PUBLIC MARKS with search equal

you said: “Especially given the by-now-clichéd recognition that we’ve decisively become an urban species”

It is indeed very interesting to think about urban systems design given there was a major move toward cities. That said I have the feeling that this move comes with, at least, three issues:

1. access to the “thought” urban environment,

2. the space left where 50% of the population is still living,

3. the space of this growth

There are many areas in the world where the growth of the cities is made by people without access or a limited access to the thought urban environment. Poor people living in slums or just in a space which is not part of the work of urban planner per say. In a recent exhibition about slums I went, it was very interesting to see that the organic structure of the slums was making possible for the individuals to create a rich and meaningful space, driving sometimes to less criminality than more traditional areas of the city. The slum is a forced collective creative space for survival.

The rest of the population, the 50% living in deserted areas are the forgotten of this story. It’s indeed more “fun”, interesting for researchers, sociologists to observe and think about the density in urban space (richness of interactions) more than the low level of activities in the “countryside”. Though there are equal challenges there in terms of design and space organization, access to services, etc.

Finally, is it really cities which are growing? What we call urban space often relates to the city center, but I have the feeling that the growth is happening in the in-between space (suburbs), which is again a complete disaster in terms of design, even more so in rich countries. The private space is becoming a space of non-creativity, dead areas of non activities. Someone, who wants to start a small business in between two buildings on the grass of a random suburb of a rich city, will not last for very long. Complete different dynamic than the slum where unregulated areas give the opportunity of creative solutions for surviving or living.

A couple of good things to remember here: #1 resolving 1 bottleneck can open another bottleneck that is much worse. #2 is to understand that not all API’s are created equal. Additionally the configuration and setup that works well on one system may not work well on another. Because of this people often leave lots of performance on the table. Don’t just trust that your current API or config is optimal, test and make sure it fits your application.

Even more likely, they were gawking at a very, very large scoreboard — the 160-foot-long, 1.2 million pound, Mitsubishi Diamond Vision true HD display, that is the centerpiece of Cowboys Stadium. This is a spectacular object, this scoreboard. It cost, by itself, twice as much to build as the previous Cowboys Stadium. It is maintained via a ten-level internal scaffolding system and its use requires the services of a full-time, highly trained operations team. Its display capacity is equal to 4,920 52-inch flat panel televisions, and it is illuminated by 30 million pulsing light bulbs. In short, it makes your typical Jumbotron look like a 13-inch TV/VCR.

Of course, this is causing some people to ask whether it was a good idea; all other things being equal, it’s better to maintain compatibility than to break it, and if the break doesn’t seem to offer anything really major or impressive over the previous compatible version, then it’s natural to ask what, exactly, made this necessary. Jens Afke has rather notably posted some thoughts along those lines, and this post is an attempt to respond and explain, as clearly as I can, why I think Python 3.0 is and will be a good thing even though it’ll create a staggering amount of work for me, my co-workers and my friends and colleagues (since I deal with two large Python 2.x codebases on a daily basis, the migration is not going to be simple or short for me).