Sweding Tron

Great piece of lo-tech amateur animation - homage

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/trons-classic-l.html

Boomtown 2050

 

The Australian Bureau of Statistics projects that the current population of Perth, Western Australia (1,497,480 as at 2006) will double by 2050.  This not only means that 651,078 new homes will need to be built but also the entire infrastructure of the city will have to double.  What was built in 178 years will need to be reproduced in 43.  This is daunting, and yet no one is talking about it.  Everyone is too busy - the city is booming!

 

As part of an Australian Research Council Discovery grant regarding suburbia, ecology and design, Professor Richard Weller (Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Visual Arts, University Of Western Australia) is heading a team that is developing various growth scenarios for the city so that the public can have a more informed debate about the future of Perth.  They state "We are not making utopias; we are projecting a range of options that are all relatively feasible."

 

More information can be obtained from the following link:

 

 http://www.alva.uwa.edu.au/boomtown

 

 

FIDIMPLICITARY

I had to send this other word with examples of impugnment in it:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-fid1.htm

FIDIMPLICITARY /ˌfɪdimˈplɪcitəry/

Putting one's faith in someone else's views.

It rather looks like the sort of word somebody has forged in a fit of misplaced inventiveness. It was created by Sir Thomas Urquhart in 1652 in a book with a Greek title I won't try to reproduce but which has the subtitle The Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel. He took it from the church Latin fides implicita, implicit faith.

He used it as a scathing epithet for academic types, gown-men, who were very happy to believe the assertions of their predecessors and were prepared to take all things literally on trust and without examination. So far as anybody knows, Sir Thomas was the only person who ever used it. It did appear in an issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1817, but in a caricature of Sir Thomas that had him refer to "those shallow and fidimplicitary coxcombs, who fill our too credulous ears with their quisquiliary deblaterations".

Those are a nice pair of knock-down words, as Humpty Dumpty might have said to Alice. Quisquiliary is Urquhart's variation on quisquilian, meaning worthless or trivial; deblateration comes from the Latin deblaterare, to prate or blab out.

These old-timers certainly knew how to insult people. We've largely lost the art of elaborate epithetical impugnment, relying more on crude invective these days. Polysyllabic scurrility should be our watchword!

Urban Planning Scott Adams Style

See: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/02/ultimate-one-st.html

Someone asked about the ultimate city plan. I have that too, conceptually.

The biggest problem with any city is all the traffic. And much of that traffic can be avoided if the city is designed right. I imagine homes above ground, connected by a network of underground bike and robot paths.

The bike paths would allow weather-free, flat paths, and parking, from anywhere to anywhere in the city. No cars to contend with, and wide enough for senior citizens to putter around in their trikes while kids zip around in the fast lane.

The robots would be like larger versions of the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot, but designed to pick up and deliver merchandise and food from one place to another. Every home would have an elevator to the underground area where the robots would deliver goods and wait for you to unload.

Imagine ordering anything you want over the Internet, and your cell phone alerts you when the delivery robot is waiting beneath your house to be unloaded. It can wait all day, because there are plenty of robots to go around. The robots would have their own dedicated paths, separate from the bikes, and accessible only by service technicians.

Commuting would be unnecessary if your co-workers and most customers also lived in the city. Each home would be equipped with a home office (or two) that provides the ultimate telecommuter setup. Just insert your earpiece and have your avatars hold online virtual meetings. If you need to courier documents or prototypes, the underground robots do it in minutes.

Homes would be built in clusters around comprehensive health club facilities, like the one near me, www.ClubSports.com. It has everything from spa facilities to yoga to tennis to rock climbing to dancing. Membership would be included in city taxes, and would pay for itself in reduced healthcare.

When you needed to travel beyond your block, but within the city, taxis and public transit would do most of that job.

That’s the basic outline of the ultimate future city. It still needs work.

 

 

The professional urban planners amongst us might have a quiet chuckle to themselves, but it is an area that many people, from many walks of life (so to speak) are rather interested in - anything that they now perceive directly affects their amenity of life.

 

Remind me one day to post my extended ideas on urban planning (and comments on this post).

 

step over

longitudinal follow up date of several million people- happiness is U shaped- with the nadir at 50 - peaks at 17 and late 80s
it correlates inversely with self discovery, fundamental changes - and dreaming intensity -
and so -
we dream ...

Historical Social Networking

This whole Web2.0 social networking thing is quite interesting - I love getting invites from people on LinkedIn and on Facebook (the two main ones where invites come from). It has this interesting effect of not only connecting to people that you know now and people that you have known in the past, but also provides an element of an historical timeline for one's life, a sort of personal archeological dig. It is an important part of one's present and future to be informed of one's past - informed from a variety of aspects - facets which reflect different elements of one's psyche and behaviour.