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)

Smoke and Mirrors

Diamonds are forever.

If you don't know what a deep learning neural network is by now, I can no longer tell you, because there's enough buzz out there already.

If you like the idea of neural nets, quantum mechanics, photons, and metamolecular diamonds are going to take over our world and our bodies in the next 20 years, then you're in the right place, at the right time.

Because today makes an appearance of a neural net that uses light instead of electricity, and they even have a new name for their proof-of-concept device - a diffractive neural net. So get with it.

Image Source: The Crystal Dome at Swarovski in Kristallwelten, Austria


Notes:
Xing Lin et al. All-optical machine learning using diffractive deep neural networks, Science (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aat8084 

A neural network that operates at the speed of light
July 2018, Techxplore.com

On Statutes and Liberties

Original Statue of Liberty vs Robert Davidson's Las Vegas replica. Which one is more feminine?

The United States Postal Service made some stamps featuring the Statue of Liberty, but used the "wrong" reference, and now owes an un-attributed artist $3.5 million. I think I'm already using the wrong language here.

The artist, Robert Davidson, made a sculpture of the Statue of Liberty for a New York-themed casino in Las Vegas (can we all just read Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation right now?), and it was this statue, not the original, that the Post Office used to make its stamps.

There's a difference, as you can see above, where one is more feminized. Davidson did that on purpose, and that difference makes it original enough to be protected under fair use law.

Interesting situation here, in that a copy of a copy got in trouble for copying the copy instead of the original, and now owes the copy-creator. But the details get even better, because the USPS licensed the photograph of the Statue from Getty (well I guess they can't just take their own photograph, right?), but they didn't realize that the photo they licensed was of the wrong Statue. Hence Davidson, sculptor of the statue in the photo that was licensed, sues for unauthorized use.

And because the Postal Service sells lots of stamps, there's lots of money involved. There was a good case similar to this involving Artist Shepard Fairey's HOPE Poster, President Barack Obama, Photographer Mannie Garcia, and the Associate Press.


Notes:
Information on Fair Use, Copyright, Intellectual Property, etc.
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Post Office owes $3.5M for using wrong Statue of Liberty 
Jul 2018, Ars Technica

On Property Rights
Feb 2018, Network Address

Pedestrian Utopia

Anamorphic Crosswalks are the new thing, maybe.

Brains are expensive. It takes a lot for us to pay attention to stuff, and so, most of the time, even though we think we're paying attention to things, we're not.

Funny, but part of our mental resources are spent convincing us that we are paying attention to everything, so that we don't misallocate our attention-resources to things we don't need to be paying attention to. In other words, we don't want to spend time noticing the things that we're not noticing. Yes?

The literal blind spot in our field of vision is a perfect example. You probably don't even know you have one, but there's a sliver of your peripheral vision field that's invisible due to some wiring issues in our heads. But part of our brain makes up for that missing piece, filling it in, extrapolating from existing data, kind of like how photoshop can erase you from a picture, leaving only the background you're standing in front of.

Anyway, whether we are willing to believe it or not, there's a lot we don't notice. This is a problem for drivers, for sure, but it's much more of a problem for pedestrians.

If you, driver, pass the same intersection every day, and one out of every 1,000 times there's a person standing at the corner waiting to cross your lane, chances are you will not see that person. They are never, ever there, so why would you see them.

This is how the brain works. It predicts; it expects. It sees what it thinks should be there based on previous experience. We can't treat every situation as brand new, because it takes too much of bandwidth. And we will not look for a pedestrian that might be there in a 1-in-1,000 chance.

Fortunately, there's some really smart people thinking about this problem. University of Toronto engineering researchers working in Human Factors and Transportation say it's a consistency and predictability issue, and I am so happy to see someone with a bit of authority say this.

They say the problem is not that it's not the driver's behavior that needs to change, it's the infrastructure itself. And it's because of this energy-saving feature of the brain.

You can ask drivers to 'look both ways' all you want. They have way too much to worry about, and if pedestrians do not make up enough of their sensory environment, they will not waste precious attention on them.

I'm not an urban planner, but there's one thing I'm really adamant about it when I comes to traffic design. In the US, crosswalks are at the corner. In Europe, however, they are about 10 or 20 feet away from the corner. Maybe not everywhere, but in enough places that I certainly took notice of this change.

This is one of those things that makes travel and exposure to other cultures so valuable. The moment I saw this difference, I couldn't believe why we were doing it the wrong way, and that nobody ever says anything about it. Studies like this support the European design; there is absolutely no way that a driver is paying attention as they turn.

And until then, another simple solution would be to just get more pedestrians! If every intersection had a wall of people waiting to cross every time you pass it, you will certainly pay attention to them.


Notes:
More than half of drivers don't look for cyclists and pedestrians before turning right, study finds
Aug 2018, phys.org

White Out

Political Correction Fluid (ie White Out).

I always thought it was weird; glad I'm not the only one. When I decided to slap together a barebones Asus ten years ago, I was surprised to find the configuration referred to as master-slave. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but whenever it comes up, a part of me does wonder why we don't put this higher on the politically correct priority list, like somewhere above he/she/xe.

Like is the terminology we use for computers hundreds of years old or something, where we just keep using the same words even though their original meaning is completely lost? (Oh wait, but is that part of the hegemony of the privileged, ie, it's so ubiquitous it's invisible?)

Turns out that yes, these terms do come from a place long before Mr. Babbage's scribbles. Well, not too long before that - they're from the world of motor control, when we started to make really complicated machines; maybe it goes all the way back to watchmaking. But it stops here, 2018.

As far back as 2003, folks in California were asking manufacturers to come up with a better alternative that doesn't make us all really uncomfortable. Maybe we're not all really uncomfortable. Then again, maybe the people who are uncomfortable don't really matter. Or they don't matter enough, in comparison to how important it is to maintain the lexical inertia of engineering.

Regardless, one of the main programming languages of our time has now decided to rearrange the playbook, or the instruction manual, as it were. Personally, however, I'm really not happy at all with the results. Parent-helper and parent-worker sound stupid to me.


Notes:
Master/Slave Terminiolgy Removed from Python
Sep 2018, VICE
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8x7akv/masterslave-terminology-was-removed-from-python-programming-language

Views of the Future

The expanding brain meme is in order.

Look, I'm not in love with Elon Musk or anything, but I got pretty pissed when I read a Futurism article about his interview with Joe Rogan.

I can obviously care less about whether or not somebody "inhaled," I mean, I was around during the Bill Clinton administration, after all. Not to mention, what to hell do people think is going to happen on the Joe Rogan show.

The part I'm upset about is where people seem to think Musk is being a loopy headfreak when he's asked about future-trending topics like AI sentience.

And that's where I'll cut - he's asked when he thinks AI will become sentient. And he responds, very slowly like every other answer he gives during this kind of painful interview - he says something that sounds to many like, "We're all trees, man."

You're thinking, "he didn't answer the question at all." But I think you're wrong. His actual answer went like this:

Joe: How far are humans from creating sentient AI?

Musk: You could argue that any group of people — like a company — is essentially a cybernetic collective of human people and machines. That’s what a company is. And then there are different levels of complexity in the way these companies are formed and then there is a collective AI in Google search, where we are also plugged in like nodes in a network, like leaves in a tree. 

We’re all feeding this network without questions and answers. We’re all collectively programming the AI and Google. […] It feels like we are the biological boot-loader for AI effectively. We are building progressively greater intelligence. And the percentage that is not human is increasing, and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence.

This is coming from a guy who is making, besides reusable rocket ships and statewide underground transport tunnels and consumer blowtorches, a neural interface system. And in case folks forget, because this was a while ago, he made PayPal. So he knows how things work. He may not be Jaron Lanier but he understands how these things work, and he's telling us that in regards to AI and sentience, we're asking the wrong question.

I'm going to elucidate what I think he was trying to say when he answered this, or at least what maybe he should have said considering his audience in this particular venue.

First, there is a fine line between us and AI. When you consider that we as users are the training program for many of these tools, such as a massive search engine, it should make you wonder which part of it is us and which part the machine.

Second, when we realize that we have essentially been programming these things since the dawn of what I will call for lack of a more neutral word, the surveillance state, we must admit the sentience is already here.

So, even more briefly, what he could have said to the question - when will AI become sentient - was that AI is us, and it's already happened.

All this being said, I spent a good three hours watching a debate on the floor of the Parliament about the real threats of AI, not to mention having watched a good thousand hours of other scientists, researchers, engineers, and other professionals talk about their work in the field. With that, I concluded to myself that a General Artificial Intelligence will not be here for another couple generations, and that the threat will be from ourselves, not a sentient system.

Musk seemed to be in concert with the latter part of this, although he's still pretty spooked about what could happen.

This brings me to my next point, which is that Musk is a guy for whom the world moves way faster than most. We have to remember, if not for him, a working reusable rocket would have taken another 50 years at least. For example, if NASA of some other government agency were in charge of the project. It doesn't mean that because of him the world moves faster, but that when he talks about things, he sees them from a very different perspective, one where amazing things you can barely imagine can happen tomorrow. And he probably assumes that you are in his head with him, which you are not, and Joe Rogan is not, and apparently this writer for Futurism is not.

But fellow speculative fiction enthusiasts are, and hopefully they would agree that it's quite entertaining to listen to this guy talk about things. (Again, if you can get around the 10-second pause before answering every question.)

Finally, full disclosure, I along with Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson am a no-case guy (no cellphone case that is).

Post Script
The comment about how we're probably living in a simulation - I'm not a proponent of this, as there are more convincing arguments against it than for it coming from the physics world. However, his comment on how in the future we will all be living in a game, and it will be indistinguishable from reality, well, I'll ask folks to read Charles Stross' Halting State, or Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End or ... many scifi novels written in the past thirty years? (And also a Network Address post from wayback.)