Sunday, October 21, 2018

Headlines from Outerspace


Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem, but are in fact useless.

There are times when too many good headlines pop up all at once. Here's a sampling of what's going on circa 2018. In 2028, will this all be passé? In 2008, would it have been unfathomable?

On-chip excitation of nanodiamonds embedded in plasmonic waveguides
Oct 2018, phys.org

No clue, just headline wordporn.

Bitcoin miner sent to prison for stealing electricity from train network in China
Oct 2018, The Independent

A man in China has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison after stealing electricity from a train network in order to mine bitcoin.

Two Companies Are Going to Manufacture Optical Fibers in Space
Sep 2018, Futurism

Eventually we will all live in computers orbiting the Earth. For now, this is an early example of otherworldly computer manufacturing.

Building a better brain-in-a-dish, faster and cheaper
Sept 2018, phys.org

"What we've done is establish a proof-of-principle protocol for a systematic, automated process to generate large numbers of brain organoids," said Alysson R. Muotri, Ph.D., professor in the UC San Diego School of Medicine departments of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine, director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine.


Image source: Gee, I sure wish I could attribute a source to this image, but it's been fetched by my "generic search engine" from pinterest (go figure, right?). In case readers here don't know what pinterest is, it's a way for image users to short-circuit Google's own copyright policies (under firm guidance by Getty) by taking images out of their source page and placing them on another page with way higher "finding power," as you might expect by any page owned by the search engine itself. 


Humans on a Chip


Treating humans like molecules are the main idea behind computational sociothermodynamics, which is the science of predicting human behavior based on thermodynamics models of particles. It's a way to gain insight into a really complex problem, and from a rather unsuspecting place. And we will be seeing a lot more of this in years to come.

Here's a new model that works by measuring how people distribute themselves as a function of the density of the crowd they're in. It's called a Density-Functional Fluctuation Theory of Crowds.

The model was originally designed for predicting the behavior of quantum systems, and it was already tested using fruit flies, because boy does science love fruit flies.

It generates a "frustration function" that measures the probability that someone will move to a new location given a specific density for that crowd. At a concert, for example, people will try to get a good spot, as long as it's not too crowded. When it gets too crowded, they'll move. And when it gets too crowded after that, they riot. Just kidding. (Not really.)

The model can then predict the "mood" of the crowd by how this frustration function evolves over time. In the article where I found this, it was suggested that this model could be used to predict a rowdy crowd before it starts. Or the moment a peaceful protest changes phase from a liquid to a gas, if you know what I mean.

Then again, who cares about a predictive model when we have neck-rec! [neck-recognition technology, an advance beyond face recognition]

This is a drone that detects movements in human faces and necks in order to accurately source heart rates and breathing rates of crowds. (I like to refer to this as physiodata, because that sounds good.)

In other words, the resolution is so fine that it can see and measure the pulse of your jugular vein, and then face-rec your id, of course. And it will do this for an entire crowd, and in less time than it takes you to snap a picture.


Post Script:
Mathematics can assist cities in addressing unstructured neighborhoods
Aug 2018, phys.org

[straight pasting here]
"...use satellite imagery and municipal data to develop mathematical algorithms that reveal slums and planned neighborhood are fundamentally different.

Their models clearly identify distinctions between the informal arrangement of underserviced urban areas and the formal structure of city neighborhoods. In two case studies, the researchers used real-world data to show that the physical layout of some unplanned neighborhoods does not allow space for sewer lines, roads or water pipes.

The team used a novel topological technique, based on connections between places, to characterize the first-time slums rather than a traditional geometric approach.

"By understanding the fundamental topology — the relationship between places of residence and work to urban infrastructure networks — we can determine parts of cities remain only incipiently connected," said coauthor Luís Bettencourt, director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago.
-phys.org


Notes:

Fruit flies and electrons: Researchers use physics to predict crowd behavior
Aug 2018, phys.org

Drone detects heartbeat and breathing rates
Sep 2017, BBC

Physiodata at Large
Oct 2017, Network Address

Urban Dynamics
Oct 2013, Network Address

The Sante Fe Institute always has cool stuff combining studies of computers, physics, social sciences.

This isn't what I meant by humans on a chip, but then again, yes it is:
3D 'organ on a chip' could accelerate search for new disease treatments
Oct 2018, phys.org



Background People



I've been real into conspiracy theories ever since Zecharia Sitchin's 12th Planet series. I was about 15, and convinced that there was an elliptically orbiting twelfth planet (eleventh? tenth? Can't keep track) filled with really smart people that would drop down and help us out once in a while. How else do you explain the Pyramids??

Because aliens, that's how.

It took me until college before I had the critical prowess to tackle that excuse for an answer. Now I like to use Michael Schirmer's Baloney Detection Kit.

Belief in conspiracy theories, as it is generally understood, comes from a lack of self-control. When you feel like you can't do anything to fix your life, you want to blame someone. And it's a lot easier to blame one big, scary, sinister, omnipotent force, one that is too big for you to fight, and too pervasive to ever fully understand.*

Conspiracy theories are also helpful if you have a hard time understanding how the world works. It's a lot easier to say everything is hidden purposefully, by a nefarious agent. That way you can't be blamed for not understanding, right?

But there's a great study that's been recently done which proves something different. It shows that the reason for us believing in conspiracy theories isn't necessarily because we feel a lack of control, but because we want to sound cool.

"Exclusive knowledge" is the key term here. Or simply exclusivity. Exclusivity makes people look cool. It's why clothiers burn their unsold wares at the end of the season. It's why gmail was invite-only. It's kind of why you can't read graffiti. And it's the most basic component of economics - supply and demand.

Everyone wants to know things that others don't. When you have exclusive knowledge, you're in-demand. But how do you prove that this is what makes people fall for stuff like flat earths and reptile people?

How? Well, you invent a conspiracy theory from scratch, preferably something happening in another country, far enough that you wouldn't have heard of it, but close enough that you can have some opinion, and then you feed it to people but tell them it's either a very popular theory, or an unpopular theory, and see how it gets received.

A totally made-up story unfolds in Germany, and is presented to the study participants, and with that, another little piece of information comes. Some are told that this story is believed by 80% of Germans, and some are told that it's only believed by 20% of Germans.

The study participants had already been tested for their propensity to believe or endorse conspiracy theories, and they were give a score. People with a high "conspiracy mentality quotient" were more likely to accept the fictitious conspiracy theory, but only if it was presented as not popular. For clarification, the exact same theory, when presented as generally accepted by most people, was not accepted.

Is there some way we can get climate change to be less popular of a theory??

*Also, believing in BS tends to happen more when you're prefrontal cortex hasn't been fully formed, which would be around 25 years old, give or take a few. 


Notes:
Want to Feel Unique? Believe in the Reptile People
May 2018, Knowing Neurons

On Background People

On Zecharia Sitchin, author of books about ancient astronauts

On Why Zecharia Sitchin is wrong about the ancient astronaut thing, from a PhD in Hebrew and ancient Semitic languages from University of Wisconsin-Madison, just in case you needed some balance in opinion

Post Script:
If you're interested, the fictitious conspiracy theory used in the study went like this:
A retired engineer had found evidence that these smoke detectors have serious side effects, emanating a ‘hypersound’ that causes nausea, gastritis and depression. This was forcefully rejected by VdS Schadenverhütung GmbH, the largest (and invented) producer of smoke detectors. The conspiracy: VdS was in cahoots with the government and knew about the dangerous smoke detectors, but did nothing.

Monday, October 15, 2018

The Flying Pantograph


Disney's Graffiti Drone needs some work.

It's called the PaintCopter: An Autonomous UAV for Spray Painting on 3D Surfaces, and it's by Disney's Research labs.

There is a big difference between this thing and the ones that have come before, in that this version has a constant supply of paint.

Otherwise, nothing to see here, except for the brief reminders below:

Artist Katsu's remote control graffiti machine, circa 2014, in WIRED

Algorithmically-directed graffiti machine at the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit, MoMA circa 2008.

Also let's not forget about this beautiful, remote graffiti alternative - lasers, by Graffiti Research Labs, circa 2010.

***
While we're at it, news in lettering; No seriously, it's more interesting than it sounds:


Have you ever wished you couldn't read as good as you do? You know, one day you're sitting there, reading, which a few hundred years ago was relegated to a fraction of the population, but you're there reading and you think to yourself, man, I'm so good at reading that I read --too fast--. I wish I couldn't read as good as I do. 

You are in luck, because some students who also wish they weren't so good at reading decided to make a font that is purposefully hard to read.

It's not illegible, it just rides the line just below perfectly legible. You have to struggle just a little bit, and that extra effort makes you remember what you're reading. 

So it is a font designed to be not read too well. Surely, this isn't easy to create, because if it's too illegible, it will convey no meaning at all.

More importantly, this is a great example of a thing I don't know what we call - when you design something to be hard to use on purpose. Like we got so good at something, that the design goal is now to go in the other direction. Speed bumps are not what I'm talking about; they're an afterthought. The dog bowl that stops your dog from eating too fast, and what else.  


Notes:
A Pantograph is an instrument for copying a drawing.

Oct 2018, BBC News




Sans Forgetica: new typeface designed to help students study
Jan 2018, RMIT Vietnam News
The Sans Forgetica font has received much press coverage, after researchers in Australia claimed they had designed a new font that would boost memory by making information that appeared in the new font feel more difficult to read—and therefore remembered better.
Previously claimed memory boosting font Sans Forgetica does not actually boost memory
May 2020, phys.org

CES 2019 The robot that draws on walls
Jan 2019, BBC

Wall-Crawling Robot Automates Mural Drawings
It's like a Roomba but on the wall, and it draws.

Post Script: Just Graffiti Things
NY Court Approves $6.7M Award for 5Pointz Graffiti Artists Whose Work Was Destroyed
Feb 2020, NBC New York

High Albedo Formula



It's pretty counter-intuitive, but a surface can lose heat even while being hit by sunlight. This is a big deal for buildings, especially the roofs of buildings, and especially when those buildings are in urban areas that experience the urban heat island effect.

We've been measuring the behavior of heat on a roof for a long time. It's called a measure of albedo, which takes into account both the ability of the surface to reflect heat, and also to dissipate it back into the atmosphere. These are two different things, and in this new technique, it is the second feature that makes it work.

Sure we can make things reflective. Painting them white is a good move. Shiny and white, even better. But how do we make it so that the roof also dissipates its heat better?

Think about the fins on an air conditioner. Their sole purpose is to rid of heat, a thousand strips of metal reaching into the air, far enough away from each other that they don't release their heat right back to themselves, and yet packed enough that they do a maximum job.

That's pretty much what this passive daytime radiative cooling technique does. It's more about the shape and structure and texture of the surface, which is a polymer coating made of foamlike nano-to-microscale air voids. I instead describe it as billions of little fingers, each one reaching out into the air to release the heat it carries from the mass behind it. They're also scattering and reflecting sunlight in every direction while they're at it.

No matter how you describe it, don't forget that this coating can be sprayed on like paint; it doesn't have to be made that way in the factory but can be applied out there in field. That makes this advance a really big deal.

Polymer coating cools down buildings
Sept 2018, phys.org

Friday, October 12, 2018

Entropy Goggles


A computer has been taught to distinguish between different arrangements of the elements and principles of design across artists and over time. But don't worry, it's nowhere near human.

Much of what makes this possible is the amount of artwork that has been digitized, ie, machine readable, ie, machine consumable. We can now feed our computers the same diet of cultural nutrients that we as photosensitive creatures enjoy, giving it a fair chance.

The computer can't see the things we see in a work of art. It can't see the richness and it can't assign meaning anywhere near the way we can. But it can do some things even better than us, especially if we give it a concise metric with which is can "familiarize" itself with the artwork.

The primary metric used here was one of complexity-entropy, where each pixel in an image was measured in terms of the complexity of its spatial patterns. A fully white square, or a square filled with all manner of colors and lines. Each pixel value is then added to give the picture an overall score.

The score of the different artworks in the database shifted in tandem with major accepted periods of artistic periods, making it look like this program has figured something out, can recognize something about our artifacts of cultural assimilation.

Machine learning enables physics-inspired metrics for analyzing art
Aug 2018, phys.org

Citizen Science

This jacket is so hi-tech even the manufacturers don't know what it does.

From what I can gather, this is the first instance of a graphene product on the consumer market.

There may be components of things we already use that incorporate it, or other materials used that are similar. But there haven't been any graphene watches or graphene duct tape yet. (I see something about a graphene light bulb from 2015?)

If you're not sure what graphene is, I should let someone with more authority impress upon you the hyperboles it bestows.

Sure stainless steel was a big deal. And synthetic plastics a triumph of man over nature (and may end up marking our place in the geological record). But graphene is all of those, and more.

It's everything-proof, anti-everything, and superconductive, whatever that means. It weighs less and holds more than anything else there is. It has made a new class of materials by subtracting a dimension from the entire arc of both human and nature's history, for it is, for all intents and purposes, a two-dimensional material.

And the greatest part is that it's not some crazy-long molecule with an unspellcheckable name, it's a bunch of carbon atoms. The same carbon atoms that have been floating around for eternity. By themselves, they usually make either graphene or diamonds, both just clumps of carbon atoms. But now, scientists have managed to trick them into planar arrangements only one atom thick.

Because we do not have experience with two-dimensional materials (because they do not exist anywhere else in the universe), we don't know what they can do, and we're pretty surprised by everything they've done so far.

After many years of development, the first thing we see is not a graphene/carbon nanotube powered-car by Tesla, or a graphene water filter by Brita, but a jacket by a high-end sports apparel manufacturer.

They don't even know why they did it*; the point is for consumers to wear it and discover what it does for them, for all of us. More of this to come, surely.

*I think we all know why they did it (publicity).


Notes:
Graphene Jacket. Part jacket. Part science experiment. Made with the only material in the world with a Nobel Prize
Aug 2018, Vollebak

Dear Phishbait


Went fishing in my spambox the other day and thought I should save this, for posterity:

Greetings,

I know you will be surprised to get this my email.  Apart from being surprised you may be hesitant to reply based on what is happening in the world of the internet. One has to be very careful  due to the amount of scammers that  are out there looking to take advantage of innocent citizens. However, I am not one of these people. My name is Capt. Patrick Williams and I was a member of the US ARMY medical team deployed to Iraq and then later transferred to Afghanistan.

I am looking for a trust worthy individual who will assist me in receiving some funds for me. I am requesting this individual to hold onto the cash until I arrive safely back to retrieve them.

As soon as I hear back I will work out the finer details.

Best Regards
Captain Patrick Williams

Post Script:
After a quick search, it looks like there's all kinds of iterations of this. Busy guy.

Outrunning the Herd




No surprise here - children are more susceptible than adults to influence by robots, even if they're obviously not people.

I'll paraphrase - a bunch of kids were put in a room with a bunch of robots and asked to do dumb sh** that they wouldn't or shouldn't be doing. They could be influenced to do said things as long as the robots made it seem ok.

We used to call this peer pressure. Now we refer to a well-known scientific experiemnt called the Asch paradigm, and it is a standard for measuring conformity. If enough people believe something to be true, it starts to become "true," whether it's true or not. This is how society works. So this idea of succumbing to peer pressure isn't new or unknown, but the effect on kids vs adults, and that it's instigated by a  humanoid, is new, or at least a reminder of how susceptible we are to the influence of others, especially at a young age.

Our allegiance to non-humans shouldn't be too crazy to consider. In case you don't remember your childhood, or don't have kids of your own, let me remind you that for an entire decade in America, a 6-ft tall, purple fuzzy dinosaur told kids what to do. And before that, I do recall letting 16-bit video games take control of my life  for a good 5 years. Kids are not too picky about who they take authority from. If they did, puppet shows might not exist. Lacking a mature brain to generate their own purpose in life, they put a premium on the opinions, beliefs and especially the commands of others. The Bicameral Mind work of Julian Jaynes might also have something to add to this.

Next, I'm not sure how much this is related in the study-authors' work, but I have to bring up Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, because one of these dimensions (individualism vs collectivism) measures the degree of conformity to be found in a particular population. Some cultures value conformity more than others, for example by forcing everyone to have the same haircut, and so this peer pressure effect may be even more pronounced in other parts of the world. This kid-influencing robot study was conducted in the UK, where there is a wider variety of haircuts.

Let's also take a look back at how Neal Stephenson was playing with this idea more than 20 years ago in a novel about an artificially intelligent book that was designed to teach children, and obviously to influence their worldview and hence their behavior.

And while we're at it, let's remember what has already taken place in America in regards to advertising to children. (I don't know enough about this to link something relevant; but I'm pretty sure there are at least some rules on how, when, and what can be advertised to kids, and it has something to do with McDonald's and breakfast cereal.)

Finally, the inverse of this study says that adults are not swayed so easily as children by a group of robots, and that we should take this as  a cool warning about such dangers in the future. But we can't deny that today, adults are already manipulated by robots*.

I can't say it better than the tech guru Jaron Lanier - social media is a behavior modification platform. We may not obey robots with the servitude of a child, but most of us tend to be influenced by our friends, and even friends of our friends, and so on.

*When I say "robots" in this context of social media, I'm talking about algorithms embodied by avatars that pretend to be actual human people, or the many shades of intelligentities that lie in between. 

Image source: Someone help me cite this X-ray Kermit picture? circa 2010


Notes:
Children 'at risk of robot influence'
Aug 2018, BBC News

Asch Test of Conformity - a test to measure the extent to which we are all suckers for social pressure.

Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions - offers a way to measure and compare some salient characteristics of culture

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Neal Stephenson, 1995.


Post Script:
What happens when you combine the Asch Paradigm and the Turing Test?


Post Post Script:
Would you look at that, just as we talk about how kids are in danger of being manipulated by robots, we get the first hints of how that might not be such a bad idea for adults. When you have an a**hole robot staring you down while you do your job, you do a better job. Go figure. I think we knew this already, with the whole cardboard cut-out cop reducing store thefts.

It doesn't matter if a thing is a robot or a can opener. We can't tell the difference. Forget the Uncanny Valley, if we assign agency to washing machines and our own mobile phones, what makes you think a crappy-looking robot isn't good enough to trick us? We are social creatures, our brain a social tool, and as such, everything is a person, and every act a social interaction. The way you handle your toothbrush has a wisp of sociality to it. Now make your toothbrush talk and have eyes, and try not to let it influence you. We can't.

Presence of 'mean' robot found to improve human concentration
Aug 2018, phys.org

Semi Automatic Artifact Generator


At the tail end of a post about training a network of sensory devices and learning machine programs to read sign language, I muse about the state of algorithmic art and how come I can't find any Alex Grey-trained Deep Dream programs to make meta-Grey artwork, and low and behold discover that neural style transfer has been a thing already for a year or so (although I have yet to find any Alex Grey training programs!).

People talk about technological mysticism, but this sh** gave me a temporary lobotomy when I first saw it.

It was a bit like hearing the sampler-sequencer on your phone for making electronic music (as a person with a real, tangible 707), or the robot landing on Mars. Up until a few years ago, you could  probably "put together two paintings" - a program that slices and dices a picture, not into pixelbits, but features like edges, curves, or gradients, and then splices together those features to make a hybrid picture. But you could not do it "in the style of Mondrian" or Miro, or Dali. This was a task relegated to the supreme conscious entities of this earth. No more.

And how did we get here? First you thought dreaming was a uniquely human thing, or at least a sentient creature thing (unless you're PKD), and then Deep Mind shows us that computers can in fact be set to dream just like us.* 

But that wasn't enough. The technique I'm referring to as neural style transfer is an extension of the Deep Dream project, where a deep neural net is turned on, but with nothing to do, and so it starts to get creative, and just puts things where it would like them to be, and seeing the things it knows about the world, even when they're not there.

Style transfer then takes this a step further. In a move than seems cruel as I write it, the "Dreamer" is given not a broad set of images of the world-at-large, as a contemporary, living, breathing human would see, but limits that Dreamers' world to one artist. Might be Dali, might be Mondrian (that's the cruel part).

Imagine having your entire brain erased, all but your memories of Mondrian's paintings. Being that we do not perceive objective reality apart from the interface of our previous experiences and current expectations, everything presented to us from that point on would look like a Mondrian painting. (Until we start incorporating the new non-Mondrian images we see into our corpus...). It's like that friend who is obsessed with comic books and superheroes, and everything that ever happens is a scene from Batman. You feel kind of bad, like he should go to a concert or take a walk in the park or something, don't you?

That's what we have here. We have created a thing capable of "seeing" the world, and then limited it's diet to only a bagful of paintings by a single artist.

And then we show it new things that it has never seen, and ask - "What do you see?"

Example - feed its dematerialized android eyes on a steady diet of Kandinsky and only Kandinsky. Then show it Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Neil Degrasse Tyson x Kandinsky
(content image + style image = generated image)

I found a pretty accessible description of what's going on:
Now remember- while doing style transfer, we are not training a neural network. Rather, what we're doing is?—?we start from a blank image composed of random pixel values, and we optimize a cost function by changing the pixel values of the image. In simple terms, we start with a blank canvas and a cost function. Then we iteratively modify each pixel so as to minimize our cost function. To put it in another way, while training neural networks we update our weights and biases, but in style transfer, we keep the weights and biases constant, and instead, update our image.
-Towards Data Science

Lastly, a bit about terminology. What I'm referring to here as algorithmic art is probably better termed AI art, to correctly co-locate it closer to fractal art. The distinguishing factor being the level of human agency. From a purist perspective, if you turn on an algorithmic art algorithm and leave the room, there is nothing on the computer when you return. Deep Dream is an algorithm that does the work while you wait, overnight while you sleep, while you both sleep, as it were. There's a new problem however in neural style transfer work - although much of what you're looking at is fully automated, the small role of the artist is disproportionately relevant to the overall impact of the image. I mean come on, a computer isn't meta-Escherizing itself! There's an artist at work there.

*Sure it is a prodigious act of artistic license to say that Deep Dreamers are dreaming "just like us," but can we not say that our dreams are a default, empty state filled with our life's worth of training data to run amok?


Notes:
Here's a place that will do it for you, but they have their own pre-designed style templates (called pastiches) - Deep Art.

There's also a few apps that do it, Prisma is one.

And here is a great survey of all the slight variations that you can get, like multiple transfer, masked transfer, color interpolation, and probably my favorite, texture transfer.

Vice article on Algorithmic Artist Dextro, 2014

Where's My Thought Translator
Network Address, 2018
Here's a few (what I imagine will become) classic style transfer artifacts, as well as a couple of the (already) style transfer classics, albeit from early 1900's abstract artists.

The Macro Image Series and the Dematerialization of Artifact
Network Address, 2013
Here's a presentation about the propagation of cultural artifacts in a digital medium.

Post Script:
I like to give Piet Mondrian credit for his prescience in foretelling bitmaps and pixelation, despite the fact that in his day, the primaries were still red-yellow-blue instead of our current day cyan-magenta-yellow.


Here, a painting of Napoleon, trained on Raphael's School of Athens:

Meta Napoleon Bonapart, unknown origin

Raphael's School of Athens

Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps

Post Post Script:
Same thing here but for music; I'm still waiting for the meta cover band that covers other bands as if they were already covering another band, for example, a cover band that does Radiohead doing the Doors, or if the Squirrel Nut Zippers covered Metallica, what would that sound like? Any tips would be much appreciated.

Monday, October 8, 2018

Ergobots




The question is no longer "Will robots take over the world;" it's more like "what will it mean to be human?"

Mobile handsets are the exocortex. Social media platforms are the virtual acropolis, populated with quasi artificial intelligentities. When you try to find a date online, you're fielding messages from semi-automated algorithms. When you call your network provider, you're talking to a fully-automated algorithm.

When you're heart gets too old to work by itself, you get a pacemaker. You're part robot. When you lose your eyeballs, for whatever reason, you get a headset that sees for you and translates visual stimuli into auditory signals that you can now perceive. You're an eyeborg.

So it's no surprise that your measly meatbody now gets support from an exoskeleton. These exosuits have been on the scene for a minute, but geared towards folks who can't move in the first place, due to spinal injuries, for example. Now they're in strenuous work environments. Tomorrow your mom will be telling you to put on your exosuit before you go out to shovel snow.

Notes:
Ford brings 'exosuits' to workers in 15 factories
Aug 2018, BBC

Livability


Downtown Cranford, New Jersey, circa 2018

A recent article in New Jersey's local news drew my attention to the subject of charming towns. In the town-planning world, the criteria by which we measure "charming" is called livability, and there's been plenty of towns seeking this status as of late.

Livability is related to walkability, like when you can get all your errands done with only parking your car once. And when you can walk from one store to another without crossing an 8-lane superhighway pedestrian deathtrap. It's also one of the reasons that lots of younger people are preferring to live in the density of downtown instead of on its spacious suburban fringes (which may be related to the reason for towns paying more attention to this stuff).

But livability goes further, as it is even more qualitative. It's not only "can I easily walk around town," but "is it a nice walk?" Livability measures how nice the greenery is, what the awnings look like on storefronts, and the feeling of open-ness vs closed-ness that one feels while walking around town or sipping coffee on a sidewalk bench after lunch.

There's ways to approach such qualitative measures quantitatively. For example, we can simply measure the amount of greenspace in square feet, or we can measure the ratio of the width of the streets to the height of the buildings (which is a good determinant of close-ness/open-ness). Or you can do what Haddonfield did, because they got notoriety.

Haddonfield adopted a business improvement district in 2004. This is a special distinction that allows certain properties in certain parts of town to get tax breaks, with the hope that it will "promote the economic and general welfare of the District and Borough." And words like 'general welfare' mean quality-of-life.

Forming these districts happens by way of a public/private partnership between property owners and a municipality. They are run via a board composed of professionals working in the town, retail business owners, property owners, and residents who are none of the above, that way their interests are diverse and vested.

The charge of this new entity is vast, but critical to a flourishing hyperlocal economy in today's world. They encourage self-help and self-financing, provide leadership, offer grant programs to attract new business, enhance the look of the downtown, sponsor networking events, organize special events, and market the downtown, all of which can help to raise the quality of living in these towns.

Improvements don't happen overnight. It took a good 15 years for Haddonfield to get this credit. Then again, what do I know, maybe it started being awesome a long time ago.

There's another town that established its own improvement district, and they've also been doing really well in the Livability Department. Cranford started an improvement district in 1992, and were the first to do so in New Jersey. If you drive through their downtown, right past the train station, you'll notice, or not notice, any Big Dog businesses. No fast food giants, no consumer goods warehouses, just mom-and-pop businesses.

This helps because the business owners are way more invested in what goes on locally than would be a multinational corporation. They care whether their sidewalks look nice. They care about quality of life issues.

Their District was created, among other things, to preserve historic aesthetics, establish a design criteria,  and ultimately to deal with funding and decision-making for the district so they could compete with the flow of commerce that went rushing through the recently-opened doors of the nearby Short Hills Mall.

Cranford recently took things a step further by hiring a town planner, because paying someone to think about all these little things makes a difference. There's a piano sitting in the middle of their downtown, all day all night. Sometimes they plan for an event there and invite a musician or a school music group, and sometimes, like on Friday nights, this random guy just shows up and plays old school Nintendo songs all night. They put up barricades and do yoga in the street. They get residents to loan their porch to local musicians who then travel around to all the different volunteer porches in town, followed by a crowd of drinking town residents (a crowd of residents, mind you, that is ok with paying somewhat higher property taxes to live somewhere that makes being an adult a little less soul-sucking).

Anyway, you can't just string up some Edison bulbs and call it a day. Livability requires planning. And it requires patience. And if you want your town to make it into the local news, or the national news, or you just want it to be a nice place to walk around, then you may want to take a stroll through these neighborhoods, take notes, and take action.

Post Script:
I neglect to mention that it doesn't hurt if you have a train station nearby.

Notes:
This town was named the 'most charming' one in all of N.J. We offer these pics as proof
Aug 2018, NJ.com

Crowdsourcing Reform: Community Participation and Land Use Regulation in New Jersey
Research paper for studies in urban planning, 2010

Haddonfield Business Improvement District

Partnership for Haddonfield 

Cranford Business Improvement District
adopted 1992

Cranford was recently named by The New Jersey Chapter of the American Planning Association as one of the 2018 Great Places in New Jersey.
Oct 2018, nj.com

Streets for People: A Primer for Americans
Bernard Rudofsky, 1969
(Read this book to learn the hows and whys of the enjoyable dowtown experience from renowned thinker, designer, and creator of the Bernardo sandal, yes it's true.)

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs, 1961
(The number one book about what makes a nice place to live by the number one person to write about such things.)


Post Script:
Here's a peek through the looking glass. An article just come from the BBC, about poor town planning. It describes the lives of many young adults stuck in this new autocentric anticulture nightmare. In America it's called "suburbia" and it's been a problem for decades.
[poor town planning]

Apparently developers did not consult planners when they plopped hundreds of residential units so far out of the city that you can't get to the market - or anywhere else - without a car.

Some developers buck this trend, and their successful recipe is detailed in the article as such:

“The secret is the layout of connected streets with interesting squares and courtyards, coupled with the way that offices, small shops, cafés, pubs and even a garden centre were integrated with the homes as in an authentic small town.”

Young couples 'trapped in car dependency'
Oct 2018, BBC

UrSci


From other flavor networks like this we can infer that Asian cuisine is vegetable-based and diverse, whereas North American cuisine is animal-based and limited to basically cow meat and butter. As for this flavor network, it shows us that cashew nuts are more like cheese than nuts.

Ur was an ancient city in Mesopotamia and the birthplace of Abraham, who is the birthperson of the Abrahamic religions (Jewish, Christian, Muslim). Because of its potent origin-inducing prowess, it has become a word that means 'the beginning of,' for example, an urtext is the original version of a text.

Every time I hear about network science, I think of the word ur-science, because it sure seems like it's underneath all the rest. If physics is the underlying science from which all else follows, then network science must go beyond even that. It's like the link between math and science, that's another way to look at it. Math is all meta, totally disembodied, no physicality involved. And it's more like a language than a science, a perfect language, God's language if you will. Network science, however, seems to reach in-between this space, in-between the body and the void.

As anyone even slightly interested in science would already know, there's some problems with physics, like finding a universal theory that explains both gravity and quantum mechanics. Although the theories used in both these phenomena are mature and useful, they don't overlap enough to make one single theory.

Then there's other problems, particularly with quantum phenomena, like 'spooky action at a distance,' also called non-locality, and also called teleportation, where a change to one particle that had been entangled with another but then separated by space and yet still entangled, will immediately change the other entangled particle, no matter how far away they may be, and instantaneously, he says again for effect to remind you, the reader, that Einstein's Relativity says that nothing happens "instantaneously" but as a result of its relationship within the greater context of spacetime. (This goes against all intuitive thought in the classical physics mindset, and is the reason Einstein called it "spooky.")

So we know that there's some work that needs to be done in terms of making Science into one thing, and to explain some of the things that we know to be true, yet we still cannot believe, albeit because of our feeble limbic-driven wetware.

***
This brings us to Network Science, this thing that became real popular with the advent of the Internet, although it's been around for quite awhile. My own introduction to this came from the book Linked by Albert-László Barabási which came out just before The Social Network (the thing not the movie) in 2002*.

In it, Barabási gives a rudimentary exploration that even a non-scientist can understand. There's hubs and there's spokes. And although The Internet looks like a mess, there is some order to it, and there are some rules to how networks form, how long they last, what kind of information gets passed through it and between who.

Plenty of work has been done on the subject of Network Science, both since Barabási 's 2002 book and long before it. Granted there is always a draw to something new. But there are also these moments that happen when a phenomena has been sitting around doing its thing for ages, and then all of the sudden an example comes to life so that everyone can see it and use it and think about it (and even write books on it). And that would be the dynamics of the social network that we now use to explain and understand everything from fundraising to depression.

When a thing becomes this pervasive in society, we can talk about it and wrestle with it in common language. And we can see anew a thing that once before we never even noticed. I guess this is similar to how we used to think the nervous system was like a bunch of pipes filled with a fluid that behaved according to laws of pressures etc., and then electricity comes along, and all of the sudden there's a new way of looking at the nervous system.

So perhaps it's possible that Network Science is a new analogy for things we have yet to understand. And then again, maybe it's just another one of those - when you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail - and the Network is just the hammer of our day. 

*Physicist Mark Buchanan also wrote about networks in his 2002 book Nexus


Notes:
The dimension of a space can be inferred from the abstract network structure
Sep 2018, phys.org

Post Script:
Network Science is the Ur-Science
Network Address, 2015

URSCI - Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Investigations at Dominican University in Illinois

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-László Barabási
Scientific Reports volume 1, Article number: 196 (2011)