Chips vs Crisps and the Evolution of Civilization

Roman roads laid the foundation for modern-day prosperity, study claims

Nov 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-roman-roads-laid-foundation-modern-day.html

See what they call "the reversal of fortune" - I call it chips vs crisps, like how England would much rather call their potato chips "chips" but they can't because they already call their french fries "chips". I have to copy mostly the whole writeup, just because:

Roman road networks were built not primarily for economic reasons, but to transport troops to different parts of the empire, but soon began to be used for trade and transport, becoming links between emerging market towns and important for economic development.

To carry out the study, the researchers superimposed maps of the Roman Empire's road network on top of modern satellite images showing the light intensity at night—one way of approximating economic activity in a geographical area. 

"What makes this study extra interesting is that the roads themselves have disappeared and that the chaos in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire would have been an opportunity to reorient the economic structures. Despite that, the urban pattern remained."

Another factor that supports the study's findings is what happened in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, in North Africa and the Middle East, where wheeled transport was basically abandoned in the 4th–6th centuries to be replaced with camel caravans. The roads in the region were used less and less and were allowed to fall into disrepair. Thus, in contrast to the western parts of the kingdom, new roads were not built on top of the old ones.

"The roads became irrelevant and thus we don't see the same continuity in prosperity at all. It can be said that the area was affected by what is called a 'reversal of fortune'—countries that early on developed civilization, such as Iraq, Iran and Turkey, are today autocratic and have significantly worse economic development than countries that were then in the economic periphery," says Ola Olsson.

"In Sweden, for example, we are talking about possibly building new railroad trunk lines. The former, from the 19th century, gained enormous importance for economic activity in Sweden. New stretches for the railroad are discussed, and if they are built you can expect some communities to get a big economic boost."

via Swedish Research Council: Carl-Johan Dalgaard et al, Roman roads to prosperity: Persistence and non-persistence of public infrastructure, Journal of Comparative Economics (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2022.05.003

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2022.05.003

Image credit: AI Art - Portrait of a Void Engineer Setting Up Samsara Generator by MC Escher and Brecht Evens - 2022

Post Script:

Is there a common sound of swearing across languages?

Dec 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-12-common-languages.html

The initial study revealed that swear words were less likely to include approximants, which include sounds like l, r, w and y. (Not offensive enough.)

Minced Oaths though:

In a following study, the authors also looked at minced oaths—which are variations of swear words deemed less offensive, for example "darn" instead of "damn." The authors found that approximants were significantly more frequent in minced oaths than swear words. The authors propose that this introduction of approximants is part of what makes minced oaths less offensive than swear words.

via University of London: The sound of swearing: Are there universal patterns in profanity?, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2022). DOI: 10.3758/s13423-022-02202-0

https://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-022-02202-0

Words Out There

'Sadfishing' social media warning from school heads
Oct 2019, BBC 

Engrams emerging as the basic unit of memory
Jan 2020, phys.org

More hot neuro-pop: Ensembles, Synaptic plasticity

Giant surveillance balloons are lurking at the edge of space
Jan 2020, Ar Technica

Stratollites.

Post Script
Oldest living things on Earth?
Stromatolites

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

Freedom Fever

David Uessem painted this.

Unfiltered Fervor: The Rush to Get Off the Water Grid
Dec 2017, NYTimes

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of living off the grid. I read Walden in college, I studied sustainability in grad school. I love chopping wood and growing my own food and tending my own livestock. Although right now I live in an apartment and do none of those, I support the general idea of sustainability.

But here's news to me - The water consciousness movement. It looks to rid the public of the bad things (flouride, chlorine) put into our water by our omniscient, flawless, and hyper-articulate government so they can dominate us and make us do whatever they want. Raw water is the answer.

"Raw water" has turned into a big market, and people are willing to pay big bucks for water that is pure and never been touched by an ill-intentioned government. And then they get hepatitis and herpes from the water.

But we should consider that flouride in water is one of the great public health interventions of our time, and that chlorine is in your water because it cleans your water. Even if you get your water from the rain, you're supposed to put chlorine in your cistern to kill the little buggers that would eventually grow there and give you diseases. Also, distilled water, by definition, has no minerals at all. But we need some of these minerals, albeit in very small amounts, to remain healthy.

On the other side, our public water infrastructure also tests our water to make sure it isn't contaminated by it's source. That testing is expensive, and I wonder how rigorously is this raw water is tested.

Then again, there is the lead thing, and that's a valid concern and a perfect example of where the government messed the f up, and should have a lot to do with why people don't trust their water supply. But the people affected by lead in their water are definitely not the people who can afford to buy this raw water. California tends to be a big market for this stuff.

In this context, it's hard to forget that California was (is?) a desert, and we basically picked up the Colorado River and threw it over the Rocky Mountains to create the largest man-made garden on Earth, which then feeds almost one-fifth of the entire world. [Hyperbole, for effect, but not entirely untrue, read up for yourself here.] Is this related? Not sure, but history should be part of a conversation about how we get our water.

I will give props to the company from Arizona that sets you up to extract water from your environment like one of those desert beetles. (Actually, more like rice in a salt shaker, according to the above nyt article).

On the flipside, Paris just fitted their public fountains with carbonated water, or bubbly water, as they call it.


And for the entrepreneurial at heart, I was thinking of selling rats that have been "liberated from science" to folks who are against animal testing. Despite the fact that many cosmetics put that little bunny rabbit drawing on their products to signify they haven't been tested on animals, it is against the law to sell cosmetics in the US unless they have been thoroughly tested on animals and then on humans, which means that label is totally bogus, and yet totally legal to put on the product, go figure.

So in the same vein, and to the same audience, you can buy the rats anywhere you want and just say they were taken from cosmetics-testing laboratories. You can raise them as your own cute little pets, and feel good about yourself, and you can even satiate them with water contaminated with herpes!

And, finally, in other news:

Rats free each other from cages
Dec 2011, Nature

Relevant updates as of 2021:

FDA slams “Real Water” linked to liver failure; water plant manager MIA - A lawyer for the water company said it can't find its plant manager or lead technician.

Apr 2021, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/water-company-linked-to-liver-failure-spars-with-fda-cant-find-plant-manager/

Alkaline “Real Water” linked to liver failure in kids—and reports are rising - The FDA has warned not to drink or use the water

Mar 2019, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/complaints-mount-after-5-kids-suffer-liver-failure-linked-to-alkaline-water/

Beyond Biomimicry

The Pompidou in Paris, built in 1970's by  Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini. It's not under construction, it's an inside-out building. It's probably easier to fix this way, but do we like the way that looks? (It's actually a nightmare to clean the place.)

Color-changing materials could be used to detect structural failure in energy-related equipment
phys.org, July 2016

"Researchers at MIT are making fluorescent polymer gels that change color when they're shaken, heated, exposed to acid, or otherwise disrupted. Given such a response, these novel materials could be effective sensors for detecting changes in structures, fluids, or the environment."

Buildings are not alive, so they don't heal themselves. It's hard for us to find out what's wrong with them, because most of their critical parts have been made invisible according to our cultural-architectural preferences.

But now, if there's structural damage in a place that's been doped with pressure-sensitive colorgel, we can see it.