A new study confirms the benefits of Urbanization. What they found were some general correlations of size and resource consumption that more or less fit the biological organism metaphor, meaning as the city grew in size it required less energy (resources) to sustain it (Energy Accounting) in a proportion called Sub Linear scaling (Economies Of Scale). What was surprising to the team was when they measured Creative output (jobs, wealth generated, innovation) as cities grew (City Size), the scaling of this output was not sublinear, but Super Linear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster... Oftentimes, cities are referred to as its own EcoSystem and many use the metaphor of it acting like a biological organism, Lobo said. But the team found that this was a false Metaphor. "The one thing that we know about organisms whether it be elephants or sharks or frogs, is that as they get large, they slow down," Lobo said. "They use less energy, they don't move as fast. That is a very important point for biological scaling." "In the case of cities, it is actually the opposite," he added. "As cities get larger they create more wealth and they are more innovative at a faster rate. There is no counterpart to that in biology." Authors: Jose Lobo; Luis Bettencourt of Los Alamos National Laboratory, LosAlamos, New Mex.; Dirk Helbing and Christian Kuhnert of Dresden University of Technology, Germany; and Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mex. (more)

Christopher Gale Langton (born 1948/49) is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life.[1] He coined the term in the late 1980s[2] when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.[3] Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langton

The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys, and subsumed the program from the American civilian Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023),[1] over 80 percent of which was for building and operating the plants that produced the fissile material. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the US, the UK, and Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

John von Neumann (/vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/ von NOY-mən; Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos [ˈnɒjmɒn ˈjaːnoʃ ˈlɒjoʃ]; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. Von Neumann had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time,[9] integrating pure and applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. He was a pioneer in building the mathematical framework of quantum physics, in the development of functional analysis, and in game theory, introducing or codifying concepts including cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA. During World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project. He developed the mathematical models behind the explosive lenses used in the implosion-type nuclear weapon.[10] Before and after the war, he consulted for many organizations including the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.[11] At the peak of his influence in the 1950s, he chaired a number of Defense Department committees including the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee and the ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee. He was also a member of the influential Atomic Energy Commission in charge of all atomic energy development in the country. He played a key role alongside Bernard Schriever and Trevor Gardner in the design and development of the United States' first ICBM programs.[12] At that time he was considered the nation's foremost expert on nuclear weaponry and the leading defense scientist at the U.S. Department of Defense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

An armed conflict between Israel and Hamas-led Palestinian militant groups[ad] has been taking place in the Gaza Strip and Israel since 7 October 2023. It is the fifth war of the Gaza–Israel conflict since 2008, and the most significant military engagement in the region since the Yom Kippur War in 1973.[146] It is the deadliest war for Palestinians in the history of the Israel–Palestine conflict,[147] and has sparked an ongoing Middle Eastern crisis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war (more)

Kamala Devi Harris[b] (born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who has been the 49th and current vice president of the United States since 2021 under President Joe Biden. She is the first female U.S. vice president, making her the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history. She is also the first African American and the first Asian American vice president. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2024 presidential election, becoming the second woman nominated for president by a major U.S. political party. From 2017 to 2021, she represented California in the U.S. Senate, and was Attorney General of California from 2011 to 2017. From 2004 to 2011, she served as District Attorney of San Francisco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris (more)

The Ivy League is a collegiate athletic conference comprising sports teams from eight private institutions of higher education in the Northeastern United States. The conference name is also commonly used to refer to those eight schools as a group.[2] The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University Of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. The term Ivy League also has connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in College Admissions, and social elitism. The term became official after the formation of the NCAA Division I athletic conference in 1954.[3] The use of the phrase is no longer limited to athletics, and now represents an educational philosophy inherent to the nation's oldest schools. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League (more)

There are several organizations that support the Mozilla community and Mozilla’s principles. They include the non-profit Mozilla Foundation as well as the wholly owned taxable subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla considers itself a hybrid organization, combining non-profit and market strategies to ensure the Internet remains a shared public resource. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/organizations/ (more)

a useful skill, or a crutch? ItDepends. (more)

Live Chat protocol (more)

Did Derek Sivers start this trend? Make it bigger? Anyhow.... (more)

LÖVE is an awesome framework (game engine) you can use to make 2D computer games in Lua. It's free, open-source, and works on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. https://love2d.org/ (more)

The Murdochs, From Page to Screen. The rise of the Murdochs, the world’s most powerful media family, which was chronicled in a three-part, 20,000-word investigation published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019, had all the right ingredients for a gripping documentary series. (more)

Kartik Agaram app: snap.love: a graph drawing tool https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/snap.love Unlike Graphviz and PlantUML, this tool is for small graphs where you want complete control over layout. Unlike PowerPoint or draw.io, this tool results generates text files that are more amenable to version control. (more)

2024 addition to the Epsilon Theory cabal; aka Cultish-Creative https://cultishcreative.com/

Cedric Chin: The Dangers of Treating Life as a Game. Late last year I wrote an essay titled Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win? which seems to have haunted a great many people. ((2021-09-21) Chin Are You Playing To Play Or Playing To Win) (more)

Group blog thinking about investment management and reality. https://www.epsilontheory.com/ (more)

Sherry Turkle (born June 18, 1948) is an American sociologist. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She obtained a BA in social studies and later a PhD in sociology and personality psychology at Harvard University. She now focuses her research on psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. She has written several books focusing on the psychology of human relationships with technology, especially in the realm of how people relate to computational objects[clarification needed]. Her memoir 'Empathy Diaries' received excellent critical reviews.[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherry_Turkle (more)

Memento mori (Latin for "remember (that you have) to die")[2] is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death.[2] The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards. The most common motif is a skull, often accompanied by bones. Often, this alone is enough to evoke the trope, but other motifs include a coffin, hourglass, or wilting flowers to signify the impermanence of life. Often, these would accompany a different central subject within a wider work, such as portraiture; however, the concept includes standalone genres such as the vanitas and Danse Macabre in visual art and cadaver monuments in sculpture... The philosopher Democritus trained himself by going into solitude and frequenting tombs.[5] Plato's Phaedo, where the death of Socrates is recounted, introduces the idea that the proper practice of philosophy is "about nothing else but dying and being dead".[6] The Stoics of classical antiquity were particularly prominent in their use of this discipline, and Seneca's letters are full of injunctions to meditate on death.[7] The Stoic Epictetus told his students that when kissing their child, brother, or friend, they should remind themselves that they are mortal, curbing their pleasure, as do "those who stand behind men in their triumphs and remind them that they are mortal".[8] The Stoic Marcus Aurelius invited the reader (himself) to "consider how ephemeral and mean all mortal things are" in his Meditations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

aka meaning crisis? (more)