Mining my thoughtspot... finding gold

Mainlining

2008-09-27T13:33:00.003+12:00

After a fleeting relationship with coffee, I've mostly given it up. For whatever reason, since moving to New Zealand I've gotten hooked on coffee. It's not that Missoula had bad coffee--quite the contrary. It's just that coffee is pretty much the only sort of casual social / business engagement that people do here.

I had grown to like my new persona as a coffee drinker. Despite lightening up my wallet considerably, it's not a bad drink. Unfortunately, coffee has really started to disagree with me. The brutal acidity and the diuretic effect of the coffee finally caused me to give it up.

To help cope with the coffee cravings I've taken back up with an old friend from my Missoula days: Yerba maté. Yerba maté is a relative of holly grown in South America. Dried, ground up, and steeped in hot water, yerba maté is strong stuff. My preferred method of brewing is to add some cold water to my Planetary Designs half-liter "desk press" mug add some boiling water and then add a generous quantity of yerba.

My preferred method is not, however, the traditional method. In Argentina they suck the tea through a slotted silver straw from a gourd. In solidarity with South Americans everywhere, I have purchased a gourd (the maté) and a bambilla (the straw). Following the proper methodology I have seasoned my gourd and consumed my first traditional yerba maté.

My first thought when I read how full you are supposed to pack your gourd was, "holy crap, I'm going to go broke buying maté for this thing." Then, after discovering that you are supposed to refill your gourd with water until the flavor is gone, I realized that my maté gourd is way too big. This is clearly a social gourd and not a solo model.

The effect of consuming maté in this concentration and quantity is that I can now fold space-time with my mind, much like the shipping guild in Dune.

McCain's brain fails mainly to locate Spain

2008-09-19T06:36:00.004+12:00

Sorry, it's election season--both here in NZ and in the US. This one was too good not to pass on to my throngs of adoring readers:

http://www.americablog.com/2008/09/english-version-now-available-mccain.html

Click the link for the English audio version of the interview. Priceless. Good to know McCain is willing to work with friendly governments in Latin America. But seriously though, what about Spain?

The Economist on Palin

2008-09-11T14:00:00.002+12:00

My friend and brilliant budding economist, Ben, recently pointed me to this article about Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin.

The Economist is hardly part of the "liberal media." If you know someone in danger of voting McCain / Palin this year, please point them to this article.

Here's hoping reason will prevail.

Why I use a Mac

2008-08-03T10:25:00.003+12:00

I'm a long-time *nix user. Back in the mid-nineties I blinged my fvwm (not fvwm2, you nancies) with the best of them. I rolled with the *BSD crowd for quite a while back then too. Back then, that's where the pipe-cutting mofos of computing hung out because that's where the action was.

Somewhere along the way, Linux stopped being the place cool stuff happened. On the server side, Solaris has been sexier for some time. On the desktop (where I spend most of my time) OS X seems to be the only place where innovation is occurring.

I think part of the reason the Mac is more appealing to me these days than Linux is that OS X has figured out how to create both a viable open source and a viable commercial software ecosystem.

Here's a graphic illustrating what I perceive to be Apple's platform advantage:

Red Cross: Bush administration committed war crimes.

2008-07-13T08:12:00.003+12:00

I ran into this video this morning. In it, the MSNBC commentator discusses a report made by the Red Cross wherein they unequivocally describe the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo as constituting war crimes.

Let's all take a moment of silence to remember what war crimes mean. Here is a nice bit of historical background on war crimes just in case anyone intends to make light of them.

Will any formal investigation ever be made? Most of the kiwis I meet cynically say they don't think so--just look at Henry Kissenger. If we all remember and we all demand it, it could happen.

The Red Cross says that the US has committed war crimes.

The Red Cross says that the US has committed war crimes.

The Red Cross says that the US has committed war crimes.

Today is a sad day

2008-07-10T12:14:00.001+12:00

There's not much more to say:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Terrorist-Surveillance.html

No iPhones for the wicked

2008-07-09T06:56:00.002+12:00

Apple's iPhone is one sexy bit of tech paraphernalia. Despite trying to ween myself off of a tech-obsessed lifestyle, I can't resist the iPhone. The thing is like a Newton but cooler!

Thanks to Vodafone New Zealand, I don't have to be strong. Err, that is they've given me sufficient economic incentive to resist the iPhone's charms.

Apple announced a global price point of $199USD. Vodafone liked that price point so much that they made the 8 GB iPhone $199NZD! The only catch is that you'll pay $250 per month. . . for 24 months for a paltry one gigabyte of data transfer.

No thanks, Vodafone! You found my price point and sailed right on by.

Tool blindness

2008-07-06T08:39:00.002+12:00

Sometimes when solving a problem, you start to develop an appreciation for your tools. You say to yourself, "My that's a lovely saw. If it weren't for that saw, I doubt I could be the carpenter I am today."

Other's aren't content to admire the saw, but instead give up carpentry entirely to pursue saw manufacturing.

But if you're Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, and if computers were saws, you'd write some holy commandments on how to build saws, use demagoguery against those who don't follow your commandments, and then issue slurs against charitable organizations started by unconverted saw makers.

Yes, the saw maker that Stallman is ripping on is Bill Gates. Now, I don't have a great appreciation of Microsoft. Microsoft's historic business practices were unethical. I don't even particularly feel that Bill Gates should be entitled to his vast fortunes given that they were, in part, ill-gotten.

I'll stop short of criticizing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, however. They are doing good work that surely even Stallman can respect. Unless, of course, he honestly believes that his tool is more important than the people that might someday live to use it because of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Roundabouts

2008-05-06T19:28:00.001+12:00

My friend and inspiration in planning, Bob Giordano, sent me an email the other day about the relative safety of roundabouts. At a dinner party the other day some friends were talking about how roundabouts compare to lighted intersections for safety.

These stats come from a traffic engineer in Melbourne. That's practically a hop skip and a jump from Auckland. Okay, so they don't exactly compare the same time periods, but the difference in numbers is striking...

Pedestrian accidents at ~2,500 signaled intersections in Melbourne between 2002 and 2006:

Fatal: 27

Serious injury requiring hospitalization: 614

Other medical: 701

Pedestrian accidents at > 4,000 roundabouts in Melbourne from 1996 to 2000:

Fatal: 0

Serious injury requiring hospitalization: 18

Other medical: 39

The lesson here? Roundabouts are cool .

Fun and games

2008-02-21T15:52:00.004+13:00

One of my favorite games from childhood, SimCity, has been released to the world and is being adapted specially to the OLPC under the name "Micropolis."

I couldn't be more excited. The build instructions looked a little gnarly to me, so I'll probably need to wait until my very own OLPC arrives from California to play with it. If it's still fun, I might have a go at building it up on the Mac so that others can play with it if they are so inclined.

The Micropolis people say that they're planning on eventually porting the whole shebang over to Python from TCL/TK (pronounced 'tickle-tea-kay' by those in the know). I'm a little disappointed that they didn't choose to refactor the app in Squeak. Oh well, Python will be good too. It'll be interesting to see how complex / simple the rulesets are that govern the function of cities.

Slogging

2008-02-19T08:32:00.007+13:00

It has been a while since I posted anything substantive here on the planning front. I stopped by the planning department at the university yesterday to see if I could take a graduate-level class or two this semester. It sounds like they may not be offering the class that I'd want to take until next term, but the head of the department kindly agreed to chat with me later this week about planning and the kinds of courses that I might take in the meantime at UoA.

I've been stuck for a while reading a topographical history of Boston. The early parts of the book are somewhat interesting in that the history of Boston goes right back to the beginning of US history. Unfortunately, I don't have much of the context for Boston. I've never been to Boston. And though Google's various tools--Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Street View--are really great, I think I probably don't have quite the appreciation for Boston that I might otherwise have. The MIT course's intent is to give MIT students something tangible to cling to after a dose of theory. Unfortunately, Boston is less tangible to me than the theory, and therefore is just a slog.

I think I'm going to return this book and move on to another book for the time being. Maybe if I can find a good topographical history of Auckland, I might have something more concrete to cling to.

I think I'm going to deviate from the MIT reading list a bit. I'm craving something a bit more contemporary. My recent malaise in finishing these books hasn't daunted my consumption of news aggregated by Planetizen. Still, the longer format of the book is nice. I'm thinking that the combination of 'contemporary' and 'book' will help me along.

Toward that, it's no secret that I'm not a big fan of suburbia. At its most fundamental level, it's simply not sustainable. Plus, I don't like it on an aesthetic level. I think it leaves people isolated, doesn't force people to have those daily interactions that, while they may be uncomfortable, are necessary for humans to remain humane. I think that suburbia breeds xenophobia right down to being afraid of the neighbors. Plus, I remember attending a planning conference in Missoula where they talked about how even a 10 minute daily commute by car can have profoundly negative psychological and health effects.

This is a silly and sad 'Dear Abby' that talks about being trapped in suburbia. My guess is that more and more people will be caught in this bind, and that the bind will become increasingly painful for people in the suburbs. I just had a geologist explain to me the other day why it is that we will never have more oil than we do now. With global food supplies in jeopardy, I think it's doubtful that biofuels will continue to enable suburban living (actually, it's much more likely that they would be an ecological disaster).

In line with my fascination and revulsion with suburbia, and my craving of something contemporary, I think my next book will be Mark Hinshaw's True Urbanism: Living in and near the center. The book talks about the growing trend of people moving back to the cities from the suburbs, and advocates for still more desuburbanization (do you like my new word?).

What's your walk score?

2008-02-08T14:37:00.000+13:00

I'm not sure that this is entirely the most accurate gage of walkability, but I like to see people thinking about these sorts of issues. Our walk score in Devonport is a 46, as compared to a walk score of 75 at our old apartment in Missoula. Come to think about it, that matches my perception of relative walkability pretty well.

What's your walk score?

Maybe you're better off being friends with my sister

2008-01-29T08:40:00.000+13:00

It's probably safer.

54%

The Image of the City

2008-01-27T16:41:00.000+13:00

Okay, it's taken me a bit of time to get the next review out. Between touring Waiheke Island last weekend, and increasing my daily reading of planning news, it has taken me nearly two weeks to chew through and digest Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City. This book is obviously regarded as one of the classics of planning, and so I tried to spend a little extra time with it. I probably should have spent more time with it, in fact, as I gather that this book has influenced at least a couple generations of planners in one way or another.

This book introduces the idea of "imageability" of a city. That is, some cities or some areas in a city have stronger identities than others. Lynch studied Boston, Jersey city, and Los Angeles surveying people about elements of the cities. Some areas were well known by residents and were described in great detail, other areas of each city dropped out of mind for the residents. Lynch proposed 5 components that contribute to imageability: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.

Boston was considered a highly imageable city with a number of boroughs having a strong visual identity.

Jersey City was said to be in a very imageable place, but that it lacked image. Interestingly, Lynch notes that people from Jersey City (Jersians? Jerseyites?) typically described areas by use or by street name, rather than than visual features.

LA was seen as sort of a mid-way between Jersey and Boston: not as imageable as Boston, but more so than Jersey City. Lynch notes the dominance of autos and the highway system in LA even in 1960. Lynch also mentions the flowers and vegetation, and calls them "the glory of many of the residential sections of the city." I wonder if that's the case now with the water shortages. I haven't spent any time in LA, but it seems that water use might preclude extensive gardens now? Or is that the problem?

Lynch noted that the joy of seeing a panorama of the city was common to all three, and asked if it would be possible to make panoramic views of the city more common. It seems like there might be some basic geometric limitations to this idea. Perhaps there are some heuristics that could be applied to identify areas that could potentially have a pleasant panoramic view.

Despite being published in 1960, this has given me something to think about in terms of the overall aesthetics of a city. A lot of the discussion in this book deals with large scale development of city image. I'm guessing that most city planners don't get to work on the ultra-high visibility elements of a city. Though the thought of radically shaping the image of a city is appealing ("Hey, you! Put a building there! Build that rail line! We need a park on that hillside stat!"), I think that urban planners probably don't get to dictate their artistic visions quite as painters do. Instead, I'd imagine that planning involves a lot of secondary or tertiary controls. Maybe you get to chisel the first grooves in a slab of sandstone, but the wind and the water are ultimately going to do the carving.

Lynch suggests some soft controls to achieve visual form in the city: zoning provisions, advisory review, persuasion of private design. I'm not comfortable with dictatorial controls, as fun as it would be to realize my own vision for a city.

Still, those strongly planned elements do exist. Reading this book, I am struck how "imageable" Auckland is. One Tree Hill, Auckland Domain and museum, the harbour bridge, Devonport's Mt. Victoria and North Head, the Sky Tower, etc. Part of my slowness in posting this was that I wanted to take some photos of the more distinctive parts of Auckland. That will have to wait for a future blog post.

Kung Fu: Worth a second watching

2008-01-27T10:03:00.000+13:00

It's not a moral choice that we don't own a television. Nor are we completely ignorant of the so-called moving pictures box. We have an iMac on which we watch videos and podcasts, and listen to radio programs like This American Life.

On a whim, last year we rented the first season of Kung Fu. I'm not sure I'd ever really given them a good watching, as I didn't really remember anything from them. Despite (maybe in part because of?) some bad dialog and predictable story lines, we had a blast watching these classics. In fact, we had such a good time watching them that I was unable to resist when I saw the second season on the sale rack outside the local CD & DVD store.

Here's what I like about Kung Fu:
- Kung Fu, though moralizing, is unflaggingly secular and is decidedly anti-superstition.
- Kung Fu is an interesting look back to the seventies--particularly how civil rights were much more at the fore of thinking.
- Caine doesn't live in suburban isolation! He goes where his sense of wonder takes him, and isn't afraid to talk to strangers.
- Caine doesn't judge people.
- Caine does not support capital punishment or victims' rights sentencing.
- Where else can you watch a Shaolin priest fight a ninja in the American Southwest, and then publicly denounce violence in all its forms?

Kung Fu is stunningly progressive in a lot of ways. Check it out, grasshopper!

Middle Eastern nation reduces dependency on domestic oil

2008-01-24T11:25:00.000+13:00

While I chew through The Image of the City, I've started searching out online communities where I can get some more contemporary exposure to the planning world. One such site is Planetizen. It's sort of like Slashdot for planning.

Anyway, I found this article today which talks about Qatar's plans to build a new 140km light rail system. Unless my friends at the CIA are mistaken, Qatar's primary economic resource is oil.

If a country like Qatar, which has plenty of oil, sees the benefit of light rail, why are libertarians using sketchy stats to smear light rail in Kansas?

The libertarians argue instead for increased bus service. The busses are supposedly cheaper, however, I'm skeptical that this is the direction cities should go. Busses ultimately compete on the same infrastructure as cars. Though busses have their place, I think there are certain types of commuting that are much better served by light rail and their relatively dedicated infrastructure.

Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places

2008-01-20T07:48:00.000+13:00

Next on my reading list was John Stilgoe's book Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. I enjoyed this book though it was probably less directly focussed on cities. In the vein of "hey, get out and look at the city" it was inspiring.

This wasn't the sort of book that lends itself well to enumeration of specific points. The author has an idealistic view of the world and is an advocate for touring around on a bike. Stilgoe divides the book into nine chapters, jam packed full of trivia loosely related to the chapter's title.

Did you know that, in the early twentieth century, men were advised to paint kitchens apple green to quiet an agitated wife? I'll be looking in old houses on the undersides of cabinets to check this one out. Did you also know that the US interstate highway system was a military building project designed to carry military hardware and also double as strategic landing strips in case of nuclear war? I didn't. I also found out that city mainstreets often lacked trees because insurance companies insisted that they were a fire hazard. Brick cities with fancy firefighting equipment were more likely to have tree-lined streets.

Though a bit romanticized in parts, this book was a really fun read and does succeed at tickling your appetite for exploration. I think this is one that I'll be likely to pick up again, particularly if I'm feeling down.

Looking at Cities

2008-01-19T21:00:00.000+13:00

It's been a busy week of reading. It took me longer than I wanted to finish this book, but the next book flew by. Alan B. Jacobs's 1985 tour through the streets of the Bay Area and Italy wasn't riveting, I have to confess. That's not to say there wasn't good information, and I think I get why MIT included an excerpt from it in their intro to planning course.

This book would be especially useful if you were interesting in getting into urban planning, but had never set foot outside to actually explore an urban area. I'm not simply being snarky here as I could imagine the occasional undergrad not having really explored an urban environment. Unfortunately, a lot of the observations were pretty obvious:

"Grates, grilles, alarm boxes, and home alert signs are age-old indicators of safety and crime issues as perceived by residents."

No shit?

Other parts were less obvious, but I can't say that anything in this book really shocked me. MIT's intent in the early readings of their introductory course is clearly to get planning students to look outside at their own cities (probably Boston for most students). That goal makes a lot of sense. Urban planners should be comfortable walking through urban environments. After all, walking through an area that ineffably gives a bad vibe is likely to invite planning policies that displace poor and minority communities. That would be bad.

All that said, I'm not really interested in reporting much of the detail of this book. In part because it was a bit lackluster compared to the previous book, and in part because I'm eager to write about the next book which was in the same vein, but much more fun and interesting for me.

Close-Up: How to Read the American City

2008-01-07T18:46:00.001+13:00

The first book on my reading list for the MIT Open Courseware's Intro to Urban Planning was Grady Clay's Close-Up: How to Read the American City. As the first reading assignment in an undergraduate introductory course, this book was a gentle introduction.

For me, this was an especially felicitous introduction given the author's background as a reporter / editor. Not only was Clay's direct journalistic writing style easy to follow, but it was good early assurance that an undergraduate education in journalism wasn't a bad choice for the budding urban planner.

Okay, my 'reviews' of these books are not going to be reviews in the traditional sense. I'm bound to make some value judgements and record some opinions about the content, but I'm also partly hoping to use these 'urban planning' tagged blog posts as a record for me. If this were a high-school book report, I'd fully expect to fail for perpetrating a plot synopsis.

This book was pretty much what the title says it is: an explanation of features of American cities. Why do many cities have slant street districts? When and why did strip development begin? What features (good and bad) are common to most or all cities? These are the questions that Clay answers.

Some things, the use of the term "indian paths" and his cute explanation of "Confravision" a "British Television version of the telephone conference call," were a tad anachronistic. Nevertheless, coming from IT, it struck me as refreshing that you could read a professional book from the dark days of the late seventies and still find much of it relevant. By contrast, I get a chuckle when I see Windows 98 manuals for sale in used book stores.

Fixes

The first bit of the book was titled "Fixes" and referred to perspective and background rather than "solutions." Here Clay cautions against maintaining an orthodox or static view of cities, but did cite some ways of discerning the way cities develop

His first "fix" talked about how aesthetics and common structural elements of European and American cities have informed the development of cities. European cities have been oriented to temples, arches, piazzas, palaces, cathedrals, and medieval requirements for defense. American cities have been oriented to (sometimes competing) grids, railroads, skyscrapers, etc.

Fix two was talked about taking "cross-sections" of a city. An example he chose was Patrick Geddes's "valley section" showing the production, transfer, and refinement of goods from hinterlands to city to port. Clay points out that the city is now a major source region. Cities aren't an aggregator for the hinterlands, they are their own. Now that more people are living in cities than in the country, it would appear that cities are even more in control now than before. This is illustrated by a good number of rural Montanans who make frequent journeys from rural areas to the big cities to stock up on urban goods at places like Costco.

Fix three talked about orientation to the urban center. Clay argues that centrality has waned with increased mobility. He's certainly right, but I wonder if things might be swinging back in the other direction. Maybe I'm imagining things, or maybe my own sense of aesthetics is tainting my view, but it feels to me like the American downtowns I've seen are seeing revival now? Maybe someone knowledgeable will read this and correct me. Or maybe one of the later texts will explain what the current national trends are. If peak oil turns out to be real, I'd guess that urban cores will become hot(ter).

Epitome Districts

"Epitome Districts" talked about microcosms within cities that typify the city or exemplify larger trends within the city. MIT's actual reading assignment was just for this section, so I decided to give this section a little extra attention as I was reading. For all I know, this reading assignment might have been given as an example of how not to read a city. Context is important. But I digress.

Epitome Districts starts with special ceremonial locations or "starts" as he calls them. Maybe it's marked by a small town monument if you are from the south. Maybe a larger monument will exist if you're up north (more money for the victors of the civil war). Clay claims that the central focus of the city in older grid layout cities is often the staircase at city hall.

Coincidentally, many a grid-layout city's beginnings orient the city grid to the natural topography of the land. Later planning oriented city grids to a north-south-east-west axis. That created interesting discontinuities such as the slant-street district in Missoula, or indeed, much of downtown. Other "breaks" as Clay calls them can be caused by hills, lakes, and other geographic features.

These breaks, Clay argues, are keen locations for development in many cases due to their often increased accessibility. The Kettlehouse's proximity to a "front" is all the proof I need. Broadway would be another good example of a developed front.

Another feature of some epitome districts are what Clay calls "venturi districts." Basically, the idea is that your political and business elite in a community transit along a predictable corridor. That seemed to be the case when I was at the Forest Service in MSO. I remember sitting at Sean Kelly's and mentioning to Gary the oddly Nazi-ish looking birds on one of the buildings we could see. A guy who was a city planner overheard me, stopped, and corrected me that it was, in fact, a thunderbird motif popular in, I think, the thirties. You had to be careful what you said when you were out to lunch. Oftentimes movers and shakers at the FS would be a table away from you.

Clay muses that venturi districts go through expansions and contractions. He didn't know what new fangled communications would do to these districts. They definitely still exist, I think, though Blackberries and the Internet seem to be nabbing their share of the action.

Next, Clay talks about Victor Gruen's approach to downtown revitalization. Basically, the idea is to wall off a portion of the central city 'aldt stat' style from cars. Pedestrian malls, cars parked on the periphery in garages, were part of Gruen's view for Ft. Worth, TX.

Finally, Clay talks about identities and epitome districts forms by razzle dazzle--adding an "e" to shoppes in Ye Olde Towne Centre, or bratwursting and lederhosening up a faux-German district. I gather that Clay is a little cynical about the ability of centrally-planned kitsch to produce an identity. I think what he's trying to get at, is that cities should be places of expression and creativity and will organically produce identity. Trying to superimpose identity rings false in most cases.

Fronts
The next section dealt with boundary zones. Clay uses the word "front" in both the military and the weather senses of the word. Several types of urban front are discussed along with their reasons for being.

Talking with my dad this morning via skype, we discussed the urban-rural continuum and how places like my dad's childhood home Huntley, Montana have gone from being rural communities with their own identities to slightly down-and-out bedroom communities for larger cities nearby. Roni's hometown of Three Forks is currently struggling to maintain its own identity other than as an inexpensive area for housing in the Bozeman area.

Clay also sites swarming as a type of front or a phenomenon of fronts. He argues that the ad-hoc temporary communities like Woodstock formed by young mobile people can provide insights to what the future of suburbia might hold. I think, however, that the current younger generation is more likely to swarm online than in the big blue room. The only swarming event I can really think of is burning man, and by all accounts that has gotten hugely commercial and has become extremely managed. Unless something changes soon, I declare dead swarming of the sort Clay talks about.

Interestingly, I think public opinion of the suburbia front is shifting somewhat from when Clay wrote his book. There are many reasons to buy a home in the 'burbs. You can buy a bigger, nicer, newer house further from town for one. But I don't think it has the same romantic appeal that it did in generations gone by. My friend Casey recently bought what looks to be a really nice home in the suburbs of Seattle. Casey has mentioned a number of benefits of buying where he did, but he also sees the downsides of the long commute and the Ned Flanders neighbors.

One of the more interesting parts of this section for me was the brief mention of natural and ecological fronts. I guess I'm a bit guilty of cerebrally thinking that nature is somehow separate from the city--even while I enjoy urban parks green space. But cities do have ecologies, and boundaries between urban biomes and more rural areas would, of course, have their own ecological traits. The first time I really got thinking about urban ecology was during my journalism studies when we were discussing Missoula's aging urban forest. I seem to recall that Missoula even had an urban forester.

Like most of the book didn't find any huge revelations in this section. Rather, "Fronts" succeeded by providing another framework with which to view phenomena that seem obvious.

Strips
This section started to give me that vaguely icky feeling about the prospect of planning. Strip development? Really? My own sense of aesthetics kind of reel at strips. I try to avoid them. They are largely devoid of character. The word strip conjures images of gas stations and dilapidated fast food joints for me. Clay seems to agree, and cites a precedent for this opinion among planners.

Nevertheless, Clay looks at strips, gives some background, and draws some conclusions. Clay explains that most strip development has its origins in the topology of the land. A road along a river is built and flooded, a second road is built, and in the final phases an interstate is built parallel to the other roads and further out. There are loads of towns that seem to simply be fueling stations for interstate travelers. These are the "blink and miss them" towns. When they grow up, they retain strip elements.

Rather than dwell too much on this section, I'll sum up the way Clay does. Strips persist because they offer convenience to automobile traffic. Reserve St., Missoula is a perfect example. Are strips tied to the automobile? What does public transit do to strips? If strips cannot be purged, can they be made accessible to non-motorized traffic?

Beats
"Beats" is Clay's somewhat old-school journalist way of referring to the regular movements of people. He assesses them by a number of characteristics including size, frequency, risk, etc. From what I remember of the city development conferences that I attended in Missoula courtesy of MIST, most trips are measured in vehicle miles traveled. Reducing this number for daily errands and commutes is a current goal for most cities, and rightly so.

As a side note, trip planning expertise a la AAA as mentioned in the book is all but dead for most people I think. Google maps and GPS navigation systems have made trip planning ludicrously simple. I've also read that UPS goes to great pains to eliminate as many left turns as possible from their routes, with an enormous savings in time and fuel. This is one area where information technology simply rocks.

There isn't much to say about this section. For the planner, predicting transit hotspots would be of keen interest. Again, this section seems obvious, but it would have been conspicuous had it been absent.

Stacks and Sinks
These two sections dealt with the industrial zones and social dead zones of cities. Simply put, stacks are piles of raw materials or waste product. Sinks are areas where Clay says the powerful stuff undesirable people and things. Both of these sections are rather short. I think they almost have to be in this book without getting into a deeper sociological discussion.

Many times, these areas are solidly blue-collar, and can be insular. Corporations generally don't like people rummaging around their garbage piles either. Clay says these areas are often typified by being difficult to get to from other parts of town. I've got my own feelings on the class component of these industrial areas, but I'm not sure of how or when to address development in them.

On the one hand, I don't like the idea that an area can be inescapable from an upward mobility standpoint. I also personally like pretty, picturesque parts of town more than these industrial areas. But if you simply go in and try to redevelop these areas to 'clean them up,' you can end up pricing out low-income residents. Ideologically, I like what I've read about Portland trying to redevelop to accommodate mixed incomes. Actually, I pretty strongly believe that society as a whole would be a lot healthier if our physical living proximity weren't so tied to our socioeconomic status.

Turf
This next short section toward the end of the book talks about how people mark out and defend territory as theirs. In his introduction to this section, Clay talks about a motel parking lot with "pubic hair greenery" to demarcate its borders. I love this imagery, and from the many nights I spent at city council meetings in Missoula, I know that public ordinances on private landscaping are a Big Deal.

In Missoula, it wasn't couched as beautification. It was about reducing the quantity of non-permeable surface in parking lots for environmental reasons. Reserve street had some pretty lame landscaping, but a trip to Billings Heights a few years ago demonstrated to me that Missoula was probably more aggressive in getting corporate landscaping concessions than other communities.

Of course individual homeowners demarcate their property in their own unique ways as well. In the older suburbs of Auckland, many people have beautiful stone walls or hedges. When I was a kid, we had some old telephone poles on their sides edging our front lawn to keep people from using our lawn to turn around at the end of our dead-end street. Other people such as Roni's grandparents use chain-link fence, garden gnomes, reflecting balls, and Disney-esque statues of fawns to mark out theirs. To each his own.

Vantages

Ever since North Americans got steam, oil, and then gasoline engines on their side, they have been over-running the landscape, filling it up with anything handy, putting boundaries to it, scattering it with themselves, their works, and tackle. By now, they are accustomed to using cities as devices for distributing surpluses of every sort, an adolescent spree stretched over generations, a way of life become an object of national idolatry. City and countryside alike have become mechanisms for living off capital while calling it income.

Clay predicts big changes--increased oil prices and greater dependence on the Middle East for it, expanded application of computers, environmental challenges, greater control of information by fewer people, etc. Of course these were exactly the things everyone was predicting back then.

As some of the biggest consumers of energy, I believe cities also have some of the best potential to benefit from the economies of scale. I have strong hopes that humanity will survive to reach the first rung on the Kardashev scale, but I think we have to proceed in that direction carefully. It would be a shame if we screwed ourselves over getting there. I think good cities are one good step toward that goal.

I probably won't write this much one every book I read, nor will I spend so much time philosophizing. I was inclined to write a bit more this go around simply because I'm just starting off. In the next year as I prepare for grad school, I hope to be able to look back and get an idea of my early impressions.

Planning to plan

2008-01-07T18:45:00.000+13:00

Some ideas take a long time to germinate and grow. Some of you may know that I've been harboring a creeping interest in urban planning / transit since my early college days in Missoula. You could even say that I had a childhood interest in city planning that dates back to SimCity.

Early on in university, when I was working for the computer helpdesk, I met Bob Giordano who heads theMissoula Institute for Sustainable Transportation. I helped out occasionally with MIST and FreeCycles (though not nearly as much as I should have in retrospect). Mostly from that involvement, and from my journalism courses at UM, I've developed strong feelings about such things as roundabouts, bike lanes, road diets, pedestrian malls, urban greenways, public transit, public policy, and city government.

Though working in IT has been a valuable experience, and has afforded us the opportunity to move across the globe, I can't suppress the nagging feeling that I'm abandoning my civic idealism. That and the diminishing allure of IT for me has me considering my next career move. Though I typically reserve the right to be fickle in such matters, I've decided to commit to going to grad school to become an urban planner, probably in the US, in less than two years.

By making some sort of public statement to friends, family, and strangers on the Internet, I'm trying to hold my own feet to the fire on this one. On those dark and rainy winter nights this next year, when I'm more inclined to surf reddit, chat online, or watch TV than read planning literature, I'll know I can't slack.

Toward these ends, I've started reading the books outlined in MIT's Open Courseware courses on urban planning. I've already finished the first book in just a few days. The architecture and planning library at the University of Auckland rocks, and I've already got the second book on my list. My review is forthcoming.

Don't sue or jail good samaritan security researchers

2007-11-12T11:10:00.000+13:00

Security, no matter how proactive we try to be, will always be reactive to a degree. Programmer writes software, someone discovers that it isn't quite safe, programmer fixes software. It's a game that plays out all the time.

From a company's perspective, there are a couple variations on this cat and mouse theme.

Good:

Programmer writes software

Good guy discovers a vulnerability and lets the company know

Company fixes vulnerability, possibly lets world know that disaster was averted

Bad:

Programmer writes software

Bad guy discovers a vulnerability and either a.) uses it for nefarious purposes or b.) tells the world about it.

Upon discovery, company looks bad in the press and scrambles around to fix problem and mitigate damage

Nobody wants bad publicity and so companies strongly prefer the "good" scenario. For the most part, security researchers are willing to play nicely with vendors to give them some breathing space to fix problems. Some security researchers, however, are more inclined to do full public disclosure early on.

Companies generally appreciate researchers who spot and report security vulnerabilities--they are, after all, preempting the potential bad guys. What companies don't like is when volunteer researchers start digging too deeply into networked systems. Past a certain threshold, certain types of research start looking less less like "help" and more like "attack."

Security researchers who find vulnerabilities via aggressive means may have good intentions, but can be impossible to differentiate from an attacker. Similarly, certain kinds of probing could potentially bring down systems. This has caused some companies to unfairly sue or prosecute legitimate vulnerability reporters. This causes a chilling effect, and makes us all less secure. Who wants to risk a lawsuit or jail time just to help out some random company when all you may get in return is the possibility of a citation in the public disclosure document? How do you know what a company views as appropriate and won't try to sue or jail you for?

Well, Paypal has adopted a new policy that outlines clearly what they view as acceptable disclosure. That part is pretty typical. However, Paypal has taken the extra (and I believe unique) step of pledging not to sue you or turn you over to law enforcement for reporting vulnerabilities to them--provided that you do so responsibly.

Quoth the Paypal:
To encourage responsible disclosure, we commit that – if we conclude that a disclosure respects and meets all the guidelines outlined below - we will not bring a private action or refer a matter for public inquiry.

Okay, disclosure time--I really like this policy because it recognizes the value that security reporting gives to companies. I also like it because my brother-in-law had a hefty part in creating this policy. I think it's definitely a step in the right direction.

This puts me in an odd position. Being that it's my brother-in-law, I'm pretty confident that the motivations behind this are genuine. I do, however, still have some reservations about this. Let me reprint that disclaimer again with my own emphasis:

To encourage responsible disclosure, we commit that – if we conclude that a disclosure respects and meets all the guidelines outlined below - we will not bring a private action or refer a matter for public inquiry.

In this case, there is still no 3rd party arbiter of what was an appropriate disclosure. Though I personally am utterly convinced that Paypal's heart is in the right place on this one, it probably wouldn't much influence my decision to disclose a vulnerability.

From my perspective, the problem is that I know of no established legal litmus test for what is prosecutable and what is not. Furthermore, I have very little faith in the justice system to understand the technical differences between genuinely helping out, and being a big bad hacker. This isn't Paypal's fault, it's just the way things are.

Still, Paypal deserves some serious credit here. They are, as far as I know, the first big company of its type to publicly recognize the value of this responsible disclosure by promising not to sue or call the cops. I sincerely hope that other companies will follow suit and lay out their standards for acceptable disclosure--and also pledge to be good guys. With enough consensus throughout the industry, I hope that robust legal protections will follow.

Open Letter to Ian Murdock & Sun Microsystems

2007-06-09T20:56:00.001+12:00

Dear Ian:

In your recent article "Where do I download OpenSolaris?" you solicited suggestions from the community on how Sun could make OpenSolaris a successful community project.

You are spot-on that OpenSolaris can and must be a viable alternative to Linux. To call people home to Sun, you need Linux brainshare, usershare, and buzzshare. I think you already know that you need to be a better Linux than Linux. In many ways (ZFS, DTrace, Zones, etc.) you already are better than Linux.

Please consider these, my humble suggestions for Solaris world domination. Also, though I'm pretty sure that Jonathan Schwartz is already a regular reader of my blog, feel free to circulate at Sun.

Sun already knows the first steps. It goes without saying that Sun needs to "Debianize" Solaris:
- Apt-get, dpkg, etc. In reality, the tech doesn't matter as much. You could "Susify" Solaris just as easily, but geeks seem to be more passionate about the superiority of Debian system management. Plus, that love fest with Ubuntu wasn't just a one night stand, was it?
- Aim for similar package coverage as Ubuntu. If you can apt-get it in Ubuntu, you should be able to apt-get it from Sun.
- Adopt GNU packages wherever there isn't overwhelming reason not to. Nobody wants the crusty old versions of things like sed, awk, grep, vi, etc. Dare to break script compatibility for the 5 users who don't install this stuff anyway.
- GPL Solaris. It seems superficial, but there is always going to be a contingent that will vociferously take potshots at Solaris for not being "Libre." If you can do it with Java, you can do it here.
- Drivers.

In short, Sun needs to appeal to the whole range of Linux users. Do all that, and you very well may become popular by Linux distribution standards. With a better integrated, more popular, and commercially supported back-end architecture, you might even be able to steal back some of those who have left Unix for Windows / IIS / .Net. Ultimately, it's still going to be a pretty crowded pond you'll be swimming in. What Sun wants and needs, I believe, is a mass exodus of Linux users.

Sadly, I fear Solaris is going to need to elevate its cool factor beyond ZFS, Zones, and DTrace to hook the proto-geeks who are tomorrow's sysadmins and purchasing managers. Sun is going to need to do something radical, visionary, and perhaps a little crazy to build its numbers. Oddly enough, I believe Sun already has the cards to make such a play.

Sun still has rights to a bunch of OpenStep technology. Sun should use it to build an open source Cocoa for Solaris. Furthermore, Sun should build it on Java. Specifically, Sun should build an Objective-C to Java bytecode compiler, effectively replacing the Objective-C runtime. The new features of Objective-C 2.0 like garbage collection seem like they could potentially benefit from the years of optimization that have gone into supporting those features on the JVM.

Look, both Sun and Apple are fighting variations on the same two-front war. On the Microsoft side, both are ultimately going to end up battling C# / .Net. On the Unix front, both are fighting a war against Linux. As the suits would say, there have to be some synergies there.

The perception, right or wrong, in the programming world is that Java has lost its mojo. Part of that is the mistaken impression that Java is slow. Why is that? I suspect that comes from nearly everyone having a bad experience with a Swing or AWT app at some point. Also, somewhere along the line, the syntax of Java stopped looking cooler than C++, and started looking uglier than C#, Python, or Ruby. A speedy Cocoa implementation on the JVM would go a long way toward dispelling some of those myths and user experience problems. Don't like the look of ObjC-2 or Java? Okay. How does JRuby suit you?

If Sun can manage a reasonable degree of source compatibility with apps written for Apple's Cocoa, they will have saved the world, restored Java's mojo, and will have beat Linux to the desktop. How's that for a "fuck you" to IBM?

Solaris should, by rights, be the market-leading Unix. To build your user base, you're going to need to catch 'em young, and the young generally can't afford to play in data centers. You're going to have to find them where they play, on the desktop, and to do that you're going to have to aim higher than GTK/Gnome.

Update:
Alert reader and longtime NeXT aficionado, Gary Longsine points out that the new Leopard X from the WWDC 2007 banners looks like it has a sun shining from behind. What with the ZFS and DTrace love in Mac OS X 10.5, one has to wonder.

Gary also reminded me that Jonathan Schwartz used to own Lighthouse Design who did a lot of OpenStep development. Sun has lots of OpenStep code...

CIA kidnap victim speaks

2007-03-06T06:34:00.000+13:00

Was reading an article in the LA Times this morning about a German citizen who was abducted by the CIA from Europe, flown to Afghanistan, and was treated in the sort of depraved fashion that only the CIA does. Only problem, he didn't do anything.

He's not asking for financial compensation for the mess the CIA made of his life. He's not asking for damages. He's not asking for the US to release sensitive information that would aid any US-invented terrorist, real or fictitious. He just wants the US government to say, "Oops, yeah, that guy didn't do anything." He's in limbo now. The US doesn't deny that he didn't do anything. They just can't take it that extra step to actually exhonorate him. Why not? They can't admit a mistake.

Read about it here at the LA Times website.

Yeah, and it's pretty shameful that Germany has to prosecute Americans. Actually, it's shameful that Americans need prosecuting.

30 dead prostitutes, gnawed by wolves

2007-02-16T07:28:00.000+13:00

I tracked down an old friend from high school the other day. After going to college out of state and spending some time in China, he's now working toward a Master's in Journalism at my alma mater. It made me whistful--whistful for friends long lost, whistful for the pearl that is Missoula, and whistful for the career in journalism I've not had.

That whistfullness for journalism quickly fades. It's always one of two types of journalism that brings me down. In the first, Fox News or CNN-quality reporting tickles my gag reflex enough to turn me off. In the second, journalistic integrity isn't the problem; it's reality's well-known liberal bias regailing me with another genocide, scandal, or body count from Iraq. I don't have a strong stomach for such things. I had been feeling particularly whistful, and it took something so terribly of the latter category to bring me back down.

Today's news comes from the land of the "control shot". In a bizarre tail that was barely mentioned in Western or even Russian news: 30 Russian women were found, aged 13-26, in various states of decomposition having been variously consumed by local wildlife.

No, the wolves weren't responsible. Apparently some Russian gangsters from Nizhny Tagil had a racket going. You see, they'd go into town, sweet talk a young lady, take her back to their place, gang rape her, and then force her into a life of prostitution. Great business model, right? What could possibly go wrong? Well, for one thing, some of the courageous young women decided that they wouldn't be party to it. What's a mobster to do?

These mobsters apparently found a way to deal with the recalcitrant ones; they simply took them out in the woods and killed them. At first they were careful about disposing of the bodies, but, after a few years of nobody noticing they just started dumping them. According to The eXile, disappearances aren't really that uncommon in Nizhny Tagil. In 2 years there were 1,409 disappearances in the sleepy town of 400,000.

What does this have to do with my chosen profession? I have an immense amount of respect for journalists who bring us all manner of news from around the globe. They are performing an invaluable service for humanity. But, I'm having a hard enough time being a reader of the news these days. I can't quite bring myself to be the guy writing it just yet.

The God Delusion: Moving Beyond Disbelief

2007-01-29T09:07:00.000+13:00

I just finished reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Let me start by saying that I quite enjoyed the book. That said, I'm not sure I had the same reaction to it that most others would have.

Richard Dawkins's book could have easily been titled, "Well, That About Wraps It Up For God." Dawkins, in a few hundred pages, obliterates all of the major arguments for religion. All of his reasoning has been presented by others many times before. However, Dawkins either restates or quotes others as appropriate to make The God Delusion a one-stop-shop refutation of god and religion.

I suspect that, for those people just crawling out from under the smothering blanket of religion, Dawkins's book elicits euphoria. When the contradictions of religion are so plainly exposed, the conflicted proto-atheist's cognitive dissonance melts away.

I remember what this sense of liberation felt like when I first felt it, even though my early christian indoctrination was far from complete (a topic of a future post). I can only imagine the high that a reformed baptist must feel. I imagine it would be like a Quentin Tarantino-style happy ending to 1984:

O'Brian: "Until you accept that 2+2=5, there can be no hope for you, Winston. Tell me, what does two plus two equal?"

Winston: "Two plus two equals. . ."

Samuel L. Jackson: "Two plus two equals FOUR, motherfucker!" *pistol whips O'Brian*

Okay, so perhaps that's a not quite how a reformed baptist would feel. Sadly, a reformed baptist probably faces ostracism from the people he loves: family and former fellow church goers alike. But the fact that many people are willing to choose ostracism over continued cognitive dissonance should be an indicator that there is some benefit.

But I've been an atheist for a long time time. Its novelty has worn off. I don't get the high anymore. I don't define myself in terms of being "non-christian" any more than I define myself in terms of being "non-french-poodle." Not believing in god isn't something I think about. I just don't believe.

What Dawkins's book did for me was to remind me of my obligations:

1. I have an obligation to myself to defend my human freedoms from those who seek to legislate religion.

2. I have an obligation to support other non-believing individuals by publicly identifying myself as a kindred non-believer.

3. I have an obligation to society to actively oppose any dogmatic belief that threatens my society's survival, or which threatens the quality of life for members of my society.

Maybe someone can help me come up with a better list of non-believers' obligations?

Dawkins points out that theocracy is waxing in many parts of the world: including the US, UK, and pretty much all of the muslim world. This cannot be allowed to stand. He also points out that atheists aren't as small a group as many people think. We might just have a bit more political power if we were to stand up for ourselves.

I suspect that many longer-term atheists such as myself are largely complacent. Most of us just don't find religion, or those who would argue for it, very interesting or engaging. Some of us have probably been cowed by the social pressure that teaches us that religion should be inherently respected, even if we don't believe in it. So, we are content to say nothing, or allow the younger atheists to say it for us in ways that aren't always productive.

So, for those who know me, it's no shocker that I've been an atheist for a long time. For those who don't, let there be no doubt: I'm a rational atheist and intend to remain so until overwhelming scientific evidence says I should be otherwise.

I'm still working out how best to oppose the rising political theocracy in my nation of birth.