Month: September 2025
Ignorance, Power, and Communication
I believe our current (dreadful) situation as a nation is heavily brought about by the lack of thinking ability for a large swath of the country. It’s not really their fault of course, no one gets to choose their natural abilities or upbringing. But it is a serious issue that we really need to face as a species I feel like we can combat much of our issues by just having better education, and easier access to it, and honestly, this seems like the easiest approach. But we can also come at it from the other end — finding ways to limit power (things like Trump, Fox News, Joe Rogan), and find better ways to communicate, or break through these bubbles that exist, that are currently very difficult to break into. Education in comparison seems easy, but perhaps the needed, more robust approach is to hit the issue from both sides.
News From My Nation
Pride in my nation seems to be running a little slim these days, but I want to be hopeful about the future, and I guess to find my “community” in some respect. Every so often I think about throwing together a website (or an app of some sort) that pulls content in from various places, and compiles them all into a single place. So for instance, I’ll check out my Alma Mater’s news section on research and discoveries, and I’m happy that I was a part of that — I like to see the advancement of human knowledge. In a broader sense, just being part of the university system in general is a community that I’m proud to have been a part of, so also pulling in those same types of news articles from other universities would help to compile all of that news from my community. These are my peeps!
I’m also an urbanite, and generally interested in the culture and challenges (and opportunities and solutions) that are a part of city life, so compiling news about great urbanism from cities would be a great addition to my news feed.
It’s still important to monitor the rest of the news, but I want to focus more on hopeful futures, and feel more connected to the community that I want to be a part of — the one that is continuing to push humanity forward.
Cars on the Street
Cars parked along streets are so ubiquitous, that we don’t even question it. But oftentimes when out running, I sometimes imagine what things would look like if they weren’t there. Perhaps that space gets devoted to small parks, running paths, or patio spaces for businesses. Perhaps we just have smaller streets, which would allow for more density. Of course there are economic reasons and practicality issues with this little thought experiment, but what an incredible cityscape we could have if we could figure that one out (publicly funded parking garages).
Ideal Density
I think a lot of urbanites probably assume that more density is usually better, but I have a feeling that there is an optimal amount density. That optimal density level would balance walkability, housing prices, environmental benefits, and similar factors, but balances with the negative affects of density, like the feelings of crowdedness and noise, access to nature, views, and access to sunlight. Of course, this ignores styles of density, where perhaps you can skew the results one way or another depending on the style of development — you may be able to have more nature sprinkled throughout a “towers in the park” style of development, but that may affect access to sunlight and obstruct views, so perhaps an optimal density would still apply.