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Topic reminds me of the book, A Burglar's Guide to the City: https://www.amazon.com/Burglars-Guide-City-Geoff-Manaugh/dp/0374117268 Which started out as a blog: https://bldgblog.com/ Unlike the book, this city appears to think the solution to all their problems is to remove the architectures causing issues, instead of trying to make city planning and management choices that enable positive behavior; successful areas don’t have abandoned building, bus stops that function as distribution point for illegal drugs, etc. Police are the last profession that should be making choices like that for a city. Using this sort of thinking, what’s next, make warrentless, no knock searches legal and require every lock uses a masterkey the police have?

There’s a great piece of Ghostbusters fanfic about this building: NYNEX, Embedded Angel of New York City https://www.bldgblog.com/2009/06/nynex-embedded-angel-of-new-york-city…

If you find this interesting, you’ll likely also find this book interesting https://www.bldgblog.com/topics/a-burglars-guide-to-the-city-2/. The book is really a taster for the other posts in the blog https://www.bldgblog.com/

You might enjoy this blog post, which captures the spirit of LA better than anything else I've read: https://www.bldgblog.com/2007/10/greater-los-angeles/

There's a few articles that go into a loosely defined faulting area dubbed the Walker Lane[1][2][3] in which it's theorized that the East Pacific Rise (a rift), under the Gulf of California, may be expanding directly north. I know some geologists were surprised at first at the 7.4 Landers earthquake in 1994, and the article goes into that the Walker Lane seems to follow US 395, so I wonder if this is just a continuing extension of geologic activity associated with it. [1] https://volcanohotspot.wordpress.com/2018/09/21/splitting-north-americ… [2] https://www.wired.com/story/walker-lane-move-over-san-andreas-fault/ [3] http://www.bldgblog.com/2019/04/walker-lane/

A Burglar’s Guide to the City is a good read. I have recommended it to a number of people. Two weeks ago while visiting San Fran I went to a security meetup and mentioned the book. One of the individuals pulled out the book and said he was reading it. Then he turned to a page that mentioned his name and noted his contribution to the book. Small world. One of my favorite subjects in the book is Nakatomi Space[1]. [1] http://www.bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/

Geoff Manaugh has an amazing blog about architecture, space, the city and just about everything in between. his write up on his NYT piece. http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/03/panopticops/

Tall isn't the answer, dense is. The proper question is "when you give up 1km² of farmland, how many beds and offices do you get in return?" (or a little more sophisticated). Tall doesn't actually correlate very well with dense, because it tends to be a small part of the ground. IIRC Bldgblog wrote that the US has about four ground-level parking spots per car. (Can't find the posting again now, but http://www.bldgblog.com/2007/10/greater-los-angeles/ and everything it links to is a fine place to start.) If you build some highrises, plus big flat malls and office parks, plus four parking spots for each car owner that's expected to move in, plus enough streets, then the highrises don't matter. You could build them half or twice as high and it wouldn't make a real difference to the density.

BLDG BLOG riffs on the Roomba idea: the idea of faking your own location through attaching your GPS anklet to a Roomba, for example, and letting it wander around the house all day is perversely brilliant, like something from a 21st-century Alfred Hitchcock film. Of course, it wouldn't take very long to deduce from the algorithmically perfect straight lines and zig-zag edge geometry of your Roomba's movements that it is not, in fact, a real person walking around in there—or perhaps it would just look like you've taken up some bizarre new form of home exercise. But a much more believable algorithm for faking the movements of a real, living resident could be part of some dark-market firmware update—new algorithms for the becoming-criminal of everyday machines. http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/ghosts-of-home-geography.html

I've been transfixed with the idea of 'Digital Comparative Studies of Cities' (or some similar turn of phrase). With the advent of mapping projects (GoogleMaps, Openstreetmap, etc), environmental sensor networks (my startup's area), and cheaper LiDAR arrays (for point cloud mappings of buildings and terrain...now in CMOS form) - we'll be able to quantify the homogeny of surbanization, architectural 'themes', road uniformity, development rates, etc over time. There are lots of similarly clever projects cited on BLDGBlog [1] if you're into this kind of thing. [1] http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

BLDGBLOG is a gold-mine for these kind of things. http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

There's an interesting interview with a designer of SimCity, where he discusses parking: Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots. Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity. Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive. Source: https://bldgblog.com/2013/05/sim-city-an-interview-with-stone-librande…

This is really inspiring. Made me think of a couple things. Not really sure if this is the right spot, but just in case... "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." The universe makes room for you when you're born, long before your self-awareness and ego develops. Society makes room for you once you can be boxed, filed and categorized, once your "truth" can be domesticated and a watered-down caricaturization of it accepted as self-evident. How to stay focused when "success" is authoritatively measured by a yardstick of abject stupidity, then? If you can find your own unique way to disappear into the Nakatomi space (https://bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1265944) of how society internalizes a given subject (which is not necessarily the same thing as the Nakatomi space of the subject itself), you can gain awareness of the intrinsics connecting personal experience with social representation, and learn to project "truth" that is perspective-corrected for however you want society to react to it ("enlightenment"). IMHO, winning is using this trick to make yourself appear utterly forgettable/boring while you carve out all the room you'll ever want to play in, find yourself and fulfillment, and do amazing things. As the penultimate fitness-function competition, I think the level of focus required to achieve this is categorically not…

Just realized that the "blogs" category in my Feedly has 347 entries in it, and about half of them haven't published in more than 3 months. Here are some that are prolific and good: https://marginalrevolution.com/ Marginal Revolution: wide-ranging and prolific blog about economics and culture. https://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com Anecdotal Evidence: well-written personal blog, mostly observations on books. https://krebsonsecurity.com/ Krebs on Security: about information security. It's written for a popular audience, which is about the level at which I understand the subject. https://mjtsai.com/blog/ Michael Tsai: collects quotes from other people about ongoing software-related news. https://acquisitiontalk.com Acquisition Talk: about weapons system acquisition, government procurement, etc. Something I wanted to follow because it's a huge sector that doesn't get a lot of attention. https://www.futilitycloset.com/ Futility Closet: wunderkammer-style blog with historical miscellany, quotes, puzzles, etc. Also a great podcast. https://www.tor.com/tag/jo-walton-reads/ Jo Walton's Reading List: Not strictly a blog, but it's in my RSS feeds. I like to see what she's reading lately, and sometimes I get good recommendations from her (e.g. KJ Parker). https://www.bldgblog.com/ BLDGBLOG: about design, architecture, etc. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/ Colossal: about art and design. https://www.subtraction.com/ Subtraction: about design

Following up on this... The blog post Islands at the Speed of Light ( http://www.bldgblog.com/2011/03/islands-at-the-speed-of-light/ ) with a "global map of 'optimal intermediate locations between trading centers,' based on the earth’s geometry and the speed of light" There's a similar article at When The Speed Of Light Is Too Slow: Trading at the Edge ( http://www.kurzweilai.net/when-the-speed-of-light-is-too-slow ) The paper that both of these articles are based on: Relativistic statistical arbitrage https://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf which opens with: > Recent advances in high-frequency financial trading have brought typical trading latencies below 500 􏰒µs􏰃, at which point light propagation delays due to geographically separated information sources become relevant for trading strategies and coordination 􏰀e.g., it takes 67 ms, over 100 times longer, for light to travel between antipodal points along the Earth’s surface􏰁. Moreover, as trading times continue to decrease in coming years 􏰀e.g., latencies in the microseconds are already being targeted by traders, this feature will become even more pronounced.

Also interesting are the resolution targets, using sets of black and white bars at varying widths in both X any X orientation, to determine the spatial resolution i.e. how high frequency a component could still be imaged separately as lines, similar to TV test cards. These are discussed in various blogs [1][2] with some amazing picures. I think these were for both satellite imaging and spy-plane (U2 and SR-71 plus less exotic surveillance systems) and not just the USA. This article [3] shows some satellite test targets in the Gobi desert, presumable for Chinese (PRC) spy satellites, and also has a cool picture of the world's largest compass rose, at Edwards dry lake bed, as well as explaining the crosses from the original article, and talking about radar altimeter targets (another dry-lake bed) that are mapped to centimetre accuracy in altitude for calibrating GPS and other systems. I find it a really interesting area of industrial/scientific archaeology, with some fascinating stories. [1] http://www.clui.org/newsletter/winter-2013/photo-calibration-targets [2] http://www.bldgblog.com/2013/02/optical-calibration-targets/ [3] http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/landscapes-made-for-satellite-eye…

Modern problems require modern solutions. Get yourselves a sawz-awl. https://amzn.to/4grxOUN , then you can operate in Natakomi Space: https://www.bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/

The Soviets tried, but we didn't want to hear what they had to say: https://bldgblog.com/2007/02/sleep-labs-of-the-soviet-empire/

Here's a blog post by the author on the same ideas, for those who don't have the time for a one hour video: https://www.bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/

As well loosely related, it is a few years that there are projects to use muograpgy to better undertstand how the dome of the Duomo in Florence was built by Brunelleschi: https://bldgblog.com/2022/09/ maybe they will start this year.

Related reading for anyone who wants to learn more about this stuff http://www.bldgblog.com/2012/06/

I wonder what the tradeoffs are between ground penetrating radar and Muon tomography? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography http://www.bldgblog.com/2008/08/mayan-muons-and-unmapped-rooms/

Whenever I hear about this building I can't help but be reminded of Geoff Manaugh's idea for a Ghostbusters III, where the Ghostbusters discover that the NYNEX telephone system is actually... well, I'll let you read it: http://www.bldgblog.com/tag/ghostbusters-iii/

Note, that link is actually a link to a tag page; it just happens that the post you're trying to point out is the only post with that tag. The actual post link is here: http://www.bldgblog.com/2009/06/nynex-embedded-angel-of-new-york-city/

Urban combat tactics are fascinating. I’m reminded of this post that explains how the IDF in the early 2000s would try to “walk through walls” in urban combat. It also discusses how the film ‘Die Hard’ is a study of architecture. [0] The underlying essay referenced in the post is brief and interesting as well, discussing how those urban tactics were influenced by postwar French thought, in particular the ideas of Deleuze & Guattari. [0] http://www.bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/

You should ask the residents of Hollister. http://www.bldgblog.com/2015/04/the-town-that-creep-built/

This reminds me a lot of BLDGBLG's post about Die Hard's architecture[1], especially this line: his dream house included a maze of trap-doors and what Sergeant Scheimreif called “escape holes.” It was everything he seemed to want a building to be—with near-infinite ways of getting from one room to another and no upper limit on the places he could hide. This stuff is a weird obsession of mine, probably stemming from being a skateboarder for my whole life. Eventually, you realize that all space is something you can rearrange. [1] http://www.bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/

''But in many ways, the Port of Oakland, and most American ports in general, are some of the most technologically antiquated in the world.'' This BLDGBLOG post from earlier in the year details to automation on the on the East coast. http://bldgblog.blogspot.ie/2015/04/infrastructure-as-processional-spa…

A lot of wave and tidal motors were built along the California coast in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It's an interesting history. Cheap fossil power made them uneconomical, though. http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/wave-motors-of-california.html http://www.outsidelands.org/wave-tidal.php

There are a couple of articles you might find interesting, that build on some of the links between the film, the book, and the games: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/01/zone-chernobyl-tarkov… http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/ghosts-of-future-borrowing-archit…