The 9/11 Memorial has taken about six years to complete. Construction has entailed pitched battles between competing interests and desires.

To understand more about the 9/11 Memorial, one may look to the person who designed it. Ten years ago, Michael Arad was a young, idealistic architect designing police stations for the New York Housing Authority — the kind of buildings that most people pass by and never really notice. But the World Trade Center terrorist attacks would soon stir a vision in Arad that will forever be part of America and its history.

The presentation of the victims’ names are cut into bronze panels that hang at the waterfall edges. The 9/11 Memorial Foundation worked with all of the victims’ families to place names in meaningful clusters or “adjacencies,” so that one victim’s name may be placed near a best friend who also perished, or neighbors who rode into work together every day are in close proximity.

“It’s hard to come to terms with something like close to 3,000 dead in an attack,” Arad says. “But when you hear a personal story, everyone can relate to that, to what it might be like to lose a family member, to lose a friend. I thought it was important to maintain that in the design, to find a way to amplify the nature of this collective loss through these stories of individual loss. That’s what the memorial is about, individual loss and a communal loss that we all experienced together.”

A relative of two Japanese quake survivors, who were rescued after nine days under the rubble, says he never gave up hope of finding them.

Newly discovered photos show the iconic Niagara Falls when it went completely dry in 1969.

And as it is today…

Paying for your subway ride may soon require just a wave of your iPhone rather than a swipe of a metro card.

Visa announced today initiatives in New York and California to create more convenient payment experiences for riders of mass transit. The company is aiming to integrate VisaNet, its electronic payment system, to let commuters avoid the hassle of digging through a wallet or pocket book for cash as the subway pulls away from the station.

The New York pilot program is more promising than L.A.’s, where the company is simply testing prepaid cards. Visa has worked with contactless solutions firm DeviceFidelity to bring this functionality to the iPhone. Using Visa’s payWave technology, smartphones with embedded chips are converted into payment devices that communicate securely with card readers at fare gates. Commuters will now only have to wave their iPhone or BlackBerry to gain access–no more fumbling for money or metro cards.

Currently, the pilot will be available on trains, buses, and at 28 subway stations in New York. Additionally, more than 10,000 cabs are already equipped with Visa payWave terminals, enabling passengers to pay with smartphones in taxis as well.

The BP Gulf Oil Disaster is just that. And the only clean up story circulating right now is the contract actor Kevin Costner has struck with BP. So if you are currently on the west coast of Florida and want to spend a sunny day on the beach, Think again! At least if you’re in Destin, FL, where thousands of tar balls washed up on the beach this week (see picture above) – yuck!

Destin Beach isn’t alone–GovMonitor says that 61 miles of Florida beaches are currently oiled. The website reports:

Tar balls, tar patties and mousse continue to be found on Panama City Beach, Destin, Ft Walton, Pensacola Beaches and throughout Northwest Florida, with the heaviest impacts reported between Escambia and Walton Counties.

Hong Kong drives on the left side of the road, mainland China on the right. So how do you prevent crashes when driving between them? Like this…

To quell confusion at the border and, more importantly, to keep cars from smashing into each other, the Dutch firm NL Architects proposed a brilliant, simple solution, the Flipper bridge.

It was one of the pledges of his electoral campaign, and now London Mayor Boris Johnson has made good on his promise to bring back the iconic London red double-decker bus. However, this is a cleaner, greener and cooler looking model. Today, the new design, complete with new-generation hybrid engine, was unveiled to the general public.

A 2010 Timelapse Showreel; Shot in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia; Host of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Shot in the days and weeks leading up to the games. This is very cool.

Cisco’s Wim Elfrink and developer Stan Gale plan to standardize many elements of New Songdo (see above) in other cities. Photograph by James Whitlow Delano

Ten years ago, Gale was a builder and flipper of office parks. Gale’s fate began to change in 2001 with a phone call from South Korea. The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer. The Vision: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea’s banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from SCRATCH a city the size of downtown Boston. New Songdo City won’t be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre “Central Park” modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan’s.