I had Soleri's book as a youngster in the 70s, and I was quite influenced by his ideas. I even taught a class to my fellow middle-school students called "City" where we built a model of a single structure city, to be built in the desert. What can I say, it was the 70s.
My Mom has lived out in Arizona for many years, and as I was getting ready to go visit her for the first time a few years ago, I realized that Arcosanti was just down the road from her house. She had never heard of it, despite being a bit of a counter-cultural type herself. We took the tour... it was a little shabby, but quite interesting. Of course it is just a pale shadow of the dreams of that wild guy. But it is a working experiment, and has lasted. I was pleased to see a poster advertising that young women were invited to be sketched nude by Paolo and they could keep some of the drawings. Pretty nice setup for the old guy.
The whole point of having separate processes for each tab is that it isolates them. If one crashes, the others remain up. It supports multiple processors, too.
The thing about creative inspiration is that you never know where it might come from. Having a little random piece of beauty fall into your lap when you aren't expecting it could be just the thing to make an unusual connection in your brain.
Wow, that is strange. I must be old, but I sometimes interpret the exact opposite: a sentence without a period must have a twinge of... bitterness? sarcasm? lack of care?
"Making cars extremely fast won’t make them much more dangerous."
Once again, car advocates don't seem to realize that there are other things out there in the street. Sure, they won't be more dangerous to other cars. In dedicated roadways that makes perfect sense. But in city streets? The life of the street require them to remain multiuse, and the constant push for higher speeds has been extremely destructive to that fabric.
It is probably not for everyone. But for 100 lucky students, I bet this will be just what they need. My son, who incidentally will be in 9th grade next year, has never had any interests beyond computers. Maybe it's time to move to NY.
Good thing they are still not evil.
Seriously, this is a very powerful way to run software, but what if they, or some other company who emulated this idea, took that great power we have granted them and used it for evil? They could suddenly 0wn millions of computers.
It would be great if after it is done, the video could be replaced with a still image of the same scene, so that it is not clear if the video is actually over or not. You could stay there for hours waiting to see if something cool is going to happen.
So... why ~are~ creative people eccentric? Eccentrically, I have decided to not pay for this article. Creatively, I am still interested in whatever insights the article may contain.
Krulwich concludes "...that we never want to see again." but I'd much rather those nuclear weapons making awesome fireworks shows than destroying the earth. Or am I missing something?
The "Post Scriptum" makes it clear that it is, but I believe it was originally published in Scientific American without that. I agree with you that all too often it's hard to tell.
(Of course it is written under a pseudonym that gives it away.)
It is true that there is a lot of fluff around the golden ratio, but it does have some cool properties in five-fold symmetry and the Fibonacci sequence, and as a result of the latter, in the spiral patterns of plants.