobhit came home last night with an early birthday present for me -- a Bluetooth speaker with a list price of $99.99, on sale for $29.99 -- and that didn't even include his 15% employee discount (which is deeper for items not already on sale). That's quite the stunning deal, actually. He happened to see the ad and asked if I wanted him to get it, knowing my iPod Classic stopped working properly a couple of months ago in the base station I've had in the bathroom for years -- since he got me that for Christmas in 2007, all of one year after he got me my first iPod, in fact. This only just occurred to me: that means I had that working base station for fully ten years before it went tits up. That's a pretty good run, really.
The fact that this stereo Bluetooth speaker is submersible-waterproof is just an added bonus. I can't imagine when or where I'll need to listen to music or podcasts fully under water, but I can imagine using it, say, near water at a lake or swimming pool, and not having to worry at all about whether it got wet. That part's pretty cool. What I like most about it is it's stereo speakers and presumably we can take it on road trips, where the sound will be better than the single speaker still working in Shobhit's car. That's slightly iffy now that I've gotten it to work -- on full blast I'm not sure the volume will be able to compete with the noise of freeway driving the way the car stereo still can.
In any case, I had to charge it up first, and that took several hours. But I got up this morning and, after finally finding the set of instructions that were in English last night, it took very little to get it working. Charged up, I powered it on, found the Bluetooth signal on my iPhone, and in no time had WTF with Marc Maron pumping through it.
Theoretically I could have taken the thing in the shower with me, but I still haven't tried that. It's also very mobile, with its own hand strap I snapped onto it. It can much more easily be taken between the bathroom and the living room, say. Honestly this is one pretty key way I've moved into the current decade in a way countless other people did years ago; that base station has actually long been a bit of a relic. Hell, the iPod Classic is a relic; it's just still more useful as a portable collection of all my music can be until I upgrade my iPhone to one that has the same memory capacity. There's just no pressing need for that just yet since the iPhone 6s I currently have works fine for all my current needs. That said, so did that base station, while the rest of the world forged ahead of it. That alone was not any reason to replace it, until it actually stopped working. And that's basically what I'm waiting for with my phone. Or, I suppose, Shobhit's phone, which was the one I had before this -- his phone will likely fatally malfunction before mine does.
Anything else? I walked home from work yesterday, picked up dry cleaning, walked to the library to pick up a book so tiny (Steve Martin's 2012 collection of funny tweets) I'll have it done today. We made quesadillas for dinner, since I brought home sample tortillas and cheddar cheese yesterday. Shobhit was stuck on his news shows for a while so I went to the bedroom to watch an episode of HBO's Crashing, which I had spaced on for a few weeks. We then watched three episodes of Roseanne on Amazon Prime Video, wrapping up season five. Four seasons to go!
[posted 12:17 pm]