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John Robert McGraham, a Los Angeles homeless man was killed last Thursday night by an attacker who lit him on fire. The murderer and accomplices remain unknown. The LA Times published this map. He had lived on a particular street in the Mid-Wilshire area for more than a decade. Members of his family, especially his sister, would visit him on occasion to check in on him and bring him batteries for his radio.

Los Angeles Statistics

Some interesting points of Los Angeles demography from the Southern California Institute for Future Initiatives researchers at SCI-Arc (Austin, Sasha, Bethsabee and Avani):

• Downtown Los Angeles has been home to the lowest median household incomes in the city and LA county since the 1950's. The contrast is significant - for example, in 2006 the county's median annual income was over $50,000; the city's median income was around $48,000; the median income for downtown was approximately $15,900.
• Los Angeles is a city of renters. Nearly 63% of the population rents an apartment. This does not include "condos."

Archipelago Colony

Here are results from another cellular automata model - a colony of ten agents operating under the same zone-building behavior set as earlier. The question here was whether the efforts of multiple agents would eventually sync to construct a unified zone. At around two days the colony seemed to reach a kind of plateau - building and dismantling at a similar rate.

The software model ran at 120 frames per second. This is the landscape at 30 seconds.











This is approximately two days later.
















And this is approximately two days further, or four days from the launch of the model.

Los Angeles Sigil #1

Speaking of geotagging and emanation, these messages were recently found nailed to an electrical pole in Echo Park. There seems to be an indicator for North, and possibly a message reading UR. I think the lower-right fragment is repeated, and the lower-left fragment is missing (from above view). The reverse faces seem to further reiterate UR by saying TOUR, MOORE, and DETOUR.

WASTE system? As I was showing these to Ed, my computer said SIGIL.

Modeling Exclusion Through Zone-building

In order to see emergent patterns resulting from zone-building over time, I built a synthetic bio-model in Processing. In the model, a single autonomous agent wanders randomly through a landscape of equally scattered white and black pixels. The white pixels are open space, the black are obstructions (designated to be waste in my system). When the agent encounters a black pixel, it picks it up and carries it. Encountering another black pixel signals the agent to drop its current load, turn away, and continue wandering.

The model runs at 30 frames per second and exports a still image at regular intervals.

This sample landscape was fairly extensive (at 720 x 480 dimensions) and ran for 12 hours. This is a still from tZero:















And, the same landscape 12 hours later, or frame 2,678,400:















This sample landscape was smaller (300 x 200), this is frame 3600 (two minutes):











And, 24 hours later:











Another 300 x 200 landscape, at 20 minutes:











And, 32 hours later:












These soft-synth bio-models are based on Mitchel Resnick's "termite" model (but authored in Processing, not OpenStarLogo).

Downtown Los Angeles Homeless Map

Cartifact has created an animated map showing densities of downtown Los Angeles homeless populations from raw data provided by the LAPD. These two visualizations show density interpolated as an approximate surface and in the form of a heat-map. The population changes are from November 2006 through June 2007. With these animations you can effectively see the flows and circulation of pockets of exclusion.

Thank you Avani for drawing my attention to this map.