It's getting common to see transportation departments 1, 2, 3, 4 and news stories 5, 6, 7 advocating zipper merge (AKA late merge), claiming that it is safer and allows higher throughput. As someone who naturally doubts the pronouncements of transportation departments, I thought I'd look into the research behind it ( Read more... )

(This exploration was inspired by de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity, coincidentally reinforced by parts of Palmer's Seven Surrenders, plus some of the style of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. So if it's a little pretentious, well, you now know why.)

How do we value human life?

I'm walking down the street. Two cars crash and burst into flames. I ( Read more... )

About once a year, I'm struck by the urge to knit something. Sometimes this is triggered by a coworker having a baby.


( Read more... )

As it does on a regular basis, the subject of gerrymandering has come up again. And, as always, I'm seeing people make the perfectly reasonable suggestion that we deal with it algorithmically. I'm all for that... until it is claimed that this would somehow make it non-political. And that's just bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.


( Read more... )

FYI, I currently have an installation called Time Machines in a store window at 11th & Commerce in Tacoma. It will be there for another 6 weeks. And hopefully, now that I have a timer rebooting things every 4 hours, the triggering electronics should even be reliable!

Click to view

(Oh, and yeah, I'm doing more in Tacoma over the next year, as I was chosen as ( Read more... )

So, you know that thing where a Roman emperor would decided if a gladiator should die by turning his thumb down or not? Turns out... maybe. All we actually know is that thumb turning (pollice verso) was involved. They might have been turned down. They might have been turned up, or hidden inside the fingers. I have my own theory ( Read more... )

A problem I've been thinking over for many years is how to improve protests. It seems to me that the standard models are largely broken at this point, in that they don't motivate political change very well. If you read sources from the 60s, protests were scary back then. They were seen as a collapse of hierarchy, of basic social order. But we've ( Read more... )

Like most people, I've commonly wondered how my life would have been different given various changes. What if we had moved when I was young, what if I had other siblings, etc. How would I be different? At what point would that alternate me be an unrecognizably different person? That's a fine course for a daydream to take, but a serious analysis ( Read more... )

1) There is a natural cognitive bias, the older one gets, to see society as going downhill ( Read more... )

This is a weird time to be a dedicated urbanist. Cities are popular again -- everyone is finally acknowledging what I always knew to be right! Real development is happening in them again, with a focus on walkable, liveable neighborhoods. That's great... except for how it is pushing out all the diversity which made the cities interesting in the ( Read more... )