go to future reading list

2024

  • The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle - Aristotle (book, ISBN10 0075546027) READING
    • REFERRAL: Own book
    • NOTE: Aristotle’s taxonomy of rhetoric includes forensic, epideictic, and deliberative categories. Forensic rhetoric deals with the past, has the objective of establishing justice or injustice, and uses the means of accusation and defense. Epideictic rhetoric deals with the present, has the objective of establishing honor or dishonor, and uses the means of praise and blame. Deliberative rhetoric deals with the future, has the objective of establishing the expediency or harmfulness of a proposed course of action, and uses the means of exhortation and dehortation.
    • Enthymeme
    • “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic.” (p. 3)
    • “…rhetoric may be regarded as an offshoot of dialectic, and also of ethical (or political) studies.” (p. 3)
    • “The political speaker will find his powers of persuasion most of all enhanced by a knowledge of the four sorts of government–democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, and their characteristic customs, institutions, and interests.” (p. 5)
    • NOTE: Syllogisms are used in deductive reasoning and feature a major premise, minor premise, and conclusion.
    • NOTE: An enthymeme is similar to a syllogism, but some of the premises may be supplied by the audience or assumed rather than stated.
    • Zeugma
    • Apophthegm
  • Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis (book, ISBN10 ???) READING Ch. 2/??
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom (book, ISBN10 0671479903) READING 115/382
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
    • “Loyalty versus quest for good introduced an unresolvable tension into life. But the awareness of the good as such and the desire to possess it are priceless humanizing acquisitions. This is the sound motive contained, along with many other less sound ones, in openness as we understand it. Men cannot remain content with what is given to them by their culture if they are to be fully human. This is what Plato meant to show by the image of the cave in the Republic and by representing us as prisoners in it. A culture is a cave. He did not suggest going around to other cultures as a solution to the limitations of the cave. Nature should be the standard by which we judge our own lives and the lives of peoples. That is why philosophy, not history or anthropology, is the most important human science. Only dogmatic assurance that thought is culture-bound, that there is no nature, is what makes our educators so certain that the only way to escape the limitations of our time and place is to study other cultures.” (pp. 37-38)
    • “To overstate only a bit, there are two writers who between them shape and set the limits to the minds of educated Frenchmen. Every Frenchman is born, or at least early on becomes, Cartesian or Pascalian. (Something similar could be said about Shakespeare as educator of the English, Goethe of the Germans, and Dante and Machiavelli of the Italians.) Descartes and Pascal are national authors, and they tell the French people what their alternatives are, and afford a peculiar and powerful perspective on life’s perennial problems. They weave the fabric of souls.” (pp. 52)
    • “Americans believe in equal access. Mortimer Adler’s business genius recognized this and made a roaring commercial success out of the Great Books. He was not even concerned about the translations he used, let alone about learning languages. Most writers in older lands despaired of being understood by those who had not lived their language. Heideger, who desperately tried to maintain and revitalize this view, thought that ‘Language is the house of being,’ that it is the height of superficiality to suppose that translation is even possible.” (p. 54)
    • “All significant political disputes [in America] have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness.” (p. 55)
    • NOTE: He considers Carl Becker, John Dewey, and Charles Beard to all be writers that cast doubt on the validity of America’s founding myth
    • “The dreariness of the family’s spiritual landscape passes belief. It is as monochrome and unrelated to those who pass through it as are the barren steppes frequented by nomads who take their mere subsistence and move on. The delicate fabric into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated. I am speaking here not of the unhappy, broken homes that are such a prominent part of American life, but the relatively happy ones, where husband and wife like each other and care about their children, very often unselfishly devoting the best parts of their lives to them. But they have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world, of high models of action or profound sense of connection with others. The family requires the most delicate mixture of nature and convention, of human and divine, to subsist and perform its function. Its base is merely bodily reproduction, but its purpose is the formation of civilized human beings.” (p. 58)
    • “…the family has, at best, a transitory togetherness. People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life.” (pp. 57-58)
    • “…fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise–as priests, prophets, or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.” (p. 58)
    • “Along with the constant newness of everything and the ceaseless moving from place to place, first radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society. Parents can no longer control the atmosphere of the home and have even lost the will to do so.” (pp. 58-59)
      • NOTE: He uses the word “privacy” in a different way than I would. I mostly consider privacy to be a protection from others peering in, but it could go both directions. His definition says “separateness” or “set-apart-ness” to me.
    • Ineluctable
    • Will-o’-the-wisp
    • bon sens
    • “…democratic relativism joins a branch of conservatism that is impressed by the dangerous political consequences of idealism. These conservatives want young people to know that this tawdry old world cannot respond to their demands for perfection. In the choice between somewhat arbitrarily distinguished realism and idealism, a sensible person would want to be both, or neither. But, momentarily accepting a distinction I reject, idealism as it is commonly conceived should have primacy in education, for man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection. To attempt to suppress this most natural of all inclinations because of possible abuses is, almost literally, to throw the baby out with the bath. Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticise false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly. As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” (p. 67)
    • Autochthonous
  • 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)
  • Rock of Offense: Romans 9:30-33 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Christ is a sanctuary to the faithful and a rock of stumbling to the self-righteous.
    • NOTE: A stone can be a shelter, a cornerstone, a firm foundatoin, or a thing to stumble over.
  • Mark 2 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Danville asks public to weigh in on possibility of regional bus service - Samuel King (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Lynchburg, Martinsville, Greensboro, and South Boston are all destination possibilites, with Greensboro leading in survey.
  • Lynchburg officials break ground on Blackwater CSO tunnel project - Mark Hand (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Upon completion of the Blackwater CSO Tunnel, Lynchburg will have spent nearly $450 million over the past four decades to clean up the sewer overflow into waterways…”
    • “About $50 million of the total cost of the Blackwater CSO Tunnel was federally funded through the American Rescue Plan Act.”
    • NOTE: 3 years to complete
    • “Atkinson Construction was awarded the construction contract for the tunnel, while Stantec was contracted by the city to oversee planning, design and project management.”
  • The declining leverage and status of ordinary people - Brink Lindsey (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “…technological progress weaned itself from dependence on large cohorts of ordinary workers in the home markets of the frontier economies.”
    • “Old-style factory work was brutal and dehumanizing; no one should wish it back. But in a grim irony, this physical deliverance ended up exacting a heavy spiritual toll.”
    • “The labor movement was a product of the unique conditions of the factory: large numbers of workers in close proximity, working with vast and immensely productive accumulations of capital, subordinated to harsh and authoritarian management, and doing exhausting, debilitating work that resulted in frequent maimings and deaths. Workers’ physical concentration facilitated organizing and common action; the oppressiveness and danger of their work gave them the solidarity of the foxhole and the willingness to fight back even against terrific odds; the accumulations of capital made employers especially vulnerable to concerted work holdups.”
    • “…capitalism’s crisis of inclusion…”
    • NOTE: Tl;dr the service industry is alienating and makes people feel like they are not building toward anything
  • How to Read More Books - Truth Unites (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NODE: As far as reading sporadically, I never take books anywhere. Why? One I’m reading is big, one I’m reading together with family, and one is too dense to just read a few pages (so I tell myself). I could solve two of these by getting a bigger backpack and finding a psychologically ligher book to read.
  • 800 kids are waiting to be adopted in Virginia - Jenna Zibton (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Lynchburg has 199 children in foster care system. Article does not mention how many of these can be adopted.
  • Bedford receives $1.4M federal grant for new passenger rail stop - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: FRA’s CRISI program has been around since 2015 and had first funding round in 2017
  • Neil the Australian Lutheran Silverware Bloke - Lutheran Satire (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • BREAKING NEWS! The Election’s Most Difficult Decision… - CGP Grey (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • The Lutheran Satire Gang Meets the New Catholic Mascot - Lutheran Satire (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • “buying lumber” 70% off at Home Depot - Live Free (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Lynchburg airport director speaks on passenger trends, potential Chicago flight - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: American Airlines has 2 years to act on opportunity to receive $1M to establish Chicago route.
  • Genesis 33 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Mark 1 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • ‘Open banking’ rules will put your financial data back where it belongs - Thomas Claburn (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Hacker news
  • Order and orient the keys on your keychain - Nathaniel (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • “Having all your keys face the same direction is critical.”
  • Killjoys will inherit the future - Tove K (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Venn diagram of work, family, leisure, sleep could be made. Work can combine with family on farms, through housework, through teaching child about your industry, etc. Work and leisure maybe can combine for people who really love and are energized by their work, or for surf instructors, rock climing instructors, etc. Family and leisure probably have the most opportunities for combination, and combining them well could make life a lot easier. Part of why some parents are stressed is probably to do with their leisure and their time with children being totally separate. Sleep doesn’t seem to combine with any of the other three, unless you’re lucid dream brainstorming.
  • Matthew 28 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 32 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 27 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 31 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • The Sovereignty of God: Romans 9:19-23 - Rev. Chris Deneen (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Passage is not suggesting that people should not ask honest questions of God, but confronting people who do not trust the sovereignty of God.
    • NOTE: Pelagius was posthumously condemned by Council of Ephesus in 431
    • NOTE: Citizens of liberal democracies often forget that they are under the authority of God and are not the rulers of their lives.
    • “I am the potter and you are the clay”
    • NOTE: God is not the agent of preparation for destruction. It is the sinful natures of those people and the encouragement of the deceiver.
    • NOTE: What does it look like to be “prepared beforehand for glory.”
    • NOTE: What does it look like to be “prepared for destruction.”
  • Genesis 30 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 29 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • RoboLeague - Digital Kitchen (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Adam S.
    • NOTE: Great FIRST Robotics Competition documentary
  • Matthew 26 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
    • NOTE: NASB calls the song they sang a “hymn”
  • Handbook for New Employees - Valve (guide) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News???
    • “Any time you interview a potential hire, you need to ask yourself not only if they’re talented or collaborative but also if they’re capable of literally running this company, because they will be.” (p. 6)
    • “The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company makes people hard to find. That’s why we have http://user—check it out. We know where you are based on where your machine is plugged in, so use this site to see a map of where everyone is right now.” (p. 6)
    • “You were hired to constantly be looking around for the most valuable work you could be doing” (p. 9)
    • “Lots of people at Valve want and need to know what you care about, what you’re good at, what you’re worried about, what you’ve got experience with, and so on. And the way to get the word out is to start telling people all of those things. So, while you’re getting the lay of the land by learning about projects, you’re also broadcasting your own status to a relevant group of people.” (p. 10)
    • “Broaden the conversation. Hold on to your goals if you’re convinced they’re correct. Check your assumptions. Pull more people in. Listen. Don’t believe that anyone holds authority over the decision you’re trying to make. They don’t; but they probably have valuable experience to draw from, or information/data that you don’t have, or insight that’s new.” (p. 11)
    • “The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles. Its members are also incented to engage in rent-seeking behaviors that take advantage of the power structure…” (p. 17)
    • “Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing. So when you’re working on hiring—participating in an interview loop or innovating in the general area of recruiting—everything else you could be doing is stupid and should be ignored!” (p. 44)
    • NOTE: T-shaped people are broad generalists with deep expertise in one area
    • “An expert who is too narrow has difficulty collaborating. A generalist who doesn’t go deep enough in a single area ends up on the margins, not really contributing as an individual.” (46)
    • “We should hire people more capable than ourselves, not less.” (p. 47)
  • Amazon announces deal with Dominion Energy to develop a small nuclear reactor - Charlie Paullin (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “About 70% of the world’s data centers are concentrated in Northern Virginia.”
    • “Virginia as a whole is home to about 150 hyperscale data centers…”
    • “SMRs can produce about 300 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 300,000 homes, compared to a traditional reactor that produces about 1,000 megawatts, or 1 gigawatt.”
    • “Dominion expects to connect a total of 16 new data center campuses, totalling an energy need of about 1 gigawatt by the end of 2024…”
  • Market at Main moving its downtown location - Rachael Smith (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “…the restaurant will relocate just across the street to 907 Main St.”
    • NOTE: Owner is Rodney Taylor
  • A Useful Graphic Made Clearer - Jarrett Walker (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Much more reasoned thinking about the density/taxes/services venn diagram than that of Alon Levy.
    • “It’s also the case that high density, while more efficient in consuming urban services, can understandably correlate with progressive politics that demand greater public investment in solving social problems”
  • Amherst farm’s egg production operation a first of its kind in region - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Promise Land Farms
    • NOTE: Highly automated, free-range chicken egg farm that Amherst County dignitaries are very excited about
  • Executive director named for Virginia Commission on Technology and Science, a first - Nathaniel Cline (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Some kind of advisor to the legislature
  • How to allocate land in Jubilee - Tim Makarios (article)
    • REFERRAL: A land tenure thought experiment - Tim Makarios (article)
    • “The most obvious way to reinstate some of the incentives is to perform the land reallocation less often, perhaps every 50 years. But this causes two problems. One is that some people will have a land allocation for their entire adult lives, while others, through an accident of birth, will have to wait until they’re nearly 50 years old to have the same opportunity. The other problem is that even if you have the right incentives immediately after you’ve been allocated land, your incentives will deteriorate as your allocation approaches its expiry date.”
  • A land tenure thought experiment - Tim Makarios (article)
    • REFERRAL: Author narrated Librivox Progress and Poverty
    • “Someone who leases large areas knows that they are buying only temporary use of the land, and they pay accordingly; when the land is reallocated, it’s no surprise, and they don’t lose anything they paid for or worked to produce.”
    • “And if we tried to abolish permanent land ownership and establish a system like the one in Jubilee, it would be unjust to confiscate the permanent rights that so many people had worked to pay for. It’s not easy to get out of this situation.”
  • Goodbye and good riddance to the 16:9 aspect ratio - Monica Chin (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • NOTE: In my mind, laptops used to be 16:10 then switched to 16:9 10ish years ago. Apparently that trend is semi-reversing. 3:2 aspect ratio is also really nice and tall.
  • Want Growth? Kill Small Businesses - Karthik Tadepalli (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • “If self-employed people are really microentrepreneurs, then the key to firm growth is giving them more access to capital. However, many different lines of evidence suggest that this view of self-employed people is inaccurate, and that it is more accurate to think of them as workers looking for wage employment than as entrepreneurs.”
    • “Firms can only sell to the people they can reach. In developing countries, mobility is very low, even in urban areas. This means that people are more likely to buy from stores near them, regardless of quality. When gas prices increased in Mexico City last year, retail shops proliferated, suggesting that the new shops arose only because high gas prices led people to travel less.”
    • “When firms upgrade their technology, they tend to move incrementally up in complexity rather than leaping to the frontier, suggesting that there are difficulties in absorbing technology that is too advanced.”
      • NOTE: E.F. Schumacher’s ‘intermediate technology’ concept
    • “Quality upgrading is the holy grail of firm productivity growth. Why? Because in most manufacturing sectors, there’s a hard limit on how much you can reduce costs, but there’s no limit on how high-quality you can make a product.”
  • Comments on TSA proposal for decentralized nonstandard ID requirements - Edward Hasbrouck (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Reviving a legacy: Crown’s Ember opens this week - Rachael Smith (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “‘We were catering primarily to a business clientele during the week and locals for birthdays and anniversaries on weekends. And he’s got to kind of start over building that business clientele back during the week, because they’ve all shifted to downtown.’”
  • Human procreation is fuelled by the spirit of war - Tove K (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “…group selection stands in direct opposition to individual selection and kin selection. Group selection favors behaviors that strengthen the group, at the expense of individuals and kin groups. Individual selection favors selfishness. Kin selection favors nepotism. Group selection favors selflessness and team spirit.”
    • “While men make a disproportionate share of self-sacrifice in war, women make a disproportionate sacrifice in gestating and giving birth to and caring for children. And my feeling is that those women are, at least in part, driven by the same spirit of elated self-sacrifice as the men who willingly and knowingly enter front lines in wars.”
    • “Economists deal with self-interested individuals aimed at pleasure and comfort. So they suggest that people should be bribed so childbearing gets more comfortable. And the more economists try to bribe people to have children, the more those economists send the message to parents that they are parasites on society. And that is exactly what cultural evolution has made sure that people don’t want to be.”
    • “In mainstream high-tech societies, few people genuinely believe that having children in itself is a good thing to do. People are actually very suspicious of other people’s children. ‘Social problems’ is more or less a euphemism for the wrong people having the wrong children and raising them the wrong way under the wrong circumstances.”
    • “If people don’t get to hear that having numerous children makes you a good citizen, most of them will not want to do that. As long as they don’t get a clear signal from society, most of them will be very anxious that forming a family is in fact an antisocial decision that will rightfully lower their social position. Appreciation from the community at large is the prize we have been shaped to crave, even more than raising our own families. Our species has evolved into an impasse where most people wait for social approval before having children. And if that social approval doesn’t show up, they don’t have any children.”
  • ‘Local ag’ podcast highlights agriculture, farmer advocacy in Bedford County - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Bedford council votes to lower speed limit on Longwood Avenue, U.S. 221 - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • No country still uses an electoral college − except the U.S. - Joshua Holzer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Opinion piece
    • “The Holy Roman Empire had seven electors: Three were members of the Catholic Church and four were significant members of the nobility.”
    • “…Virginia delegate George Mason viewed ‘making the Executive the mere creature of the Legislature as a violation of the fundamental principle of good Government,’…”
    • National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
    • NOTE: Current list of states signed onto National Popular Vote Interstate Compact reaches 209 electoral votes out of the 270 needed for the plan to work.
  • Long Bridge Groundbreaking Furthers New Era in Rail Travel in Virginia - Karina Romero (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “The new two-track railroad bridge will connect Arlington, Virginia with Washington, DC allowing for the expansion of rail service to meet future demand. Construction activities including site preparation will begin over the next few weeks with large-scale construction beginning in 2025. The project is scheduled for completion in 2030. The new bridge will be constructed adjacent to the existing bridge, a 119-year-old river crossing that currently operates at 98% capacity during peak periods – and will relieve one of the largest rail traffic bottlenecks on the East Coast.”
    • “When complete, [Transforming Rail in Virginia] will enable the state’s Amtrak Virginia service to offer a total of 13 daily roundtrips up from eight currently, traveling throughout the state and connecting to the Northeast Corridor.”
    • “…three daily roundtrips from Norfolk, two daily roundtrips from Roanoke and Newport News, and one daily roundtrip from Richmond.”
      • NOTE: If they’re adding 5 daily roundtrips from four cities across the state, and three of those routes are overlapping north of Richmond, seems likely that Roanoke will get at least one more.
  • Do commuters traveling south to Virginia need more train service time options? - Nathaniel Cline (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “…commuters hoping to use the service to travel from Maryland using the MARC commuter train into the commonwealth in the late morning may miss out, because Virginia Railway Express only runs trains heading south from Union Station at 6:35 a.m. and later around 1 p.m.”
    • “An estimated 16,000 daily trips would be serviced by the run-through service, mainly between Baltimore, MD, and Alexandria at 11,600 trips.”
  • Crime, education key issues in Ward II debate - Mark Hand (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “…Ward II Republican candidate Rodney Hubbard said he believes bringing hard copy books back into the classroom could make it easier for certain students to succeed, especially those who might prefer actual books versus looking at a screen all day. Wilder responded, ‘We’re not going back to books.’ ‘The times have changed now, so we’ve got to move with the times,’ he said.”
      • NOTE: Interesting statement from Wilder. Doesn’t work as a syllogism because premise does not lead to conclusion. Maybe an enthymeme, where the hidden/assumed premises are that 1. The zeitgeist is good, and 2. It is imperative that we pursue the good.
  • How Long Til We’re All on Ozempic? - Greg Justice (article)
  • Rural Transit Systems Explore, Benefit from Data Sharing - Skip Descant (article)
  • My thoughts on the CREC ++ KingdomCraft - Redeemed Zoomer (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: He calls CREC “double-retreatists” and says they are even less likely to obtain cultural power/dominance than the PCA
    • “I think a lot of evangelical Christians are too anti-elitist…but we need to be elitist, because elites are the ones that make cultural change…Jordan Cooper talks about this a lot…”
    • “It is possible to build new institutions in theory, but I dont’ think we can do it right now, because I think our culture is just too weak to build new institutions. These CREC people, they want to build new institutions, but they forget that our culture is just such a spiritually dead and dry culture we can’t build anything beautiful these days…just in the general broader culture, nobody is building new things, whether secular or Christian…and a lot of times these overly individualistic, evangelicals like people in the CREC–they think they’re exempt from the cultural decay we see around us, but everyone in the culture is in the same pool. There’s no peeing section of the pool.”
  • SUMMER REPLAY 5 ++ 11-Devra Davis ++ Health Risks of Cell Phones and 5G - Believe Big Podcast (podcast episode)
    • REFERRAL: Beth W.
    • Devra Davis
    • “It’s not the power of the microwave..it’s the pulse…”
    • NOTE: She says the pulse of microwaves weaken the membranes of cells, causing them to release oxidants
  • Genesis 28 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • The IRS is rolling out its free tax-filing tool to 30 million Americans—and surprisingly, it’s great - Bryce Covert (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Taxes are not About Urbanism - Alon Levy (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Falls into same error as Contra Strong Towns article in saying that because transportation is a small part of the budget, it’s not a big deal if we don’t spend judiciously on it. If you’re having trouble maintaining what you built, no problem. Just double the 5.6% (on average) spent subnationally and things will run great again! That’s far easier said than done.
    • NOTE: Also, 2% of federal spending and 5.6% of subnational spending are what we currently spend to maintain our infrastructure in it’s current poor state. The amount required to maintain what we’ve built in good condition is higher.
    • NOTE: Policing is something that does get more expensive as density increases AFAIK. It might also get better, but I doubt there’s a strong relationship there.
    • NOTE: Urban3 analyses focus on infrastructure spending, which is [as Levy admits] negatively correlated with density. Would be interesting to find some rigorous research on how density affects the cost of providing public schooling. Parking and bussing certainly cost more in a rural or suburban setting, but these costs could be offset by rural savings I’ve not thought of.
  • The Just God: Romans 9:14-18 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Our perception of rightness and unrightness are skewed. We like to put ourselves in the camp of right and pick another different group to be in the camp of unright.
    • NOTE: God renders justice to all, right and unright.
    • “There is one group of all humanity that is considered unright.”
    • NOTE: Exodus 33 I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.
    • NOTE: Both the Israelites and Egyptians were in the camp of the unright, contrary to the way we like to think about the Israelites
    • NOTE: God’s election is not unjust…it is merciful
    • NOTE: There is a difference between fact and what we find acceptable
    • NOTE: He has proclaimed from the foundation of the earth that we are to proclaim the good news
  • Matthew 25 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 24 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 23 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 27 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 26 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Study finds three Virginia universities with ‘some’ viability risks - Nathaniel Cline (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Radford University, University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg), and Virginia State University (Petersburg)
  • Police investigate ‘unprecedented’ spate of homicides - Mark Hand (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Cash Guadio, Christina Louise Hamilton, Anthony Dwight Davis
  • New bar, restaurant opening next to Bikes Unlimited - Rachael Smith (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • What’s a “Modular Roundabout”? And Why are More DOTs Installing Them? - Ben Thorpe (article)
  • Monday’s Headlines Pick Up Where They Left Off - Blake Aued (article)
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  • God’s Purpose of Election: Romans 9:6-13 - Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Adoption, glory, law, worship, covenants, patriarchs were promised to the people of Israel, but “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel”.
    • NOTE: The promise made to Abraham is not for the [plural] offspring but for the [singular] offspring, which is Christ.
    • NOTE: Christ is the second adam and is the true son of God. Christ replaces Adam.
    • “the children of the promise are counted as offspring”
    • NOTE: The children of God are not children of the flesh but children of the promise…those who come by faith to God.
    • NOTE: Hall of faith in Hebrews picks out specific people in the flesh lineage of Israel and marks them as children of promise. It helps clarify that not every descendant of Israel is of God.
    • NOTE: God chose Isaac and rejected Ishmael; chose Jacob and rejected Esau. These examples are evidence that not everyone in the line of Abraham is “of God” or “of Israel”
  • The Death of the Minivan - Ian Bogost (article)
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    • “However it evolves, the minivan will still be trammeled by its fundamental purpose. It is useful because it offers benefits for families, and it is uncool because family life is thought to be imprisoning. That logic cannot be overcome by mere design.”
    • “Perhaps the minivan could be recrossed with the boxy utility van, which seems ready for its own revival.”
    • “If you live in a driving city, and especially if you have a family, a minivan conversation will eventually take place.”
    • “…these benefits are overshadowed by the minivan’s dreary semiotics.”
    • Semiotics
  • Shipley Do-Nuts opening on Timberlake Road in early 2025 - Rachael Smith (article)
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    • “It will be the first Shipley in Virginia…”
    • “…350 company-owned and franchised restaurants across 12 states…”
    • Kolach
  • It Really IS Infrastructure Week! - Jim Matthews (article)
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    • “Amtrak this week announced the beginning of an extensive modernization of its King Street Coach Yard, about a mile south of King Street Station…”
    • “…these two facilities are part of a larger effort…that will encompass six heavy shops in all, with contracts soon to be awarded in Boston, New York, and DC. The expectation is for the King Street and Penn shops to be open for business in 2027…”
  • FRA Offering $1B of Intercity Passenger Rail Grants - AASHTO (article)
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  • Genesis 25 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 22 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Has Modern Society Failed Men? (The Crisis of the Modern Male Part 1) - Dr. Jordan B. Cooper (video)
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  • Has the Highway Trust Fund Outlived Its Usefulness? A Conversation With Beth Osborne. - The Strong Towns Podcast (article)
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    • “Transportation For America”
    • NOTE: Federal aid highway system apparently includes many state-owned rural routes and urban arterials
    • NOTE: State portion of gas taxation has increased over time because federal gas tax was frozen in 1993
  • Safety action plan looks to reduce wrecks on Lynchburg area roadways - Justin Faulconer (article)
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    • “Over the next eight to 10 months, project consultants ERP PC and Kimley-Horn will guide a date-driven, comprehensive stakeholder and public outreach process for input from area residents.”
    • “Fatalities throughout the region from 2018 to 2023 includes 175 vehicle drivers and occupants, 25 pedestrians, 19 motorcyclists and one bicyclist, according to data from CVPC. Throughout that same stretch, just more than 21,120 crashes in the region led to 1,680 serious injuries, the report shows.”
    • “An SS4A requirement is setting a target date to reach zero or setting one or more targets to achieve significant declines in roadway fatalities and serious injuries by a specific date, the report states.”
  • Centra breaks ground on new Simons Run Medical Campus - Rachael Smith (article)
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    • “Lifepoint Rehabilitation and Lifepoint Behavioral Health will manage day-to-day operations of both hospitals.”
  • Dominion Block, Brick & Hardscapes launches in Lynchburg, Roanoke - Rachael Smith (article)
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    • “Boxley Block, Brick & Hardscapes has rebranded as Dominion Block, Brick & Hardscapes following a management-led buyout of the block, brick and hardscapes line of business from Boxley Materials Company, an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of Summit Materials, LLC.”
    • “Boxley became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Summit Materials LLC in 2016.”
  • Former Sta-Kleen bakery building added to register - Mark Hand (article)
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    • “The former bakery building, located at 1218 Park Ave., was built in several phases from 1913 through the 1940s. The roofline is accentuated by several raised parapet walls originally painted with the ‘Sta-Kleen Bakery Inc.’ logo.”
    • “Among other buildings in Lynchburg on both the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places are the aviary at Miller Park, the Carter Glass House, Miller-Claytor House, Old City Cemetery and the Samuel Miller House.”
  • City works ‘against the clock’ to resolve landfill issue - Mark Hand (article)
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    • “The newly constituted Region 2000 Services Authority would consist of only Lynchburg and Campbell County, with Campbell County agreeing to expand the landfill on Livestock Road to handle trash for another 25 years.”
    • “Airspace capacity is the volume of space in the landfill permitted for disposal of solid waste by each jurisdiction.”
  • Libraries will only exist for as long as we borrow from them. Consider it your civic duty - Jodi Wilson (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker news
  • Bee Line Transport put forward as city’s towing contractor - Mark Hand (article)
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    • “…Suter said Mitchell’s Towing and Recovery was eliminated from consideration because it has the capability to tow only Class I vehicles, not the heavier vehicles in the city’s fleet.”
  • White Rock residents ready for new community center - Mark Hand (article)
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  • Amtrak Debuts New Brand Campaign to ‘Retrain Travel’ for Current and Prospective Customers - Amtrak (press release)
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  • Lynchburg fire awarded $4.4 million grant to build new fire station, fill new positions - Amy Cockerham (article)
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    • “The fire station is getting $4.4 million through the SAFER (Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response) grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
    • “Wormser said they’re shooting for an early spring 2025 groundbreaking for the new station.”
  • Longer Crossings Kill More Pedestrians - Kris de Decker (article)
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  • NFPA’s single-stair symposium - Stephen Smith (article)
  • Stew’s U.S. High Speed Rail News ++ October 2024 ++ Brightline West CAHSR Acela Northeast Corridor - Lucid Stew (video)
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  • Exploring the Role of Religious Institutions in Community Development - The Strong Towns Podcast (podcast episode) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Podcast subscription
    • “I think loving [a neighborhood] means living within it…Step 1 is just being a good neighbor, Step 2 is actually, like, occupying it and showing it love, so plant flowers, mow your yard, paint your house, occupy these buildings, take care of them, love them, nurture them, and the third step is being known by your–and this is going to sound very Catholic, but–being known by your works to the people that are dwelling aside with you, especially when they’re not Christian, especially when they’re not part of the Church. …I think that a really great church, people who are not members of that church should want to live in that neighborhood because it is a neighbhorhood of generous people, kind people, loving people, who take care of their place, build things, create, help each other. It should be the kind of place that you want to live in because of the values that emanate from it, and growing the parish does not mean growing the church attendance. It should mean actually growing the footprint of Christian love.”
    • Proximity Project
  • Transportation board scraps I-73, and lawmakers hope for an alternative route - Elizabeth Beyer (article)
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  • Planet Money: Zombie 2nd Mortgages - 99 Percent Invisible (podcast episode)
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  • Lynchburg works on stadium deal with prospective Hillcats buyer - Mark Hand (article)
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  • Partisans without parties - David Dagan (article)
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    • “The pithy diagnosis that is increasingly gaining traction is that we are trapped in a partisan paradox — a phenomenon political scientist Julia Azari describes as a condition of ‘weak parties with strong partisanship.’”
  • New Crisis for Inter-City Customers As Megabus Goes Bust - Aaron Short (article)
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  • Lynchburg’s Ward I election to be city’s most competitive and expensive council race - Rachel Mahoney (article)
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  • Matthew 21 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 20 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 19 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 18 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 24 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 23 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Exploring the Role of Religious Institutions in Community Development - The Strong Towns Podcast (podcast episode) LISTENING
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  • Where sale prices are going up - Michael Lewyn (article)
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  • The 30-Year Mortgage Was Bad. The 40-Year Mortgage Will Be Even Worse. - Charles Marohn (article)
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    • “The idea of a 40-year mortgage can only come from a place insensitive to what it means for an individual or a family to take on such debt servitude. As Josh Rosner wrote in a famous paper in 2001, a home without equity is just a rental with debt.”
  • Seeing Like A Network - Rohit Krishnan (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • “Twitter had a more sparse hub and spoke network, which worked better for information exchange, whereas Youtube’s dense network reinforced shared ideas.”
    • “Dense networks form tightly knit clusters, but are less likely to form ‘bridges’.”
    • “As ideas spread rapidly across this hyper-connected landscape, they tend to converge rather than diverge, creating what cultural critics call ‘mimetic isomorphism’ – a fancy term for the tendency of institutions (or in this case, cultural products) to become increasingly similar.”
    • “What we need are pockets of ‘cultural islanding’ – protected spaces where ideas spread slower.”
    • NOTE: Has a really wild collection of line graphs showing that people in the 2020’s think current decade is the worst at a higher rate than almost any other decade in the last 90 years
    • Panglossian
  • Innovations in care delivery can improve access to primary care for Medicaid beneficiaries - Lawson Mansell & Daphne Hansell (article)
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    • “H.3836 would establish in statute that states have permission to engage in arrangements with DPC clinics. Under current law, states have to go through the Medicaid waiver process to contract with DPC clinics.”
  • 3 Ways To Handle Church Parking That’s Only Needed Some of the Time - Adeleine Geitner (article) RECOMMENDED
  • United Way of Central Virginia receives $283K planning grant to launch Bright Beginning Child Care and Workforce Initiative - Rachael Smith (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “‘Currently, there is a significant shortage of licensed childcare slots for children aged 0-4, with a 67.7% gap between demand and available services, as highlighted in the October 2023 JLARC report,’ the release states. ‘This deficit is far above the statewide average of 9.1%…’”
    • “In collaboration with other agencies and corporate partners, this center will provide up to 300 placements.”
  • New militia group to hold inaugural ‘muster’ in Miller Park - Mark Hand (article)
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    • “Virginia also has an anti-paramilitary law that prohibits all paramilitary activity, including teaching, demonstrating, or assembling one or more people for the purpose of training with firearms.”
  • Blending history with new beginnings, renovations underway on 5th Street - Rachael Smith (article)
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    • “…Calfee is setting his sights on further developments along the road and Fort Avenue. Part of his larger goal is to create a ‘Stadium District,’ a project modeled after his successful developments on Bedford Avenue.”
    • “Adolphus Humbles”
  • Appalachian Power Company requests reduction to pay rate for net-metering solar customers - Charlie Paullin (article)
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    • “Appalachian Power is currently paying those participants $0.16 per kilowatt hour for the excess power they generate, and wants to grandfather them for 25 years, while offering new participants $0.04 per kilowatt hour.”
  • ‘Substantial And Certain’ Penalties For Extra-Long Trains - Jim Matthews (article)
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  • 2024 FIRST Robotics Competition CRESCENDO presented by Haas Game Animation - FirstRoboticsCompetition (video)
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  • Testimony: Lessons for the 2025 Tax Policy Debate - Daniel Bunn (article)
  • More than Conquerors: Romans 8:35-39 - Bryan Rigg (sermon)
  • U.S. Education Department to open new financial aid form to more applicants - Shauneen Miranda (article)
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    • “The application got a makeover following the December 2020 passage of the FAFSA Simplification Act.”
  • Virginia Department of Education releases final cellphone-free school guidelines - Nathaniel Cline (article)
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    • “While some have already adopted cellphone regulations, school boards are expected to adopt them by Jan. 1.”
  • The Princess Bride - Rob Reiner (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Supererogation and Statecraft - Common Places (podcast episode) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Not all of morality is an obligation.”
    • Peter Singer
    • J. O. Urmson
    • Hugo Grotius
    • NOTE: Kantianism and Utilitarianism are the two options you’re given in undergraduate philosophy courses, but those options don’t allow for admirable actions that are not obligations
    • “Love is still a duty, but it admits a kind of freedom of application.”
    • Viridical
    • “neighbor love”
    • Hannah Arendt
    • Sophist
    • Counsels of perfection
    • Reinhold Niebuhr
    • Adiaphora
    • NOTE: moral philosophy, systematic theology, and political theology fields have many connections, but their practitioners don’t often interact with one another
    • John Rawls
    • Habitus
  • Va. lawmakers prepare to overhaul decades-old school funding formula - Nathaniel Cline (article)
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    • NOTE: Standards of Quality (SOQ) appears to be the formula the state uses to fund schools. Apparently it’s teacher-based rather than student-based right now.
  • New quaint coffee shop opens in Bank of the James building - Rachael Smith (article)
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  • Virginia’s largest natural gas producer moves regional headquarters in Tazewell County - Charlie Paullin (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “CNX Resources, headquartered in Pittsburgh with operations also in Ohio, West Virginia and across the counties of Buchanan, Russell and Tazewell in Virginia, produces natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shales of Appalachia.”
    • “The company, which operates in Virginia as Pocahontas Gas, produced around 52% of all natural gas in the state in 2023, mostly in Buchanan County, Virginia Energy spokeswoman Tarah Kesterson stated. Natural gas across the state that year had an estimated value of $217 million and accounted for 54% of in-state electricity generation, she added.”
  • Roanoke City Council reaffirms controversial zoning reforms amid community pushback - Connor Dietrich (article)
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    • NOTE: Council voted 6-1 to eliminate single-family zoning across the city
  • Months after cutting ties with oncology provider, Centra says patient numbers are rebounding - Emily Schabacker (article)
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    • “Lynchburg Hematology and Oncology provided oncology services at Centra for about a decade through a professional services agreement, but relations between the two entities deteriorated over time, leading to allegations that the clinic overbilled Centra for patient services from 2016 to 2021, according to court documents.”
  • Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse - Kris De Decker (article)
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    • “Hot water production is the second largest energy use in many homes (after space heating and/or cooling), and much of it is used for bathing or showering.”
    • “Greek bathhouses comprised rooms with individual hip baths against the walls. Sitting up straight, the bathers threw hot water over themselves or had this done by a servant. In contrast, Roman bathers shared the water in large bathtubs or pools. Both used steam baths as well.”
  • Public Transportation and Gig Workers - Alon Levy (article)
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    • “Public transit is the most successful when destinations are centralized; it scales up very efficiently because of the importance of frequency, whereas cars are the opposite, scaling up poorly and scaling down well because of the problems with traffic congestion”
    • “High concentration of jobs, more so than residential density (which Los Angeles has in droves), predicts transit usage, at metro area scale.”
  • TSA again backs down from its REAL-ID threats - Edward Hasbrouck (article)
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    • NOTE: Seems like TSA is postponing full REAL-ID enforcement again to May 5, 2027
  • After discussions on the future of 5th St., auto body request moves forward - Rachael Smith (article)
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  • What’s cooking on SourceHut? September 2024 - Drew DeVault & Conrad Hoffman (article)
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  • Carmageddon: Shift to Remote Work Led to Increase in Driving and Congestion Nationally… - George Kevin Jordan (article)
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    • “According to Streetlight Data, a mobility analytics firm, VMTs per capita jumped 12 percent between May 2019 and May 2024”
  • Amid internal GOP feud in the 5th District, Democrat Gloria Witt sees her chance - Markus Schmidt (article)
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  • None to Condemn: Romans 8:33-34 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Paul the writer was very familiar with judicial settings and procedures
    • NOTE: In Paul’s day, proconsuls and governors were able to preside as judges in legal cases. Apparently no separation of powers between executive and judicial branches.
    • “Who will call you into the courtroom when God has called you out.”
    • NOTE: Jesus is appointed prosecutor by the Father to execute justice.
    • NOTE: In Roman court system, defendant did not typically have a lawyer.
    • NOTE: We often think of Jesus as being the defendant in the court of justice, but he is actually the prosecutor. The prosecutor gave his life for the defendant.
  • Genesis 22 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
    • NOTE: Suppose this type of child sacrifice was common in that time and place, and by not allowing Abraham to follow through, God was showing his merciful nature and how He was different from the gods of neighboring peoples.
  • Genesis 21 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Geothermal energy is having a moment. Could it power Virginia’s data centers? - Ivy Main (article) RECOMMENDED
  • How to spread Christianity ++ KingdomCraft - Redeemed Zoomer (video)
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  • Genesis 20 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
    • NOTE: Tax mentioned was a church tribute.
    • NOTE: Jesus and the temple are in the same house, and people don’t pay tax within their own house, so Jesus was not liable for the temple tax. However, he paid it so as not to upset the people and to be an example to others of how one should pay their civil and temple dues.
  • Matthew 17 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Becoming perceptive - Henrik Karlsson (article)
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    • “I start asking questions about word choices that seem off to me, or strange pauses, or things said with surprising emotion. This way, I can bring out more and more of the data that confuse me, until my mental model ‘breaks down.’ When this happens, I feel confused and alert.”
    • “Learning [through complex simulations and case studies] is frustrating, and you get none of that comforting feeling of progress that a curriculum provides—but it is faster, and it makes you more perceptive.”
  • Matthew 16 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 15 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 14 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • [High Speed Rail In Texas and Oklahoma? South Central HSR Corridor At Hypothetical True High Speed - Lucid Stew (video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWTif5WS1mM)
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  • Are You READY for the MOST ANTICIPATED Trailer Reaction of 2024? - Say Goodnight Kevin (video)
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  • Purple State Pro-Familism - Patrick T. Brown (article)
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    • “Youngkin’s apparent appeal in a state politically stacked against him is evidence that governors who take the political constraints of their state seriously, and avoid the temptation of being too online, can rack up political success.”
  • Disentangling Autonomy-Supportive and Psychologically Controlling Parenting: A Meta-Analysis of Self-Determination Theory’s Dual Process Model Across Cultures - Emma L. Bradshaw, James Conigrave, Jasper Duineveld, Ben Albert Steward, and others (research paper) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: OpenEd newsletter
    • “Autonomy concerns the capacity for volitionally initiating and maintaining behaviors. Parental autonomy support entails actively considering the child’s perspective, engaging them in purposeful, age-appropriate decisions, providing meaningful rationales for rules and limits, and supporting self-expression (Ryan & Deci, 2017). These behaviors satisfy people’s basic psychological needs and are considered foundational to the development of executive functioning (Bindman et al., 2015) and healthy self-regulation (Joussemet et al., 2008; Ryan & Deci, 2000).” (p. 4)
    • “Psychologically controlling parenting behaviors include guilt invocation, harsh punishment, threats, contingent regard, and love withdrawal (Mageau et al., 2015).” (p. 5)
    • ” Accounting for its negative correlation with psychologically controlling parenting, parental autonomy support remained moderately, positively related to child well-being (r = 0.26, 95% CI [0.20, 0.31]). The cross-path from parental autonomy support to ill-being was small and negative (r = -0.14, [-0.18, -0.10]). Accounting for its correlation with parental autonomy support, the path from parental psychological control to ill-being was moderate and positive (r = 0.20, [0.17, 0.23]), whereas the cross-path to well-being was small, negative, and not statistically significant (r = -0.07, [-0.15, 0.01]). This pattern of results supports the dual process claim that parental autonomy support and parental psychological control are separable phenomena, each with their own unique effects on child well-being and ill-being.” (p. 18)
    • “…the costly effect of parental psychological control appears especially pronounced for daughters. (p. 20)
    • “…the cost of parental psychological control may be especially pronounced for the children of parents with less education.” (p. 21)
    • “We searched for outcomes that are broadly hedonic well-being/ill-being outcomes, meaning we do not know the extent that parental autonomy support and psychological control account for variations in more eudaimonic outcomes such as meaning, purpose, and pro- and anti-sociality, nor child outcomes assessed earlier in life such as committed compliance or executive functioning.” (p. 27)
    • Eudiamonic
    • Gray literature
  • The ‘Busy’ Trap - Tim Kreider (article) RECOMMENDED
  • September 2 - Ran Prieur (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Bowling Alone - Robert D. Putnam (book, ISBN10 0684832836)
    • REFERRAL: Why Does Suburbia Suck? - David Pakman Show (video)
    • REFERRAL: Life After Lifestyle - Toby Shorin (article)
    • REFERRAL: Walkable City Rules: Jeff Speck – CNU Real Places November 2018 - Congress for the New Urbanism (video)
    • REFERRAL: The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood - Zach Rausch (article)
    • NOTE: Apparently discusses negative effects of long car commutes.
    • NOTE: He calls Alexis de Tocqueville the patron saint of American communitarians
    • “Even more valuable, however, is a form of generalized reciprocity: I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.” (pp. 20-21)
    • Arriviste
    • Frisson
    • The Grange
    • “Active involvement in the parish depends heavily on the degree to which a person is linked to the broader social context–having friends in the parish, in the neighborhood, at work, being a part of a closely knit personal network.” (p. 74)
    • “The revitalization of evangelical religion is perhaps the most notable feature of American religious life in the last half of the twentieth century. As church historians Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have argued, this development is merely the latest reinactment of a familiar drama from American religious history: an insurgent, more disciplined, more sectlike, less ‘secularized’ religious movement overtakes more worldly, establishmentarian denominations. The Methodists did this to the Episcopalians in the mid-nineteenth century, and now the fundamentalists have done it to the Methodists.” (p. 77)
    • “Historically, mainline Protestant church people provided a disproportionate share of leadership to the wider civic community, whereas both evangelical and Catholic churches put more emphasis on church-centered activities.” (p. 77)
    • “The social capital of evangelicals, however, is invested at home more than in the wider community. Among evangelicals, church attendance is not correlated with membership in community organizations.” (pp. 77-78)
    • “Thus the fact that evangelical Christianity is rising and mainline Christianity is falling means that religion is less effective now as a foundation for civic engagement and ‘bridging’ social capital.” (p. 78)
    • “Architects specializing in office design began to configure the workplace to bolster employees’ sense of connectedness, creating spaces with such evocative labels as ‘watering holes,’ ‘conversation pits,’ and ‘campfires’ where empoyees come to warm their hands.” (p. 86)
    • Gin rummy
    • Canasta
    • Whist
    • “…people born between 1910 and 1940 constitute a ‘long civic generation’–that is, a cohort of men and women who have been more engaged in civic affairs throughout their lives–voting more, joining more, trusting more, and so on–than either their predecessors or their successors in the sequence of generations.” (p. 132)
    • Incivisme
    • NOTE: He talks about millennials, and I did not realize that term was coined by 2000. Apparently was coined in 1987.
    • “Thin trust is even more useful than thick trust, because it extends the radius of trust beyond the roster of people whom we can know personally. As the social fabric of a community becomes more threadbare, however, its effectiveness in transmitting and sustaining reputations declines and its power to undergird norms of honesty, generalized reciprocity, and thin trust is enfeebled.” (p. 136)
    • “Driving is one important domain of anonymous public intercourse…” (p. 142)
    • “Droll confirmation of declining civility on the highway comes from a long-term study of drivers’ behavior at stop signs at several intersections in suburban New York, as summarized in figure 40. In 1979, 37 percent of all motorists made a full stop, 34 percent a rolling stop, and 29 percent no stop at all. By 1996, 97 percent made no stop at all at the very same intersections.” (p. 143)
    • Emollient
    • “In a careful survey of community involvement in suburbs across America, political scientist Eric Oliver found that the greater the social homogeneity of a community, the lower the level of political involvement: ‘By creating communities of homogeneous political interests, suburbanization reduces the local conflicts that engage and draw citizenry into the public realm.’” (p. 210)
    • “In round numbers the evidence suggests that each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent–fewer public meetings attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, less volunteering, and so on. In fact, although commuting time is not quite as powerful an influence on civic involvement as education, it is more important than almost any other demographic factor. And time diary studies suggest that there is a similarly strong negative effect of commuting time on informal social interaction.” (p. 213)
    • “…work-based ties now compete with place-based ties rather than reinforcing them. If your co-workers come from all over the metropolitan area, you must choose–spend an evening with neighbors or spend an evening with colleaues. (Of course, tired from a harried commute, you may well decide to just stay at home by yourself.)” (p. 214)
    • Oenophile
    • “The fraction of sixth-graders with a TV set in their bedroom grew from 6 percent in 1970 to 77 percent in 1999.” (p. 223)
    • “…39 percent of the light viewers attended some public meeting on town or school affairs last year, as compared with only 25 percent of the demographically matched heavy viewers.” (p. 229)
      • NOTE: Light viewing is an hour or less of TV per day, and heavy viewing is 3 hours or more per day
    • “Television privatizes leisure time.” (p. 236)
    • “Even within demographically matched groups, people who attend more movies also attend more club meetings, more dinner parties, more church services, and more public gatherings, give more blood, and visit with friends more often.” (p. 237)
    • “…figure 71 depicts a long civic generation, born roughly between 1910 and 1940, a broad group of people substantially more engaged in community affairs than those younger than they.” (p. 254)
    • NOTE: the ‘long civic generation’ became dominant in the population around 1960, when many social capital indicators reached their maximum in the 20th century
    • Putative
    • “At its peak this most popular of civilian war efforts generated nearly twenty-million Victory Gardens in backyards and vacant lots, yielding 40 percent of all vegetables grown in the country.” (pp. 269-270)
    • “When people lack connections to others, they are unable to test the veracity of their own views, whether in the give-and-take of casual conversation or in more formal deliberation. Without such an opportunity, people are more likely to be swayed by their worst impulses.” (pp. 288-289)
    • “TV-based politics is to political action as watching ER is to saving someone in distress…Citizenship is not a spectator sport.” (p. 341)
    • “Civic engagement matters on the demand side and the supply side of government. On the demand side, citizens in civic communities expect better government, and (in part through their own efforts) they get it…On the supply side, the performance of representative government is facilitated by the social infrastructure of civic communities and by the democratic values of both officials and citizens.” (p. 346)
    • “[Daniel Elazar] concluded that there were three cultures: a ‘traditionalistic’ culture in the South; an ‘individualistic’ culture in the mid-Atlantic and western states; and a ‘moralistic’ culture concentrated in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and Pacific Northwest…The traditionalistic states, where politics tends to be dominated by elites resistant to innovation, are also the states that tend to be lowest in social capital. The individualistic states, where politics is run by strong parties and professional politicians and focused on economic growth, tend to have moderate levels of social capital. The moralistic states–in which ‘good government,’ issue-based campaigning, and social innovation are prized–tend to have comparatively high levels of social capital.” (p. 346)
    • “It is commonly assumed that cynicism toward government has caused our disengagement from politics, but the converse is just as likely: that we are disaffected because as we and our neighbors have dropped out, the real performance of government has suffered.” (p. 347)
    • Boss Tweed
    • Plessy v. Ferguson
    • NOTE: Read about the history of lynching and it originally meant assuming extrajudicial authority. Named after Charles Lynch, who took the law into his own hands imprisoning loyalists in the Revolutionary War. Lynch apparently wasn’t even considered biased against black people by the standards of the day and definitely didn’t “lynch” any. The term only later came to mean extrajudicial killing.
    • Entrepot
    • Hull House
    • National Consumers League
    • National Urban League
    • American Camping Association
    • Anomie
    • NOTE: He refers to “the high school movement,” which is funny because I thought of high schools always existing or K-12 public education being created in one swoop.
    • “…investment in social capital was not an alternative to, but a prerequisite for, political mobilization and reform.” (p. 399)
    • "”Its critics, in the ascendancy among professional historians for much of the last half century, note the propensity of Progressives to favor technocratic elitism. In proposing ‘professional,’ ‘expert’ solutions to social problems, many progressives adopted an antipolitical stance that had the effect, if not the intention, of demobilizing public participation.” (p. 399)”
    • Plebiscitary
    • DDB Needham Life Style Surveys
  • Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Design Constraints in Computational Culture - Aymeric Mansoux, Dušan Barok, Brendan Howell, Ville-Matias Heikkilä (paper)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
    • “We live in a time of maximalist techno-aesthetics driven by the myth of perpetual growth and infinite resources, an aesthetic based on the ever-increasing complexity and re-source consumption of digital devices that seeks to justify their growth through self-referential legitimisation. Its most visible feature is the increasing density of information for its own sake: more pixels, more detail, more ’fidelity’.”
    • “Leaders in the computer tech industries often remind us that we live in times of computational miracles,[ 14 ] yet our experience of these miracles tells a different story of mundane, uninspiring and bleak anecdotal failures: always taking photos but never having time to look at them, files that can’t be found or contextualised on devices or in cloud storage, losing the password for the password manager, stifling productivity apps, electronic document explosion while paper documents are still required, invalid usernames, everything becoming a website, baroque chains of dependencies, software updates required to keep using the same software, terms of service for pointlessly networked home appliances, customer support that can only be reached on social media, laptop leg burns, glued and soldered batteries, no service manuals or technical documentation to facilitate repair of trivial hardware failures, internet connectivity mandatory for offline use, AI telling lies with unscrupulous conviction, restaurant menus with QR codes, etc…”
    • UbuWeb
    • Jugaad
    • “…there is a danger of confusing permacomputing aesthetics with retro-computing aesthetics.”
    • “In this context, it becomes obvious that any use of so-called outdated computing devices that have exhausted their economic value, can only be of a nostalgic nature, because such use makes no sense from the perspective of systems of constant production, consumption, creative destruction and reproduction. In a present where consumerism, modernity and identity are all linked,[44] out-of-date things can only refer to a past self, a past time.”
    • “When Jamaican music studio engineers in the 1970s began experimenting with obsolete and abandoned US audio equipment such as spring reverbs, they were not nostalgic for 60s surf music. These machines, instead, became a core component of an entirely new musical genre: dub music.”
    • “…permacomputing is walking on thin ice and needs a lot of work to understand its own situatedness to avoid it ending up as a mere hobby for the most privileged, a romanticisation and aestheticisation of poverty, like many low-tech practices in high-income countries.”
    • Permacomputing Wiki
  • Southwest and Southside Virginia deserve fare-free transit - Finn Pollard (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Genesis 19 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Lynchburg Republicans nominate Diemer for Ward 3 council seat - Cardinal Staff (article)
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  • Genesis 18 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 17 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 13 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Predestined: Romans 8:28-30 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
  • Human Transit, Revised Edition - Jarrett Walker (book, ISBN13 9781642833058) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
    • “Some transit authorities do have lower operating costs for smaller vehicles, but if so, that’s not because of the vehicle; it’s because of what the labor agreement says about the vehicle. Many transit labor agreements allow the driver of a smaller vehicle to be paid somewhat less. But the difference usually isn’t nearly enough to make it possible to, say, replace one big bus with two vans half the size.” (pp. 18-19)
    • “…spontaneity is also the biggest payoff of legibility. Only if you can remember the layout of your transit system and how to navigate it can you use transit to move spontaneously around your city. Transit apps can give you directions for a particular trip, but most people need a more stable mental image of their city and its network, so that they have a sense of what is easy to reach. Legibility has two parts: simplicity in the design of the network, so that it’s easy to explain and remember, and the clarity of the presentation in all the various media.” (pp. 27-28)
    • “The commute wall is about 30 minutes away, a number known as Marchetti’s constant. While some people have hellishly long commutes, most people travel about 20-40 minutes each way, just as people in ancient and medieval cities seemed willing to walk that long.” (p. 33)
    • “An I-shaped line can easily be extended on either end without affecting the existing riders, but loops can’t be extended; a city that outgrows its loop has to break it apart, disrupting existing trips.” (p. 64)
    • “…the park-and-ride catchment area of a stop is usually defined by a large area that is upstream of the stop, where downstream is the traveler’s intended direction.” (pp. 68-69)”
    • “…the walking distance most people seem to tolerate–the one beyond which ridership falls off dramatically–is about a quarter mile (approximately 1300 feet or 400 m) for a local stop service but farther for a faster service.” (p. 70)
    • “…a transit map that makes all lines look equal is like a road map that doesn’t show the difference between a freeway and a gravel road.” (p. 97)
    • “For a motorist, roads are there all the time, so their top speed is the most important thing that distinguishes them. But transit is only there if it’s coming soon.” (p. 97)
    • NOTE: Traffic delay, signal delay, and passenger stop delay are the three main types of delay experienced on a transit route.
    • “In the United States and Canada, productivity means the number of riders per hour that a transit vehicle is operating, since the quantity of those vehicle-hours roughly correlates to operating cost.” (p. 120)
    • ”..average metro density is irrelevant to transit ridership. What matters is the density right around the transit stops.” (p. 124)
    • NOTE: He suggests being upfront about what % of capacity is going towards ridership services vs coverage services. Is it 85/15 like Santa Clara County, or 65/35 like Cleveland?
    • “For many smaller authorities in the United States, fare revenue is so low that it doesn’t even cover the direct costs of fare collection.” (p. 134)
    • “In general, transit alows growth in economic activity without growth in congestion. It allows a city’s economy, and hence its employment, to grow beyond the level where road congestion would otherwise stifle it.” (p. 136)
    • “On a bus route map you may see two lines crossing and assume that means they connect. But if they both come once an hour, this is more like one road crossing another on an overpass, without an interchange.” (p. 160)
    • “The better our frequency, the less crucial it is to pulse.” (p. 162)
    • NOTE: Many cities have some blending of regtangular grids and spiderweb (or polar) grids for their transit networks
    • “…all of San Francisco’s crosstown lines–whether I shaped or L shaped–try to get all the way across the grid before they end, so that almost all end-of-line points are on edges of the city. This is a common feature of good grid design, because it maximizes the range of places you can get to in just one connection.” (p. 168)
    • NOTE: Driver break point necessary at end of a line
    • “When different companies are competing along the same route, they don’t do it by competing to make the customer happy; they do it by racing each other to be the bus that comes next at a stop. That’s because, ultimately, the people at the stop don’t want to choose between competing products. They want to get on the bus that comes first and that goes where they’re going.” (p. 187)
    • “Often, the decision [about where to locate] is just about cheap land, but land is cheap because it’s inaccessible. If an employer, government, or organization reduces real estate costs by locating in a hard-to-reach place, they may have saved money for themselves, but they’ve increased costs for their employees and visitors. If they then demand that the transit authority run inefficient service to their remote location, they’ve also transferred the cost onto the transit authority and onto the people that support it with their taxes.” (p. 192)
    • “Travel time, especially commute time, is one of the most fundamental measures of the viability of a city.” (p. 192)
      • NOTE: Average commute in Lynchburg, according to the Department of Economic Development and Tourism, is 24 minutes. I assume it will increase gradually in coming years, barring really good transit design/investment.
    • “The most important step in civilizing these boulevards would be to insist on a safe place to cross the street every 400 meters (quarter mile).” (p. 219)
      • NOTE: Fort Avenue in Lynchburg has the following crossing setup: Park Avenue <–235m–> Langhorne Road <–2000m–> Memorial Avenue <–840m–> Perrymont Avenue <–500m–> McKinney Avenue <–75m–> Toledo Avenue <–530m–> Wards Road <–665m–> Sandusky Drive <–520m–> Long Meadows Drive <–1000m–> Wards Ferry Road <–345m–> Leesville Road <–2100m–> Candlewood Court
  • YMCA of Central Virginia announces launch of Little Scholars Academy preschool - Rachael Smith (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: They use STREAMin3 curriculum from UVA
  • Lieutenant governor sees ‘signs of life’ in Lynchburg - Mark Hand (article)
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  • Matthew 12 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Thomas Sowell - Public Transit and Price Distortions ++ LibertyPen (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “transit costs”
    • NOTE: While I’m skeptical of his claim that jineys can replace high-quality fixed route transit, he has a point that incumbent transit agencies seek to outlaw or squash any new transit technology that may threaten their business, pushing more people into personal vehicles.
    • NOTE: Suggests that a fixed fare for any trip length is an unreasonable subsidy of long riders by short riders. Jarrett Walker rails against this type of thinking somewhere, arguing that most of the costs of transit are fixed regardless of ridership, so having dynamic fare pricing can create added complexity with little benefit.
  • Princess Mononoke - Hayao Miyazaki (film) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Eli M.
    • NOTE: Differs from Avatar (which was inspired by it) in that there’s an actual reconciliation between the natural forces and industrial forces. In Avatar, the solution is for industrial forces to be destroyed/banished so the natural forces can enjoy their perfect, libleft fantasy.
  • Genesis 16 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Understanding single-stair reform efforts across the United States - George Ashford, Andrew Justus, Alex Armlovich (article)
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  • Matthew 11 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
    • “11 Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist! Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. 12 From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force. 13 For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John. 14 And if you are willing to accept it, John himself is Elijah who was to come. 15 He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
      • NOTE: Matthew Henry Commentary says: “In the kingdom of glory. John was a great and good man, but he was yet in a state of infirmity and imperfection, and therefore came short of glorified saints, and the spirits of just men made perfect. Note, First, There are degrees of glory in heaven, some that are less than others there; though every vessel is alike full, all are not alike large and capacious. Secondly, The least saint in heaven is greater, and knows more, and loves more, and does more in praising God, and receives more from him, than the greatest in this world.”
      • NOTE: Matthew Henry Commentary says: “From the days of the first appearing of John the Baptist, until now (which was not much above two years), a great deal of good was done; so quick was the motion when it came near to Christ the Centre; The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence–biazetai-vim patitur, like the violence of an army taking a city by storm, or of a crowd bursting into a house, so the violent take it by force. The meaning of this we have in the parallel place, Luke xvi. 16. Since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it. Multitudes are wrought upon by the ministry of John, and become his disciples.”
  • Stew’s High Speed Rail News - Sept 2024 ++ CAHSR DFW Texas Central Northeast Corridor Brightline West - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Genesis 16 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 15 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 10 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Subjected to Futility: Romans 8:20-25 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
  • New plan would bring Amtrak to the New River Valley sooner, and at a lower cost - Matt Busse (article)
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    • “The latest plan using the N-Line would avoid the [Merrimac] tunnel and its costly renovations, possibly making a future extension to Bristol more feasible.”
  • Matthew 9 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 14 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 13 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 8 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 7 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Why Strict Churches Are Strong - Laurence R. Iannaccone (paper) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: 622: How Ideological Purity is Killing Churches with Ryan Burge - Holy Post (video)
    • “Statistical studies have confirmed that denominational growth rates correlate strongly with “strictness” and its concomitants (Hoge 1979), and new historical research has revealed that the mainline’s share of the churchgoing population has been declining since the American Revolution (Finke and Stark 1992)” (p. 1181)
    • “…seemingly unproductive costs provide an indirect solution. These costs screen out people whose participation would otherwise be low, while at the same time they increase participation among those who do join. As a consequence, apparently unproductive sacrifices can increase the utility of group members. Efficient religions with perfectly rational members may thus embrace stigma, self-sacrifice, and bizarre behavioral standards.” (p. 1183)
    • “There remains, however, an indirect solution to the free-rider problem. Instead of subsidizing participation, churches can penalize or prohibit alternative activities that compete for members’ resources.” (p. 1187)
      • NOTE: This reminds me of a section in Bowling Alone where he mentions that Evangelicals mostly involve themselves inside the church rather than in the surrounding world. If we assume Evangelicals are stricter than Mainliners, and that Evangelicals are less involved in the outside world than Mainliners, it seems plausible that strictness and lack of outside involvement are related. For Evangelicals to become more involved in the outside world, perhaps they could channel more service through the church institution to baptize it and make it compatible with strictness.
    • “…the standard ranking [of strictness] begins with the “liberal,” “mainline” denominations, and runs through “evangelicals,” “fundamentalists,” “pentecostals,” and finally “sects.” (p. 1189)
    • “Calculated at the level of the individual, correlations between church participation and outside participation are consistently positive and significant. People who regularly participate in church activities also tend to involve themselves in a wide range of organizations and activities outside of the church…But when they are calculated at the level of denominational averages, all these correlations are negative. Hence both theory and data underscore that the group-level patterns represent more than the mere aggregation of individual-level correlations” (pp. 1197-1198)
    • NOTE: Those with few social and economic opportunities outside a sect are most likely to become involved in a sect…it’s “cheap” for them to do so.
    • “For any target population of potential members, there will therefore exist an optimal level of strictness. Groups that exceed this level will tend to scare off many potential members with what are perceived as excessive demands. Groups that fall short of this level of strictness will suffer from free-rider problems and hence from a pervasive lack of commitment that leaves many potential members feeling that the group has little to offer.” (p. 1202)
    • “The notion of optimal strictness becomes especially important in a changing social environment. To remain strong, a group must maintain a certain distance or tension between itself and society. But maintaining this ‘optimal gap’ means walking a very fine line in adjusting to social change so as not to become too deviant, but not embracing change so fully as to lose all distinctiveness.” (p. 1203)
    • “…a group can afford to prohibit or put out of reach only those ‘commodities’ for which it offers a close substitute.” (p. 1204)
    • “I suspect that Kelley identifies only one-half of the problem when he attributes Catholic membership losses to the Vatican II reforms, whereby the church ‘“leaped over the wall” to join the liberal, “relevant,” ecumenical churches’ (1986, pp. 33-35). The other half of the problem is found in its hard-line positions on birth control and priestly celibacy. The Catholic church may have managed to arrive at a remarkable, ‘worst of both worlds’ position-discarding cherished distinctiveness in the areas of liturgy, theology, and lifestyle, while at the same time maintaining the very demands that its members and clergy are least willing to accept.” (p. 1204)
    • “In commercial markets, the strongest firms are not always the fastest growing. Highly profitable businesses sometimes choose to maintain their current size and forgo an increased market share. The Amish have pursued an analogous strategy in the religious marketplace.” (p. 1205)
    • “Apparently gratuitous costs can thus divert uncommitted people from strong groups. Committed people end up forming costly groups, while the less committed people end up in standard groups, and the free riding that otherwise undermines all groups is mitigated. The problem and its apparently bizarre solution both arise as consequences of rational self-interest.” (p. 1209)
  • Emery ++ A Film - Hayne Griffin (film)
  • The Housing Market Is a Bubble Full of Fraud, and It’s Going To Pop - Chuck Marohn (article) NOT RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Too handwavy
  • What Makes A Perfect Pizza? - Schlatt & Co. (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • Jesus Revolution - Jon Erwin, Brent McCorkle (film)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Ward I candidate calls for direct election of Lynchburg mayor - Mark Hand (article)
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    • “In Virginia, the mayor is directly elected by citizens in 22 cities and elected by the city council in 16 cities.”
  • Goodbye Mr. Chips - Stuart Orme (film)
  • Saving this house’s wood from landfill (about $15k worth) - Beau Miles (video)
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    • NOTE: Some houses in AUS are framed with eucalyptus hardwood
  • Kayaking the sickest urban river in Australia - Beau Miles (video)
  • Running 43km along a hidden railway line - Beau Miles (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: Similar to what I was doing tracing Watering Branch
  • Shocking things I’ve never done ++ The 12 Days of Newness ++ Ep 1 - Beau Miles (video)
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  • Sick of second hand life? So was I. - Beau Miles (video)
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  • What if we teleported the oceans to Mars? - xkcd’s What If? (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • Joe Rogan Experience #1491 ++ Bill Burr - PowerfulJRE (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “Bill Burr Joe Rogan”
  • Filmmaking Lessons from a Youtube Misfit - Digital Spaghetti (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: ytch.xyz
    • NOTE: Beau Miles is a less pretentious, Australian Van Neistat
  • Bill Burr Philadelphia Incident - MotleyTV (video)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Geri’s Game - Jan Pinkava (film)
  • There Are Some Problems With Not Being Bilingual. Josh Blue ++ Full Special - Dry Bar Comedy (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine, First Draft - Stewart Brand (book chapter) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • “A major attraction of a community of practice is its role as an arena for recognition and endorsement by one’s peers. Orr showed how amicable competition among Xerox technicians built competence and spurred achieving mastery.”
    • Community of practice
    • “Unlike financial forms of capital, social capital is not depleted by use; it is depleted by non-use.”
      • NOTE: Quoted from the Wikipedia article on Social Capital “…practice is a continuous, highly skilled improvisation within a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine…. Narrative forms a primary element of this practice. The actual process of diagnosis involves the creation of a coherent account of the troubled state of the machine from available pieces of unintegrated information…”
      • NOTE: Quoted from Talking about Machines by Julian E. Orr
  • Urban Planners Overregulate Private Lots but Neglect the Design and Regulation of Public Spaces - Alain Bertaud (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “The pattern and width of streets in the downtown Wall Street area remain identical to what they were at the time of the early seventeenth-century Dutch colony. Even the name, Wall Street, has not changed. The introduction of new, wide avenues, carved by Baron Haussman out of Paris’s medieval districts, is one of the few exceptions to the overwhelming endurance of existing street patterns. Most streets in our cities are fossils dating from the time when surveyors designed the neighborhoods.”
  • America Drawn Inward: Assessing Bowling Alone at 20 - Ian Marcus Corbin (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search “Bowling Alone 20 years later”
    • “Television takes your average human - from a species that evolved to its current form while navigating hills and beaches, hunting expeditions, farming, sex and childrearing - and pumps in an astonishing, carefully composed stream of bright, undemanding, frenetic stimulation. It occupies our inner lives so that we don’t have to be our difficult, boring, ambiguous selves, or be in our difficult, boring, ambiguous places, surrounded by difficult, boring, ambiguous people.”
    • “This de-frictioning extends also into our chosen relationships. Sitting face to face with another human is an immense thing - their personality shows itself in words, yes, but also postures and glances and a thousand other small things. Your personality, too, is oozing out of your pores, and so meeting in person is a large, rich and dangerous activity. Boundaries are harder to maintain, disagreements and dislikes harder to hide. To have a friendly conversation in person is a much greater achievement than to have it via telephone, email or text.”
  • The triumph of stasism - Matt Zwolinski (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Whatever else might be said for or against it, capitalism as an economic system is a dynamic, internationalist force which tends – as even Marx recognized with a kind of grudging admiration – to tear down both national borders and traditionalist ways of life. The constant, churning creative destruction of markets has never been a comfortable fit with the conservative emphasis on traditionalism and localism.”
    • “Importantly, liberalism in this sense is not in any way opposed to the kind of conservatism associated with Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott or, despite his protestations to the contrary, Hayek. It is entirely possible to put one’s confidence in individual liberty and spontaneous order while still maintaining the importance of tradition and custom – both of which are often themselves examples of decentralized, evolved social norms.”
  • Glorification: Romans 8:18-19 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
  • A Bug’s Life - John Lasseter (film)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Crawl Space 101 - Scott Sidler (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search “digging out crawlspace”
    • “Ventilation allows moisture from the earth to escape through the vents rather than work its way into your house, potentially causing mold and mildew problems.”
  • Genesis 12 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 6 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 5 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 4 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 3 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 2 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 11 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 10 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 9 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • On Seeing Through and Unseeing: The Hacker Mindset - Gwern (article)
  • Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process - Henrik Karlsson (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • “If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.”
    • “The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy: if you could just make it into another context your problems will go away.”
    • “The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback. By increasing the speed at which you can act on the context, trying new things will become cheaper for you—and so you will take more risks, and extract more information from the context. Write faster, prototype faster, ask for feedback faster. Velocity is underrated. It sounds crass and careless—speeding up. But it doesn’t have to be.”
  • The Multitasking Marvel: How Street Trees Can Solve Many Municipal Problems - Emma Durand-Wood (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “A mature tree can intercept 30%-40% of rainfall before it even hits the ground.”
    • “…trees actually lower the nearby air temperature through the process of evapotranspiration. This makes them far more effective at cooling than the ‘artificial’ shade created by buildings or other grey structures.”
  • Do Quests, Not Goals - David Cain (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • “Still, the tendency is to wait for a better, less cluttered stretch of time to appear before you do that. You will execute your great plans as soon as life becomes a little easier and more spacious than it is now. This is exactly backwards. Forming and achieving aspirations is how life gets easier and more spacious. It’s how people build skills, gain experience, invent things, declutter their homes and lives, start businesses, and enrich the mind with art, exploration, and creative work.”
  • Five Facts on Tim Walz’s Sustainable Transportation Track Record - Kea Wilson (article)
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  • This is Big News For Minnesota - Chuck from Strong Towns (video)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Discord
  • The rise of a new pragmatism - Geoff Kabaservice (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “But low-salience bills that don’t attract the media spotlight — because they are too complicated to be reduced to sound bites, or because they can’t be easily slotted into culture-war frameworks, or because they aren’t identified in the public mind with either Biden or Trump — can and do pass with significant bipartisan support.”
    • “high-profile nihilists and destructionists”
      • NOTE: Terms used to describe some Republicans. I wonder if “destructionist” refers to those that want to gut the administrative state
    • “As Leonhardt pointed out, Trump blew up much of the zombie Reaganism that had previously dominated the GOP, knowing that the working-class voters who now make up the base of the party rely heavily on the public goods and services that are at the heart of the Abundance agenda.”
  • Oh Crap! Dealing With Sewer Upgrades Is a Complicated Mess - The Strong Towns Podcast (podcast episode)
    • REFERRAL: Email
    • NOTE: Talks about how sewers flowing into rivers seem insane now, but were a natural first step in getting dangerous sewage away from where people lived
  • What Strong Towns Really Says About Infrastructure Spending - Charles Marohn (article)
    • REFERRAL: Email
  • The French Dispatch - Wes Anderson (film)
  • Roslyn Ross on ‘Job Parenting’ - TheProgressiveParent (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “Roslyn Ross unschooling”
  • The Glass Menagerie - Anthony Harvey (film)
    • REFERRAL: Shelf browsing
    • NOTE: Amazing and hard to watch in the same way that Fences is hard to watch
  • dracula flow 3 - PLUMMCORP RECORDS (video)
  • dracula flow 2 - PLUMMCORP RECORDS (video)
  • dracula flow - PLUMMCORP RECORDS (video)
  • Ghost Gunner 3-S ++ Optic Cut Library - Defense Distributed (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • The Aladdin Lie: A Response to Hoe_Math - BraveTheWorld (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: Considers “Titanic” to be a film perpetuating the lie that women will leave someone of their same social class for a man of lower social class
  • Stew’s U.S. High Speed Rail News August 2024 ++ Brightline West, CAHSR, DFW HST, Acela/NEC And More! - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Videos subscription
  • 622: How Ideological Purity is Killing Churches with Ryan Burge - Holy Post (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video Search “Megan Basham Shepherds For Sale”
    • NOTE: Weird how they say Deacon is typically a preaching role…give example of deacon Stephen preaching in Bible
    • NOTE: They keep conflating deaconesses and female pastors
    • NOTE: Used term NETR (No Enemies To the Right), which is the opposite of what I hear conservative friends complaining about with people
    • “moderate churches have always struggled with freeriding”
    • NOTE: They seem to believe that pastors should not order their congregation to believe or do something…merely influence them.
  • Climate Change: Why Christians Should Engage - Truth Unites (video)
  • Megan Basham’s Shepherds For Sale: Problems With This Book - Truth Unites (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “Gavin Ortlund Shepherds For Sale”
  • Common Sense Gun Laws - Dan of Antiquity (video)
    • REFERRAL: Michael H.
  • Selfie Waves - Vsauce (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • The $2.1 Billion McDonald’s Machine - Fern (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
    • NOTE: Video calls the things “self order terminals”
  • Rome’s Historic, Wacky, and Modern Railways - RMTransit (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Ikea Heights (The Complete Series) - UberVidz (video)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Hobbit Software - Dave Anderson (social thread)
  • Running One-man SaaS, 9 Years In - Pēteris Caune (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
    • “Healthchecks the product is hobbit software”
  • The Refuge On Memorial ++ Lynchburg’s Homeless Shelter - Mullins Media Co. (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “Lynchburg, Virginia”
  • My FBI Declassified Story - Marques Brownlee (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • Frida - Julie Taymor (film)
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - Peter Jackson (film)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • 5 issues I’m STILL undecided on ++ KingdomCraft - Redeemed Zoomer (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • “The reason conservative Christians lose every cultural battle (and every religious battle honestly) is because their instinct is always to retreat. If a city gets hijacked by liberals, leave it, move to the countryside. If a university gets hijacked by liberals, become anti-intellectual hillbillies and just move to a farm and tell your kids not to go to college and then be surprised when they’re not the elites running culture in 30 years. If your church…if your mainline church gets hijacked by liberals just leave it and go to some evangelical church run in a strip mall somewhere. Conservatives always have this retreatist mindset and it’s why they always lose their influence. It’s why progressives always end up changing the culture. It’s because progressives like to get involved in the world and conservatives just like to leave when things don’t go their way.”
  • ‘The Interview’: Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely - New York Times Podcasts (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video search “bowling alone after 25 years”
  • One Year Quitting Caffeine ++ Update on my life and videos - Alex Kojfman (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • I Accidentally Quit Coffee ++ Caffeine-free never going back ++ How to quit caffeine go caffeine free - Alex Kojfman (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “caffeine withdrawal”
  • I quit caffeine for 30 days - Matt D’Avella (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “caffeine withdrawal”
  • What Michael Pollan Learned from Quitting Caffeine for 3 Months - PowerfulJRE (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “caffeine withdrawal”
    • NOTE: He said even after 3 months being off caffeine he still didn’t feel the same. Possible that I’m not having such a bad time because I’m younger?
  • I Abruptly Stopped Drinking Caffeine And This Happened - Heme Review (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “caffeine withdrawal”
  • How Caffeine Addiction Changed History (ft. Michael Pollan) ++ WIRED - Wired (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search “caffeine withdrawal”
  • Common Places: Finding a Christian America? - The Davenant Institute (podcast episode) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Podcast search “Davenant Institute”
  • Do People Travel Less In Dense Places? - Michael Lewyn (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Replica HQ, a new company focused on data provision, calculated per capita travel time for residents of the fifty largest metropolitan areas. NYC came in with the lowest amount of travel time, at 88.3 minutes per day. The other metros with under 100 minutes of travel per day were car-dependent but relatively dense Western metros like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and San Jose (as well as Buffalo, New Orleans and Miami). By contrast, sprawling, car-dependent Nashville was No. 1 at 140 minutes per day, followed by Birmingham, Charlotte and Atlanta.”
  • Welcome to OpenEd - Isaac Morehouse (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Seems like something I’ve dreamed about for “composing” an education from different programs, courses, materials, etc.
  • Rail Passengers Statement on Complaint Against Norfolk Southern - Rail Passengers Association (press release)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • An Unfair Fight: Romans 8:9-11 - Rev. Samuel Hicks (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
  • Genesis 8 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Why We Are Doing All We Can to Increase Our Kids’ Chances of Marital Success - Ana Samuel (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • The Master Plan: An Obsolete Urban Management Tool - Alain Bertaud (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Planners should monitor their city’s demographic and economic development at least quarterly. This monitoring should include indicators reflecting land and housing prices and the commuting times of various neighborhood and income groups. Planners should also develop indicators reflecting the performance of social services’ housing affordability, and the city’s environmental quality. Elected officials should establish the minimum or maximum indicator values that trigger urgent municipal action and require priority investments.”
  • Thousand-page document governing nearly every street in the U.S. gets a refresh - NACTO (press release)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • The Flesh: Romans 8:5-8 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Various heretics in the church have tried to hammer out exactly what determines if a person is a believer or an unbeliever. Federal Vision movement tried to tie salvation to baptism, and some pentacostal movements have tried to tie it to spiritual gifts.
    • δύναμαι dunamai
  • Relationships are coevolutionary loops - Henrik Karlsson (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • The Wicker Man - Neil LaBute (film)
    • REFERRAL: Accident
    • NOTE: Confused with 1973 version at library but still watched for some reason after realization
  • The Two Towers - Peter Jackson (film)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Genesis 7 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 6 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 5 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 4 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 3 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 2 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 1 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Matthew 1 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Revelation 22 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Revelation 21 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Revelation 20 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • America’s Weird, Small Political Parties Explained ++ TLDR News - TLDR News US (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search
    • NOTE: Mentions American Solidarity Party
  • A Typology of Conservative Protestants in an Anxious Age - John Ehrett (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Eli M.
    • “From the perspective of the Pugilists: the Pluralists are cultural compromisers, the Patriots place the national partisan horse-race over the hard work of local institution-building, and the Tweeds are nerds who will be steamrolled by a hostile culture.”
  • The Marvelization of Cinema - Like Stories of Old (video) RECOMMENDED 2X
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • Vocal Fry: what it is, who does it, and why people hate it! - Dr. Geoff Lindsey (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search
    • NOTE: Good analysis of the physiology of vocal fry and where/when it is popular, but very light on the social aspects. I want to know how people come to do it, and what level of fry (or lack thereof) is most and least attractive to each gender. How about fried-ness by age, by cohort, by level of education, by sexual orientation, etc.
  • Americans’ confidence in higher education falls, poll shows - Kiliane Gateau (article)
    • REFERRAL: Email
    • NOTE: LOL
  • The Hidden Marriage Market - Rob Henderson (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “A study from 2005 that tracked assortative mating in marriages found that if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, your probability of marrying a college graduate is only nine percent. In contrast, if you hold a college degree, your probability of marrying a fellow college graduate is 65 percent.”
    • “A decade ago, an article in The Atlantic stated that ‘If male enrollment falls to 40% or below, female students begin to flee.’ One reason for this is that in addition to receiving an education, people also want to go to college to meet romantic partners; 60% of college students are now women.”
    • “A recent meta-analysis found that the average intelligence of university students and university graduates has dropped to the average of the general population. The college degree is losing its signaling power not only for the labor market, but for assortative mating, too.”
  • Getting over getting to space - Anders L. (article)
  • Why Budget Airlines are Suddenly Failing - Wendover Productions (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
    • NOTE: Mostly due to fuel costs, lower utilization of highly utilized planes because of delays, some high-efficiency jet engine recall, and people wanting frills when they fly on vacation
  • Amtrak Unveils Renderings of Future West Baltimore MARC Station - Amtrak (press release)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Awnings: a simple cooling tech we apparently forgot about - Technology Connections (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Are New Cities Necessary? - Alain Bertaud (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Cameron Craddock Howe running as Independent for Ward I City Council seat - Mark Hand (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • The Flaneur on Public Transport - Jarrett Walker (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • 80 Hours in the Country Everyone Wants to Leave - Yes Theory (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search
  • Genesis 3 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • The Law of Sin: Romans 7:21-25 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • Genitive case
      • NOTE: One of four cases in Greek
    • NOTE: In paul’s thinking the heart and the mind and the soul are extremely connected. The heart controls the mind.
    • John Owen
  • Spaceballs - Mel Brooks (film)
    • REFERRAL: Michael R.
    • REFERRAL: Tim M.
  • Revelation 19 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Proverbs 1 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Genesis 2 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • My Son Lost a Hat On a Tram. Can We Find It? - Mendertainment Studios (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Revelation 18 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Discipline is Underrated - David Cain (article) RECOMMENDED
  • Furlong - Adam Meeks (film)
    • REFERRAL: Letterboxd browsing
  • Despicable Me 2 - Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Why Redbox has been powering down - Janko Roettgers (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search “abandoned redbox”
    • “The convenience store chain had Redbox kiosks in front of its stores nationwide, and Redbox was contractually obligated to pay 7-Eleven a percentage of the fees it got from every single rental. A lawsuit filed by 7-Eleven in June alleges Redbox stopped paying those fees last spring. 7-Eleven terminated its contract with Redbox in August of 2023 and demanded that the company pick up its kiosks but says Redbox never did. As a result, 7-Eleven franchisees began to unplug the machines and tape credit card readers shut. Countless inoperable kiosks remain in front of 7-Eleven stores to this day.”
  • Sundance 2016 IndieWire Panel January 24, 2016 ++ “Captain Fantastic” - GigViz (video)
  • Genesis 1 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Revelation 17 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Captain Fantastic and Ideology - TRCMEDIASTUDIES (video) RECOMMENDED 2X SPEED
  • Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter XVI - Westminster Divines (document part)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
    • “II. These good works, done in obedience to God’s commandments, are the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith: and by them believers manifest their thankfulness, strengthen their assurance, edify their brethren, adorn the profession of the gospel, stop the mouths of the adversaries, and glorify God, whose workmanship they are, created in Christ Jesus thereunto, that, having their fruit unto holiness, they may have the end, eternal life.”
  • Construction Begins on New High-Speed Rail Line - Flynn Nicholls (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • The Most Underrated Thing About American Urbanism - Oh The Urbanity! (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Malachi 4 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Malachi 3 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • We SAVED our denomination from destruction - Redeemed Zoomer (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • The state of SourceHut and our plans for the future - Drew DeVault (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • Revelation 16 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1 Million from GitHub Founder - Bryan Lunduke (video)
  • Cold Law, Hot Gospel - Canon Press (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Javier Milei has turned Argentina into a libertarian laboratory - The Economist (article)
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once - Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan (film)
    • REFERRAL: Tyler W.
  • The Third Use of the Law (Formula of Concord Article VI) - Dr. Jordan B Cooper (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: For Lutherans, 3 uses of law in order are curb, mirror, and guide. For Reformed people, 3 uses in order are mirror, curb, and guide
    • “It doesn’t say here that all we need is the warnings of the Law so we flee to the Gospel…it’s not what it says. It says we need the punishments so that we might follow God’s Spirit…we hear the punishments of what is wrong, and through those punishments we then look to God’s Spirit and strive toward obedience.” (38:13)
    • “What I hear from people is they say ‘Well of course we preach the Law…of course we believe in the Law.’ If you’re saying that, but your preaching is simply not the law itself but just saying ‘You’re a sinner,’ that’s not the Law, ok. ‘You’re a sinner and God forgives you,’ that’s not the Law and the Gospel. If you’re doing that, and never actually instructing anyone toward specifics of anything in the Law, that is antinomianism by the definition that Luther gives toward antinomianism. Or, if you don’t preach the Law and then the only law that you preach is ‘we all are self-righteous…and the problem with us is really that we have too much righteousness and we just are always attempting to get self-justification,’ that’s not the Law. Not that there’s no sense…of course self-righteousness is a Sin, but to define all sin as one thing and then say ‘well that’s the only Law,’ you’re not actually teaching the Law. And if you’re not actually teaching the Law in the pulpit, that is antinomianism, because Luther’s critique is not toward those who say there is no Law or function of the Law, but they’re saying ‘there’s no function of the law in the pulpit in the church,’ so if you are not proclaiming specifically the Law–the actual demands of God, and not just some vague sense–in its fullness, that’s antinomianism.” (39:24)
  • Sin Shown to Be Sin: Romans 7:13-14 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • ἁμαρτία \hamartia\
      • NOTE: a sin or a failure
    • “the law is like a bucket of ice cold water…and we are awakened to the reality of sin”
    • NOTE: Sin has a will and volition of its own and is trying to kill you.
  • Malachi 2 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
    • “For the man who does not love his wife, but divorces her, says the LORD, the God of Israel, covers his garment with violence, says the LORD of hosts. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and do not be faithless.”
  • Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google - Amelia Tait (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker news
  • Anglosphere Costs and Inequality - Alon Levy (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: In essence, author considers rise in costs to be result of contracting out whole process of constructing subways, rather than building in-house expertise.
  • TIERLIST of Reformed Confessions - Redeemed Zoomer (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Stew’s July U.S. High Speed Rail News 2024 ++ Dallas Fort Worth HST CAHSR Acela NEC Brightline West - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Sin Came Alive: Romans 7:9-12 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: “I was once alive apart from the Law” means that he was living unaware of his sin, in blissful ignorance
    • NOTE: According to 2018 Pew research study, 69% of professing Christians said that God would not condemn people for a small sin
    • NOTE: Law without Gospel is condemnation. Gospel without Law does not make sense. Law and Gospel together bring awareness and salvation from sin.
  • The Fellowship of the Ring - Peter Jackson (film)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Is Wayfinding Worth the Extra Cost of Static Signage? - Asia Mieleszko (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Schedules, system maps, potential detours, and route and fare information are typically located on separate web pages. And if you, like most, opt to Google the answer, you may be directed to a five-year-old PDF. The MTA is excellent at keeping its web pages updated. Many smaller agencies are not. Being able to scan this medley of particulars in an instant at the place you’re expecting to catch your ride is, according to everyone I spoke with, unbeatable.”
  • Want To Build Strong Cities? Win the Definition Game, First - Tiffany Owens Reed (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • New Possibilities on the Horizon for Historic Downtown Lynchburg’s 12th Street - Central Virginia Planning District Commission (press release)
  • Brightline West is Great. Let’s Make it Even Better. - RMTransit (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Revelation 14 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Chris Fleming ++ He Should Be Way More Popular ++ Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out Podcast - Mike Birbiglia (video)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • Malachi 1 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Stress is about cheating - Tove K (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAl: Memory of blog existing
  • Why I bought an Encyclopedia - Janet Vertesi (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Hacker news
    • “epistemic literacy”
  • The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand (book, ISBN10 0026009102)
    • REFERRAL: Julia Tourianski
    • “Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security, of abandoning one’s values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, know that the fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose, and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man’s nature and of life’s potential.” (p. xiii)
      • NOTE: From foreword by author
    • "’…Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?’” (p. 12)
    • NOTE: Would die to hear a dialog between Roark and Christopher Alexander
    • Tracery
    • Crenelle (crenellated)
    • “[Ellsworth M. Toohey] called upon architects to abandon their selfish quest for individual glory and dedicate themselves to the embodiment of the mood of their people.” (pp. 70)
    • “There seemed to be a great many aspiring to that title [of intellectual]. Readers acquired erudiiton without study, authority without cost, judgement without effort. It was pleasant to look at buildings and criticise them with a professional manner and with the memory of page 439; to hold artistic discussions and exchange the same sentences from the same paragraphs. In distinguished drawing rooms one could soon hear it said: ‘Architecture? Oh, yes, Ellsworth Toohey.’” (p. 70)
    • Drawing room
      • NOTE: Short for withdrawing room and synonym for living room
    • Pilaster
    • Astoria, Queens
    • Dado
    • Hadrian Mausoleum
    • “That’s not the way it’s done. You must be pretty hard up to come running after a sculptor. The way it’s done is like this: You make me come to your office, and the first time I come you mustn’t be there. The second time you must keep me waiting for an hour and a half, then come out into the reception room and shake hands and ask me whether I know the Wilsons of Podunk and say how nice that we have mutual friends, but you’re in an awful hurry today and you’ll call me up for lunch soon and then we’ll talk business. Then you keep this up for two months. Then you give me the commission. Then you tell me that I’m no good and wasn’t any good in the first place, and you throw the thing in the ash can. Then you hire Valerian Bronson and he does the job. That’s the way it’s done.” (p. 335)
    • “He looked at Roark and saw the calmest, kindest face–a face without a hint of pity. It did not look like the countenance of men who watch the agony of another with a secret pleasure, uplifted by the sight of a beggar who needs their compassion…” (p. 337)
    • Parvenu
    • Theosophy
    • Patrician
    • Davenport desk
    • “My building will be seen. It will reclaim the whole neighborhood. Let the others follow. Not the right location, they’ll say? Who makes right locations? They’ll see. This might become the new center of the city–when the city starts living again.” (pp. 620)
    • REFERRAL: The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom (book, ISBN10 0671479903)
      • “There is always a girl who mentions Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a book, although hardly literature, which with its sub-Nietzschean assertiveness, excites somewhat eccentric youngsters to a new way of life.” (p. 62)
  • Can YIMBY policies cause large price declines? - Salim Furth (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Supply has never and will never cause a collapse of prices and rents. It causes stability.”
      • NOTE: Quoting Kevin Erdmann
  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Revisited - Sebastian Lehodey (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Seven Pounds - Gabriele Muccino (film)
    • REFERRAL: Dave ?
  • My thoughts on the RPCNA (Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America) – KingdomCraft - Redeemed Zoomer (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: He considers RPCNA to be the most conservative presbyterian denomination in the United States, and somewhat unique in that they are “mainline”, but never became theologically liberal
  • The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood - Zach Rausch (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker news
  • The Curious Law Problem: Romans 7:7-8 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: ἐπιθυμία \epithumia\ is word used for coveting, meaning desire, passionate longing, lust
    • NOTE: Covetousness is a form of idolatry, because we make ourselves into gods and consider following our desires to be most important
    • “The law brings knowledge of sin, and the knowledge of sin is good for the believer”
  • Bourne Supremacy - Paul Greengrass (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • More Crowding, Fewer Babies: The Effects of Housing Density on Fertility - Lyman Stone (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “At low population densities, there isn’t much correlation between “crowded housing unit” and lower fertility. But as area population density rises, the fertility rates of people in the least-crowded units rise, and the fertility rates of people in the most-crowded units falls.”
  • Ivan Illich on Bicycles - Kent Peterson (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Discord
    • “The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.”
      • NOTE: Quote from Ivan Illich within article
  • The Solar Sermon - Krazam (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Actual Clickbait ++ Smarter Every Day 299 - SmarterEveryDay (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • The Grudge - Takashi Shimizu (film)
    • REFERRAL: Eric M.
  • Zechariah 14
    • REFERRAL:
  • What About Bob? - Frank Oz (film)
    • REFERRAL: Lauren R.
  • 2 battery storage siting agreements get council approval - Mark Hand (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • The Bourne Identity - Doug Liman (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • A Tangled Mess: Romans 6:19-23 - Samuel Hix (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • “The cruciform life”
    • NOTE: Duplex gratia means that you have been made right with God and have been unified with Christ Jesus
    • NOTE: Mentioned psychoanalyst Karen Horney that theorized that neuroses come out of the discrepancy between an idealized picture of ourselves and the reality of our lives. Sam was primarily drawing from her book Neurosis and Human Growth.
  • City of Lynchburg Awarded Funding for Urban Forestry Projects - City of Lynchburg (press release)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • One nation, under watch: New brand of largely unregulated mass surveillance is expanding in Virginia - Katie King (article) READING **RECOMMENDED
  • Wisconsin AI-powered Flock cameras are tracking where you drive - Brian Polcyn (article)
  • Stew’s U.S. High Speed Rail News June 2024 ++ Brightline West CAHSR DFW HST Acela NEC Keystone - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Virginia Breeze to offer east-west bus line in 2025 - Nathaniel Cline (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • How Car Sharing Can Make Your Community Stronger - Emma Durand-Wood (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Horatio Hornblower - Andrew Grieve (television series)
  • Revelation 13 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Main Streets Suck.* - Eryngo Urbanism (video)
  • The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and the Corruption of the American City - Jonathan Ireland (article)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Zechariah 13 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Die Hard - John McTiernan (film)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Lynchburg Citizens Academy at Communications and Public Engagement - Anna Bentson, etc. (lecture)
    • REFERRAL: Andrew J.
  • Revelation 12 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • New DHS publicity about REAL-ID - Edward Hasbrouck (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “The May 7, 2025 date is entirely arbitrary, not fixed by law, has been extended time and time again for years, and can and likely will be extended again.”
  • Escaping the “Transit Sandbox” - Tony Dutzik (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Data is Overrated - Alon Levy (article)
    • “from 2004-2012, the average federal funding share for transit New Starts projects was 45 percent, compared with 80 percent for highway projects eligible for federal funding”
  • Americans don’t Understand Passenger Trains - Alan Fisher (video) NOT RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Lawless - John Hillcoat (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • High Fidelity - Stephen Frears (film)
  • Bedford council making strides in passenger rail stop goal - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Mary Zirkle, the town’s economic development coordinator, reported to council in November a site along the north side of Macon Street and west of 4th Street was chosen as the preferred location. The property is directly across from the town’s athletic fields between the Bedford County Health Department and Bedford Primary School.”
  • Remember the Titans - Boaz Yakin (film)
    • REFERRAL: Laurel C.
  • Zechariah 12 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Is Alberta finally doing it? - RMTransit (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Contra Strong Towns - Arpit Gupta (article)
    • REFERRAL: Interrogating the Strong Towns “Ponzi Scheme” - Salim Furth (article)
    • NOTE: This is what I posted in Strong Towns Discord along with link -> My knee-jerk response is that: 1. “Bankruptcy” just looks like not fixing things and letting them decay. 2. Regardless of whether infrastructure is a small part of budget pie, it’s not easy to expand the budget, so if that doesn’t cover maintenance, a place is screwed. 3. Urban spending/capita is higher in raw numbers, but everything is more expensive in more desirable places (cities), so maybe infra spending as % of GDP would be more accurate? 4. Infrastructure quality is actually higher in these places that can and are willing to support it (crosswalk bars 1ft apart vs. 2ft apart). 5. Maybe “ponzi scheme” is too strong of a term.
  • Interrogating the Strong Towns “Ponzi Scheme” - Salim Furth (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Revelation 11 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • FF-24: Roslyn Ross on having a family in spite of Ayn Rand and being an expat - Fountainhead Forum (video)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • “Never do for a child what a child can do for themself.”
    • NOTE: Mentioned that Amish people reject the bicycle because it separates people, but accept rollerblades because they bring people together. Likewise, they reject soccer but accept volleyball.
  • Microtranist Is Taxpayer Funded Uber, Advocates Warn — And It’s a Threat to Real Transit - Kea Wilson (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Fortunately Lynchburg is keeping microtransit in-house, and only deploying to low-density areas. Have heard concerning rumblings regarding deploying service to whole city, though.
  • Bedford six-year plan for secondary road improvements set at $7.4 million - Justin Faulconer (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • NOTE: Somewhat maniacal that they’re trying to pave every rural road. This has to be a massive subsidy.
  • Have you noticed what Jon Jon has noticed? - Strong Towns (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Are we there yet? A guide to highway distance signs - David Rookhuyzen (article)
  • Living in Christ: Romans 6:12-18 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE: Under grace the law should become increasingly important to us, because we’ve been freed to follow the law
    • Alistair Begg
  • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - Terry Hughes (film)
  • Hunt for the Wilderpeople - Taika Waititi (film) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Press Release: Niskanen welcomes committee passage of the YIMBY Act - Louisa Tavlas (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Data is Overrated - Alon Levy (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Yangbo D. (Strong Towns Slack)
    • NOTE: TNC (Transportation Network Company) is a jargon synonym for “rideshare company” like Uber or Lyft
    • “An app showing me that the bus in Boston will not arrive for another 17 minutes is not going to make me ride the bus (I took a taxi that time; the public bus tracker was down but there was some dodgy third-party app). A schedule in which the bus shows up every 6 minutes without variation is.”
    • “Important aspects of planning require either very coarse information, readily available not just from conventional present-day census sources but often also from the state of data analysis of the 1920s and 30s.”
  • Why Airport Security Suddenly Got Better - Real Engineering (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Ben A.
    • NOTE: Normal xray scanners just shoot high energy radation and low energy radation through the luggage at different times and record the ratio between the high-energy and low-energy reflections. Different materials have different ratios, so they can look them up in a table and color code items by material for security staff. Water has a very similar ratio to many explosives, so was banned because it was too difficult to distinguish. Newer machines from Smiths Detection take many images of the luggage to create 3D models. This allows the software to identify the volume of different bodies and consider the material’s density as well as high-energy to low-energy reflection ratio. Apparently makes it technically feasible to scan for explosives while letting people keep water in their bags.
  • Hill City Trolleys - Harold E. Cox (book, ISBN13 9781938205415)
    • REFERRAL: Christian Crouch
    • 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)
    • Macadam
    • NOTE: 12 minute headway was standard for most of the years electric trolleys were in operation
    • NOTE: Mentioned a federal policy in 1930s of not subsidizing road maintenance for roads with trolley tracks on them
    • “The Diamond HIll line, which had been Rivermont’s alternate partner, was abandoned on 25 September [1901], and College Hill was paired exclusively and reliably with the Rivermont line. This routing became the most prosperous and pampered of LT&L’s lines, getting the newest and best cars when there was a choice. The pairing continued until the abandonment of the Rivermont line on 7 August, 1938.” (p. 94)
      • NOTE: This would absolutely still be the most profitable bus route
  • Black Swan - Darren Aronofsky (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • How to measure the impact of zoning on housing in your city - Jonathan Nolan (article) RECOMMENDED
  • Lynchburg Citizens Academy at Financial Services - Donna S. Witt, etc. (lecture)
    • REFERRAL: Andrew J.
    • NOTE: About 25% of land value in city is non-taxable according to VA state standards (does not necessarily align with 501c3 status)
    • NOTE: State code mandates that debt service no more than 10% of expenditures
    • NOTE: Water and sewer and such are in “enterprise funds” that must self-maintain outside of general fund
  • Zechariah 11 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • How Amsterdam Built A Dystopia - Hoog (video)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • What I learned by living without artificial light - Linda Geddes (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • “Morning light seemed to be particularly powerful: those exposed to a high stimulus between 8:00 and 12:00 took an average 18 minutes to fall asleep at night, compared to 45 minutes in the low stimulus group. They slept for an extra 20 minutes. Their sleep efficiency was 2.8% higher. And they reported significantly fewer sleep disturbances.”
    • “It supports the idea that brighter and blue-enriched morning light could be a useful countermeasure to artificial light in the evenings especially during the darker seasons, when less daylight is available.”
  • How Private Equity Consumed America - Wendover Productions (video) NOT RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video search
    • NOTE: Even at 2x speed it was very low-content
  • Follow the Money to the After Party - Megan Basham (article)
    • REFERRAL: Bob P.
  • Revelation 10 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Dark Ecology - Paul Kingsnorth (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
    • “If you want human-scale living, you doubtless do need to look backward. If there was an age of human autonomy, it seems to me that it probably is behind us. It is certainly not ahead of us, or not for a very long time…”
    • “Schumacher’s riposte reminds us that Ivan Illich was far from being the only thinker to advance a critique of the dehumanizing impacts of megatechnologies on both the human soul and the human body. E. F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith—there’s a long roll call of names, thinkers and doers all, promoters of appropriate energy and convivial tools, interrogators of the paradigm.”
    • “But though they burn with the shouty fervor of the born-again, the neo-environmentalists are not exactly wrong. In fact, they are at least half right. They are right to say that the human-scale, convivial approaches of those 1970s thinkers are never going to work if the world continues to formulate itself according to the demands of late capitalist industrialism. They are right to say that a world of 9 billion people all seeking the status of middle-class consumers cannot be sustained by vernacular approaches. They are right to say that the human impact on the planet is enormous and irreversible. They are right to say that traditional conservation efforts sometimes idealized a preindustrial nature. They are right to say that the campaigns of green NGOs often exaggerate and dissemble. And they are right to say that the greens have hit a wall, and that continuing to ram their heads against it is not going to knock it down.”
    • “[The Amazon Rainforest] teems with a great, shifting, complex diversity of both human and nonhuman life, and no species dominates the mix. It is a complex, working ecosystem that is also a human-culture-system, because in any kind of worthwhile world, the two are linked.”
    • “Hunter-gatherers living during the Paleolithic period, between 30,000 and 9,000 BCE, were on average taller—and thus, by implication, healthier—than any people since, including people living in late twentieth-century America. Their median life span was higher than at any period for the next six thousand years, and their health, as estimated by measuring the pelvic inlet depth of their skeletons, appears to have been better, again, than at any period since—including the present day.”
    • “…the successors of the neo-environmentalists will be making precisely the same arguments about the necessity of adopting the next wave of technologies needed to dig us out of the trap that GM crops have dropped us neatly into. Perhaps it will be vat-grown meat, or synthetic wheat, or some nano-bio-gubbins as yet unthought of. Either way, it will be vital for growth and progress, and a moral necessity.”
    • “Ground yourself in things and places, learn or practice human-scale convivial skills. Only by doing that, rather than just talking about it, do you learn what is real and what’s not, and what makes sense and what is so much hot air.”
    • NOTE: A snath is the handle of a scythe
    • 1992 Earth Summit
    • Neo-environmentalism
    • Progress trap
    • Pelvimetry
  • Whiplash - Damien Chazelle (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • All Aboard With Stephen: Infrastructure and Fleet - Amtrak (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • What happened to cheap food? Diners, Automats, and affordable eating - Kendra Gaylord (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
    • Automat
  • The Young Victoria - Jean-Marc Vallée (film)
    • REFERRAL: Claira W.
    • NOTE: Really like Hagen Bogdanski’s photography. Has a lot of interesting shallow depth-of-field shots.
  • Wedding Crashers - David Dobkin (film)
    • REFERRAL: Own DVD
  • Union with Christ: Romans 6:5-11 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • σύμφυτος \sumphutos\
    • NOTE: Union with Christ does not mean we are planted beside Christ, and it does not mean that we are engulfed by Christ like a vine engulfs a tree. Rather, it is like when two trees grow together such that they operate as one tree.
    • Inosculation
  • First Reformed - Paul Schrader (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
    • Thomas Merton
    • The Cloud of Unknowing
    • “In order to grasp the spiritual in films, you have to leave room for the viewer to lean in. You can’t do it all for them. You can’t tell them how to feel. You can’t use music to tell them how to feel, you can’t use motion to tell them how to feel. You have to get them to the place where they–come, and the whole trick is how to push a viewer back, ever so slightly, while giving him reason to come forward, and so you push him back technically, and you try to bring him forward through story and character elements.”
      • NOTE: Quote from interview with director Paul Schrader
  • The Wolf of Wall Street - Martin Scorsese (film)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • American Myths of European Poverty - Alon Levy (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “The United States is, by a slight amount, richer than Northern Europe, which for the purposes of this post comprises the German-speaking world, the Nordic countries, and Benelux. Among the three largest countries in this area, Germany is 16.5% poorer than the US, the Netherlands 8.3% poorer, Sweden 14.3%. This is more than anything an artifact of shorter working hours – Sweden has an ever so slightly larger GDP per hour worked, the other two are 6-7% poorer per hour worked.”
  • I Fixed Stuff in Prague with Magical Mouldable Sticks - Mendertainment Studios (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Major US Public Transit Union Questions “Microtransit” - Jarrett Walker (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • How Britain Made a Dystopian City - JimmyTheGiant (video)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Discord
  • Cleveland: a target of rail competitors? - Ken Prendergast (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Vehicle Miles Traveled Taxes Rollout across States - Jacob Macumber-Rosin and Adam Hoffer (article) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Her - Spike Jonze (film) NOT RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
    • NOTE: Must be a good bit in the future because LA has a ton of trains
  • The Genius of 2x4 Framing - Stewart Hicks (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video search
  • HARD Lessons from Building a House in Germany - Type Ashton (video) NOT RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: Thought it was going to be about particularly German construction gotchas, but was a long-winded account of general project-management failures.
  • There Are Many Reasons Why Stockholm Is So Pleasant to Walk In. Here’s One! - Streetfilms (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: RRFB gives about the same result here as those blue signs do in Stockholm
  • Zechariah 9 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Zechariah 8 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Revelation 9 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • 3:10 to Yuma - Delmer Daves (film) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Shall We Go on Sinning?: Romans 6:1-4 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • “Union with Christ necessitates a complete and total transformation.”
    • NOTE: Baptism in the name of Moses is to be baptised into the discipleship of Moses, while baptism in the name of Christ is to be baptized into union with or discipleship of Christ.
  • Revelation 8 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Zechariah 7 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Zechariah 6 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Season 6 Episode 16: Christian Nationalism - Southside Rabbi (podcast episode) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Podcast subscription
  • Lynchburg Citizens Academy at Department of Human Services - April Watson, etc. (lecture)
    • REFERRAL: Andrew J.
    • NOTE: 644 CPS complaints for 944 kids in FY23
    • NOTE: 763 children getting childcare assistance right now
    • NOTE: LCS truancy is defined as 7 days unexcused absence in school year
    • NOTE: ~24k medicaid recipients in city of Lynchburg, and ~14k before Covid
    • VQB5
    • Virginia Comprehensive Services Act
  • Combining radio and visual tracking of road vehicles - Edward Hasbrouck (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “Once the unique identifying numbers of the in-vehicle wireless access points are linked to a vehicle and the vehicle’s registration record and owner by matching the time and location of device detection with an ALPR scan of the vehicle’s license plate, they can be used to track those devices and log their movements in a permanent file associated with the registered owner, even when those devices leave the vehicle.”
    • National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System
  • Could Amazon be a source of significant long-term growth for intermodal rail? Analysis - Chase Gunnoe (article)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
    • NOTE: Watched a train go by that was 15-20% Amazon Prime intermodal containers, so wondered about that
  • America’s Newest Interstate Nears Completion in Indiana - Jared Brey (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Roundabouts Are Safer. So Why Does The U.S. Have So Few Of Them? - CNBC (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • Cycling in Carmel, Indiana from a Dutch perspective - BicycleDutch (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
  • Arizona’s Culdesac: A Car-Free Paradise or Part of the Problem? - Ben Abramson (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “…the model of another large residential development built to completion from day one is a long way from the incremental urbanism and thickening our cities need.”
  • Stew’s High Speed Rail News May 2024 ++ Brightline West Texas Central CAHSR Acela NEC - Lucid Stew (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video subscription
    • NOTE: Brightline West CEO encouraging LA rail operator to electrify one of their lines so Brightline could run trainsets further into LA
  • Revelation 7 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • The Blues Brothers - John Landis (film) RECOMMENDED
  • Birdman - Alejandro González Iñárritu (film)
  • Zechariah 5 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Reigning Power: Romans 5:20-21 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
    • NOTE:
      Irreligious Religious Gospel
    Sin Non-existent Containable/Controllable Pervasive
    Law Unnecessarily oppressive Can obey perfectly “To increase the trespass”
    Hope Self-fulfillment Obedience Grace
    • NOTE: Law increases the trespass by increasing the seriousness of sin and the culpability for sin
  • True Facts: Bees That Can Do Math! - Ze Frank (video)
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
  • Revelation 6 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • The Mask of Zorro - Martin Campbell (film)
  • That Hideous Strength - C. S. Lewis (book, ISBN13 9781451664829) RECOMMENDED
    • 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”
    • Cheroot
    • Stile
    • Spinney
    • Démarche
    • Logres
    • “The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.” (pp. 313)
    • “…only one in the saddle of whose soul rode Mercury himself could thus have unmade language.” (p. 350)
    • “He had passed from Hegel into Hume, thence through Pragmatism, and thence through Logical Positivism, and out at last into the complete void.” (p. 350)
  • How Investor-Owned Utilities Turn (Your) Money into Political Power - John Farrell (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Lynchburg Citizens Academy at Lynchburg Regional Airport - Marjette Upshur, Tom Martin, etc. (lecture)
    • REFERRAL: Andrew J.
    • NOTE: 72% of workforce in the city commutes from the counties. Average commute is 24 minutes.
    • NOTE: 1541 businesses licensed in the city with gross receipts over 150k
    • NOTE: Manufacturing sector is largest contributor to city GDP
    • NOTE: Old Holy Cross site will be home to 125k square foot Centra office building
    • NOTE: Co-starters curriculum came out of Chattanooga, TN
    • NOTE: Community development has 27 employees
    • NOTE: 1490 building permits issued in 2023, 1/2 commercial, 1/4 residential, and 1/4 institutional
    • NOTE: Each year city receives about $1M in Community Development Block Grants, and it can be used for infrastructure if it benefits low and moderate income residents
    • NOTE: ~300 properties in the city that are condemned and ~50 that are derelict, which means owner has 90 days to make repair plan and gets fined $500 a month for every month they don’t deal with the issue
  • We Are In A Housing Trap. Can We Escape? - Strong Towns (video)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Zechariah 3 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Revelation 5 (book chapter)
    • REFERRAL: Reading plan
  • Techno City - Ben Cohen (film)
  • Gone with the Wind - Victor Fleming (film)
  • Run Lola Run - Tom Tykwer (film) RECOMMENDED
  • Germany’s BIG DUMB BOXES ARE AWESOME. - Type Ashton (video) RECOMMENDED
    • REFERRAL: Video recommendation
    • “Every time a corner, or a recess, or other facade modulation is introduced into a building, the chances of issues related to weathering, durability, and building movement increase.”
    • NOTE: Weird how all the new developments she filmed were just white big, dumb boxes. Any amount of color would significantly improve the appearance of these places. If albedo is a concern, just use pastel colors.
  • Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ: Romans 5:18-19 - Ruling Elder Wynn Shackleford (sermon)
    • REFERRAL: Church attendance
  • District 9 - Neill Blomkamp (film) RECOMMENDED
  • Perry Mason: The Case of the Shattered Dream - Andrew V. McLaglen (television episode)
    • REFERRAL: Dona M.
  • Perry Mason: The Case of the Borrowed Brunette - Arthur Marks (television episode)
    • REFERRAL: Dona M.
  • How Your City Can Ensure It Can Afford Its Infrastructure - Edward Erfurt and Lindsey Beckworth (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Company backed by $100 million in federal funding looks to open battery plant in Lynchburg - Matt Busse and Markus Schmidt (article)
  • Lynchburg Citizens Academy at Library System and Parks & Recreation - Beverly Blair (lecture)
    • REFERRAL: Andrew J.
  • Frequency is Relative - Alon Levy (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “The German system of a train every two hours on every city pair is wise, in light of the typical intercity rail travel distances in a large country with slow trains. Higher frequency is warranted if the cities are bigger and therefore require more service, or if they are closer together in time through either a short geographical distance or higher speeds. New York and Philadelphia are about 1:10 apart by rail, and high-speed rail could cut this to about 45 minutes…”
  • Future Interstates - L&E Geography (video)
    • REFERRAL: Strong Towns Discord
  • 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)
    • REFERRAL: Andrew J.
    • 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 Reader #43 - Kris De Decker (article)
    • “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)
    • REFERRAL: No Tech Reader #43 - Kris De Decker (article)
    • “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.’”
    • NOTE: Discovered long after reading this that they reinvented the “stile”, a structure designed to keep animals in a fenced area but allow humans to pass over.
  • No Tech Reader #43 - Kris De Decker (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • New River Valley gets a look at Amtrak options - Mark D. Robertson (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
    • “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

  • 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)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Divine Sex - Jonathan Grant (book)
    • REFERRAL: Audrey F.
  • The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu (book) LPL
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond (book) HOME
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure - Juliet Schor (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • God, Freedom, and Evil - Alvin Plantinga (book) HOME
    • REFERRAL: Daniel C.
    • REFERRAL: Wikipedia article on the problem of evil
  • Richard Sapper - Jonathan Olivares (book)
  • The Decline of the West - Oswald Spengler (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America - Peter N. Stearns (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Lex, Rex - Samuel Rutherford (book)
    • REFERRAL: 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)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Underground History of American Education - John Taylor Gatto LPL (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The ARPANET Sourcebook: The Unpublished Foundations of the Internet - Peter H. Salus (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • How to Read a Book - Mortimer J. Adler (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software - Nadia Eghbal (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Bryan Caplan (book)
    • REFERRAL: Some podcast
  • Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software - Sam Williams (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • 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)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money - John Maynard Keynes (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • 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)
  • Copper, Iron, and Clay - Sarah Dahmen (book)
    • REFERRAL: Daniel K.
  • Mastering OpenSCAD - Jochen Kerdels (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 (The Protocols) - W. Richard Stevens (saved somewhere in reading folder) (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss LPL (book) HOME
    • REFERRAL: Matthew F.
  • The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander LPL (book)
    • REFERRAL: Girl at Sandy Cove Marsh camp
  • The 480 - Eugene Burdick (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Anarchy in Action - Colin Ward (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Thinking in Systems: A Primer - Donella H. Meadows (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Long Night of the Watchman - Václav Benda (book)
    • REFERRAL: Live Not By Lies - Rod Dreher (book)
  • The Heavenly Man - Brother Yun (book)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Lynchburg, VA Downtown 2040 Master Plan
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • DNS and BIND - Cricket Liu, Paul Albitz (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • East of Eden - Jonathan EdwardS (book)
    • REFERRAL: David W.
  • Reformed Worship - Howard L. Rice (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Tale of Two Adams - Chris Caughey (book)
    • REFERRAL: Austin O.
  • Human Transit - Jarrett Walker (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Symbolic Exchange and Death - Jean Baudrillard (book)
    • REFERRAL: Cody Wilson
  • Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities - Kevin Kelly LPL (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • You and Heredity - Amram Scheinfeld (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Box - Mark Levinson (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • I led 3 lives - Herbert A. Philbrick (book)
    • REFERRAL: Kurt F.
  • Edge City: Life on the New Frontier - Joel Garreau (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Bug - Ellen Ullman (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free - Cody Wilson (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Lectures on Jung’s Typology - Marie-Louise von Franz (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Programming in Scala, 5th Edition - Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, Bill Venners, and Frank Sommers (book) HOME
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • Digital Vegan - Andy Farnell (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Tragedy of Great Power Politics - John Mearsheimer (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Design manual for bicycle traffic - Crow Platform
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Central Banking 101 - Steven Wang (book)
    • REFERRAL: https://column.com
  • Levy’s Laws of the Disillusionment of the True Liberal - Marion J. Levy Jr. (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates (book)
    • REFERRAL: Bryant M.
  • The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • 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)
    • Matt J.
  • The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Layered Money - Nik Bhatia (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene (book)
  • Why things bite back - Edward Tenner (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Christian Theology and Tragedy - Kevin Taylor & Giles Waller (book)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • 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)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Insolent Chariots - John C. Keats (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • 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)
  • 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.
  • 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 (book)
  • 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
  • The Streets of Lynchburg - Martha Helen Cleveland Craddock (book) HOME
    • REFERRAL: Givens Books browsing
  • Building the American Highway System - Bruce Edsall Seely
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Connect Central Virginia 2045 Long Range Transportation Plan
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • 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 - Howard Zinn (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
    • NOTE: A recommended book about Zettelkasten
  • City Comforts - David Sucher (book)
  • The Technological Society - Jacques Ellul (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • 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
  • A Short History of Progress - Ronald Wright (book)
  • A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge (book)
    • REFERRAL: Thom M.
  • Slow Noodles - Chantha Nguon (book)
    • REFERRAL: Whatever Works - Johnny Sanphillippo (article)
    • “Find the pockets of freedom available o you. Exploit loopholes. Play the role of a defeated subject when necessary. Remain undefeated in the important ways, wherever possible. … Determine what you need and find a way to get it for yourself. It will not necessarily be supplied to you, no matter how earnest the promises.”
  • Simplifying Saving and Improving Financial Security through Universal Savings Accounts - William McBride, Huaqun Li, Garrett Watson, Alex Durante (article)
    • REFERRAL: Blog subscription
  • Energy & Equity - Ivan Illich (book)
  • Bloody Sunday - Paul Greengrass (film)
  • The Anxious Generation - Jonathan Haidt
  • The Republic - Plato (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom (book, ISBN10 0671479903)
  • United States Declaration of Independence (document)
    • REFERRAL: The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom (book, ISBN10 0671479903)
  • Constitution of the United States (document)
    • REFERRAL: The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom (book, ISBN10 0671479903)
  • Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville (book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_States
    • REFERRAL: The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom (book, ISBN10 0671479903)
  • Scots Confession (document)
  • The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom (book, ISBN10 0671479903)
      • “A few students mention recent books that struck them and supported their own self-interpretation, like The Catcher in the Rye. (Theirs is usually the most genuine response and also shows a felt need for help in self interpretation. But it is an uneducated response…” (pp. 62-63)
  • Chariots of Fire - ??? (film)
    • REFERRAL: The Flesh: Romans 8:5-8 - Rev. Bryan Rigg (sermon)
  • What We Know About Climate Change, Updated Edition - Kerry Emanuel (book)
  • The Big Church Sort - Ryan Burge (book)
  • The Big Sort - Bill Bishop (book)
  • Politics and the English Language - George Orwell (essay)
    • REFERRAL: Michael H.
  • Still Connected - Claude Fischer (book)
  • Talking About Machines - Julian E. Orr
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman (book)
  • Encino Man - Les Mayfield (film)
    • REFERRAL: Bryant M.
    • NOTE: Bryant said I remind him of one of the laid-back characters in this
  • Steal this Book - Abbie Hoffman (book)
  • Video lecture on Christopher Alexander - Ryan Singer (video)
  • Detectives in Togas - Henry Winterfeld (book)
    • REFERRAL: Alia E.
  • Secular Authority - Martin Luther (book)
  • The City of God - St. Augustine of Hippo (book)
  • Who is my neighbor? - Thomas Achord & Darrell Dow (book)
  • Tenet - Christopher Nolan (film)
    • REFERRAL: Tim M.
    • REFERRAL: Ruth M.
  • Soul Keeping - John Ortberg (book)
    • REFERRAL: Mike M.
  • The Invisible Hook - Michael T. Leeson (book)
    • REFERRAL: Unknown
  • The Story of Civilization - Will Durant & Ariel Durant (book series)
    • REFERRAL: A guy so arrogant and haughty he wouldn’t tell me his name
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum (book)
    • REFERRAL: The Sovereignty of God: Romans 9:19-23 - Rev. Chris Deneen (sermon)
  • Starting FORTH - Leo Brodie (book, ISBN10 0138429308)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • An Introduction to GCC: For the GNU Compilers GCC and G++ - Brian J. Gough (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces - Remzi H Arpaci-Dusseau (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles - Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Nutrition and Metabolism - Susan Lanham-New, Ian Macdonald, Helen M. Roche and Nutrition Society (book)
    • REFERRAL: Web search
  • x86-64 Assemby Language Programming with Ubuntu - Ed Jorgensen (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective (2nd Edition) - Randall E. Bryant and David R. O’Hallaron (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Beej’s Guide to Network Programming Using Internet Sockets - Brian “Beej Jorgensen” Hall (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • High Performance Browser Networking - Ilya Grigorik (book)
    • REFERRAL: Hacker News
  • Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? - Eric Kaufmann (book)

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