Daily Bread for 5.1.13

Good morning.

A new month begins with mostly sunny skies, a high of 81, and southwest winds at 5 to 10 mph. We’ll have 14h 6m of sunlight, 15h 8m of daylight, and a waning gibbous moon. There will be two minutes more light tomorrow.

Tonight at 5:30 and again at 6:30, in Hyland Hall Room 3101, there will be training sessions for business people on a Digital Mapping Project: the sessions will present tips on marketing a business in an environment of digital communication. For more information, see Wednesday, May 1st: The Digital Whitewater Mapping Project.

The Empire State Building from Paul Sellen on Vimeo.

It’s the anniversary of the Empire State Building’s dedication ceremony:

On this day in 1931, President Herbert Hoover officially dedicates New York City’s Empire State Building, pressing a button from the White House that turns on the building’s lights. Hoover’s gesture, of course, was symbolic; while the president remained in Washington, D.C., someone else flicked the switches in New York.

The idea for the Empire State Building is said to have been born of a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could erect the taller building. Chrysler had already begun work on the famous Chrysler Building, the gleaming 1,046-foot skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. Not to be bested, Raskob assembled a group of well-known investors, including former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. The group chose the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Associates to design the building. The Art-Deco plans, said to have been based in large part on the look of a pencil, were also builder-friendly: The entire building went up in just over a year, under budget (at $40 million) and well ahead of schedule. During certain periods of building, the frame grew an astonishing four-and-a-half stories a week.

At the time of its completion, the Empire State Building, at 102 stories and 1,250 feet high (1,454 feet to the top of the lightning rod), was the world’s tallest skyscraper. The Depression-era construction employed as many as 3,400 workers on any single day, most of whom received an excellent pay rate, especially given the economic conditions of the time. The new building imbued New York City with a deep sense of pride, desperately needed in the depths of the Great Depression, when many city residents were unemployed and prospects looked bleak. The grip of the Depression on New York’s economy was still evident a year later, however, when only 25 percent of the Empire State’s offices had been rented….

Google has a question about a mountain in Europe: “What mountain in Switzerland includes three types of glacial erosion, and resembles an ancient Egyptian structure with four specific sides?”