Hi Mike, you remind me of my best friend here but he's from Texas. He's a Cherokee physicist who graduated Harvard is a world expert on string figures and now spends his time translating Chinese Poetry although he himself is a great poet. Here's his URL: http://www.torusflex.com/ He's much older now. The pictures are from his time teaching at the Laguardia High School of the Performing Arts here at Lincoln Center. He's now retired and writing and publishing like a Banshee.
As for the city planning. Urban design came from several places. It has many late protagonists ending up with the mixed record of people like Robert Moses in New York and the planned communities. But before that, there were the descendants of the old Cameratas in Italy and the British and Continental Men's Clubs. In the 1880s, the Robber Barons took the reins of time, culture, medicine, education, fashion, Indian policy and transportation with overt actions creating time zones, high brow culture/middlebrow and lower class culture and entertainment, they organized education and libraries, rail transportation creating great cities on the plains away from everything, invented modern medical education with the founding Johns Hopkins University, and practiced social theories on the remnants of the once huge American Indian empires confining them to reservations and western social theories. After 1929, they also began the investment in information technology with the automation of entertainment in the development of non-live performing mediums that had a huge economy of scale. This was overt. Just as modern engineering sprang from the bowels of Italian artists creating artistic perspective, so did modern information technology begin in the Arts and what to do with them in the marketplace. But it was planned in social setting as rigid as the most rigid board room but with a lot more grace. The historical record is clear although the idea of clubs and committees has fallen out of fashion in favor of conglomerates and market entities. A lot of frontier development was organic but as Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, the Frontier ended in 1900 and the era of social design began as an attempt at conservation and efficiency. In 1929 it all collapsed in what would become a great Depression and the world would be shaped in the image of the War to End all Wars and 100 million would die. That is their inheritance. I participated as one of the pawns in the world's largest lead and zinc mining field in the middle of an Indian Reservation where I lived until I was 18. REH PS: In the last twenty years or so, I've used futurework and other groups on the internet as a kind of university to open horizons and get to know the other Domains outside my own. It's been a tremendous help. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2012 3:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Nobel Prize Keith wrote: KH> Well, I'll tell you. Almost all major conurbations lie at what were KH> previously major ports (even if they're not so busy today), The KH> remainder are on rivers. In times past they all had many KH> manufacturing areas and developed major warehousing (for stuff made KH> in the interior of the country) and financial sectors. and Ed replied (in part): Ed> All I'm saying is that while we like to think of cities in terms of Ed> ports and trade routes, their foundation and growth occurred because Ed> of a variety of factors. Many cites originated as convenient landing -- latter shipping -- points. But their long-term development surely depended, as Ed opines, on "a variety of factors". Brian Arthur (Stanford, Santa Fe Institute, PARC) has numerous papers on positive feedback related to how cities come to dominate over other potential sites of conurbation. [1] Wiener showed us how negative feedback was the essential element of control -- steering or "cybernetic" -- mechanisms. But in 2nd c. Britain or 19th c. America, nobody was trying to *steer* the development of cities. Positive feedback leads to runaway and disaster in, say, steering a ship or stabilizing a very tall building. It seems also to lead to runaway and, in retrospect, possibly to disaster in the growth of cities. Only cities typically grow over centuries so the disaster arrives very gradually. From the perspective of the Roman legions or the East India Company or the railroad barons or a modern mega-corporation, nearly everything and everyone in a city is an "externality" during those centuries of growth and change. I kinda like Krugman, at least intermittently, because he tends to see what he's looking at -- what's on the "end of his fork" -- rather than what existing doctrine says he should be seeing. But in seeking underlying principles, I'm more impressed by acceptance at the Santa Fe Institute than I am by the late-comer economic Nobel recognition. And WB Arthur hews more to the kind of thinking that Ray urges on us -- systems, complexity, (so-called) operations research, chaos -- than to thinking that depends on the existing architecture of economic doctrine. Ed> Prior to Krugman, the theory of international trade was based on the Ed> Ricardian notion of comparative advantage.... From what little I Ed> know, Krugman brought in the idea that, given a certain level of Ed> technological development, resource advantage didn't really matter Ed> very much. No wonder so many people dismiss him. He offended, continues to offend, established dogma. Well, as I said before, I never took Econ 101 and ran aground in Chapter 1 trying to beat up a Econ 101 textbook. Before enlightenment, chop wood,draw water. After enlightenment, chop wood,draw water. So FWIW, - Mike [1] Some collected in W. Brian Arthur, _Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy_, Univ. Michigan Press, 1994 -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
