Posted on September 12th, 2018
In a recent conversation, SebastiƔn pointed out that there is a dearth of words to talk about cities. I gestured to a building while walking around the Fillmore and said "That's some nice urbanism!", and he grumbled that that's equivalent to pointing to a shop and saying "That's some nice economics!".
His point was that the word "urbanism" is overloaded, and he's right. We use it to describe everything in the lexical space: concrete physical...
Posted on September 3rd, 2018
This was originally published in Oct 2015.
It's a controversial question whether streetcar (also known as trams, trolleys) or bus rapid transit systems (BRT) are a better investment to solve cities' challenge of offering short-distance transit options. The two offer similar stop spacing, and both share the road with cars. However, they differ greatly in their cost structure, flexibility, and public image. Some notes on the subject...
The arg...
Posted on September 2nd, 2018
This was originally published in Nov 2015.
When I first stumbled across the streetcar vs bus rapid transit (BRT) debate, I was strongly biased towards streetcars. My opinion was largely shaped by the few weeks I spent in Berlin this past summer. While I was in Germany, I relied most heavily on Berlin's friendly yellow Metrotrams. I really only used the U-bahn and S-bahn when I had to make long, cross-city trips, where the travel time differen...
Posted on September 1st, 2018
Given how much time I spend producing text, I've spent shockingly little of it considering the tradeoffs of various modes to input it.
I had a vague sense that typing is faster than handwriting and that, despite this fact, I still prefer writing drafts by hand in my notebook. Recording audio notes while walking and using Otter's automatic voice-to-text transcription is fantastic for getting thoughts down in a steady flow, but the result is ne...
Posted on August 28th, 2018
When I started learning about thermodynamics, I was shocked to learn that the typical engine converts only about 35% of its energy into useful work. Just the theoretical maximum efficiency for a typical car is ~73%*āconverting all of its input heat into work would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time. And in practice engines operate at an actual efficie...
Posted on August 22nd, 2018
I gave in to my paranoid tendencies today and wrote a little backup script for Twitter, which I figured I'd share here.
Two requirements: github.com/sferik/t: A command-line power tool for Twittergithub.com/wireservice/csvkit: A suite of utilities for converting to and working with CSV, the king of tabular file formats
To install these from the terminal:
Here's the script to do the backup itself (which I plan to run ~1/mo):
For some rea...
Posted on August 5th, 2018
Sergey Zavadski emailed me today asking for advice on how to start writing, and I figured I'd share my response here and open an invitation for suggestions from others!
The biggest advice I'll give is to find ways to hold back from self-censoring. There are three key tools I use to do this myself, though there are probably other clever ways I haven't considered.
One is called The Most Dangerous Writing App, which deletes your writing if you ...
Posted on August 2nd, 2018
I spent Friday, 9 March 2018 in Bangalore, India, the last of the cities I visited that week. Of the five, Bangalore was the one that pleasantly surprised me the most. I had never been to India before, and I prepared myself for an underdeveloped, hectic urban experience. Its infrastructure was substandard, and it was not a sparkling metropolis like Singapore or a viscerally ambitious culture like Beijing, but it had a dynamism and cosmopolitan...
Posted on July 24th, 2018
A common argument against spaced repetition goes something like this:
If an idea or fact is useful enough to memorize, your brain will retain it anyway. If it's important, it'll just stick, because you'll use it enough times.There's some validity to this. If you find it is really difficult to remember something, you may want to examine whether it's really worth expending that memorization effort. Maybe you just don't need to know it that badly...
Posted on July 15th, 2018
Epistemic status: Pretty sure of the structure of the argument (~80%), not so sure of the valence of the coefficients (~60% that agglomeration does not overwhelm the supply-demand effect).
Epistemic effort: Medium effort. This idea has bounced around my head for almost a year, and over that time I spoke with several friends about it. Then, I had a long conversation in which I formalized it a bit more, at which point I decided to write it down....
Posted on July 11th, 2018
Zoning, occupational licensing, and immigration are all the same problem, just in different forms. They all reduce individuals' ability to move to the places with the greatest opportunity, and a few concentrated interests are overrepresented, trouncing the broader social interest.
In the case of zoning, NIMBYs constrain the potential of a neighborhood or region for the sake of their own stability, comfort, and home values. Future residents are...
Posted on June 3rd, 2018
Epistemic status: High confidence about the pros/cons discussed regarding my own experience, fairly low confidence about the parts I heard secondhand.
Epistemic effort: Low-to-medium effort. I realized these things were connected while I was in the shower last night, then I spent two hours stream-of-consciousness writing to get them onto the page. I then read it over once for minor editing and shared it with a friend to sanity check.
1.
"Bik...
Posted on May 31st, 2018
Today I learned of the existence of Copenhagen Suborbitals, the "world's only manned, amateur space program". From their website:
Since 2011, weāve built and flown 5 homebuilt rockets and space capsules from a ship in the Baltic Sea, and some day one of us will fly into space. Itās all crowdfunded and nonprofit, and has only come this far because people all over the world donate money that pay the materials, tools and rent. Our goal is simple:...
Posted on May 30th, 2018
I originally published these notes in April of last year in one of my old blogs.
These notes come from reading two blog posts from the wonderful Urban Kchoze blog:Urban kchoze: Japanese zoning (here is the annotated and cached copy)Urban kchoze: euclidian zoning (here is the annotated and cached copy)The Japanese system is inclusionary, as contrasted to the exclusionary system common here in the US. The typical zoning form in America is calle...
Posted on May 22nd, 2018
I originally published this in May of last year in Idea Collector, one of my old blogs.
Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience wandering Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo last May. I'd be curious to learn how it compares to objective measures, models, others' experience, and so on!
Epistemic effort: I noted my impressions in bullet-point form while wandering around the cities, then when I returned from the trip I spent ~1h ...
Posted on May 21st, 2018
I originally published this in May of last year in Idea Collector, one of my old blogs.
Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience wandering Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo last May. I'd be curious to learn how it compares to objective measures, models, others' experience, and so on!
Epistemic effort: I noted my impressions in bullet-point form while wandering around the cities, then when I returned from the trip I spent ~1h ...
Posted on May 21st, 2018
I spent Thursday, 8 March 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Of the cities I visited during this trip, Jakarta was the one I disliked most. I try to be as positive as possible on the internet (it's just too easy to be negative), but in this case it would be ingenious. The parts of Jakarta I explored were unpleasant and a bit depressing.
If Las Vegas and Mad Max had a baby...
The main thoroughfare felt more like a highway than a street. This combine...
Posted on May 16th, 2018
Epistemic status: This is a quick write up of my personal experience using Evernote as a PKB. The ideas/processes mentioned in here might work for others too, but I'm not prescribing them! There may be something that would work even better for you, and perhaps for me for that matter. (If you have suggestions please do tell me š)
Epistemic effort: I wrote up an email response to Nick quickly, and then I went back through it once to make sure n...
Posted on May 7th, 2018
Cities are fractal. You can always go a layer deeper and thereās just as much complexity.
Following this principle, I sometimes think it might make sense to just stay in San Francisco my whole life and explore the infinite levels of that fractal. Itās cheaper than interstate or international travel anyway, and according to this framework you get the same amount of interestingness no matter how many levels deep you go.
The catch is that whe...
Posted on April 20th, 2018
A while back Daniel Frank emailed me about the essay I published about Singapore, and he was skeptical of the idea that the international community would act as a deterrent against authoritarianism in Singapore:First, I donāt think this applies to most countries (for example, look at the muted Western protest to changes in countries like Turkey and Poland).
Secondly, I specifically think doesnāt apply to Singapore. The two most influential n...
Posted on April 19th, 2018
Epistemic status: My personal impressions from wandering the city for a day. Very likely that I'm missing important nuance in lots of places. If you notice a gap, please let me know! I'm so curious to learn more about Singapore. This is more of a diary entry than a worldview. Not sure how to put a confidence interval on that. š
Epistemic effort: I jotted down notes throughout the day in the city and wrote up this post without lots of editing...
Posted on April 17th, 2018
California's housing crisis is not a new problem, but for the first time there's a proposal facing the state legislature that could make a dent: Senate Bill 827, known as SB 827. The bill would change zoning around transit to allow for mid-rise housing.
To get a sense of its potential, some friends and I created renderings to illustrate what the bill would make possible. Here's one of them:
You can find the rest of the renderings plus more...
Posted on April 1st, 2018
Effective software developers know how to manage their ignorance. Studying the inner workings of each dependency and every layer of your stack is a luxury you often can't afford, so it's important to know how and when to make leaps of faith.
More than any explicit technical knowledge, this intuition is perhaps the biggest thing that differentiates experienced programmers from inexperienced ones. When I first started coding, painful awareness ...
Posted on March 22nd, 2018
I spent Tuesday, 6 March 2018 in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. I like the cityās pre-war name better (not a political statementāI just think itās prettier āŗļø), so Iāll use that throughout the post. Most of the signs around town used "Saigon" rather than HCMC, and some of the locals I spoke to called it that too, so I think itās kosher.
As with Beijing, I was also excited for the food, to get a sense of daily life, and of course ...
Posted on March 17th, 2018
I spent Monday, 5 March 2018 in Beijing. The urbanist nerd inside of me was thrilled to see Chinaās capital. Iād read so much about its astounding growth and change in the past few decadeāfinally a chance to see it firsthand! I was also excited for the food, to get a sense of daily life, and of course to build my mental map of the city.
My key takeaway is that Beijing is an epicenter of cultural and technological change, but the experience ...