Language

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

 - George Carlin

Stupidity

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

 - George Carlin

Our species

If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

 - George Carlin

 

Colmar and Pithara - A Study in Difference and Sameness

You know, I was looking at the photo's of Colmar, the medieval town in Northern France (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=colmar,+france&ie=UTF8&ll=48.080679,7.359972&spn=2.429462,4.707642&z=8 - just south of Strasbourg and north of Basel) and I was immediately struck by how it would be to live there - what it would be like.

 

Firstly, because it appears to be so different from living in Perth - from an urban and suburban environment.

 

Secondly, by the beauty (old-worldly, etc, etc) of the buildings, and the way that they are all put together - cobble-stone streets and small shops, and three story height and nothing more - etc etc.

 

What is it like to live in a place where one has to participate in the place in a certain manner - walking and riding, rather than driving.  And arranging lifestyle in that manner.  A closer and more intimate way of living, rather than driving quickly from one place to another, parking, doing one's business, and then driving back again.  More connected to what is around one - rather than the inside of a car.

 

I was struck by this because of the recent move to inner city living rather than purely suburban living - with the consequent change in behavioural patterns relating to travel and transport and connection to the rest of the community.  This was a GOOD move - and I can see how it may relate to living in a place such as Colmar (although I am probably disregarding the downsides of living in a place like Colmar.  I live in an inner urban community, which is a quick train ride from the centre of the city and has the rest of a large city available to it in short distance.  Colmar seems to be smaller - but still appears to be a medieval village inside a larger residential area, and probably only less than 60km away from Basel - which is still within the suburban sprawl of Perth now.  Maybe it does not have as many facilities available as we have in this city.  Maybe it does within a reasonable driving distance - which would include a reasonable train distance as well.  And it does seem to have a massive forrest close to it - so maybe it has everything that anyone could want in living in a place!).

 

But the thing that I REALLY wanted to write about was the fact that medieval towns like Colmar have not only survived, but are vibrant and a part of the whole living in Europe experience - and are maintained as such, as part of the lifestyle of the place - rather than simply being pulled down and destroyed, or left to rot.

 

There are a whole range of similar towns etc in Germany which I have visited as well - they are more the norm rather than the exception.  They all have their own peculiar character which makes it a wonder to visit and enjoy.  I am sure that there is an element of appreciation by those of us who have never lived in such a situation, when we visit, that the locals do not understand or are aware of.

 

The houses, the streets, the idiosyncracies which make the place so interesting.

 

It struck me that we have little towns in WA that have a certain element of the same character.  They have their own ambience, their own idiosyncracies, which lend a unique style to the experience of being in that town.

 

Except that most of the towns like that in WA are really slowly deteriorating into a state of decrepitude.  There are some that are surviving, but losing their individual character as they move forward into survival - they are simply small versions of a larger urban and suburban sprawl (a la the American model).  The really little towns are struggling.  There is no real equivalent to Colmar (maybe there is, but surely not in the same manner or capability.  Maybe someone can advise me).

 

And, to me, that is a real loss - since the little WA towns have their own character, so different from elsewhere in the world, which provides a unique lens on the experience of human habitation - a uniqueness which offers something to the whole vitality of life on earth - which will gradually fade away (in a manner in which medieval towns in Europe have not really faded away).

 

A touch of sadness at this realisation - heightened by an awareness that there is little which can be done about the situation.

 

A minor example of such a situation would be Pithara, where I grew up.

This Picasa album - http://picasaweb.google.com/sutherlandswa/20071013Pithara - has some snapshots taken during its centenary celebrations on 13 October 2007 - note the huge difference in age between Pithara and Colmar.  It is highly likely that Pithara will never make it to a 200 year celebration, let alone to a 500 year celebration!  (Those very very attentive amongst you will notice that not every single photo in this album is of Pithara.  I leave it as an exercise for you to work out where the other location is!).

 

Is there any beauty in the snapshots of Pithara, its buildings and locations?

Cemeteries Of London - Coldplay

Cemeteries Of London

- Coldplay

At night they would go walking ‘till the breaking of the day,
The morning is for sleeping…
Through the dark streets they go searching to see God in their own way,
Save the nighttime for your weeping…
Your weeping…

Singing la lalalalala la lé…
And the night over London lay…

So we rode down to the river where the toiling ghosts spring,
For their curses to be broken…
We’d go underneath the arches where the witches are in the saying,
There are ghost towns in the ocean…
The ocean…

Singing la lalalalala la lé…
And the night over London lay…

God is in the houses and God is in my head… and all the cemeteries in London…
I see God come in my garden, but I don’t know what he said,
For my heart it wasn’t open…
Not open…

Singing la lalalalala la lé…
And the night over London lay…

Singing la lalalalala la lé…
There’s no light over London today…

---

http://www.metrolyrics.com/cemeteries-of-london-lyrics-coldplay.html

http://teanaelf.com/cemeteries-of-london-coldplay/

---

CHORDS & LYRICS

some lyrics may be incorrect
_________________________________
________________________________
_____________________________________



Verse 1:

----D--------------------Dm------
At night they would go walking til the

--C-------------Dm
breaking of the day

-----Dm
the morning is for sleeping

-------------D---------------------Dm
through the dark streets they go searching
--------C---------------Dm
to see god in their own way

------------Dm
save the nighttime for your weeping

------Dm
your weeping


Chorus:
___________________________________

--------Dm----------C------Dm
singing la la la la la la yeah

---------Bb--------Am-------Dm
And the night over London Lay



Verse 3:
____________________________________

------Dm-----------------F---------
So we rode down to the river where the
---Am------------Dm
toiling ghosts spring

-----------Dm-----------F--Am
For their curses to be broken

------Dm---------------F------
We go underneath the arches where
------Am--------------Dm
the witches are in, saying

-----------Dm------------------F--Am
There are ghost towns in the ocean

------Dm
the ocean


Chorus:
_____________________________________

---------Dm----------C------Dm
singing la la la la la la yeah

---------Bb--------Am------Dm
And the night over London lay

Verse 3:
______________________________________

Dm--------------F---------Am-----------Dm
God is in the houses and god is in my head

--------Dm-------------F----Am
All the cemeteries in London

---------Dm------------F-----------Am
I see god come in my garden but i don't

--------------Dm
know what he said

--------Dm-------------F--Am
For my heart it wasn't open

-----Dm
Not open


Chorus:
__________________________________________

--------Dm---------C-------Dm
singing la la la la la la yeah

---------Bb--------Am-------Dm
And the night over London Lay

--------Dm---------C-------Dm
singing la la la la la la yeah

------------Bb---------Am-----Dm
There's no light over London today

---

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

  - William Gibson

trying to delve through what is happening now to discern the bigger picture and longer term aspects of being amongst the happenings

We do seem to be living through a period of turbulence - I am sure of it.
The most interesting thing is that everyone goes about their daily lives, living as best they can, as if nothing will be that different tomorrow.
We probably all know that it is probably going to be different tomorrow, and maybe we think we should do something, except that the momentum of daily life means that one simply keeps going, and the directional changes are minute (yet felt over the long term).  Rather like the massive aircraft carrier or cruise ship.  Indeed, the prevailing metaphor for many people would be that we are on a massive cruise ship (the whole earth), cruising along in luxury, or at least, relative comfort, not quite knowing where the cruise ship is really going and not really having any control over where it goes - apart from where it theoretically has said it is going (when we signed up and paid our money).  Now, let's not try to push the metaphor too much, but ...

In some ways, it is a little like being human overall.  We all know we are going to die.  Some of us are confronted with it sooner rather than later.  But we continue to live our life as we have made it, or was we think we want it, rather than radically change everything, simply because death sits on our shoulder.  Maybe it is BECAUSE death sits on our shoulder that we continue to live our life as we want it, or as best we think we can.  We all know that death is certain and immutable - so, just live.

So, maybe, it is almost the same in relation to the mega-events of the world at the moment, a dispersed reflection of the micro-world of each individual.  Our own death far outweighs the imperative of any other "death" (of others, of the world as a whole), and any other "deaths" are reflective of our own death, thus, in the face of such a certainty, we live our lives as best we can and want.

Which is not to say that things don't change.
As I said, it is as best we can and want.
Sometimes as best we can is hard and horrid.
Hence some of the stories which people are now starting to recount - about how life is returning to a hard way - like it used to be before.
And hence, the fear that one has for one's loved ones.  How hard will it be for them?  What can one do to help them?
Who knows - sometimes lots, sometimes nothing - sometimes it is simply thinking of them and nothing more to be done.  Who knows.

Mind you, little things do happen - as you have said - and the evolution of humanity continues - as much as it ever has.
All the writing of all the doomsayers (or even people simply "reporting") tends to disregard the pure adaptability of humanity.  Why are there so many of us - because we can adapt relatively well - maybe better than anything else apart from certain bacteria and other such "creatures" (actually, lots of things - but they are all rather different from our mammalian structure).

So, lots of adaptations will lead to a new world - no doubt about that.

Jean-François Lyotard: Introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/pm/lyotard-introd.htm

Jean-François Lyotard: Introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

The object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies. I have decided to use the word postmodern to describe that condition. The word is in current use on the American continent among sociologists and critics; it designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts. The present study will place these transformations in the context of the crisis of narratives.

Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example, the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political end -- universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanarrative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge, questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is consigned to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.

Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements--narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the inter section of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.

Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology (such as structuralism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches-local determinism.

The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance -- efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear.

The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socioeconomic field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more (to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these inconsistencies, as did Marx.

Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchantment as it is to the blind positivist of delegitimation. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion is technological; it has no relevance for judging what is true or just. Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jurgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.

Here is the question: is a legitimation of the social bond, a just society, feasible in terms of a paradox analogous to that of scientific activity? What would such a paradox be?

The text that follows is an occasional one. It is a report on knowledge in the most highly developed societies and was presented to the Conseil des Universities of the government of Quebec at the request of its president. I would like to thank him for his kindness in allowing its publication.

It remains to be raid that the author of the report is a philosopher, not an expert. The latter knows what he knows and what he does not know: the former does not. One concludes, the other questions -two very different language games. I combine them here with the result that neither quite succeeds.

The philosopher at least can console himself with the thought that the formal and pragmatic analysis of certain philosophical and ethico-political discourses of legitimation, which underlies the report, will subsequently see the light of day. The report will have served to introduce that analysis from a somewhat sociologizing slant, one that truncates but at the same time situates it.

Such as it is, I dedicate this report to the Institut Polytechnique de Philosophie of the Universite de Paris VIII (Vincennes)--at this very postmodern moment that finds the University nearing what may be its end, while the Institute may just be beginning.

Also see http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/pm/

Poetry - I Am Sure

I am not going to make any comment, but ... ... ... read this stuff

Slow Wave - http://www.slowwave.com/index.php

I was pointed to this strip by Scott Adams - it is really weird (as he says - http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/slow_wave/) - sort of useless and innocuous when you first read it, but then strangely compelling when you read through a bunch of them at a time.  Fascinating having an insight into people's innermost cogitations - and a fascinating social meme to spread.

http://www.slowwave.com/index.php

See Around Corners

That is so much a wonderful difficult philosophical question - what happens if we walk right past the meaning of our life because we can't see it - for so many reasons? Do we ever really know what is the real meaning for us, ever, whenever anything may happen? Is it all just plain guess work, that whatever choice we make at any point in time can be completely invalidated by the next moment in time? Do we just keep going, on the obviously invalid assumption that what our life is to be and what we need in life is just around the corner, on the assumption that we pretend that we can see around corners?

This leads to both good and bad conclusions (of course, there are no such things as good or bad conclusions - only the perception and appreciation of conclusions from our own perspective). But, it certainly also just leads to life leading on to more life.

Risk? What Risk?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/science/29collider.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&hp

 

---

March 29, 2008

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

By DENNIS OVERBYE

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

 

Incompetence

Pretty interesting - and pretty much accords with my experience:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL

 

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.

Friendship

Old friends, we have sought out a place to meet,
Now we chat by the window until
The candles burn out.
Talking and laughing together,
Our faces are happy
And our hearts serene.
This friendship is as pure as water;
We jot down our poems
With strong brushwork.

- Monchu (1739-1829)