3 entries for Sunday, November 23, 2025

This effect makes the newsrack and the traffic light interactive; the newsrack, the newspapers on it, the money going from people's pockets to the dime slot, the people who stop at the light and read papers, the traffic light, the electric impulses which make the lights change, and the sidewalk which the people stand on form a system - they all work together.

the urban taxi can function only because pedestrians and vehicles are not strictly separated. The cruising taxi needs a fast stream of traffic so that it can cover a large area to be sure of finding a passenger. The pedestrian needs to be able to hail the taxi from any point in the pedestrian world, and to be able to get out to any part of the pedestrian world to which he wants to go. The system which contains the taxicabs needs to overlap both the fast vehicular traffic system and the system of pedestrian circulation.

The playground, asphalted and fenced in, is nothing but a pictorial acknowledgment of the fact that 'play' exists as an isolated concept in our minds. It has nothing to do with the life of play itself. Few self-respecting children will even play in a playground.

[In a natural city, play happens in a thousand places within the cracks of adult life. Children become full of their surroundings through play, unless they're in a fenced-off cage.]

[Putting a concert hall beside an opera house is almost never practical to either audience, and only a consequence of that simple-minded part of us which puts things with the same name in the same basket.]

[Theories describing leadership by 'the government' (rather than 'governments') expect it will rush to the rescue whenever the market 'fails' and rely on economists to advise when and how, without any concept of private individials to solve collective problems among themselves.]

Too much time on your hands

[Inventing your own module instead of using a pre-existing one increases your maintenance work down the line as well as the learning curve for new contributors who need to get acquainted with non-standard tooling.]

Even if you don’t reinvent the wheel, being very particular about various aspects of your project that aren’t really critical (say, code formatting) is mostly about marking your own territory. Behind the facade of enforcing quality standards, you are primarily asserting your ownership of the project and demonstrating this power to other contributors.