go to future reading list

2024

  • Hill City Trolleys - Harold E. Cox (book, ISBN13 ???) READING 24/??
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
    • NOTE: Revision published by Blackwell Press, a local press associated with Lynch’s Ferry journal of local history. Not to be confused with Wiley-Blackwell, a much larger publishing company.
    • “The land companies were often associated with street railways, good public transportation being essential for the development of remote subdivisions in a day when roads were generally impassable. The land company generally built a hotel, an amusement park, or some other facility to attract business. In Lynchburg, the Rivermont Company engaged in a project which may be unique in the annals of land schemes - the establishment of Randolph Macon Woman’s College.” (pp. 8-9)
    • David Lamar
    • NOTE: In 1891, trolley trip from downtown to modern day University of Lynchburg took 25m
    • Jackson and Sharp Company
    • NOTE: Lynchburg Traction and Light Co. created in 1901 as result of several mergers
    • NOTE: Virginia Nail and Iron works was at Reusens Road
    • Bonsack Cigarette Machine
    • “During its first fifteen months [the Lynchburg and Rivermont Street Railway Co.] hauled 300,000 passengers without an injury. On 4 July 1892, it hauled 5363 passengers.” (pp. 22)
  • Massage Basics - Davide Sechi (book, ISBN13 9781402711725) READING
    • "”…on every square centimeter of skin there are on average 3 million cells, 10 hairs, 15 sebaceous glands, 100 sweat glands, 200 pain receiving centers, 25 pressure points for the reception of tactile stimuli, 13 devices for the reception of cold and 2 for heat, 4 meters of nerve fibers, and 3000 cells connected to the sensory organs.” (pp. 24)
    • “…the layer of wax [sebaceous glands] produce not only makes the surface of the body soft, but also acts as an insulating material protecting the skin from potential heat loss.” (pp. 24)
  • That Hideous Strength - C. S. Lewis (book, ISBN13 9781451664829) READING
    • REFERRAL: David W.
    • NOTE: Physical book contains whole space trilogy.
    • “You want a man who loves business and wire-pulling for their own sake and doesn’t really ask what it’s all about. If he did, he’d start bringing his own–well, I suppose he’d call them ‘ideas.’” (pp. 40)
    • NOTE: Bracton College setting is weirdly similar to the college in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It features stuffy characters that are comical in their detachment from reality, an unfathomably old campus littered with memorials to forgotten alumni, etc.
    • “Husbands were made to be talked to. It helps them to concentrate their minds on what they’re reading–like the sound of a weir.” (pp. 75)
    • “Statistics about agricultural laborers were the real substance; any real ditcher, plowman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow.” (pp. 85)
    • NOTE: Kvetching about renters has apparently always been a thing. The way N.I.C.E. fellows talk about them in this book is exactly how some local planning commissioners talk about renters.
    • Bursar
    • Traducer
    • Drollery
    • “‘I thought love meant equality,’ she said, ‘and free companionship.’ ‘Ah, equality!’ said the Director. ‘We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.’ ‘I always though that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.’ ‘You were mistaken,’ said he gravely. ‘That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes–that is very well. Equality guards life; it does not make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.’ ‘But surely in marriage…?’ ‘Worse and worse,’ said the Director. ‘Courtship knows nothing of it, nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends–comrades–do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…’” (p. 145)
    • Kinuko Y. Craft
      • NOTE: Illustrator of beautiful original artwork reused on cover of this publication
    • Viridical
    • Numinor (misspelled by C. S. Lewis from hearing Tolkien read an unpublished manuscript
      • NOTE: Seems to represent “the true west”
  • Revelation 4 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
    • Matthew Henry’s Commentary on Acts to Revelation
      • “The prevailing colour was a pleasant green, showing the reviving and refreshing nature of the new covenant. Four-and-twenty seats around the throne, were filled with four-and-twenty elders, representing, probably, the whole church of God. Their sitting denotes honour, rest, and satisfaction; their sitting about the throne signifies nearness to God, the sight and enjoyment they have of him.”
    • Sardius
    • Jasper
  • Amtrak is coming to Christiansburg - Keshia Lynn (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “If the Amtrak train is off of Cinnabar Road, it will be completed by 2028 and cost almost $400 million. If it’s near the mall, it would be finished by 2030 and cost almost $800 million. Finally, a stop at both locations would cost more than $950 million, and it wouldn’t be completed until 2030.”
  • Hill City Hardwoods owner running as a Democrat for Ward I City Council seat - Emma Martin (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • The “Urban Planning Activist” Starter Kit - Nth City (video)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Discord
  • Extending The Northeast Corridor & Acela Service to Virginia - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • The Missing Transit in This Fast-Growing Canadian Province - RMTransit (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • What is Incrementalism, Anyway? - Alon Levy (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “already in the 1970s, SBB timetables were such that trains arrived at Zurich shortly before the hour every hour and departed on or shortly after the hour. The Rail 2000 plan expanded these timed connections, called Knoten or knots, to more cities, and prioritized speed increases that would enable trains to connect two knots in just less than an hour, to avoid wasting time for passengers and equipment. The slogan is run trains as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible: expensive investment is justifiable to get the trip times between two knots to be a little less than an hour instead of a little more than an hour, but beyond that, it isn’t worth it, because connecting passengers would not benefit.”
    • “Switzerland pads the timetable 7%, whereas the TGV network (largely on dedicated tracks, thus relatively insulated from delays) pads 11-14%, and the much more exposed German intercity rail network pads 20-30%. The extent of timetable padding in and around New York is comparable to the German level or even worse; those two-hour trip times include what appears to be about 25 minutes of padding. The related LIRR has what appears to be 32% padding on its Main Line, as of nine years ago.”
  • Zechariah 1 - Zechariah (book chapter)
  • Are Rents About to Crash? - Charles Marohn (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “It doesn’t work this way for an apartment, which in the financial world is called Commercial Real Estate (CRE). The set of guarantees for CRE is not nearly as comprehensive and robust as it is for residential mortgages. As a result, many loans have much shorter terms (three to seven years) with a balloon payment at the end. This lowers the risk for the lender by increasing the risk for the borrower.”
  • Gran Torino - Clint Eastwood (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
    • Ford Gran Torino
    • NOTE: Special features on DVD include segment where one Detroit car enthusiast mentions how cars are “a second layer of clothing”
    • Hmong Americans
  • Dreamer - John Gatins (film)
    • REFERRAL: Claira W.
    • Filly
  • Why You Click with Certain People - Sharon Begley (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • “Short of connecting brains with electrodes to sync their activity, there might be a way to increase your chances of clicking. We feel more connected with people whose postures, vocal rhythms, facial expressions, and even eyeblinks match our own. Maybe clicking can be triggered from the outside in: Consciously sync the actions you can control—posture, expression, and the like—with other people’s, and your brain activity may follow.”
  • How Much More?: Romans 5:15-17 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
  • Come Thou Fount - Robert Robinson, John Wyeth, and Ashael Nettleton (song)
  • Here’s How We Get Housing That’s Both More Affordable AND Better Quality - Emma Durand-Wood (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “News about ‘renovictions’ caught my attention. That’s what happens when a building has been neglected to the point that major renos are unavoidable, tenants are evicted to enable the work to be done, rents on the renovated units are jacked up, and a whole new set of tenants moves in. But renovictions are also done disingenuously as a predatory landlord practice, where the need for major renovations is exaggerated for the sole purpose of getting lower-paying tenants out and higher-paying tenants in.”
    • “Landlord-tenant laws and renter protections can only go so far. At a certain point, effective protection for tenants comes by virtue of having actual choice in where they spend their rental dollars.”
  • Trucking and Grocery Prices - Alon Levy (article)
  • The sudden death of the American condo - Salim Furth (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “One suspect is condo defect law, which has (at least in some states) swung so far that most builders and insurers won’t touch condos. Another is the fact that older condos have appreciated less than houses over time suggests that it’s not just construction problems.”
  • Moneyball - Bennett Miller (film)
  • Plans for private San Francisco-Los Angeles overnight sleeping car service revived - Bob Johnston (article)
  • The urban economics of sprawl - Salim Furth (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Cities also come with significant infrastructure costs that intensify with built and human density. I’m skeptical that a full, accurate accounting of costs can be done at the micro level. And the macro-level indicators, like overall tax rates, certainly don’t suggest large savings from density.”
      • NOTE: Author does not consider whether the higher tax rates of high-density places are the result of a higher cost of providing the same services as low-density places or just the propensity of urbanites to desire a larger variety and higher quality of services. If Lynchburg was twice as densely populated, and kept the current tax rates, budget proportions, and set of city services, the quality would significantly increase.
    • “Can we allow housing at the urban fringe but ban new highways? This is just a recipe for stroads. Places like Northern Virginia that failed to build a network of limited-access highways instead have 6-lane arterials with traffic lights that mean they always run at half capacity. For a major city with serious demand pressure, building new highways or parkways is a good and necessary part of greenfield growth.”
      • NOTE: He’s right about stroads being what happens when you ban highways but keep it car centric, but why can’t each of those highways be replaced with a BRT or light rail line? He says transit to these places is impractical, then says we need to build more limited access highways, which are not cheap.
  • Why Utah is So Weird - Wendover Productions (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • Why Does The U.S. Destroy Its Cities For Highways? - Strong Towns (video)
  • Anatomy of a credit card rewards program - Patrick McKenzie (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • “…interchange fees are not constant and fixed. They are set based on quite a few factors (gibbering madness intensifies) but, most prominently, based on the rank of card product you use. The more a card product is pitched to socioeconomically well-off people, the more expensive interchange is. Credit card issuers explicitly and directly charge the rest of the economy for the work involved in recruiting the most desirable customers.”
  • Feeds are Not Fit for Gardening - Chris Krycho (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden - Maggie Appleton (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Feeds are Not Fit for Gardening - Chris Krycho (article)
    • “… streams only surface the Zeitgeisty ideas of the last 24 hours. They are not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature over time. Though the rising popularity of Twitter threading is an impressive attempt to reconfigure a stream environment and make it more garden-esque.”
    • “The garden is our counterbalance. Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you’re hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar’s Number. It’s hyperlinking at it’s best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.”
    • Moveable Type
  • Amazing Grace - Michael Apted (film)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life - Terry Jones (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Inherent Vice - Paul Thomas Anderson (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Death Reigned: Romans 5:12-14 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • Pelagius
    • NOTE: NASB verses copied below. Pastor preaching from ESV.
      • “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned–for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.”
    • NOTE: The word for “type” in “type of Him” is Strongs number G5179b
    • Federal headship
  • 3:10 to Yuma - James Mangold (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Lynchburg Citizens Academy at Department of Public Works - Lee Newland, Ryan Roberts, etc. (lecture)
    • NOTE: Clay Simmons deputy director
    • NOTE: Departments are Solid waste, grounds, building maintenance and custodial, streets, engineering, and administration
    • NOTE: Staff of 168 employees + ~30 seasonal workers hired through staffing company
    • NOTE: FY2024 operating budget of $22,545,794
    • NOTE: Have lots of contracts, including paving contracts and guardrail contracts
    • NOTE: 118 Signalized intersections, 3200 regulatory signs, and 6800 non-regulatory signs
    • NOTE: Pavement markings on over 350 lane miles of city streets
    • NOTE: 4 corridors with adaptive signalization (Wards Road is one), and Old Graves Mill road will be 5th
    • NOTE: MUTCD compliance required for projects receiving VDOT or federal funding
    • NOTE: City does get billed by APCO tarriff document
    • NOTE: 5th Street final project should start summer 2025
    • NOTE: Lee Newland said the city is about 40% short on funds to maintain existing roadways.
    • NOTE: Most of the loop vehicle detectors are along Enterprise Drive
    • NOTE: Traffic engineer confirmed Synchro vehicle detector cameras detect bicycles and motorcycles as well
    • NOTE: Fellow academy attendee asked about getting bike lanes on Bedford Avenue and city engineer said there’s no room
    • NOTE: Director of Public Works said new pavement condition index survey should be done in the next couple of years.
  • Tom Martin wears a lot of hats; the common thread is service to his community - Emma Martin (article)
  • Local and Intercity Rail are Complements - Alon Levy (article)
  • Bright from the Start: GE’s CFL with an incandescent trick up its sleeve - Technology Connections (video)
  • Fifth-Hand Dealers in Ideas - Isaac Morehouse (article) RECOMMENDED
  • The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Self Driving Kids - The War on Cars (podcast episode)
    • Lillian Moller Gilbreth
    • “The couple pioneered the use of short films to study how jobs were performed, and they once set up camera equipment in their laboratory to film five of their children getting their tonsils out.” (pp. 2)
    • Kitchen work triangle
    • Reggio Emilia approach
    • Jean Piaget
    • Fabulist
    • Leitmotif
    • “Storage becomes a leitmotif of the family home, which first bulges with attics, basements, and garages, then streamlines with carports, builtins, and kid-size cupboards. Pushed and pulled by the perceptions of children’s space needs, the average size of the American house grows from 980 square feet in 1950 to 1660 square feet in 1973 to 2600 square feet today.” (pp. 7)
    • "”From the late nineteenth century on, writers, thinkers educators, and politicians wanted to get children out of the city. Off the streets, out of apartments, into private homes, and bused to suburban schools. Children were to be their parents’ problem, and the building of playrooms and the purchasing of play equipment–a swingset for every yard!–created an ideal of childhood that was privatized and consumer-driven.” (pp. 8)
    • “The act of making that designers find so satisfying is built into early childhood education, but as they grow, many children lose opportunities, to create their own environment, bounded by a text-centric view of education and concerns for safety.” (pp. 9)
    • Howdah
    • Parti-colored
    • “As a number of writers have argued, children’s toys and children’s play are a space dominated by intense commercial energy and an ever-increasing explicitness of purpose.” (pp. 14-15)
    • “Some early block sets, following Locke, used the six sides as an opportunity to display symbols: letters, numbers, or stories, often taken from the Bible. Designer and historian Karen Hewitt describes these early commercial products as ‘dipped in honey,’ sweetening learning by treating the toy like an advertisement for itself, with multicolor imagery made possible by chromolithography, a then new printing technology. To focus the child’s mind on letters, it would be better if alphabet blocks weren’t all colors of the rainbow, or if the colors corresponded to a next step in reading, like differentiating vowels from consonants. In recognition of this, twentieth-century Montessori alphabet sets use blue for vowels and red for consonants.” (pp. 16)
    • Froebel gifts
    • NOTE: Buckminster Fuller owes his appreciation of triangles to Froebel’s nineteenth gift, peas-work, where children make structures from toothpicks and peas or cork.
    • “Pratt’s blocks are commonly referred to as unit blocks, and these were staples of my own childhood, at home and at school. The basic brick is 5 1/2 by 2 3/4 by 1 3/8 inches (140 by 70 by 35 millimeters), a 4:2:1 proportion. Unit blocks are large enough to use on the floor but small enough for three-year-olds to manipulate.” (pp. 31)
    • Urea-formaldehyde
    • NOTE: First Lego bricks were made of cellulose acetate
    • NOTE: Original Lego bricks came in red, green, white, and tan
    • “The company’s existing boxes already included a number of architectural models, to which LEGO added a large vinyl mat, marked with streets and blocks, new 1:87-scale vehicles, trees, bushes, and signs that matched the so-called HO standard size used for model railways.” (pp. 43)
    • “System of Play laid out a large, car-centric town on a grid plan, rationalizing and modernizing the village.” (pp. 43)
    • “The playroom, well stocked with toys, was supposed to replace the pleasures of the urban, social street.” (pp. 43)
    • Muji
      • NOTE: Appears to be like a Japanese answer to Ikea with a focus on minimalist design
    • Tripp Trapp
    • “High chairs and their cousins, playpens and perambulators, became the inanimate replacements for female servants, silent assistants for mothers who now had to cook, clean, and keep their children out of trouble, while also instructing them in good behavior.” (pp. 80)
    • “Until the early twentieth century, house plans, and even apartment plans, waver between creating a private sleeping zone of bedrooms either upstairs or at the back of the domicile and placing a principal bedroom downstairs or up front as a sign of status.” (pp. 85)
    • “[Melusina Fay Peirce’s] solution was ‘cooperative housekeeping,’ where women would band together to buy a building and outfit it with equipment for cooking, baking, laundry, and sewing, performing the work together and charging their husbands retail prices for the result. Once established in the area, families who were part of the cooperative could move into kitchenless houses, set in the center of an urban block rather than along its edge, creating a commonly held yard around the domicile. One in every thirty-six lots would be taken over for the cooperative building, the work engine of the reorganized domestic space.” (pp. 85)
    • “It was clear from the beginning of the set-aside single family home that it would be ‘more work for mother,’ but nonetheless, it remained the American ideal and only grew in isolation and complexity.” (pp. 86)
    • “Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge wanted to create a nation of homeowners, with the underlying goal of beating back Bolshevism by mass ownership of property.” (pp. 90)
    • “As children completed each primer, they would move farther from the teacher, so that everyone in a row would be studying the same book and could file forward as a class.” (pp. 127)
    • NOTE: Massachusetts was first state to make schooling compulsory in 1852, and Mississippi was the last to do so in 1917. That’s a 65 year gap. I wonder if other laws banning or requiring things have a similar time gap between these states adopting them.
    • “Once a Harkness Table is installed in a classroom, it fixes the room to that method and is as inflexible, in its own democratic way, as rows of desks. The trapezoidal tables of my open-plan middle school in the 1970s hinted at a brave new order, cellular rather than gridded.” (pp. 135)
      • NOTE: Perhaps inspiration for Vector Space classroom desks
    • NOTE: In 1847 Horace Mann and Henry Barnard created Quincy Grammar School in Quincy, Massachusetts, which was the first (or one of the first) school to divide students into grades based on their abilities. By 1855 all the grammar school in Boston was divided into grades, and by 1860 every primary school in Boston was divided into grades.
    • “In order to break the rigidity of the traditional classroom structure, [Dewey] saw the school as a node in a network of child-centered architecture including homes, parks, libraries, and museums. Learning should not take place only in the room, and it was not solely transferred from teacher to student.” (pp. 143)
    • “In 1912, [Booker T.] Washington proposed to build six rural schools around Tuskegee, Alabama, with funding from Julius Rosenwald, who had made a fortune through his nationwide expansion of Sears, Roebuck, and Co. stores and was a new Tuskegee trustee. Rosenwald initially proposed that the schools be standardized and sold as kits, like Sears’s famous kit houses, but Washington thought local participation was key. The Rosenwald Fund would contribute one-third of the cost; interested communities would raise another third in cash, labor, or building materials; and the final third would be contributed by the white-run school boards. Once the schools were built, they were handed over to the school boards.” (pp. 145)
    • “…by the time of Rosenwald’s death in 1932, which ended the building, there were more than five thousand schools across fifteen southern states, from Virginia to Texas. By 1928, one of every five schools in the south was a Rosenwald School.” (pp. 145)
    • “When it came time to build a new school in his district, it was only natural that [Carleton Washburne] wanted his architect to work from a child’s perspective. ‘The building must not be too beautiful, lest it be a place for children to keep and not one for them to use. Its materials must be those not easily marred, and permitting of some abuse…’” (pp. 149-150)
    • NOTE: Grade system was introduced around the 1850s, and already in 1912 and educator named Frederic Burk was advocating for its abolition.
    • NOTE: Washburne’s “Winnetka Plan” involved students going through curriculum as they increased in skill. If you passed the test for a lesson, you would move ahead, and if you failed, you would repeat it. Later in the book this is called a “continuous progress” system.
    • “Hertzberger also tinkered with school furniture, making his own play on building blocks: a square, recessed section of floor, termed a ‘sitting-hollow,’ in which sixteen hollow blocks, with cut-out handles, could be stored. When taken out, they became campfire stools or the makings of a tower, and the pit became a secondary play space. For another school he devised a learning banquette with a low L-shaped sofa, high walls, and a built-in desk. On the exterior, the area underneath the sofa serves as storage cubbies. The changes in height that pieces like the blocks or banquette create insert pockets of privacy within the large, open schoolrooms without buildng actual walls. (pp. 176)
    • NOTE: Author says that her open-plan Quaker Friends school allowed students significant flexibility in what they studied, and used a “continuous progress” system for mathematics classes.
    • “If you put a class of kids in a room with one adult, she says, you’ll revert to one-directional teaching. ‘Change is like a little grass which is bending. If you don’t actually finish it off with physical design, it will bend back.’”
    • NOTE: All this creative work in the area of building schools more conducive to learning and creativity is great and all, but why are we separating our children from the world like this in the first place? This really hit me when I read about schools trying to internally replicate “main streets” and “town centers.”
    • “Alexander’s answer to the problem of maintaining a physical connection between home, neighborhood, and school is to decentralize the school, inserting it into the neighborhood fabric in a storefront or other small-scale commercial space on a pedestrian street, near adult workplaces, and within walking distance of a park.” (pp. 198)
    • “Playgrounds are places made by adults, for children, always with the hope of harnessing their play to a specific location.” (pp. 203)
    • “The parents of the boys are happy with their experiment, estimating that eight months of schoolwork have been covered in a summer in the sand. The boys have solved their own problems of administration, carpentry, industrialization, sewerage, and monetization. They have cooperated and rarely been idle, even as they played in the yard under observation and minimal intervention.” (pp. 208)
    • “In a 1907 letter to Cuno H. Rudolph, president of the Washington Playground Association, [Theodore] Roosevelt wrote: ‘City streets are unsatisfactory playgrounds for children because of the danger, because most good games are against the law, because they are too hot in the summer, and because in crowded sections of the city they are apt to be schools of crime. Neither do small back yards nor ornamental grass plots meet the needs of any but the very small children. Older children who would play vigorous games must have places especially set aside for them, and since play is a fundamental need, playgrounds should be provided for every child as much as schools. This means that they must be distributed over the cities in such a way as to be within walking distance of every boy and girl, as most children can not afford to pay carfare.’” (pp. 211-212)
    • “The sturdy field houses that were part of these new parks grew to house branches of the public library, as well as offering classes in infant welfare, musit, painting, drawing, and dancing. Pasteurized milk was on tap, along with professional nurses and day nurseries.” (pp. 215)
    • “The creation of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972, and the publication of 1981 guidelines for public playgrounds, changed the allowable height and distances between apparatuses as well as the type of surfacing material recommended for use underneath.” (pp. 218)
    • “While many public officials were content with the four Ss–sandbox, slide, swing, seesaw–postwar focus on controlling and improving the lives of children, and rebuilding cities, led to an explosion of new forms for outdoor play.” (pp. 219)
    • NOTE: Aldo Van Eyck architect designed a number of buildings for Amsterdam’s post-WWII reconstruction. He was also part of CIAM, which I remember Christopher Alexander decrying in “A City is not a Tree.”
    • “…you rarely see children’s architecture today, even in contemporary schools, in gray and brown, without carpeting, without imagery, without the tiresome palette of primary colors.” (pp. 221)
    • “Somersault frames near the street act as a portal, with activities becoming more intense, and more dense, as you head to the back of the site.” (pp. 224)
      • NOTE: Same idea as Jeff Speck expounds on in “Walkable City”. He says that buildings facing the street should be transparent or permeable to attract interest and invite passersby in.
    • “…for thirty years [Van Eyck] seeded an old city with slices of modernity that offered children stages for play, separate but not sequestered from teh business of adult streets and sidewalks.” (pp. 226)
      • NOTE: That doesn’t sound so bad. It seems to fit with Christopher Alexander’s idea that children should be separated from the city. Maybe he hated the playgrounds of other CIAM theorists.
    • “When Kodomo Yume Park opened in July 2003 it was hot and humid, and the children spent most of their time huddled in its one air-conditioned space. After a week of that the playworkers had had enough and cut the power. ‘We told them the air conditioning was broken,’ says my guide, Hitoshi Shimamura, director of the organization Tokyo Play. ‘Then they started playing with water.’”
    • “Junk playgrounds had a brief postwar flourishing in the United States. The first one opened in Minneapolis in 1949, a one-year experiment called The Yard sponsored by McCall’s magazine, which published a 1950 cover story about the experiment.” (pp. 230)
    • “By 1977, there were twenty adventure playgrounds, most about a decade old, operating in Roxbury, Massachusetts; Eugene, Oregon; and Milpitas, Irvine, and Huntington Beach, California. The oldest continually operating American iteration opened in 1979, on the Berkeley Marina, but it is one of only a handful today outside Europe and Japan.” (pp. 231)
    • NOTE: Mentions The Land, an APG near Wrexham which was later the subject of The Land, a documentary I watched at the Miller Center.
    • “Current guidelines suggest seesaws can be used safely if there is a tire installed beneath the seats and a buffer zone around them in case of falls, but the result has been the slow disappearance of the apparatuses, which were on 55% of American playgrounds in 2000 but only 7% by 2004.” (pp. 235)
    • “Seesaws, merry-go-rounds, and other disappearing equipment of the past developed the vestibular system, which senses the body’s relationship to the ground, improving children’s balance and coordination.” (pp. 237)
    • “Exposing themselves to risk, and coming back unharmed, is an essential part of psychological development. Direct experience may, in fact, teach children about which risks are worth taking. ‘Adults should therefore try to eliminate hazards that children cannot see or manage without removing all risks, so that children are able to meet challenges and choose to take risks in relatively safe play settings,’ Sandseter and Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair write…” (pp. 238)
    • NOTE: High Point Childrens Museum has a KaBOOM! Imagination Playground foam block set as mentioned in this book
    • “Loose parts theory arises out of an interest in anarchy rather than order. Whether designer loose parts actually fulfill this mission is unclear. The Toy, the Play Panels, the Imagination Playground blocks are perhaps too clean, too easily lofted and joined. In the adult design world, constraints are a creative opportunity, but these loose parts intentionally minimize the degree of difficulty.” (pp. 263)
    • Harkness Table
    • Facticious
    • Julius Rosenwald
    • Rosenwald School
    • Winnetka Plan
    • Eliel Saarinen
    • Phillis Wheatley Elementary School, New Orleans
    • Vittra Utbildning
    • Settlement movement
    • Dowager
    • Circumscribed
    • NOTE: She refers to the “Karymor playground spinner”, which from an image search appears to be those rapidly spinning tables with handles on old playgrounds.
    • Terrazzo
    • Loggia
    • CPSC Public Playground Safety Handbook
    • Kompan Saturn Carousel
    • Kompan Giant Swing with Bird’s Nest
    • Bosque
    • “Geography and maturity can be linked, if we let them.” (pp. 271)
    • “In the late nineteenth century, when avenues on the Lower East Side were first paved and the speed of vehicles increased, boys spread glass on the streets to keep carriages from disrupting their games.” (pp. 273)
    • “I proposed a supra-agency combining departments of planning, transportation, education, and health in order to restructure the physical planning of the city to promote [child-friendly] ends. As it happens, Vancouver has already done this, and in the ensuing years, more cities would follow.” (pp. 277)
    • Solarium
    • “…most enclaves are designed in a similar high-1970’s manner: arcs of attached units, up to four stories tall, create a long oval open space at the center and are separated by narrow, crooked paths. To children, these paths create a porous structure, secret routes between one courtyard and another.” (pp. 291)
    • “The most relevant pattern to False Creek South is #68, Connected Play. ‘Children need other children. Some finding suggest that they need other children even more than they need their own mothers,’ Alexander writes. And indeed, one of the chief difficulties of contemporary parenthood is connecting your children to others in healthy ways.” (pp. 293)
    • “Women-Work-City, a housing complex built in Vienna in 1993, combined midrise apartment buildings with landscaped courtyards, private balconies, and an on-site kindergarten and doctor’s office, all close to public transit. It was developed as a part of that city’s gender-mainstreaming project–an attempt to provide equal access to city resources for men and women by taking a careful look at how men and women use cities differently. Connections, and safe connections, turn out to be a major part of that effort, as does a focus on family life.” (pp. 296)
    • “The Children’s Home operates as a pressure valve for the family, a nonjudgemental third parent to fill in the gaps and allow parents to get away from their children for an evening (even if they stay in). The Children’s Home is one of those third spaces, often discussed for adults as an alternative to home and work.” (pp. 297-298)
    • “The century of anarchists, educators, and theorists who wanted to give children back the city through design also believed that children should have input into the city’s structure, sparking a series of continuing experiments in gathering their kid-size view of the world. Urban95, an ongoing project of the Bernard van Leer Foundation, takes the average height of a three-year-old, just above three feet, as the vantage point for a new set of planning principles for healthy child development. The project is ‘premised on the belief that if we want to make a city livable for everyone, planning from the vantage point of a toddler is the best place to start.’” (pp. 298)
    • “Heather represents an ideal: Her spirit of inquiry has not been limited by poverty or urban life but allowed to flourish, aided by her mother’s comfort with her playing in spots not marked as ‘for children.’ [Robin C.] Moore contrasts Heather’s freedom with that of Gill, a girl of the same age whose mother would only allow her to be interviewed, awkwardly, in her presence and who was only allowed to play on the windswept concrete playground of their housing estate.” (pp. 301)
    • “The children also show him a variety of made up games based on street furniture, including lampposts, retaining walls, stairs, and railings. For the child, the path between places can be as exciting as the place, if they are allowed to make the journey in their own time.” (pp. 302)
    • “Streetcar suburbs, built outside major American cities from the 1870s on, created a new model for domestic life: the detached house, with a garden on all sides, physically removed from its neighbors and from the real diseases at work in urban areas. ‘The new idea was no longer to be a part of a close community,’ writes historian Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier (1985), ‘but to have a self-contained unit, a private wonderland walled off from the rest of the world. Although visually open to the street, the lawn was a barrier–a kind of verdant moat separating the house from the threats and temptations of the city.” (pp. 304)
      • NOTE: Everything’s relative. My streetcar suburb has a wildly more pro-social arrangement than a suburb I grew up in.
    • “[Lewis] Mumford felt there was something unhealthy about the way children and child-rearing dominated home and social life. The green space was a blessing, for a time, but when children reached the age to explore, mentally and physically, there was nothing more within reach.” (pp. 305)
    • “Streetcar suburbs were accessible, and dependent on central cities. Children could, and did, get on streetcars and buses and go into downtown. But sprawling suburbs, greater self-sufficiency, and dependence on the automobile pushed families and their children farther out.” (pp. 310)
    • Coffee klatch
    • Traffic Agents app
    • SeeClickFix
      • NOTE: Basically the institutional version of Lynchburg Road Issues
    • Regional Planning Association of America
  • Stew’s U.S. High Speed Rail News April 2024 - Brightline West CAHSR Acela NEC Dallas Ft Worth - Lucid Stew (video)
  • Appalachian Power files for rate increase that would boost the average residential bill by $10 a month - Matt Busse
    • “The latest request is the first under a new state law that requires Virginia’s second-largest electric utility to file rate review requests with the SCC every two years instead of every three. The $16 average monthly increase earlier this year was the result of the last triennial review.”
  • The United States Has Too Few Road Tunnels - Alon Levy (article)
  • The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play! - Melanie Thernstrom (article)
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
    • “Parents who limit screen time, as local families often do, tend to compensate by piling on extracurricular activities and tutors.”
    • “Even if a boy wanted to play outside, Mike explains, with whom would he play? At any given hour, there might be a 30 percent chance that some kid was playing outside. But the so-called network effect, in which children influence one another’s behavior, means that 30 percent might as well be zero, because it is low enough that no boy can count on it and so will default to his screen — causing the percentage to drop lower. That is, kids don’t play outside because other kids don’t play outside.”
    • “Mike found himself up against the fact that in America, the ethos of wealth and the ethos of community are often in conflict: Part of what the wealthy feel they are buying is privacy and the ability to be choosy about whom they socialize with.”
    • “In a neighborhood in which front yards are for admiration only, Mike installed a picnic table, close to the sidewalk, where he and his family often sat, so that people walking by would have to talk to them. Mike put a white board on the fence and started projecting videos and slide shows onto it, in hope of luring neighborhood children. And it worked: Dogs stop to drink at a fountain made from a large, flat millstone in the shape of a hockey puck, children wander over to the play river and people pause to read the quotes on the mosaics he had an artist design.”
    • “With all due respect to Westchester, Silicon Valley may have the densest concentration in the country of former engineers, executives and other highly educated women who have renounced work in favor of what they call uber-parenting — and they want results.”
  • Demand for bus service has increased. The state’s proposed east-west bus line offers a solution. - Nathaniel Cline (article)
    • “An announcement about the new bus travel option is expected in May pending approval by the Commonwealth Transportation Board, which will pick one of two possible route plans and give an annual investment of at least $500,000 to fund the effort.”
    • “Survey results also determined that Richmond, Charlottesville, Virginia Beach, Harrisonburg, Williamsburg, Norfolk, and Stauton were the top seven priority stops for riders. High-interest destinations include schools, military bases, and medical facilities.”
  • Transit and Scale Variance Part 2: Soviet Triangles - Alon Levy (article) RECOMMENDED
    • “There is no chance of [transit-oriented development] happening in a bus city, let alone a bus city with just a handful of radial lines. In a first-world city where public transit consists of buses, the actual main form of transportation is the car. In Stockholm, academics are carless and shop at urban supermarkets; in Växjö, they own cars and shop at big box stores. And that’s Sweden. In the US, the extent of suburbanization and auto-centricity is legendary. Providence has some inner neighborhoods built at pedestrian scale, but even there, car ownership is high, and retail that isn’t interfacing with students (for example, supermarkets) tends to be strip mall-style.”
    • “With a weaker center, buses can’t just serve city center, unless the operating budget is so small there is no money for anything else. This is what forces a bus network that has money for enough buses to run something that looks like a transit network but not enough to add rail to have a complex everywhere-to-everywhere meshes – grids if possible, kludges using available arterial streets otherwise.”
  • Why small developers are getting squeezed out of the housing market - Noah Smith (article)
    • “Even if an enterprising lender wanted to support a developer with a more innovative building, the absence of a secondary market for these sorts of non-conforming loans is a significant structural obstacle. The majority of mortgages are sold on the secondary market, which allows banks to export their risk to someone else. That risk can only be exported, however, if there’s Federal support. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don’t provide the backstopping lenders require to get comfortable with issuing these sorts of products, meaning traditional lenders must hold these loans on their balance sheets if they want to offer them. This is, you guessed it, too risky for most banks to contemplate.”
  • Bad Manors - Kate Wagner (article)
    • “The McMansion adds a fourth zone for entertaining, reflective of the increasing social alienation and distance from urban centers caused by decades of sprawl. Such a profound shift in American life necessitated the internalization of communal spaces—bars, gyms, billiard halls, and the like—into the home itself.”
    • “Owing to its distance from all forms of communal space, the McMansion must also become the site of sociality. It can’t just be a house; it has to be a ballroom, a movie theater, a bar.”
  • Why Paris is Doubling its Metro - The B1M (video)
  • Unanimous Supreme Court rules that no-fly case can go forward - Edward Hasbrouck (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • State budget includes $200K to study connector road at CVTC site - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • How many people fly without REAL-ID? - Edward Hasbrouck (article)
    • REFERRAL: Buses, trains, and US domestic travel without ID - Edward Hasbrouck (article)
    • “The TSA records that include the 2015 and 2016 ID verification call counts don’t say what percentage of travelers without ID or with unacceptable ID were eventually allowed to fly. But IVCC call logs for 2008-2011 showed that 98% of such travelers were allowed to fly. We’ve heard nothing to suggest that the approval rate has changed.”
  • Buses, trains, and US domestic travel without ID - Edward Hasbrouck (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Some US routes continue to be operated by Flix under the ‘Greyhound’ name, but in 2023 Flix took over all ticketing for buses in the US operated by Flix or Greyhound. Flix issues only e-tickets, not paper tickets, and requires passengers to show ID when boarding buses.”
  • Acceptance Speech – Peter Sonski, Nominee for President - American Solidarity Party Official (video)
  • Acceptance Speech – Lauren Onak, Nominee for Vice President - American Solidarity Party Official (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • The Transit Policy Riders Love to Hate - RMTransit (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Andrew J.
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: In Europe, stops are space 400-500 meters apart. He mentions some American systems having 100 meter stop spacings.
  • The U.S. Northern New England High Speed Rail Corridor At True High Speed? - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Youngkin administration considers bill to expand local authority to lower speed limits - Nathaniel Cline (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • I Lay Down My Life: John 10:1-18 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Five dangers to the sheep: thief, robber, and hired hand, and wolf
    • NOTE: Wolf seems to be combination of four other dangers
  • Powerful Realtor Group Agrees to Slash Commissions to Settle Lawsuits - Debra Kamin (article)
    • REFERRAL: Ben A.
    • “The lawsuits argued that N.A.R., and brokerages who required their agents to be members of N.A.R., had violated antitrust laws by mandating that the seller’s agent make an offer of payment to the buyer’s agent, and setting rules that led to an industrywide standard commission. Without that rate essentially guaranteed, agents will now most likely have to lower their commissions as they compete for business.”
  • Domicology (ABANDONED BUILDINGS, RECYCLED HOUSES & GHOST TOWNS) with Dr. Rex LaMore - Ologies (podcast episode)
    • REFERRAL: Mollie W.
    • REFERRAL: Elise S.
    • NOTE: MB mark on wood means treated with Methyl Bromide, which is apparently pretty dangerous
  • Can Amtrak Finally Bring High-Speed Rail To Texas? - CNBC (video)
    • NOTE: Web search
  • Building code reform moves forward in Virginia - Andrew Justus (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • HB 368
    • SB 195
    • NOTE: Governor must sign or veto by 2024-04-08
    • “If adopted, the Virginia bill would direct the BHCD to convene a stakeholder group, including firefighting professionals, to advise the BHCD on how to modify the existing building code to allow single-stair multifamily construction up to six stories to unlock more cost-effective and neighborhood-scale multifamily construction. The stakeholder group will submit its recommendations to BHCD by December 1, 2024.”
  • Duverger’s Law and the Two-Party System Explained - The Center For Election Science (video)
    • REFERRAL: Michael H.
    • NOTE: Approval voting systems like ranked choice voting do not necessarily lead to proportional representation.
    • NOTE: From further reading, seems like Single Transferrable Vote is a proportional representation system.
  • What if America had More Political Parties? - TLDR News US (video)
    • REFERRAL: Michael H.
    • NOTE: Approval voting systems like ranked choice voting do not necessarily lead to proportional representation.
  • Botswana: How to Make a Country Rich (From Scratch) - BritMonkey (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video suggestion
  • Why Strip Malls are Trash for Walkability - Alan Fisher (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Your Two-Day Shipping Needs to Change - Alan Fisher (video) NOT RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: Annoyingly high-level overview that glosses over the possibility of incentivizing local rail freight by ceasing highway subsidy and goes directly to nationalizing the rail network.
  • Urban Bikeway Design Guide - NACTO (book, ISBN13 9781610915656) RECOMMENDED
    • NOTE: A “diverter” seems to be a big concrete median in the middle of a 4-way intersection that turns it into two t-sections for cars. Bikes can be let through little gaps in the curb to go straight.
    • “Dotted line transition areas to through bike lanes shall not be used on streets with double right turn lanes. Double right turn lanes are extremely difficult for bicyclists to negotiate.” (pp. 76)
    • NOTE: Right turn only auxilliary lane / right turn add lane
    • “Right-turn only lanes should be as short as possible in order to limit the speed of cars in the right turn lane. Fast moving traffic on both sides can be uncomfortable for bicyclists.” (pp. 76)
    • “Preserves positive guidance for bicyclists in a situation where the bicycle lane would otherwise be dropped prior to an intersection.”
      • NOTE: Benefit of combined bike lane / turn lane, which I’m thinking Campbell Avenue and Fort Avenue intersection should use.
    • NOTE: In bicycle boulevard section, speed management designs are split into those that provide “vertical deflection”, like speed bumps and humps, and those that provide “horizontal deflection”, like bumpouts, chicanes, mini traffic circles, etc.
    • “On many local streets, stop signs are ‘woven’ such that travelers along local streets must stop at every other intersection. On bicycle boulevards this pattern should be altered to remove stop signs on the bikeway and reorient them towards intersecting local streets.” (pp. 185)
  • Why Do High Churches Get All the Good Artists: Concluding Thoughts - G. Connor Salter (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • Must It Always Be Kid-Friendly? (Why Do High Churches Get All the Good Artists Pt 7) - G. Connor Salter (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • “Catholicism has a long tradition of talking about Christ as a suffering figure through the Stations of the Cross, passion plays and so forth. Anglicanism has a strong liturgical tradition that (as I noted in Pt. 3) faces the reality of human sin in a mature way. Evangelicalism occasionally makes little motions in those directions. Interesting little sub-cultures will pop up that try to capture harsh spiritual truths for a grown-up audience (the most overt example being the Christian metal movement), without every being really embraced by the mainstream.”
  • The Negative Way (Why Do High Churches Get All the Good Artists Pt 6) - G. Connor Salter (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • “Lord of the Rings presents us with someone who in a typical fantasy story or medieval epic would take a journey leading to treasure or conquest. Instead, Frodo finds that his quest will be all about carrying a burden to have it destroyed, with no guarantees he will succeed or come back.”
    • “By and large, evangelicals haven’t built a tradition that explores the negative side of the spiritual life. As a result, evangelical entertainment struggles to explore spiritual ambiguity, the realities of doubt. Finding room for those kind of stories is key to producing better art in general, as well as a cultivating a balanced view of spirituality.”
  • The Importance of “Thinginess” (Why Do High Churches Get All the Good Artists Pt 5) - G. Connor Salter (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • “There’s a sense of generalness designed to make you feel comfortable in the conformity. This means that suburban evangelicals struggle to appreciate things for their own sake. Crafting something requires immersing yourself in the material, sometimes in ways that may seem silly from the outside. Greta Gerwig tells an interesting story about getting advice from Steven Spielberg for making Little Women, since Lincoln was set in the same period. Spielberg recommended many resources, and convinced Gerwig to use celluloid film by having her smell a roll of film. He got her to appreciate the qualities of film stock, which Spielberg believed was part of what makes celluloid film perfect for making an 19th-century period film. Spielberg understood the qualities of film stock, even in small details. To put simplistically, he understood the ‘thinginess’ that made that thing special.”
    • The Late Great Planet Earth
    • “Suffice to say, [dispensational premilliennialism] was a view of the End Times that downplayed the Biblical mandate to care for things and use our skills well.”
    • “On the literature side, Wendell Berry has become very popular in recent decades, with his detailed narratives about country living. Walter Wangerin’s memoirs about his childhood and pastoral career – less interested in landscape but very interesting in a down-to-earth Christianity – seem to have a similar attraction. For filmmakers, this gap seems to have been filled by figures like Wim Wenders and Terence Malick.”
  • Apologetics and the Power of Tension (Why Do High Churches Get All the Good Artists Pt 4) - G. Connor Salter (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • “This idea that religious concepts have to be held in balance can be difficult for many evangelicals, due to the high interest in a certain kind of apologetics. Many popular apologetics books, from Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ or Alisa Childers’ Another Gospel?, give the impression that all the big religious questions can be answered easily. Paradox? No such thing in Christianity. Nuance? Who needs it? Five minutes with the latest apologetics book or pamphlet or podcast, and all our concerns will be answered definitively.”
  • The Need for Problems (Why Do High Churches Get All the Good Artists Pt 3) - G. Connor Salter (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • Suburbs and Evangelicals (Why Do High Churches Get All the Good Artists Pt 2) - G. Connor Salter (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • “We must recognize modern-day evangelicalism is an inherently suburban concept.”
    • “This union between suburbia and evangelicalism creates a dilemma for Christian art. Much of what we call Christian art (Contemporary Christian Music, Christian Fiction novels, Christian Films, etc.) is entertainment by evangelicals for evangelicals.”
  • Why Do High Churches Get All the Good Artists? (Pt 1) - G. Connor Salter (article) RECOMMENDED
  • Beyond “Level of Service” — New Methods for Evaluating Streets - Angie Schmitt (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Measuring the vehicle mileage generated by new development is another useful metric that several California communities are using. Traditional LOS gives preference to new developments in sprawling greenfield locations because they disperse vehicle traffic over a broad area, reducing congestion at any one intersection. But add up all those developments and the effect of that strategy is to encourage more driving overall, worsening congestion. A VMT measure, on the other hand, gives preference to projects in locations that lead to shorter and fewer vehicle trips.”
    • NOTE: Lynchburg has goal to develop target LOS for all modes in comprehensive plan. Submitted a FOIA request for information about this.
  • The Beginning of the End for Level of Service? - Angie Schmitt (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “The state of Florida, for example, uses a multi-modal Level of Service analysis. The state of Virginia is considering something similar, said Weinberger.”
  • Coders at Work - Peter Seibel (book, ISBN13 9781430219484) RECOMMENDED
    • NOTE: Begin interview with Jamie Zawinski
    • NOTE: Jamie Zawinski and his friend Dan Zigmond got jobs in a Carnegie Mellon lab when they were 15 because they went to an Apple Users Group!
    • “Because everyone was so sure that they were right, we fought constantly but it allowed us to communicate fast. Someone would lean over your cubicle and say, ‘What the fuck did you check in; that’s complete bullshit–you can’t do it that way. You’re an idiot.’ And you’d say, ‘Fuck off!’ and go look at it and fix it and check it in. We were very abrasive but we communicated fast because you didn’t have to go blow sunshine up someone’s ass and explain to them what you thought was wrong…” (pp. 16)
    • Second-system syndrome
    • “If you want it to really be cross-platform, you have to do them simultaneously. The porting thing results in a crappy product on the second platform.” (pp. 20)
    • “I think one of the most important things, for me anyway, when building something from the ground up like that is, as quickly as possible, getting the program to a state that you, the programmer, can use it. Even a little bit. Because that tells you where to go next in a really visceral way.” (pp. 29)
    • “You’ve got to say in a comment something that’s not there already. What’s it for? Either a higher-level or lower-level description, depending on what’s important.” (pp. 36)
    • “Long variable names. I’m not a fan of Hungarian notation, but I think using actual english words to describe things, except for loop iterators, where it’s obvious. Just as much verbosity as possible, I guess.” (pp. 36)
    • “…I think you want to arrange for there to be no more than three or four people working really closely together on a day-to-day basis.” (pp. 37)
    • “Well, I certainly picked up a bunch of computer science over the years. But learning to program was the goal. Making the machine do something was the goal and the computer-science side of it was a means to an end.” (pp. 41)
    • “It’s weird that people often confuse these two pursuits. People who are into very theoretical computer science are thought of in this same way as people who are shipping desktop applications. And they don’t really have a lot to do with each other.” (pp. 42)
    • “I think a lot of introductory stuff focuses on syntax and I definitely saw that in the classes I had in high school and in the intro classes at Carnegie-Mellon during my brief time there. This is not teaching people to program; this is teaching people where the semicolon goes. That seems like the kind of thing that’s going to scare people away from it more than anything, because that’s not the interesting part. Not even to someone who knows what they’re doing.” (pp. 43)
    • NOTE: Zawinksi hated the Design Patterns book because he felt it involved too much copy-pasting and calling basic things by complicated names.
    • NOTE: Zawinski’s only math exposure was algebra, physics, and a little calculus in high school. He said it wasn’t his thing.
    • Six Apart
    • GNU Debugger (GDB)
    • Class invariant
    • “Fitzpatrick: You don’t need that much math. For most programmers, day to day, statistics is a lot more important. If you’re doing graphics stuff, math is a lot more important but most people doing Java enterprise stuff or web stuff, it’s not. Logic helps and statistics comes up a lot.” (pp. 81)
    • “Seibel: A lot of being a modern programmer requires finding the right pieces that you need to use and understanding them just well enough to use them.” (pp. 84)
    • “Crockford:…Readability of code is now my first priority. It’s more important than being fast, almost as important as being correct, but I think being readable is actually the most likely way of making it correct.” (pp. 107)
    • Literate programming
    • “Crockford: I’ve become a really big fan of soft objects. In JavaScript, any object is what you say it is. That’s alarming to people who come at it from a classical perspective because without a class, then what have you got? It turns out you just have what you need, and that’s really useful. Adapting your objects…the objects that you want is much more straightforward.” (pp. 118)
    • JSLint
    • “Crockford:…Looking at where we’ve come on the timeline of programming, we started with machine codes and then we took a leap to symbolic assembly language and then we took a leap to high-level languages and then we took a leap to structured programming and then we took a leap to object-oriented programming. And each of these leaps takes about a human generation. We’re overdue on the next one.” (pp. 128)
    • “Crockford:…Right now, the network does an extremely poor job of identity, does an extremely poor job of security, and those are a necessary component, I think, of building robust social systems.” (pp. 131)
    • “Eich: I know a lot of JavaScript programmers who are clever programmers, and the best ones have a good grasp of the economics. They benchmark and they test as they go and they write tight JavaScript. They don’t have to know about how it maps to machine instructions.” (pp. 140?)
    • “Eich: So a blue-collar language like Java shouldn’t have a crazy generic system because blue-collar people can’t figure out what the hell the syntax means with covariant, contravariant type constraints.” (pp. 147)
    • “Eich:…Peter Norvig, when he was at Harlequin, he did this paper about how design patterns are really just flaws in your programming language. Get a better programming language.” (pp. 155)
    • “Eich:…We aren’t going to impose any kind of waterfall, design then implementation. That was the big thing when I was getting into the industry in the early 80’s and it was a nightmare, frankly. You spend all this time writing documents and then you go to write the code and often you realize that it’s really stupid and you totally change the code and put the documents down the memory hole.” (pp. 157-158)
    • Histrionics
    • “Prolog is so different to all the other programming languages. It’s just this amazing way of thinking. And it’s not appropriate to all problems. But it is appropriate to an extremely large set of problems. It’s not widely used. And it’s a great shame because programs are incredibly short. I think I went into shock when I wrote my first Prolog program. It’s a kind of shocking experience. You just walk around going, where’s the program–I haven’t written a program. You just told it a few facts about the system, about your problem.” (pp. 233)
      • NOTE: Joe Armstrong on Prolog
    • Hoare property
    • “…to be an entrepreneur you need to get energy from stressful situations involving money, whereas my energy is sapped by stressful situations involving money.” (pp. 248)
    • The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith by Fred Brooks
    • “…unless some people are working on radical and elegant things you’re going to end up in a local optimum, incrementally optimizing the mainstream but stuck on a low hill.” (pp. 251)
    • “One thing that is hard, even for professional software engineers and developers, is to viscerally grok the size of the artifacts on which we work. You’re looking at the Empire State Building through a 1-foot-square porthole, so it’s difficult to have a real feel for how gigantic the structure you’re looking at is. And how it’s interconnected.” (pp. 280)
      • NOTE: from Simon Peyton Jones interview
    • “I think the primary limitation on software is not the speed of computers, but our ability to get our heads around what it’s supposed to do.” (pp. 281)
      • NOTE: from Simon Peyton Jones interview
    • “Systems are filled with so much goop–in order to build an ASP.NET web service-y thing you need to know about this API and this tool and you need to write in three different languages and you need to know about Silverlight and LINQ and you can go on doing acronyms forever. And each of them has a fat book that describes it. This is a tension I don’t know how to resolve. These are useful systems–they’re not designed by accident. Each of them is there for a reason and each of them has a smart person who’s thinking hard about how this thing should be architected. But nevertheless, each, individually, has a broad interface. It may or may not be deep, but it’s certainly broad. There’s a lot of stuff you need to just have in your head. It’s like learning a language–a human language–there’s a large vocabulary.” (pp. 282)
    • “Every now and then I feel a temptation to design a programming language, but then I just lie down until it goes away.” (pp. 436)
      • NOTE: Quote from L. Peter Deutch
    • Frob
    • “It’s a tile game. And I ran it on an IBM 1620 that was in the physics department. I knew where all the underground computers were in the place, and I had them all running at night doing my jobs. Plus, at the main computer center I probably had 20 accounts under different rocks.” (pp. 455)
      • NOTE: Quote from Ken Thompson
    • “Modern programming scares me in many respects, where they will just build layer after layer after layer that does nothing except translate. It confuses me to read a program which you must read top-down. It says ‘do something.’ And you go find ‘something.’ And you read it and it says ‘do something else’ and you go find something and it says, ‘do something else’ and it goes back to the top maybe. And nothing gets done. It’s just relegating the problem to a deeper and deeper level. I can’t keep it in my mind–I can’t understand it.” (pp. 459)
      • NOTE: Quote from Ken Thompson
    • “So I got to meet Peter Samson in his great failed attempt to solve the New York City subway system, to ride the whole system on one ticket as fast as possible.” (pp. 522)
    • NOTE: Spacewar is considered to be the first videogame ever
    • “I’m surrounded by people who think linked lists are magic. They don’t know anything about the 83 different kinds of trees and why some are better than others. They don’t understand garbage collection. They don’t understand structures and things.” (pp. 529)
      • NOTE: From interview with Bennie Cosell
    • “With TeX I was interacting with hundreds of years of human history and I didn’t want to throw out all of the things that book designers have learned over centuries and start anew and say, ‘Well, forget that guys; you know, we’re going to be logical now.’ In this case, the name of the game was mostly to take an enormously complicated problem and find a fairly small set of primitives that would support it. Instead of having 1,000 primitives, I have 100 primitives or something like that. But going down to 50 primitives, 10 primitives—which we would do if we wanted to be mathematically clean—I believe wouldn’t work. The problem of making books goes too much into the complexity of the world, which just doesn’t want to be simplified.” (pp. 598)
      • NOTE: From interview with Donald Knuth
  • America Has No Transportation Engineers - Steffen Berr (article) RECOMMENDED
  • Latest Dutch Traffic Statistics (2024) - BicycleDutch (video)
  • Freedom from Condemnation: Romans 5:6-11 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • “The love of God is rooted in eternity past…God’s love for you extends from before the foundation of the earth”
    • dikaioó
    • echthros
      • NOTE: Word for “enemies” in text
    • “What does it mean to be reconciled to God?…we enemies of God…our relationship to Him is changed completely…changed to the very last ounce of our being…”
    • καταλλαγή
      • NOTE: Word used for “reconciliation” in text
    • “‘The best proof that He will never cease to love us lies in that He never began.’ - Geerhardus Vos”
    • NOTE: When we consider salvation as being something that happened in the past, we become less and less effected by it as we move further from the time we realized that we had faith in God.
  • Amtrak Adds More Service Throughout the Northeast Corridor to Meet Growing Customer Demand - Amtrak (press release)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: More daily trips from NYP-WAS and PHL-BOS
  • Apples to apples housing cost comparisons - Michael Lewyn (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Our church is trying to get rid of us… - Redeemed Zoomer (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Is North American Urbanism Actually Hopeless? - RMTransit (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Stew’s March 2024 High Speed Rail U.S. News – CAHSR Brightline West Acela NEC Dallas Ft Worth - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: Brightline West will be purchasing used trainsets from Europe instead of new Alstom or Siemens trainsets
  • The problem with “house churches” – KingdomCraft - Redeemed Zoomer (video) RECOMMENDED
    • NOTE: He discusses the endemic “retreat-ism” of conservative/orthodox Christians from every area of public life
  • The 10 Levels of Theology Knowledge - Redeemed zoomer (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Armchair Extra: Philly vs Chicago - Alan Fisher Extras (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • The You Don’t need a Car for the American Lifestyle /// HovCart Ebike - Alan Fisher (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Justification = The Love of God: Romans 5:6-10 - Rev. Tony Myers (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: In Romans chapter 5 we are talking about the results of our faith
    • NOTE: The mentions of time in this passage refer to Kronos, in that Christ died at the perfect/opportune moment
    • Thomas Boston
    • NOTE: Word for death used here is sort of horticultural…in that Christ was cut off from the Father
  • The Beaufort County fire department saved a reported $765,000 last year by implementing into their response systems a new fleet of smaller-sized, “all purpose” vehicles. - TheDigitel (article) RECOMMENDED
    • NOTE: REFERRAL: Strong Towns Slack member
    • “The move was the result of a number of internal studies, according to the department, that found that full-sized fire trucks were not of primary importance, considering only 1.1% of emergency calls were fire related while over 66% were medical emergencies.”
  • Grid Cities are Fine, and OBF is a Copycat - Alan Fisher (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • This Review is Going to Make Me Very Unpopular - Linus Tech Tips (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: About the FairPhone 5
  • Rural Towns don’t have to Suck - Alan Fisher (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Walkable City Rules: Jeff Speck – CNU Real Places November 2018 - Congress for the New Urbanism (video)
    • REFERRAL: Web search “walkable city rules”
  • Virginia and North Carolina are Home to the Busiest Amtrak Stations in the Southeast - Amtrak (press release)
    • REFRRAL: Blog subscription
  • Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere - The Onion (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Why Is It So Hard To Cross The Street? (& What You Can Do to Help) - Strong Towns (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Alexandria Fourth Track - Virginia Passenger Rail Authority (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: By 2030 VPRA plans to have near-hourly rail service between D.C. and Richmond
  • Opinion – Why the Music of Rich Mullins Endures, 25 Years After His Death - Tish Harrison Warren (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Group chat
  • Rejoice in Suffering: Romans:5:3-5 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Several views of suffering: suffering is random, suffering is permitted by God, suffering is something to rejoice in
    • NOTE: Because we have been justified by Christ Jesus, through that justification we rejoice in our sufferings.
    • NOTE: It’s not that we should rejoice despite our suffering or in the midst of our sufferings, but because of or on account of our sufferings.
    • NOTE: One of the dangers of health & wealth “gospel” is that it considers trials to be bad rather than something to rejoice in, and that experiencing many trials is an indication that you don’t have enough faith
  • I just realized why I´m doing the Marble Machine Project - Wintergatan (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • In like Flynn - Amy Biegelsen (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Web search “Rachel Flynn Jerry Falwell”
    • “At the time, Flynn was Lynchburg’s community development director, and Falwell, the city’s pre-eminent religious and business leader. Their feud started after Flynn insisted that Falwell build two exit ramps to accommodate emergency vehicles at his ever-expanding Liberty University. Falwell lagged. They clashed again about a Cracker Barrel restaurant he wanted to develop on a wooded lot. Flynn asked him to leave trees in one corner to protect a stream running through the property. He declined, and then denounced her from the pulpit.”
  • How Qatar is Trying to Become the Switzerland of the Middle East - Wendover Productions (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • The Benefits of Justification: Romans 5:1-2 - Chris Deneen (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Chris is from Johnson City
    • “Faith is believing the promises of God and living as if they have already come to pass”
    • NOTE: Purposes of the law: mirror to show us God’s righteousness and our sinfulness; restraint of evil; guide for how to live holy lives before God
    • NOTE: Is it possible to focus too much on justification and neglect the living of holy lives before God together? Faith without works is dead. I’m not sure how to bring this up without triggering peoples’ legalism alarm.
    • NOTE: “Gaining access” can be considered an introduction. Once you have been “introduced” to God, you have access to him.
  • I Renovated an apartment w/ FB marketplace ‘free stuff’ - Paranda (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Lynchburg Planning Commission 2-14-2024 - Lynchburg Virginia (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Virginia just passed a law that removes a barrier to building more housing - David McAuley (article)
  • Hinkle: Are proffers built on shaky ground? - A. Barton Hinkle (article) RECOMMENDED
    • “In theory, proffers are voluntary. In practice they’re about as voluntary as the money you fork over to a tow-truck company to get your car out of the impound lot. Localities don’t always require them. But when they do, developers cough up. Moreover: The localities, not the developers, decide how much the developers should pay. In Chesterfield the maximum proffer amount is $18,966. In Northern Virginia the sum can be twice that or more.”
    • Koontz v. St. John River Water Management District
  • Pierce Street Gateway celebrates successes, sets ambitious goals for 2024 - Rachael Smith (article) RECOMMENDED
  • Improving The Northeast Corridor and Acela Into World Class High Speed Rail - Lucid Stew (video)
  • Why induced demand is fake - Ben Southwood (article)
    • NOTE: Fatal flaws are that he doesn’t consider the cost of roads and thinks more transportation/mobility is always better.
  • Senate committee advances shared solar bills - Matt Busse (article)
  • United Daughters of the Confederacy’s tax breaks are on the chopping block. It’s about time. - Samantha Willis (article)
    • HB 568
    • SB 517
    • NOTE: Incredibly weird that the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is hardcoded into state law
  • Shared solar bills clear House panel - Matt Busse (article)
    • NOTE: Still need to work out how transmission is paid for if you subscribe to shared solar generation. Do the shared solar companies pass part of customer fee through to APCO for transmission? Would I still have a relationship with APCO? Would APCO mediate between me and shared solar company or would I exclusively interact with shared solar company?
    • House Bill 108
  • 4 Ways a City Can Hide Its Insolvency Using Accounting - Michael Durand-Wood (article) RECOMMENDED
    • “…while municipalities aren’t allowed to take on debt in their operating budgets, they are allowed use debt for their capital budgets.”
    • “So, simply by outsourcing roadwork, the City had turned a sizable portion of its operating expenses into capital expenses. The end result was the same, a newly maintained road, but now you could fund the expenses that used to be operations, with debt.”
      • NOTE: Not sure if Lynchburg does it this way. I think they have road maintenance as an operating expense.
  • The Best Argument for Parking Mandates (Is Still Wrong) - Daniel Herriges (article)
    • REFERRAL: RSS Subscription
    • NOTE: Decent introduction for the uninitiated
  • Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, or, “Looking for the Mouse” - Clay Shirky (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • NOTE: Hacker news commenters were pretty skeptical of his history in this article and thought Shirky was too optimistic about people’s desire to share. They said interactive attention sinks like Tiktok sort of derailed the productive sharing Shirky was excited about.
    • Clay Shirky
      • “In April 2010, Kevin Kelly cited the phrase ‘Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution’, and called it the ‘Shirky Principle’”
  • Waste milk from Westover Dairy leaks into Lynchburg creek - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • NOTE: Article says Hendricks Street, but that doesn’t exist. It’s Hendricks Avenue.
  • The Family of Faith: Romans 4:16-17 - Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • “That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring–not only to the adherent of the law, but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”–in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
      • NOTE: ESV passage used in sermon
    • NOTE: NASB translation not used in sermon - “For this reason it is by faith, in order that it may be in accordance with grace, so that the promise will be guaranteed to all the descendants, not only to those who are of the Law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, (as it is written ‘A FATHER OF MANY NATIONS HAVE I MADE YOU’) in the presence of Him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.”
      • NOTE: I wonder how the italic sections get put in…is there some type of emphasis in the original language?
    • NOTE: Sermon notes are really scattered because I’m zoning out today
    • “It depends upon faith so that the promise may be guaranteed to all the offspring of Abraham”
    • NOTE: The gentile nations do not have the law, sacraments, etc, so how will they be justified? It’s because they are saved not by adherence to the law but through faith.
    • NOTE: Referenced related passage Hebrews 11:17
    • “It is not about our faith but it is about the object of our faith”
  • What are analog bulletin boards used for today? Analysing media uses, intermediality and technology affordances in Swedish bulletin board messages using a citizen science approach - Christopher Kullenberg, Frauke Rohden, Anders Björkvall, Fredrik Brounéus, Anders Avellan-Hultman, Johan Järlehed, Sara Van Meerbergen, Andreas Nord, Helle Lykke Nielsen, Tove Rosendal, Lotta Tomasson, Gustav Westberg (research paper)
    • REFERRAL: No Tech Magazine
    • “Perhaps, rather paradoxically, part of the explanation to why the bulletin board has survived in the digital era of the internet lies in its immobility. Because of the constant global access to and character of social media, but also due to the mobility of the devices through which they are accessed, texts and messages posted on, for instance Facebook, can never be as local as those posted on a physical bulletin board.”
  • A Fence and a Ladder: Subversive Acts of Everyday Urbanism at Home - Stephanie Davidson (research paper)
    • “It is an example of what Margaret Crawford would call ‘everyday urbanism’¹ or what Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett would call the ‘urban vernacular’: ‘The vernacular is what ordinary people do in their everyday lives. It consists of local practices that take shape outside planning, design, zoning, regulation, and covenants, if not in spite of them. The relationship between the built environment and the social practices that occur within it reveal both intentional and unintentional effects of great importance.’”
  • New River Valley gets a look at Amtrak options - Mark D. Robertson (article)
    • “If one of the plans goes ahead, Amtrak service could begin in the region as soon as 2028. The New River Valley has not had passenger rail service since 1979.”
    • “The Virginia Rail Passenger Authority is expected to vote at its June meeting on which plan to adopt. The rising cost of the New River Valley project, driven primarily by the cost of renovating the Merrimac Tunnel, has raised concerns among some state legislators that the proposed extension to Bristol might be in jeopardy. At last week’s authority meeting, board member Beth Rhinehart of Bristol repeatedly urged the authority not to adopt any station site in the New River Valley that would preclude an extension further west.”
    • NOTE: “Just another tool in the toolbox” is such obnoxious public agency corpo cliche
  • A Virginia Church Plans to Convert Parking into Housing - Barry Greene, Jr. (article)
  • Most Public Engagement is Worthless - Charles Marohn (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Where Do Infrastructure Projects Come From? - Charles Marohn (article)
    • “Our thinking is a byproduct of the questions we ask. This is one of the reasons Steve Jobs was not a big fan of asking the customers what they wanted. Customers don’t know what they want, at least when it comes to something innovative. Something different.”
    • “The meeting started out with the standard public policy questions planning professionals like to ask. What do you like about the city? What do you not like? If you could change one thing, what would it be? The answers were worse than worthless, and it was painful to watch non-policy people trying to answer questions that weren’t designed for them. After a bit of pain, we got around to asking the kind of questions Steve Jobs would have asked. How did you get here today? (A: Walk or bike.) Is this how you get around in the winter when it’s twenty below zero? (A: Yes.) Do you feel safe walking? (A: No.) Do you feel safe biking? (A: No.)”
    • “Modern Planner: What percentage of the city budget should we spend on parks? Steve Jobs: Do you use the park?”
    • NOTE: One commenter called this approach “Design Thinking”
    • “Our planning efforts should absolutely be guided by the experiences of real people. But their actions are the data we should be collecting, not their stated preferences.”
    • “I’ve come to the point in my life where I think municipal comprehensive planning is worthless. More often than not, it is a mechanism to wrap a veneer of legitimacy around the large policy objectives of influential people. Most cities would be better off putting together a good vision statement and a set of guiding principles for making decisions, then getting on with it.”
    • “Focus groups are good for getting you to local minima, but suck for getting to the global minima. Which is probably far less useful than what Jobs said, but it works better for my brain.”
      • NOTE: From comment on article
    • NOTE: A commenter mentioned CAVE (citizens against virtually everything)
  • Where Do Infrastructure Projects Come From? - Charles Marohn (article)
    • REFERRAL: RSS subscription
  • Cleaning up the built environment to reduce crime - John Macdonald (article)
    • REFERRAL: RSS subscription
    • NOTE: Mentions really interesting studies and quotes, but is sort of wonkily written. Wonder if the author used a little too much LLM.”
  • Amtrak Celebrates Completion of New Baltimore Platform Construction - Amtrak (press release)
    • REFERRAL: RSS subscription
  • Stew’s Feb 2024 U.S. High Speed Rail News – CAHSR Brightline West Acela NEC Dallas Ft Worth Cascadia - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Go 101 - Tapir Liu (book, v1.21.0-745652d) ABANDONED
    • “…I think the fact that, as a static language, Go is flexible as many dynamic script languages is the main selling point of Go language. Memory saving, fast program warming-up, fast code execution speed and fast compilations combined is another main selling point of Go. Although this is a common selling point of many C family languages. But for web development area, seldom languages own the four characteristics at the same time. In fact, this is the main reason why I switched to Go from Java for web development.” (pp. 4-5)
  • The Promise: Romans 4:13-15 - Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Three promises to Abraham are descendants, that his offspring will be a blessing to all people, and land.
    • NOTE: References Genesis 17:4
    • NOTE: Commentator Murray says promises to Abraham ultimately find their fulfillment in the new heavens and the new earth.
    • NOTE: We are promised to be a blessing to all people but it appears that we are antagonizing to all people.
    • NOTE: In Galatians we learn that Jesus is the [singular] heir of the promise to Abraham RE offspring.
    • NOTE: If we are heirs by obedience to the law, we will be brought more and more under condemnation. The law is good, but we are deficient in our ability to obey it.
  • Amtrak railway in New River Valley Delayed to 2028 - Thomas Mundy (article)
  • Amtrak Virginia Sets Record with Calendar Year 2023 Ridership - VPRA (press release)
    • NOTE: Route 46 to Roanoke saw 23.5% 2022 to 2023 ridership increase
  • Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave’s letter on the threat of computed creativity - Nick Cave, Stephen Fry (open letter) RECOMMENDED
  • Hill City Happenings January 2024 - Lynchburg Virginia (video)
  • The American Government’s Massive Plan to Build more Passenger Rail: Corridor ID - Alan Fisher (video)
  • How to Build a Low-tech Internet - Kris De Decker (article)
    • “Although the WiFi-standard was developed for short-distance data communication (with a typical range of about 30 metres), its reach can be extended through modifications of the Media Access Control (MAC) layer in the networking protocol, and through the use of range extender amplifiers and directional antennas.”
    • RuralCafe
  • Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth - Apostrophe S Productions, Inc. (television series)
    • REFERRAL: Library browsing
    • Oblique
    • “Interviewer: What does it mean to have a sacred place? Joseph Campbell: This is a term I like to use now as an absolute necessity for anybody today. YOu must have a room, or a certain hour a day or so where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe to anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you, but a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the sacred place of creative incubation, and first you may find that nothing’s happening there, but if you have a sacred place and use it and take advantage of it, something will happen. Interviewer: This place does for you what the plains did for the hunter…? Joseph Campbell: For them the whole thing was a sacred place, you see, but most of our action is economically or socially determined and does not come out of our life. I don’t know if you’ve had the experience I’ve had, but as you get older the claims of the environment upon you are so great that you hardly know where the hell you are. What is it you intended? You’re always doing something that is required of you this minute…that minute…another minute. Where is your bliss station?”
    • NOTE: He describes sanskrit as being the great spiritual language of the world
    • Rota Fortunae
    • NOTE: When interviewer asks him how one can keep ahold of one’s bliss and not lose the plot, Campbell refers to one’s bliss as one’s umbilical! If we are born of God, He is our bliss and our umbilical cord providing life to us.
    • “When Peter drew his sword and cut off the…uh…the servant’s ear there in Gethsemane and Jesus said ‘put up your sword, Peter’ and put the ear back on…Peter has been drawing his sword ever since!”
    • NOTE: Abelard in 12th century wrote about Christ’s death as atonement and not as a payment.
    • “When you have a goddess as the creator, it’s her own very body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe, and in Egypt you have the mother heavens: Nuut…the goddess Nuut, who’s represented as the whole heavenly sphere”
      • NOTE: Definitely misspelled Nuut
    • “These fighting people are herding people. The Semites are herders of sheep and goats, and the Indo-Europeans of cattle.”
    • NOTE: He refers to health, wealth, progeny and fun as the animal aims
  • OPINION: Could Pedestrian Reflectors Reduce Fatal Crashes in the United States? - Matt Kalinowski (article)
  • The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith II - Frederick P. Brooks (article)
    • “A folk adage of the academic profession says, ‘Anything which has to call itself a science isn’t.’ By this criterion, physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy may be sciences; political science, military science, social science, and computer science are not.” (pp. 2)
    • “Have we abandoned art as subcreation for each other’s enrichment, in favor of an art of self-exorcism, art as primal scream?”
    • NOTE: He jumps between topics somewhat schizophrenically…I wonder if the original “Computer Scientist as Toolsmith” that Coders at Work mentioned was significantly different? There’s a reference in this work to the original one, which was published in Information Processing 77.
  • The Surprising Success of Private Passenger Rail - Wendover Productions (video)
  • Bills would bring shared solar to Appalachian Power territory, expand program for Dominion customers - Matt Busse (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Seems to be a completely alternative way to purchase power. There was a bit in the article about how the rates shared solar consumers pay for power is subsidized by the non-shared-solar ratepayers who pay a specific rate for generation and distribution. Apparently the rates at which these shared solar operators sell power is not regulated by the VA SCC (at least not with the same tariff as APCO or Dominion).
  • Alexandria is exploring e-bike incentives. Could a statewide program be next? - Wyatt Gordon (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Since Virginia’s e-bike bill is currently being drafted by the General Assembly’s Division of Legislative Services, no one yet knows exactly what the legislation carried by Del. Thomas will entail. The bill could lay out a statewide rebate, propose a pilot program or simply study how best the commonwealth could implement e-bike incentives.”
  • Bad data: Not a decline in travel - Joe Cortright (article)
    • “The critical takeaway for any user of this NHTS data has to be that it you simply can’t compare the 2017 trip-making data with the 2022 trip making data. This shouldn’t be an obscure footnote: it should be a cigarette-pack warning. But, with its cute-infographic, the USDOT did exactly the opposite.”
  • Why Red States Are Suing to Hide Their Transportation Emissions - Kea Wilson (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Virginia is among the states that sued the president, DOT secretary, federal highway administrator, and USDOT
    • Sunshine law
    • “‘There’s this idea that as people drive more, it’s good for the economy, but that is a very questionable hypothesis,’ she added. “When people drive more, it costs people a lot of money — money that could be used on more wealth building enterprises like education or home ownership or retirement. … We’re disinvesting in rural communities and making rural households travel further for jobs and basic necessities. We should be looking for efficiencies that get people where they need to go with less travel and less cost.’”
  • Narrower City Streets Could Actually Be Safer: Study - Nico Demattia (article)
    • “So what do the researchers recommend changing? For starters, switching the standard road width to 10 feet for roads with speed limits under 35 mph that aren’t used as freight corridors.”
  • Effective Transportation in Smaller Cities and Rural Areas - John Salmon (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Had an epiphany that regardless of what John thinks about fixed-route transit, his nonprofit taxi system would be an excellent complement to a strong, core network of fixed bus routes with <=15 minute headways. I’m interested in solving landuse issues and un-sprawling the city through the provision of excellent fixed route transit, and he’s just trying to help less fortunate people get where they’re going under a sucky landuse regime. We’re working on different problems.
  • The Bialetti Moka Express (Episode #1) - James Hoffman (video)
    • REFERRAL: YouTube search
  • 10 Resolutions for a Very Bicycle New Year - Ron Johnson (article)
  • Your Eco-Friendly Lifestyle Is a Big Lie - Matt Reynolds (article) NOT RECOMMENDED
    • NOTE: Very fluffy
  • Statement regarding the ongoing SourceHut outage - Drew DeVault (article)
  • Resources for Reformers: Houston’s minimum lot sizes - Salim Furth (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “In theory, lowering lot size mandates ought to raise the price of land while lowering the price of existing structures.”
  • Member One Federal Credit Union and Virginia Credit Union to merge - Matt Busse
  • Mexico City: Casa de Carla y Pedro (television episode) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Claira W.
    • NOTE: They set up a privately-operated public library in their home that’s full of specialist books not found in other libraries. To check out a book, people have their picture taken with them holding the book.
  • France: Hourré House - Katy Chevigny (television episode)
    • REFERRAL: Claira W.
  • Sweden: Naturhus - Doug Pray (television episode)
    • REFERRAL: Claira W.
  • Making a Home vs Finding a Home - Isaac Morehouse (article)
  • The Procrastination Matrix - Tim Urban (article) RECOMMENDED
    • “In other words, Quadrant 1 often does not exist. This isn’t always the case, but it’s especially likely to be true for people who have yet to get their career rolling, because usually when your truly important work is also urgent, it means you have something good going on. This creates a catch-22, where the people who most need urgency in order to do things—procrastinators early in their career—are often those with a totally vacant Quadrant 1.”
  • How to Beat Procrastination - Tim Urban (article)
  • Why Procrastinators Procrastinate - Tim Urban (article)
  • Surprising And Fascinating Results From The Taste Test - James Hoffman (video)

2023

2022

2021

Future

  • Bowling Alone - Robert D. Putnam (book)
  • A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander (book)
    • REFERRAL: Isaac Morehouse
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
  • Suburban Nation - Jeff Speck & Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (book)
    • REFERRAL: Why Does Suburbia Suck? - David Pakman Show (video)
    • REFERRAL: A City is Not a Tree: 50th Anniversary Edition - Christopher Alexander (book, ISBN13 9780989346979)
  • Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children - Ann Hulbert (book)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
  • Deschooling Society - Ivan Illich (book)
  • Divine Sex - Jonathan Grant (book)
    • REFERRAL: Audrey F.
  • The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu (book) LPL
  • The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure - Juliet Schor (book)
  • Richard Sapper - Jonathan Olivares (book)
  • The Space Trilogy - C.S. Lewis (book series) LPL HOME
  • The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand (book) LPL
  • The Decline of the West - Oswald Spengler (book)
  • The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom LPL (book)
  • Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America - Peter N. Stearns (book)
  • Lex, Rex - Samuel Rutherford (book)
    • Rich B.
  • How Will You Measure Your Life - Clayton Christensen LPL (book)
    • Hannah Frankman
  • Assimilate : a critical history of industrial music - S. Alexander Reed (book)
  • The Underground History of American Education - John Taylor Gatto LPL (book)
  • Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis LPL (book)
  • The ARPANET Sourcebook: The Unpublished Foundations of the Internet - Peter H. Salus (book)
  • The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond (book) HOME
  • How to Read a Book - Mortimer J. Adler (book)
  • Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software - Nadia Eghbal (book)
  • Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Bryan Caplan (book)
  • Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software - Sam Williams (book)
  • Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe - Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (book)
    • REFERRAL: LaShonda D.
  • Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder - Nassim Nicholas Taleb LPL (book)
  • The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money - John Maynard Keynes (book)
  • The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera (book)
    • REFERRAL: Live Not By Lies - Rod Dreher (book)
  • The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies - Ryszard Legutko (book)
    • REFERRAL: Live Not By Lies - Rod Dreher (book)
  • The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation - Oliver Bullough (book)
    • REFERRAL: Live Not By Lies - Rod Dreher (book)
  • This saved us : how to survive brainwashing - Silvester Krčméry (book)
    • REFERRAL: Live Not By Lies - Rod Dreher (book)
  • An Introduction to GCC: For the GNU Compilers GCC and G++ - Brian J. Gough (book)
  • Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces - Remzi H Arpaci-Dusseau (book)
  • The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles - Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken (book)
  • Nutrition and Metabolism - Susan Lanham-New, Ian Macdonald, Helen M. Roche and Nutrition Society (book)
  • x86-64 Assemby Language Programming with Ubuntu - Ed Jorgensen (book)
  • Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective (2nd Edition) - Randall E. Bryant and David R. O’Hallaron (book)
  • Beej’s Guide to Network Programming Using Internet Sockets - Brian “Beej Jorgensen” Hall (book)
  • High Performance Browser Networking - Ilya Grigorik (book)
  • Copper, Iron, and Clay - Sarah Dahmen (book)
    • REFERRAL: Daniel K.
  • Mastering OpenSCAD - Jochen Kerdels (book)
  • TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 (The Protocols) - W. Richard Stevens (saved somewhere in reading folder) (book)
  • The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss LPL (book) HOME
    • REFERRAL: Matthew F.
  • The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander LPL (book)
  • The 480 - Eugene Burdick (book)
  • Anarchy in Action - Colin Ward (book)
  • Thinking in Systems: A Primer - Donella H. Meadows (book)
  • The Long Night of the Watchman - Václav Benda (book)
  • The Heavenly Man - Brother Yun (book)
  • Lynchburg, VA Downtown 2040 Master Plan
  • DNS and BIND - Cricket Liu, Paul Albitz (book)
  • East of Eden - Jonathan EdwardS (book)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Reformed Worship - Howard L. Rice (book)
  • The Tale of Two Adams - Chris Caughey (book)
    • REFERRAL: Austin O. (book)
  • Human Transit - Jarrett Walker (book)
  • Symbolic Exchange and Death - Jean Baudrillard (book)
    • REFERRAL: Cody Wilson
  • Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities - Kevin Kelly LPL (book)
  • You and Heredity - Amram Scheinfeld (book)
  • The Box - Mark Levinson (book)
  • I led 3 lives - Herbert A. Philbrick (book)
    • REFERRAL: Kurt F.
  • Edge City: Life on the New Frontier - Joel Garreau (book)
  • The Bug - Ellen Ullman (book)
  • Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free - Cody Wilson (book)
  • Lectures on Jung’s Typology - Marie-Louise von Franz (book)
  • Programming in Scala, 5th Edition - Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, Bill Venners, and Frank Sommers (book) HOME
  • Digital Vegan - Andy Farnell (book)
  • The Tragedy of Great Power Politics - John Mearsheimer (book)
  • Design manual for bicycle traffic - Crow Platform
  • Central Banking 101 - Steven Wang (book)
  • Levy’s Laws of the Disillusionment of the True Liberal - Marion J. Levy Jr. (book)
  • Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates (book)
    • REFERRAL: Bryant M.
  • The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks (book)
  • The Shadow of Christ in the Book of Job - C.J. Williams (book)
    • REFERRAL: Pastor I met at Charlottesville Amtrak station
  • Thank God for Bitcoin: The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money - Gabe Higgins, Derek Waltchack, Robert Breedlove, J.M. Bush, Julia Tourianski, Lyle Pratt, and George Mekhail (book)
  • The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (book)
  • Layered Money - Nik Bhatia (book)
  • The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene (book)
  • Why things bite back - Edward Tenner (book)
  • Christian Theology and Tragedy - Kevin Taylor & Giles Waller (book)
  • John Acuff - Start (book)
    • REFERRAL: Michael H.
  • 48 Days to the Work You Love - Dan Miller (book)
    • REFERRAL: Michael H.
  • The Nordic Secret - Lene Rachel Andersen & Tomas Björkman (book)
  • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman (book)
  • The Insolent Chariots - John C. Keats (book)
  • Subject Collections - Lee Ash (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Independent Scholar’s Handbook - Ronald Gross (book)
  • Encyclopedia of Associations - Frederick Gale Ruffner, Jr. (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Independent Scholar’s Handbook - Ronald Gross (book)
  • How To Be Invisible - J.J. Luna (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Watchman Privacy Podcast
  • The Existential Pleasures of Engineering - Samuel C. Florman
    • REFERRAL: The Independent Scholar’s Handbook - Ronald Gross (book)
  • Blaming Technology - Samuel C. Florman
    • REFERRAL: The Independent Scholar’s Handbook - Ronald Gross (book)
  • Hill City Trolleys - Harold E. Cox LYNCHBURG MUSEUM
    • REFERRAL: Christian Crouch
  • Amateurs: On the Margin Between Work and Leisure - Robert A. Stebbins
    • REFERRAL: The Independent Scholar’s Handbook - Ronald Gross (book)
  • A New Theory of Urban Design - Christopher Alexander
    • REFERRAL: A City is Not a Tree: 50th Anniversary Edition - Christopher Alexander (book, ISBN13 9780989346979)
  • Physics - Aristotle
  • The Black Tax - Shawn D. Rochester
    • REFERRAL: Bryant M.
  • Pandora’s Seed - Spencer Wells (book)
  • Packaging: The Sixth Sense - Ernest Dichter (book)
    • REFERRAL: Cut Your Grocery Bills in Half - Barbara Salsbury (book)
  • Red Famine - Anne Applebaum (book)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? - Xochitl Gonzalez (article)
    • REFERRAL: jwz.org
  • Strange Days - Kathryn Bigelow (film)
    • REFERRAL: Michael R.
  • God, Freedom, and Evil - Alvin Plantinga (book) HOME
    • REFERRAL: Wikipedia article on the problem of evil
  • The Pirate Book - Aa.Vv. (book)
    • REFERRAL: notechmagazine.com
  • The War on the West - Douglas Murry (book)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • The Great Good Place - Ray Oldenburg
  • Current fear of crime, sense of community, and loneliness in italian adolescents: The role of autonomous mobility and play during childhood - Miretta Preza (paper)
  • Parking Management Best Practices - Todd Litman (book)
  • Fighting Traffic - Peter Norton REFERRAL: Episode 4: Cars and the Culture Wars - The War on Cars (podcast episode)
  • Retrofitting Suburbia - Ellen Jones (book)
  • How to be an Atheist - Mitch Stokes (book)
    • REFERRAL: Daniel C.
  • The Power Broker - Robert A. Caro
    • REFERRAL: reddit.com/r/f***cars
  • The Streets of Lynchburg - Martha Helen Cleveland Craddock (book) HOME
    • REFERRAL: Givens Books browsing
  • Building the American Highway System - Bruce Edsall Seely
  • Connect Central Virginia 2045 Long Range Transportation Plan
  • How To Start a Business without Any Money - Rachel Bridge (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • No Logo - Naomi Klein (book)
  • How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell (book)
  • Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Parking Reform Made Easy - Richard Willson (book)
  • Reasonable Faith - William Lane Craig (book)
    • REFERRAL: Twitter
  • A Severe Mercy - Sheldon Vanauken (book)
    • REFERRAL: Tyler G.
  • The Highway and the City - Lewis Mumford (book)
    • REFERRAL: The High Cost of Free Parking - Donald Shoup (book, ISBN13 9781932364965)
  • The Geography of Nowhere - James Howard Kunstler (book)
    • REFERRAL: Active Towns East Coast Greenway video
  • Economism - Jack Quack (book)
    • REFERRAL: Bryant M.
  • Orthodoxy - G. K. Chesterton
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns
    • NOTE: One chapter discusses mystic patriotism for one’s place…similar to topophilia.
  • The Wickerman - Robin Hardy (film)
  • Emergent Tokyo: Designing the spontaneous city - Jorge Almazan (book)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Slack member kaz.wojtewicz
  • Against Heresies - Irenaeus (book)
    • REFERRAL: Daniel C.
  • The Secret Life of Groceries - Benjamin Lorr (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Between Heaven and Earth - Sarah Ricardi-Swartz (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Temptation of Illiberalism in Theologically Conservative Christian Circles: An Initial Take - Brian J. Auten (speech transcript)
  • Haven in a Heartless World - Christopher Lasch (book)
  • The Affluent Society - John Kenneth Galbraith (book)
    • REFERRAL: The High Cost of Free Parking - Donald Shoup (book)
  • The Fourth Trimester (book)
    • REFERRAL: Daniel K.
  • Dominion - Tom Holland (book)
    • REFERRAL: Josh D.
  • An Autobiography - Booker T. Washington (book)
    • REFERRAL: Josh D.
  • Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey (book)
    • REFERRAL: The War on Cars podcast - Infiltrating the Auto Show
    • NOTE: He writes about the effects of industrial tourism in the national parks and the way driving through parks rather than hiking seriously affects the visitor experience
  • The Lives of a Cell - Lewis Thomas (book)
  • The Economy of Cities - Jane Jacobs (book)
  • Streetfight - Janette Sadik-Khan (book)
  • SaltFatAcidHeat - Samin Nosrat (book)
    • REFERRAL: Dona M.
  • The Epistle to the Romans - John Murray (book)
    • REFERRAL: Steve H.
  • Beyond Greenways - Robert Searns (book)
  • The Past is a Future Country - Edward Dutton (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Cities for People - Jan Gehl (book)
    • REFERRAL: Walkable City - Jeff Speck (book, ISBN13 9780865477728)
  • The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth - Benjamin Friedman (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Density Divide: Urbanization, Polarization, and Populist Backlash - Will Wilkinson (research paper)
    • NOTE: Quote from “The Density Divide” summarizing this book’s thesis:
      • “…the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman draws on the relationship between business cycles and periods of social progress and retrenchment to offer a compelling argument that these psychological phenomena combine to create a powerful one-way ratchet effect.151 In the context of longstanding expectations of rising prosperity, a decrease in the rate of growth can seem like a painful loss, eliciting a propensity to jealously guard our holdings and advantages. We can become disposed to close the gates and bolt them, even if the economy, and each individual share, continues to grow. It follows, then, that actual economic stagnation or contraction will be even worse, and raise our competitive, zero-sum instincts from a simmer to a boil.”
  • The Fall of Public Man - Richard Sennett (book)
  • Affluent Workers Revisited - Fiona Devine (book)
  • Tactical Urbanism - Mike Lydon (book)
    • REFERRAL: Confessions of a Recovering Engineer - Charles Marohn (book, ISBN???)
  • City of Brass - S. A. Chakraborty (book)
    • REFERRAL: Daniel K.
  • Bottom of the Pot - Naz Deravian (book)
    • REFERRAL: Daniel K.
  • Fragile Neighborhoods - Seth Caplan (book)
  • Lynchburg and its People - W. Asbury Christian (book) LPL
    • REFERRAL: Browsing at Lynchburg Public Library
  • The Art of Building Cities - Camillo Sitte (book)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Slack
  • You and Your Research - Richard Hamming (lecture transcript)
    • REFERRAL: Coders at Work - Peter Seibel (book, ISBN13 9781430219484)
  • A People’s History of the United States - ??? (book)
    • REFERRAL: Lady Bird (film)
  • The Myth of the Birth of the Hero - Otto Rank (book)
    • REFERRAL: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth - Apostrophe S Productions, Inc. (television series)
  • How to Take Smart Notes - Sönke Ahrens (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News thread
    • NOTE: A recommended book about Zettelkasten
  • Starting FORTH - Leo Brodie (book, ISBN10 0138429308)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • City Comforts - David Sucher (book)
  • The Technological Society - Jacques Ellul (book)
  • Switch - Chip Heath (book)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Local Conversations Leader Course
  • The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt (book)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Local Conversations Leader Course
  • Storm Front - Jim Butcher (book)
    • REFERRAL: Eric M.
  • Sabriel - Garth Nix (book)
    • REFERRAL: Eric M.
  • Through a Screen Darkly - Jeffrey Overstreet (book)
  • In Search of the Common Good - Jake Meadors (book)
  • Finding Holy in the Suburbs - Ashley Hales (book)
  • Wings of Desire - Wim Wenders (film)
  • The Ninth Configuration - William Peter Blatty (film)
  • Atlas of the Heart - Brene Brown (book)
    • REFERRAL: Mollie W.
  • Emile, or On Education - Jean-Jaques Rousseau (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
  • Rerum Novarum - Pope Leo XIII (encyclical)
  • Stratified Policing - Roberto Santos and Rachel Santos (book)
    • REFERRAL: Nicholas L.
  • Playborhood - Mike Lanza (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
  • Characteristics of Risky Play - Beate Hansen Sandseter (article)
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
  • How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts - Simon Nicholson (article)
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
  • Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill - Maud Hart Lovelace (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
  • Free the Children! Down with Playgrounds! - Dennis Wood (essay)
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
  • The Image of the City - Kevin Lynch (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Design of Childhood - Alexandra Lange (book, ISBN13 9781632866356)
    • NOTE: Discusses how children see the city through the making of maps of their neighborhoods
  • The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice - William Shakespeare (play)
    • REFERRAL: That Hideous Strength - C. S. Lewis (book, ISBN13 9781451664829)
  • The Screwtape Letters - C. S. Lewis (book)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • A History of the Reformation in Scotland - John Knox (book)
    • REFERRAL: Josh D.
  • I have sent some version of this email to a lot of rookie developers - R. John Anderson (article)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Discord

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