Dad, urbanist, Kansas City Colonnade enthusiast
Kansas City
Joined December 2020
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Dion retweeted
I have a map for this! When this was destroyed it’s estimated that as many as ONE FIFTH of the migratory birds of North America were lost. It contained the largest lake in Indiana, Beaver Lake, which had the colorfully named Bogus Island in the middle of it, a notorious hideout for ne’er-do-wells and outlaws.
A stretch of river in Indiana once took roughly 250 miles to travel a distance you could now cover in 90. Crews cut through the bends and straightened it so the surrounding country would drain.
That country was the Grand Kankakee Marsh.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of wet prairie, shallow water, marsh and wooded swamp spread across northwestern Indiana into Illinois. Estimates of its full extent reach about a million acres. Much of the ground people now pass as ordinary farmland belonged to that wetland.
For Potawatomi communities, this was a homeland. Food, travel and daily life followed water routes through a landscape later described as needing improvement.
Then came drainage ditches, dredging and a shorter river. Water that had spread across the basin was given a faster way out. Land could be planted.
The straight channel is still there. So are surviving pieces of marsh, though you have to know what you’re looking at to imagine the country between them.
I’d like to see an Indiana highway sign that says what used to be under the corn.
That HPE ad is the most confusing I’ve ever seen. What are these dorky euros shilling and why are they doing it durning my NFL game
Dion retweeted
We can't brute force compute all possible moves in Go, a static game with a simple 19 x 19 grid, yet somehow people think we're going to simulate a dynamic system of trillions of cells each containing trillions of molecules.
If you had an exponential amount of compute you could solve simulate biology exactly and wouldn't need to run any experiments.
Some of you will think "of course, but that's an unrealistic assumption" and others will think "no, you need experiments even with that much compute. That's just How It's Done".
You would of course need evaluations once you have a solution, but you don't in principle need experiments to find it: Experiments are a way to save compute, dating from a time when it was much more expensive.
And I think the presentation is exponential but real systems aren't irreducibly exponential. AlphaFold worked, after all.
Dion retweeted
For some species, we have made some recovery!
Humpback whales, for example, have dramatically recovered.
There was a moment when Kirk was shot where you could feel things being to shift…but then Trump just completely missed his chance because he’s a huge narcissist who doesn’t really care about remaking the American system if it isn’t convenient for his personal interests
Dion retweeted
There used to be a show called Crossfire whose premise was to take two complete partisans, neither of whom cared at all about trying to get to the truth, and have them argue about politics. This show was terrible and Jon Stewart got it cancelled: youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5Yp…
At this time, the premise of the Daily Show was something like, "First, we will try to find things in politics that are genuinely funny. Second, we will expose obvious hypocrisy among public figures" -- and this was actually useful! -- it highlighted the foolishness of partisanship, and how dumb it was to platform people whose job was to repeat the party line in a totally unprincipled way.
I think a wrong turn was taken when the Daily Show and its descendants moved to a model which said, "We will try to make our audience more informed about politics."
While this is a very tempting idea, comedy writers themselves lack the epistemic community to arrive at the truth -- it's a very hard problem, and comedy writers might be better at this than partisans, but they're not good at this, and not clearly better than much maligned traditional news media. Even worse, combining information with jokes often means snark. Now you get John Oliver acting like his specific narrative about a complex issue is so obviously correct that the opposing view is laughable.
If there is a lesson, I think it is that comparative advantage is underrated. Comedy shows should try to be funny, news shows should try to inform, and everyone should try to make their audience bewildered by the complexity of the world and their inability to grasp most of what is going on, instead of deluding their audience into thinking it is simple.
Many people loudly proclaim pangram doesn’t work even though they know better because they’re ashamed they lean on AI tools in their writing out of laziness and are scared they’ll be exposed if pangram is widely adopted.
Some take this to the extreme, like this.
Put in my address and the first suggestion was Prospect Avenue lol
Forget 15 minute cities, here is everything that is on Wikipedia located within a 30 minute walk of where you are:
neil-scott.com/localwiki/
Surveys consistently find that, in the abstract, something like 40% of Americans prefer walkable urbanism and 60% prefer suburban sprawl.
Surprisingly, only a relatively small share of people have sorted themselves according to these preferences, in either direction.
I don’t think there’s much evidence this is true: “A city that's all far suburbs and no near suburbs when you get out of the city center is not well built and will have serious financial problems if it can't maintain continuous population growth”
When we talk about "suburbs," I think it's really important to distinguish between what I might call "near suburbs" and "far suburbs."
A "near suburb" is a neighborhood that is primarily residential and primarily single-family homes, but is on the urban street grid, has some multi-family and commercial property scattered around, may have some public transit, and depending on the metro area, may even be part of the city proper.
A "far suburb" is much more like what we think of as suburbs. Pretty much exclusively single-family homes, with any other land use segregated away. The roads are loops and cul de sacs. No transit at all. Likely either has its own city government or is just a bunch of unincorporated HOAs.
In my opinion, a good rule of thumb for how well a city is built is to look at the ratio of the near suburbs vs the far suburbs. A city with a lot of near suburbs is more vibrant and sustainable. A city that's all far suburbs and no near suburbs when you get out of the city center is not well built and will have serious financial problems if it can't maintain continuous population growth.
Not a lifestyle for me but I appreciate that they allow the working poor access to high opportunity school districts
