September 2006 Archives

I've taken a series of walks through the Lainzer Tiergarten, a huge nature reserve in Vienna. I mainly did this to get some form of exercise and to get out of the apartment during the day. On most recent wandering, on September 14, I hiked up to the highest point of the reserve, Hubertuswarte, which is about 800 meters (2625 feet) above sea level. Back in the 1920s, the city decided to build a 50-meter (164 foot) observation tower on this peak.

It apparently was the ultimate place to take your sweetheart in Vienna for the next couple decades, since nearly all the carvings into the metal paneling are from the 1930s through 1960s. Seeing that you have to walk for over an hour to the nearest gate of the preserve, I suppose it's not the coolest place to go anymore. In any case, I took a lot of photos, since 60-year-old graffiti is hard to come by.

You can see the entire collection here.

Searching for a job, and being international relations major, I have not excluded the possibility of moving to New York City in the not-so-distant future. I've received some comments about New York City crime, which has led me to do a little bit of research. Here are some tables comparing crime in New York City to that of Syracuse, Rochester, Boston, and Washington, DC:

Then I decided to find some crime rate comparisons of countries worldwide. I didn't find too much, but I found this table comparing a few countries:

What's up with Sweden!? It's pretty unfathomable to me that I'm nearly twice as likely to get murdered in Sweden than in the United States! You can read the report regarding this table here.

It's been around 33 minutes since Facebook opened the floodgates to the 6 billion or so people who haven't been able to register under one or more of the s