Yesterday the massive new database The Encyclopedia of Life launched to great fanfare online. The site is an ongoing project to collect information on all 1.8 million species known to science. The project, funded by the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations, is expected to take 10 years to complete and cost more than $100 million. The project has been compared to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit. The EOL organization hopes for similar success for their site.

Unfortunately for interested surfers, the EOL site has been swamped with traffic and is currently running very slowly, if at all. When the buzz dies down, check out the tens of thousands of listings for plants; it is already very impressive.

A neat new website (which unfortunately is buckling under the weight of its newfound popularity; The Dirt had to visit several times before getting it to work) called Walk Score allows users to find out how walkable their community is based on an algorithm that calculates distances to walkable businesses, transit, and parks near an address. Walk Score provides a score of 0 to 100, with 90 and above being a "walker's paradise" and 25 and below being "driving only."

The Dirt was happy to see its own mass-transit and walking-friendly neighborhood scores an 81 on the Walk Score scale. How does your home rate? It's also nice to see that Walk Score is open about its current limitations: read "How It Doesn't Work" for more details, or if you don't like your score!

Metropolis, a cool publication that "examines contemporary life through design" (and that The Dirt looks forward to perusing each month), has recently announced the winner of its Next Generation design contest. The winning team, the San Francisco-based firm Civil Twilight, came up with a way for streetlights to dim and brighten at night as needed. The heart of the system is an ultra-sensitive photocell that measures ambient moonlight and light pollution levels. When one of these "lunar-resonant" streetlights needs to be on, it is, but when it's bright enough outside at night the light would dim or turn off completely.

The only question would be "When is 'bright enough' bright enough?" Public safety folks may think it is never a good idea to turn off a streetlight at night. Still, I bet there are LAs out there who would love to design a streetscape with such smart lighting. A full rundown of the winning team and the runners-up will appear in the May issue of Metropolis.

Deep in search engine Google's development labs is a new product that may help to spur more use of mass transit systems. The Google Transit Trip Planner works in the same way as the ubiquitous Google Maps; input your starting address, your ending address, and click, and walking directions to bus stops and subways stations will appear along with detailed information on which bus or route to take to reach your destination. The system also takes into account the time of day for scheduling and allows for advanced trip planning.

The system is still in beta (not that the term means much to Google!) with nine cities in seven states available, including places like Pittsburgh, Duluth, and Honolulu. It's unknown whether the more complex transit systems of New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle will be coming to Google, but knowing how Larry Page and Sergey Brin want to catalogue all the world's information, surely many more cities' transit systems can't be far behind.

Update 02/05/07: In the comments Dirt reader K. Notman points us to MBTA Boston's T system website that has its own trip planner, powered by (wait for it)...Google Maps! The GOOG is everywhere, people.

The New York Times has an interesting, and long, article on proxemics, the study of personal space. The Times notes that as population increases and cities become denser, proxemics is becoming more and more valuable to developers and urban planners who hope to understand how people move through public spaces. Researchers are also looking at how ingrained the need for personal space is in the public by studying video games like Second Life, which allows users to create avatars and live in an online community. According to a new study set to be published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior, avatars' need for personal space directly corresponds to that of their human counterparts.

During our fairly long commute into the city via various modes of public transportation, The Dirt can often be found huddled in a corner poring over back issues of The New Yorker, dog-earing pages, and circling paragraphs. One of our more recent finds actually relates to you. In an profile on video game designer Will Wright--the brains behind SimCity, TheSims, SimEarth, and the upcoming Spore--all of which generally allow players to create and manipulate computer-generated built and natural environments and the people who live in them--author John Seabrook claims that "A sizable number of [SimCity] players who first became interested in urban design have gone on to become architects and designers, making SimCity arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created."

Now that's a bold statement. The Dirt was fairly obsessed with SimCity in our early college days, before discovering other distractions, so maybe it was an influence. How about you? Any hardcore SimCity players out there? Anyone think the game can actually impart wisdom when it comes to urban design? (We do.) Anyone wondering what the heck we're talking about? Let us know in the comments section.

Getting an outside perspective on the built environment is always healthy, and I can think of nothing more outside than a novelist whose work BLDGBLOG describes as falling somewhere between "science fiction, urban surrealism, dark fantasy, magical realism, and even horror comedy." The author in question is Jeff Vandermeer, who has won a host of awards for his science fiction writing and has some fascinating thoughts on urban design and the future of the city. BLDGBLOG has an interview with Vandermeer that runs the gamut from security design in a post-9/11 world, to geological deposits, to the Prague cityscape. We here at The Dirt had never heard of Vandermeer until reading this interview, but we'll definitely be looking out for him on our next trip to the public library.