We'll check in at the polls to see how voters are voting this morning. Then, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have been flying all over the U.S. during their campaigns, what's the environmental impact of all that traveling? Plue, Pat Krug tells us about the world's rarest whale, we talk to urban planner Jeff Speck about his quest to create more walkable cities, Jens Lekman joins the show to talk about his new album, "I Know What Love Isn't," and much more.
Checking in on SoCal polling places
It's the day that we've all been waiting for, election day. We'll check in with KPCC's Corey Moore and Ruxandra Guidi who'll be on location at various Los Angeles-area polling places.
A look at the environmental impact of the US presidential election
Today, President Obama is back in Chicago and Mitt Romney is at a rally in Cleveland after voting this morning near his Boston-area home. Later today he will travel to Pittsburgh before flying back to Massachusetts.
As the two candidates made their final push for votes this week, they've been traveling a whole lot. Yesterday alone the two flew more than 5,000 miles while campaigning.
That's a lot of air miles. So it got us thinking about what's the environmental effect of all that travel?
KPCC's Molly Peterson has been looking into it.
Follow this link to find out your carbon footprint.
Nor'easter storm heading toward Sandy-ravaged East Coast
The East Coast is still trying to recover from the punch delivered by superstorm Sandy. 106 are dead and over 1.3 million homes and businesses are without power.
While voters are making their way to the polls, they'll also be bracing themselves for another storm that's on the way. The Nor'easter is moving up the coast from Florida and is expected to hit New York and New Jersey tomorrow afternoon.
Nor'easter storms are low-pressure systems similar to hurricanes, except they thrive on cold air. Specific to the East Coast, the storms are known to cause flooding, high winds and blizzard-like conditions depending on the time of year they hit.
Joining us now is Kerry Schwindenhammer, a meterologist with Accuweather.com.
World's rarest whale identified by New Zealand scientists
The rarest whale in the world, the spade toothed beaked whale, has never been seen alive. However, today in the science journal “Current Biology,” DNA test results are published that reveal two carcasses found in 2010 on a beach in New Zealand were the carcasses of this very whale.
Previous to this discovery, there had only been three times in the past 140 years that evidence of this whale’s existence had been found. All three of those findings were skull fragments. The first was found in 1872 in New Zealand, the second in the 1950s in New Zealand, and the third in 1986 on the Juan Fernandez Islands off the coast of Chile.
This latest discovery was in 2010 was on Opape Beach in New Zealand, where a conservation team mistakenly identified the beached 17-foot female body and the 11-foot male calf body as the more common gray’s beaked whale. The team took a sample of tissue and then buried the whales. It wasn’t until months later at the University of Auckland when DNA testing revealed that these carcasses were actually the rarest whale breed in the world, the spade toothed beaked whale.
Pat Krug, marine biologist at Cal State LA says that it, “Is difficult to know what you could attribute this stranding to, it is amazing that this species could go undetected by humans for centuries because of our history of whaling … no whalers ever caught this species. Its remains never turned up anywhere. It is very elusive.”
The elusive nature of this whale means that scientists know very little about it. Males have broad, blade-like tusks and both males and females have dolphin-like beaks. It is presumed that it eats squid, and can dive into the depths of the ocean for 87 minutes at a time. Krug says this is due to, “Incredible adaptations even down to the way the individual proteins fold.”
The skeletons of these whales could be used to discover even more about them, and finding out more about these whales will help uncover a few more of the many secrets of the ocean. The significance of this discovery, according to Krug, is that, “It highlights the fact that we really still don’t know anything about our oceans. You can imagine how many small mammals we might have missed if there are whole whales that we had never seen alive.”
Can a re-imagined and walkable downtown save America?
The traffic in L.A. is enough to drive anyone crazy. But if you're city planner Jeff Speck, it could inspire you to write a book.
He's a city planner who travels around the world looking for ways to unclog traffic and make cities more livable. His new book is called "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At A Time."
Interview Highlights:
Why do we need to be saved?
“I started out studying sprawl and the difference between sprawl and traditional neighborhoods and what life was like in those places, as a designer. I was surprised to find the groups that who got more attention and were more serious than designers were talking about the same thing. There are three main groups that have been stressing the value of cities over suburbanization. First is the doctors, the epidemiologists who in the 90’s figured out that sprawl is killing us in terms of what it was doing to our bodies, living in this environment where the automobile is a prosthetic device. The second is the environmentalists who now realize that for most of us who don’t own factories, the best way to stop contributing to global warming is to live in environments where we drive less, the third group led by Ed Glaeser, Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, and others, said that cities tend to be where the most inventiveness happens. Cities make us more productive”
You have travelled a lot in your studies, which city do you think is the best designed?
“The best cities for people and in some ways for living in with a car are those that were designed before the car… cars behave like water. The more space we give them the more space they take. Such as LA, they have been given a lot of room and they take up a lot of room. So my favorite cities are the ones that have plenty of cars in them, but cars that move slowly, like a Florence, Italy or a Boston, Massachusetts. There are a lot of small cities on the East coast, places designed before the car and have not been reamed out in order to speed the car.”
Are there places in Southern California that are fairly successful as “walkable” places?
“Santa Barbara is famous for being a place you can go to walk around. Interestingly LA is on “walk-score,” a website you can score your community, as one of the top ten neighborhoods in America list. There are tons of great neighborhoods in LA that are walkable, Santa Monica, Manhattan Beach, old town Pasadena. What isn’t so functional in LA is the way that they are connected together. The transit system that used to connect them together is dismantled. Living in LA and having friends all over LA means that you are in your car a lot.”
Can you talk about how old town Pasadena became successful?
“Old Pasadena is a fascinating experiment, Don Shoup, the world’s leading authority on parking at UCLA, studied old town Pasadena and Westwood, who back in the he 80’s were competing downtowns, they both decided they had a parking problem. Westwood responded by making parking free… and Pasadena responded by making parking a dollar an hour. The merchants didn’t want it at first, but they said look, we are going to take every dollar you spend on parking and put it towards improving the streets, planting trees, turning the alleys into beautiful pedestrian walkway system, and now as you know old town Pasadena eats Westwood’s lunch as a place you would want to be on a given afternoon, what sort of tax revenue comes out of it, and how the merchants are doing.”
What changes would you make to improve LA?
“Great thing about LA, the way we planners refer to it was say the ‘bones are good.’ It has a really nice street network, it has small blocks, blocks are essential. There was a study done that found if you double the block size you increase the fatality rate. The bones are good. The problem with LA is you essentially reamed out your streets. What were two or three or four lane streets with parallel parking and ample sidewalks and trees for pedestrians, in many cases those became four and five and six and eight lane streets, without moving the buildings or changing anything. So the basic framework is healthy. It is a matter of street by street determining where walkability is possible. There is no point trying to make the whole city walkable. There are certain parts which can be walkable which will attract people because of what is there, the uses and the pleasantness of the buildings, they have friendly faces and all the things that add up to people making the choice to walk because it is a pleasure. Those are the streets to fix, you have everything else but a good horizontal surface. And you fix the horizontal surface because that’s what a city can do.”
Is this an excessive cost in a state where money is at a premium?
“Most places I work do not rebuild the streets we simply restripe the street. When you restripe the “four-laner” into a “two-laner” downtown you can actually get rid of a lot of your signals. The best parts of many cities have four way stop signs at all the intersections. If you have ever been to Georgetown in Washington D.C. that’s essentially 100 blocks of four way stops and it’s a pleasure to walk around and a pleasure to drive around.”
What is your ideal city?
“The best places are places that have the quality that comes from many generations of people carrying for them. There isn’t a new city that has been built or I’ve worked on that I would rather be at than a place that has had 50, 100, 500 years of people being in it. The thing that distinguishes the current generation of planners, the new urbanists, is that we are not trying to reinvent the city, we are trying to recreate, we base it on all the qualities that make the cities we love great. We measure the streets, we count the trees, we see how tall the buildings are and how far apart they are and when we make new places we make them just like the best analogous places in the world.” You can read more about urban planning in Jeff Speck’s new book, "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At A Time.”
Excerpt of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step At A Time by Jeff Speck
Xbox's 'Halo 4' game hits shelves today
The fourth installment of Xbox's multibillion-dollar first-person shooter Halo video game franchise comes out today.
Since its 2001 launch, the Halo franchise has sold around 46-million games worldwide and has generated an estimated $3 billion. There are Halo toys, a web series, tournaments, books and more.
And some analysts expect Halo 4 to be one of the highest-selling video games of the holiday season. Here to talk about the game is Dan Ackerman, senior editor at CNET.
Stolen Mojave Cross found by the road in Half Moon Bay
The famous Mojave Cross returns! The 7-foot-tall metal monument, erected in 1934 had been destroyed and reconstructed over the years. But its legal battle before the U.S. Supreme Court is what really brought it to national attention.
Lower courts had ruled that its religious message violated the constitutional separation of church and state, but in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that it could remain.Two weeks later it vanished.
We speak to Rebecca Rosenblatt from the San Mateo Sheriff's Department.
China leaders prepare for secretive 18th Party Congress
No matter who wins the presidency here, he'll soon be dealing with new leaders in China.
The communist country will hold the 18th Party Congress on Thursday, a hugely important political event completely closed to the outside world.
This happens while the Chinese ruling elite is being rocked by so much scandal and corruption that even the normally secretive state apparatus can't keep the infighting out of public view.
How international voting methods differ from the US
Well it's not news to anyone that a Communist country like China has a very different electoral system from ours. But it's not just those big ideological differences that separate us, it's also the way we vote.
Around the world there is a huge diversity of voting practices, and here to give us a survey is Take Two producer Meghan McCarty.
1.Many countries use indelible ink, marking a voters finger in order to prevent voter fraud, so a voter can’t go in and vote again. Some of the countries that use this method include Afghanistan, Iraq, India, Egypt, Zimbabwe and Peru, among others.
2. The ballots for countries with low literacy rates are typically simpler, with just presidential or just legislative races. They use party symbols or colors, but many of these countries have multiple parties, making the symbols or colors very important.
3. Some countries don’t print ballots, such as Gambia. They issue marbles, which are issued to voters who then put their marble into a bin they want to select, behind a curtain. A bell sound goes off for one marble, so if there are two bell sounds, the administrator knows there was fraud.
4. Some countries still use separate voting places for men and women, such as Yemen, Chile, and in Puerto Rico.
5. In Bolivia, there is a ban on alcohol the day and night before of election.
6. In Australia, there is a small fine for not voting, in Bolivia if you don’t vote you could have trouble withdrawing money from your bank account, and in Belgium, not voting for four consecutive years could lose you the right to vote for the next 10 years.
7. The United States is actually unique in the fact that election day is a work day, most countries either vote on the weekend or get the day off.
'This Indian Country' spotlights the integral roles of Native Americans in history
The names D'arcy McNickle, William Potter Ross and Vine Deloria Junior might not mean much to you. They all played integral roles in the history of American Indians, yet we seldom hear about them.
We'll speak with University of Illinois Professor Frederick Hoxie, the author of the new book, "This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made."
Jens Lekman's tour for 'I Know What Love Isn't' hits LA on election day
If all this election business has got you feeling a bit wound up, you may want to unwind this evening at the Fonda Theater in Hollywood.
That's where sentimental Swedish crooner Musician Jens Lekman will take to the stage not long after the polls close. He'll likely be playing tracks from his newest album, "I Know What Love Isn't."
Lekman joins the show to talk about love, loss and why he likes to sing at 6 a.m.