Deane Barker

Annotated Link: London to Calcutta by Bus

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

For a couple of decades, there was a bus service from London to Calcutta, India. It took almost two months.

Book Review: Messy Cities: Why We Can't Plan Everything

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Uneven, like most anthologies”

Appropriately, I started this book just after having returned from five days in New York City. I was there for a two-day conference in Brooklyn, but I stayed in Tribeca, and spent some time walking the streets of that neighborhood and Soho. Between those sojourns and the subway to Brooklyn each morning, I got pretty good dose of a “messy city.”

I’m going to document the book in real-time below. It’s an anthology, so each chapter is a self-contained essay.

Introduction

Whomever wrote the introduction started off by talking about “desire lines” or “desire paths,” which are paths worn into the ground by where people actual want to want, rather than that’s planned. I enjoyed this quote:

They are the paths we take rather than the paths we are given.

And that really sets up the entire book.

The goal of this collection is to show that messiness is an essential element of the city… Messy urbanism needs championing, because out minds and instincts tend to default to the seemingly simpler options of seeking order.

I also enjoyed a quote from an separate article about “complexity” in a city, and what it demands of us:

…learning to interact well with strangers requires a toleration of ambiguity, the capacity to contain frustration, an ability to listen carefully to people whose speech, needs, or desires may seem alien.

Reflections

A Farewell to El Gran Burrito

This is an elegy for a Mexican street vendor in Los Angeles. The authors make the point that it was in a crappy building, but the food was amazing. The authors relate a story of visiting in the wee hours of the morning and being amazed by the cross-section of the people who were there – with an emphasis on the local queer community.

Sadly, the El Gran Burrito building got torn down to redevelop the area around it.

As urban planners and designers, we are schooled and trained to think that the best buildings and public spaces are born of grand visions framed by clean lines and filled with exquisite details.

[…] And what happens when they aesthetics get repeated as nauseum? You get a sameness in scale and look that makes cities almost indistinguishable from each other.

The authors ask how cities might avoid this sameness and codify protections for an eclectic mix of building types.

They use the word “vitality” a lot, which I suspect will come up throughout the book.

These Walls, These Roads

This is a very political essay from a Palestinian about the Israeli occupation of the land his family calls home.

His larger point seems to be that the forces that control a city can force other people into patterns of life that affect their sense of time.

How long is the bus stop wait? How long is the walk to the nearest grocery store? How many years of work until you can afford a home? How long is the co-op housing wait list? How about your commute.

He finishes with a reference to a concept called “right to the city.”

the right to full participation in the collective act of the city, the right to not only be from or belong to a place but to see yourself reflected in it and to partake in the creative act of shaping where you reside.

This essay seems a little out of place. I don’t deny the validity of the author’s experience, but I’m not sure how it relates to the purported subject of the book.

Living Loud: The Migration of a Steelpan Soundtrack

This is an essay about the noise of a city. The author was originally from Trinidad, where he was constantly subjected to noise.

He and his family immigrated to Toronto, and he discusses how the perception and toleration of noise is vastly different there.

The energy, the vibrancy, the joy of family noise has migrated to other countries and, carried miles and miles abroad, where it has not always been welcomed.

[…] It is no wonder that many from the south who venture to build new lives up north feel a chill not just of winter’s cold but of that silence.

I think his point is to promote the idea of noise as a key part of a vibrant city.

The good news is that we can live with noise. In the same was that the rhythm of our breath or our heartbeat steadies us. Noise is not a hindrance to a good life – it can propel a tidy life with a syncopation that can bridge oceans and cultures.

Planning for an Unplanned City

This is a discussion of whether we might have over-regulated cities. The author opens with a discussion of a Hanoi train that passes within inches of merchants and restaurant tables on it way out of the city, and how this would never be allowed in a Western city.

Have our rules and regulations squeezed too much of the life out of our cities? Or are they critical bulwarks for protecting public health and safety?

The author seems torn on the question. On the one hand, he wants more flexibility in how cities can respond to challenges, but on the other hand, he concedes that we need to keep people safe, and that flexibility in rules means they might be abused by people seeking to take an advantage:

Each of these, on its own, serves a valuable public purpose. In the aggregate, however, they can also preclue some of the dynamic urbansim that many cities are trying to recapture.

Interruptions

The author talks about their Toronto neighborhood, which is very dense, and how every neighbor is part of their neighbors’ lives. They borrow things from each other, know the entry codes to everyone’s house, and are constantly discussing their lives with each other.

I was recently sharing with some friends about colleagues about this resolving door of daily interruptions… They visibly recoiled at the prospect of interactions this intimate in their own living environments.

The author claims that living with this level of casual intimacy makes for better understanding between people.

There’s evidence that knowing people with vastly different lived experiences than your dramatically increased your capacity for empathy for them and others of their background. …it’s part of the social contract I think we agree to when we live in big cities.

No citation is given for that, but the other does also mention a 1995 Chicago heat wave where survival was linked to someone’s intimacy with their neighbors, which meant that groups of people would check on each other and make sure they were coping with the heat and not in distress (I assume there is some known evidence for this, though I didn’t find anything on the Wikipedia page).

The author discusses how they moved to Toronto from Vancouver, and how they believe they they were subconsciously looking for more closeness with neighbors. He cities his background in an Indian-Kenyan family, and makes a funny observation about American sitcoms like Family Matters and Full House where the neighbors (Steve Urkel and Kimmy Gibler, respectively) were always dropping in unannounced.

Packrat City

This is discussion of the author’s role as a “heritage planner” for the city of Toronto. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite figure out what a heritage planner is. I searched for the author, and found her on v various platforms, but I still don’t have a great definition.

She starts the essay talking about how she keeps physical things that bring back memories. She calls herself a “packrat,” not a hoarder.

More recently, heritage planners have shifted toward a conversation paradigm that includes buildings not for their landmark status, but for the contextual role they play in the city. These buildings weren’t constructed to communicate nationalism, wealth, or grandeur, but they have more subtle stories to tell. The role of the heritage planner is to find those stories and determine whether and how to hold on to them.

That’s the closest I got to a definition.

Localities

An Argument Worth Having

This essay is by the head of the Chinatown Land Trust in Toronto, which is a type of organization that collectively owns land and allows members to vote on usage.

She writes that arguments and conflict are good. It means that people are engaged in the process and feel that their communities are worth arguing about and for.

I have come to believe that Chinatown’s ability to weather its storms comes from an organic level of protection – a healthy capacity for community conflict. In all its most dysfunctional and generative ways.

[…] I would pick a conflict with my co-op neighbor about who to hire for our giant plumbing contract next year over begging my landlord to let me turn on the air conditioner every summer.

Conflict means that people have skin in the game, and it implies that they want good resolutions because they need and plan to live with the consequences.

Dixie Road

This essay seemed to be a bit of a polemic against the suburbs. The author was an immigrant, and after moving to Toronto was immediately struck by how big the spaces were – how wide the streets were (hence the title), and how far away everything seemed.

The author proposes two changes:

Greater variation in zoning requirements, allowing closer usages of land types
A reduction in car-based regulations, such as street width, corner radii, and minimum parking requirements)

Suburbs across the country are victims of normative planning and development processes that prioritized the creation of a rapid revenue base through large-scale, rural-to-suburban land-use conversion and rigid, car-centric design standards.

A Beach Like No Other

This was essentially a story about a construction site and what a neighborhood did with it.

When a building was demolished and the ensuing construction was delayed, an empty lot appear in a neighborhood. Several people rallied around this lot, named it “Bloordale Beach” and began gathering there.

For most of the year and a half, Bloordale Beach existed as a gorgeous landlocked oasis, if not in its physical appearance, then in the community’s hearts and minds. The beach offered levity during the most difficult months of the pandemic.

The essay tells of a “Shared Space Initiative,” where Toronto designated certain spaces as “open” during the pandemic, but encouraged people to socially distance within them.

If the city would lighten up a little, like they did with the beach, and let us have some fun, who knows what other kinds of creations could emerge.

The Ballet of the Parking Lot

This is a discussion of “POPS” – Privately-Owned Publicly Accessible Space (the acronym doesn’t quite work). In particular, it’s discussing strip mall parking lots, which are private-owned, but have public uses.

The authors created a program they called “plazaPOPS” where they created more inviting spaces in these parking lots. They would install benches and tables, and invite social gatherings and public events to take place.

[The] parking lots may be unappealing, yet they anchor the city’s social life. Should strip mall plazas be considered part of the public realm?

What is Safety

This one is really out of place. It’s a discussion of an organization called Rainbow Railroad that helps LGBT people in oppressive countries immigrate to friendlier countries. The story is anchored around the suicide of a woman who attended a queer concert in Egypt and was persecuted for it.

There is very little tying this one to the topic of the book. There a few mentions of a housing crisis and how hard it is to find a place to live once you immigrate, but is essay is mainly concerned with explaining the plight of queer people in countries like Uganda and Afghanistan.

Why Can’t We Sell Stuff Anyplace?

This is… discussion (?) of zoning laws that prevent people from selling things wherever they want.

…why some cities, especially in the Global North, are so particular about where shopping can happen.

The essay discusses how shopping happens in other, less regulated, areas of the world – Hanoi, Istanbul, etc. – and then goes into a long-ish history of zoning laws and how we ended up separating business and residential areas.

In the end, other than highlighting the fact that the “Global North” tends to separate these areas, the author doesn’t seem to argue much in either direction. He seems satisfied to simply note the difference.

Desire Lines in the Sand

This essay is a discussion of Hanlan’s Point (or sometimes “Hanlan’s Beach”) in Toronto, which is an informal gathering place for the LGBT community and a generally accepted place for nudity in the city.

It discusses how the area morphed into its current use over the course of a century, which explains the “desire lines” of the title: some areas become what they are because there is a need for it among the populace, and they sort of just “claim” a space to fill the need.

For queer communities, desire lines symbolize the many ways that queer people have made places for themselves in cities that have often excluded or erased them.

The essay talks about an effort of the city to develop Hanlan’s Point into a entertainment district, and the grassroots counter-effort that sprung up to prevent the removal of a claimed area for the queer population of Toronto.

Conjay’s First Walk Home

This is a bit of fiction, about a boy named Conjay and his first day of second grade. He lives in the Toronto neighborhood of Little Jamaica.

In the story, he walks home with his friend Omar, but gets lost. However, he’s so familiar with his neighborhood – the people, the businesses, and the sights – that he’s able to find his way back.

It’s a bit cringey and utopian, but I get the point. When we go everywhere in cars, we’re insulated from landmarks and waypoints. But since Conjay lived in a neighborhood where he could walk, he was much more familiar with his surroundings.

Flexible Streets

This one is a little confusing because it starts with an anecdote about a blind woman and her dog. She is testing whether a new street configuration is navigable by the disabled. This made me think it was going to be about accessibility…

But it’s not. It’s about changing city streets to do more than just route cars. It discusses a bunch of different ways that cities have tried to get more use out of these streets: from little parks in parking spaces to Dutch streets that are considered an extension of the residents’ front lawns.

…as part of an increasing challenge to the dominance of the motorized vehicle, [the] boundaries are being blurred. Publish spaces are being reimagined and hybrid, flexible, or shared, their boundaries fuzzy and their functions bleeding into each other.

Leave the Leaves

This essay is an admonishment of the practice of cleaning up leaf waste. It makes the point that “leaf litter,” as its often called, plays an important role in the bio-chain and shouldn’t be packed up into bags and moved. It should just be left where it is.

Far from being waste, leaf little is an ecosystem – an damp, dark place of decomposition and regeneration. […] The landscape “cleaning up” choreography, timed with autumn’s arrival and repeated in the spring, is a ritual of harm. […] We’ve been trained by aesthetic conventions to view organic detritus as something that looks “messy.”

I identified with this one, quite a bit. I hate cleaning up leaves, and my wife loves how they look on the lawn. I’ll leave them as long as possible, and the only thing I’ll usually do is mulch them up in the mower. I would never bag them.

The essay was good: had a strong point and recommendation.

Non-humans (Heard and Unheard)

This one was really odd. It explained an exercise that the authors conduct in workshops (I gather that the authors are indigenous artists).

It’s a listening exercise. You are meant to listen carefully to all the sounds you hear. But has some odd angles.

For the next five minutes, do you have permission to listen? Can you remember how to hear the unheard sounds of non-humans? […] Acknowledge you are a visitor to this place, and attune to the sounds/vibrations as they enter your ears and move through/against your body.

I struggled to find anything meaningful here (I noticed that I didn’t highlight anything). However, when describing an after-exercise discussion, a participant said something interesting:

If we could only get rid of these sounds, we could have better listening.

That feels like an attempt to deny the reality of what is and replace it with the fantasy of what is desired.

My Teacher

This is a very short essay about a turtle laying her eggs, and more generally about the plight of many turtles in Toronto’s High Park and the dangers they encounter.

The lands have become a place that prioritizes human activity and often forgets the impacts of this activity on all of our animal and plant relatives.

Again, it’s very short. There’s not much of a point beyond the quote above.

Beyond the Lawn: Meadow or Mess?

This is a longer essay (the first one with subheaders) about a “pollinator habitat” front lawn that was cited by Toronto code enforcement. Unfortunately for the city, the person who maintained the habitat is a “professor of urban planning.”

The fight over this particular lawn apparently dragged on and was something of a cause celebre. The author eventually got a meeting with the mayor of Toronto about it, at which the mayor was presented with a comprehensive plan to reform the lawn to allow habitats like this. The author states that none of the reforms were ever implemented.

Interesting, the author cites a Canadian court precedent that says that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms…

…extends to protect expressions of environment values and beliefs reflected in natural gardens.

The author also calls out that laws on these situations are necessarily subjective:

A weed is simply an undesired plant, a flower growing in the wrong place.

And there’s some commentary on how traditional, manicured lawns imply something about society:

The lawn is all about order and control. Much has been written about this, along with its colonial roots. As a symbol of leisure and wealth introduced from Britain, the virtues of the clean-shaven lawn were extolled and emulated by American elites from Jefferson to Olmstead, and later, postwar, became integral to the identity of the suburban landscape. Facing the street, the front lawn signals conformity to neighborhood norms, order through homogeneity – a monoculture cut to prevent seed, its fertility controlled.

I could not determine if the author ever had to cut down their habitat.

Designing Out Disorder

This essay is about “defensive urbanism,” or the design of the built environment to discourage certain behavior. The author singles out specific things designed to prevent homeless people from using the spaces to live.

The most common forms of defensive urbanism include modified seating, unusable surfaces, spatial barriers, uncomfortable light and sound, and the absence of public amenities.

This is apparently linked to something called Crime Prevention Thought Environmental Design which is a philosophy that dates from the 1960s.

Beyond direct criticism of defensive urbanism, the author expands the perspective to the philosophical:

the purpose and meaning of public space is contested.

[…] encounters with difference are one of the defining features of urban life. Urban historian Lewis Mumford writes that the primary purpose of the city is “to permit – indeed to encourage – the greatest possible number of meeting, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life my be enacted.”

That is an opinion, clearly. The author continues to explain why this matters:

While not always comfortable, exposure to people of different ages, races, classes, religions, politics, and cultures and create conditions for mutual respect, political solidarity, tolerance, and civil discourse. […] When we use design to displace, it means hiding, rather than acknowledging, the social and political realities faced by marginalized communities and individuals.

There’s a point there. Doing things to remove homeless people from public spaces does not fix homelessness. It just prevents us from having to acknowledge it. The truth is that most of us are just fine that homelessness exists, so long as we don’t have to look at it.

The Collective Effervescence of Messy Parks

This is about how parks are meant to be a collision of lives. It very much echos the theme of the last essay:

[…] that’s part of the beauty of parks – they bring you into contact with other people, and contact sometimes leads to friction. However, it’s working through these frictions, rather than avoiding them, that strengthens communities.

The essay claims that “good” parks are ones that lots of different people use for lots of different purposes. “Overdeisnged and overregulated” parks make them less approachable and less comfortable.

Just as we tend a garden, we need to embrace the complexity of life and give our parks the right mix of resources, care, and freedom to evolve and grow into their own.

Mexico City’s Eclectic Apartment Architecture

True to the title, this essay starts out discussing the author’s trip to Mexico City and the wide variety of apartment styles he found there. Then he segues into a discussion of too much planning in city development.

The overly planned cities in Canada and the U.S. make it very challenging for builders to experiment with de elopment and learn from successes and failures.

[…] Many of the planning restrictions that define development in Toronto have been instituted for one three broad reasons: to prevent specific outcomes that the city has determined are undesirable, to protected the (assumed) needs and desires of existing residents who live near a development, or to advance arbitrary aesthetic preferences.

And this gets the to the heart of the book and the underlying problem: cities are opinions. What one person likes, another will hate, and city planning is an attempt to figure out how to balance everyone’s preferences. This author has a different preference, and would prefer the city accomodate that.

Later in the piece, he does discuss outcomes other than preferential:

Micromanaging every aspect of a proposed building as led to worse outcomes for new developments and has made it difficult to achieve thriving, successful communities with abundant housing.

One of the problems, I think, is that buildings are relatively permanent. This isn’t like allowing a temporary sidewalk sale or something. When a building is built, you’re kind of stuck with it for a long time. Does this imply we should be more conservative?

Tower Communities Are What We Make Them

This is a short essay, and a little confusing. It discusses some large tower apartment buildings in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

I’m not sure what the author was advocating for, other than a recollection of a place where they grew up. They tell of tightly-packed units in buildings with residential spaces repurposed for other uses, like a mosque.

Honestly, while the author seems to recall this all with some fondness, it doesn’t sound great.

Many of the apartment units housed considerably more people and the names reporting in the rental agreement […]

[…] The staircase had a unique smell, a blend of bleach, oil-based paint, remnants of tobacco from the Backwoods cigars being repurposed as blunt wraps, and the occasional waft of urine.

To me, that sounds awful. But I’m a product of my upbringing, just as the author is a product of theirs.

Global Cities

This section expands past Toronto into other cities of the world.

Rasta Cape Town

This essay is about the author’s experience living among the Rastifarians of Cape Town, South Africa.

What I learned from these underappreciated change-makers were the foundational lessons in the messiness, contradictions, and vibrancy that come from poor people’s movements.

I wasn’t sure what the entire point of the essay was, or how it related to city planning. The author seemed to be making some point about how cities evolve around cultural leaders, and they should employee those leaders to …help?

[…] the culture-builders, those who speak the language of identity to the descendants of the colonized, are far more effective at mobilizing for change than social workers, teachers, parole officers, welfare administrators, and well-meaning non-profit do-gooders – the conventional first response for well-meaning urbanism.

Chaotic Unregulated Tokyo: The quintessentially Messy City?

This essay is a discussion of zoning and building code laws in Tokyo, and how they have contributed to that cities eclectic feel, and – apparently – low housing costs.

The author points out a number of unique features of Japanese zoning laws and building codes:

The laws are federal, not local or state. So individual cities can’t override the federal laws.
The laws are mostly concerned with building structure and features, not land use. So, as long as your building is within code, you can use it for whatever you want.
Subdivision rules are lax, so houses are often demolished and replaced with many smaller houses
Building lifespans are intended to be short. Buildings are generally of lower quality and meant to survive only one generation before being replace, so building usage is much less permanent.

The author concludes by pointing out that most public judgments of a city come from people visiting it, who don’t share the native culture of a city.

So Japan’s “spontaneous” urbanism is neither the product of a lack of planning regulations nor of informal urbanism, but more the result of a different culture and different priorities in zoning and planning regulations. Tokto’s “messy” urbanism exists more in the eye of visiting urbanists than anything. For most Japanese, Tokyo has a clear order and set of structuring principles. Different urban cultures and regulatory system work to different sets of values and to different conceptions or order and disorder.

The Readable City

This essay is encouragement for cities to be messy. The author correlates this with vibrancy and culture.

Clean cities give you the official line. Walking through them lends a vetted and permitted version of the city. […] [A messy city] makes a place seem exciting and infinite, a layer that can turn a city from a giant museum piece to a dynamic one where the landscape can change as quickly as culture does.

The author spends a lot of time talking about posters, and about several underground marketing campaigns he did for various projects, where they ignored city posting laws because the bureaucracy was too much to handle.

In this essay, the author really does hit on the major theme in this book: cities are a coalescing of opinions. And this author clearly has a strong one. He even concedes this at one point:

The disorder of [a messy city] – like, say, the unjuried nature of graffiti and street art – makes some people nervous.

Right there – that’s a conflict of opinion. And who decides who wins? Does the person desiring order have any less right to their opinion than the author?

And that’s the hard thing about cities.

Cities for Women and Girls

This is an essay about the dangers that women and girls face in cities. There are some attempts to correlate this back to how the cities are designed and how they function:

Within and across India, public spaces and transport are frequently very crowded, with bodies packed into small spaces. In these instances, personal space is often violated under the guises of anonymity.

[…] Nuses and abandoned cars line the side of the road, often blocking the street lights and making it a great place for robbers, drug addicts, and miscreants to lurk in the shadows waiting for their next victim.

It’s an interesting look at how social norms and expectations collide with city planning. Public transportation is often not safe, and public spaces are where opinions and bias can be on public display.

She relays a heartbreaking story of a girl who dropped out of school strictly because she felt unsafe on the bus ride. And she notes that women spend more money every year than men in order to feel safe.

Of course, the base problem here is bad men doing bad things. But this is a factor in city design. While fixing the base problem of bias and violence against women would be perfect, in the absense of that, we need to account for its existence when designing cities and considering public spaces.

A Food Map of Toronto

This author is a food reporter, and she explains how she views Toronto mainly as a collection of restaurants. She starts with a (perhaps fictional) narrative of giving a friend “directions” which consist solely of a series of restaurant landmarks.

She doesn’t seem to be advocating for much, but she makes a few points toward the end:

Loving a city isn’t just about seeing its good parts. It’s about recognizing its quirks…

And:

I like the idea of everyone having their own versions of city maps, however distorted they might be. Some stretches might seem shorter because they’re packed full of places you love or seem longer when there’s nothing that speaks to you. But that’s how you make the city yours – by adding the little touches and notes of delectable mile marks and intersections that you can’t wait to tell your friends about.

Sports and Spaces

This essay is about “urban sports” – sports which are played in the city. In the U.S., our thoughts would likely go to basketball, or “street ball.”

The author starts out by discussion a suburb of Mumbai where the government created a sports courts, and they became well-used. The author continues with a discussion of something called “9-man,” which I gather is kind of like volleyball, which originated among Chinese immigrants during The Depression. It’s become a part of immigrant cultural identity.

A great deal of sporting culture plays out every day on the streets of cities around the world. […] The messiness of urban sports and street games makes our cities more livable, sustainable, and socially connected, and contributes to improving their future.

Everything Is Everything… But the Details Matter

This essay opens with the central theme of the entire book:

Cities are ideas expressed as built form.

I’ve said many times on this page along: “Cities are opinions.” They are a physical manifestation of how someone – whether and actual person, or an aggregate person based on many opinions – things you and I should live.

After that, this essay gets a little murky. It tells the story of a very modern mall in India which failed. The author claimed it failed because:

[…] it didn’t conform to the Eurocentric model of progress.

I think the larger point is that the mall was someone’s grand vision, but the “details” involve making sure something meets the local needs. The author further states:

[…] while seemingly outdated community-led initiatives might appear disorderly, they often address local needs effectively. Conversely, externally imposed developments may seem formal and well-organized in their design, but fail to integrate seamlessly into the community, sometimes causing more harm than good.

And:

Participatory decision-making is essential for creating urban spaces that reflect the needs and values of those who live in them.

The above quotes are a pretty coherent point. I think maybe I was just confused because the title of the essay is needlessly vague?

The Case Against Controlling Infrastructure

This essay perhaps sums up the entire book. The author makes the claim that too much control over infrastructure makes cities “orderly,” but at an… artistic (?) cost:

The case for “orderly urbanism leans of technical efficiency as the prime goal. However the positive aspects of great spontaneity and diversity of situations and priorities, although appearing “messy,” can have their inherent order.

The author clearly seems biased in one direction – towards varied cities that demonstrate diversity and are “livable, democratic, environmentally friendly, and inclusive – they do call for a “positive tension between both extremes.”

Painting the Town

I knew we would eventually get to a chapter on graffiti – or “street art” as the author calls it. I was kind of dreading this, because I have a very strong reaction against it. My feeling is that if it’s not your wall, don’t paint on it.

But the authors of this essay doesn’t seem to be advocating very strongly for any particular side. They make the point that “tagging” is not the same as street art (tagging is when someone just writes their initials or something). They also note that street art is usually a way for marginalized communities to express themselves.

They conclude with this:

Whatever its source, street art is an upwelling of artistry, identity, and energy from the denizens of the city. It is a sign that creativity is thriving and will not be suppressed. It reminds us that a creative city is a messy city.

That’s fine. But, again, if it’s not your wall, leave it alone.

Urban Systems

Banquets and Belonging

This essay is in support of banquet halls, which seem to be an odd thing to support. But the author makes an effective case that for many cultures, large celebrations are part of their cultural identity.

The author opens with a discussion of a South Asian (Indian, perhaps?) wedding and the hall in which in which it takes place. These celebrations are very important to their culture, and the author laments that banquet halls are so pedestrian that they’re often not included in planning discussions.

A lot of cultural planning efforts began with an emphasis on preserving a very narrow definition of culture – primarily focusing on the high arts tradition and representative spaces and artifacts, such as museums, art galleries, and public sculptures.

The trick with banquet halls is that the hall is not the thing. The cultural significance isn’t the hall itself, but the events that it enables.

They allow people to participate in ritual and to pass on traditions to future generations, to gather and form community, to make memories… We need to pay attention to these sites of cultural infrastructure and create systems that support them so they can continue to exist as places for future generations to gather and celebrate.

Satisfying Our Thirst for Agency

This is a fascinating essay about why we’re are (the author claims) attracted to “messy cities.” They satisfy our desire to detect “agency” or life.

The author provides an example from nature. If you’re looking into a stream and see something move, how do you determine if it’s a fish or just some debris?

A leaf’s movements would simply follow the laws of physics in turbulent waters. […] A fish would defy those laws in some way, moving in directions counter to the local turbulence.

That’s “agency,” and it’s what we’re attracted to. To humans, agency signals life. Moving in defiance to local currents is what we try to detect and it brings us comfort.

When we see mess or “disorder” in an urban environment, is it possible that what we discern is the potential for us to exert our own will on our surroundings? And is there where the attraction of messy complexity comes from?

Does mess signal freedom? Does it empower us to telling us, “You can exist here. You can exert your own will over this space?” By extension, does conformity do the opposite?

Best essay in the book so far.

Industrial Land’s Secret Sauce

This is kind of an odd one. It’s in support of industrial land in the downtown core of a city. Th essay effectively laments that this land is constantly being re-zoned for “mixed use,” which means residential, office, and retail.

The essay is oddly academic. It seems clearly to have been written for city planners (there’s a note that the end that was a condensed version of something that appeared in another book).

The argument is a little scattered – I couldn’t pick out a clear theme. But the author does not like that industrial uses are being pushed out of the downtown core of cities, and they’re encouraging cities to maintain industrial zoning because allowing “mixed use” tends to push rents up too high for industrial tenants.

Thinking Twice About Consultation

When the author says “consultation,” they mean public input on a project (this might be a Canada-specific term?). This essay basically says: public meetings about low-income housing are a disaster because only people opposed to the project show up, and they’re elitist, classist, and often racist.

So, the “thinking twice” of the title basically means “don’t do it.” At one point the author comes out and says:

If an affordable housing proposal meets all the building and zoning requirements, there should be no further reason to engage the public.

And.

Should there be a limit on public engagement? When does consultation lead to exclusion? […] Should we seek public input on who gets to live in a community? That act should be considered “people zoning” for which there is no legal or moral basis.

Lifeline at the Door

This one seems a little out of place. It’s a defense of public health services, and, in particular, the “Supervised Consumption Services” they offer where drug addicts can consume injected drugs in the presence of a health professional in order to make it less risky. I wasn’t completely sure of the scope of services, but it might (?) involve testing for fentanyl concentration.

Again, this one doesn’t seem to fit into the rest of the book. There’s some passing comments about how some people think a line of homeless people every morning is “messy,” but it’s really just a call to be more compassionate about other people’s’ circumstances.

Public Health in the Post-Covid Era

This is another odd one. It doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to do with city planning. It’s more about the relationship between poor housing and someone’s health. I agree that this is a real thing, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with the theme of the book.

The author makes the point that the lifespans of homeless people are 30-40 years less than the general public:

[…] we are effectively stealing three to four decades of life from the unhoused not because of personal choices but because of policy failures.

The gist seems to be:

Housing is health care.

Again, no argument that housing plays heavily into someone’s health, but it just seems to be an outlier against the rest of the book.

Another Fine Mess About Regionalism

This is the biggest outlier so far. It recounts a very specific inter-government spat about health care. It has nothing to do with cities or city planning.

I barely followed it. It was a very esoteric look at some aspect of city government, and concludes with this:

There were many lessons to learn… Perhaps the greatest: don’t create an intergovernmental body unless it has an active, realistic, and meaningful mandate.

I can’t argue with that, but, again, it seems very much outside the point of the book.

We Can Live With That

Another odd one. It recounts the story of an official “Growth Plan” for the Greater Toronto Area and how the Toronto government didn’t seem to follow it until it was eventually repealed.

Had trouble finding a theme, but there was a quote I liked:

Successful city building means searching for the delicate balance between the objective subjective, the tangible and intangible. It involves not only designing functional infrastructure and efficient systems but also creating spaces and places that resonate with people on an emotional level.

I think the author was just a little salty with how their plan was disregarded:

Consensus and compromise are valuable tools in the planning process, but they must be accompanied by an ongoing commitment to collective action.

Confessions of a First-Time Parade Organizer

This is simply the story of someone who organized a parade through Toronto. There’s not much here in terms of argument, but the authors ends with this observation:]

Organizing this parade energized my own urbanism practice, reminding me that it’s one thing to talk about social connection and quite another to practice nurturing it. … While parades may not solve our most intractable issues, they can help us learn how to be together and trust each other, which comes in handy when we want to embark on the harder stuff…

So, that’s it.

I keep coming back to the same point: cities are opinions. To build a city, you have to balance what lots of people living in close proximity want, and you will always fail. Your only hope is to “ride the gestalt,” but that means figuring it out.

The authors of these essays clearly have a bias (why else would they have written for the book?). They used the words “vibrant” and “vital” and “diverse” a lot.

But for every one of those people, there are others that feel the opposite. For every person who calls graffiti “street art,” there is someone that just calls it vandalism. How do you balance the needs and wants of all those people?

This is why cities fundamentally differ from rural areas. In a city, almost everything you neighbor does will affect you. A city is a big commune where behavior spills over, and you have some right to be concerned with what everyone else does. Out in the country, who cares? When your nearest neighbor is a mile away, who even knows what they do?

I don’t know the answer. I’m tempted to say that there’s an undercurrent of arrogance in the book – this is the way, dammit! – but then I realize that’s to be expected. They wrote the book. They clearly have a point of view that they want to evangelize.

But is the majority point of view? Would someone with the opposite point of view write a book about it?

I don’t know. Again, cities are opinions, just like books are opinions. The authors have theirs, and city residents have their own.

The trick is finding a solution everyone can live it, even when it inevitably doesn’t make everyone happy.

Book Review: There is No Antimemetics Division

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Promising but confusing”

An antimemetic is an idea that resists spreading. I read an entire book about this last year. But that was about real antimemtics. This is about monsters.

This book was an outgrowth of the SCP Wiki which is a community-edited wiki that represents a fake world of monsters and aliens and such that have to be contained.

The idea is that there are ideas that are so dangerous that they’re effectively monsters – they could actually kill you. They’re called “Unknowns,” and they’re numbered. They actively prevent themselves from spreading – they force you to forget about them once you’ve encountered them, and they erase any evidence of their existence. If you meet with one, you will forget everything that happens. If you encounter them again, you need to hope there’s some written record of what happened that you can refer to.

People working in the Antimemetics Division take “mnestics,” which are drugs to help them remember. They’re effective, but they damage the body over time.

The book starts with the main character being called into her bosses office, and him demanding to know who she is and what she does. Turns out his memory of her and her role was stolen by…something. She has to explain to him all over again why she exists and what she does.

Then a co-worker is “attacked” in the company cafeteria by a coworker that’s really a disguised Unknown. There are people all around him, but the Unknown has him in a “field” that causes everyone to forget everything they see. He manages to find a written record that has been extended by everyone that this Unknown has killed explaining what they tried to do to survive, and encouraging them to extend the record before they get killed so that perhaps someone down the line can survive it.

The whole thing was confusing, and I admit to not totally understand what was going on most of the time (especially towards the end). But I loved the premise. It was unique and interesting, and some of the individual scenes were horrifying in a new and unique way, even if I didn’t quite get it all.

It was very Lovecraftian. It depended on things unseen but felt. There’s was this kind of “scary thing lurking in the background vibe to it).

I read this at the same time as The Gentle Romance. The understand them both about the same, but I disliked this one less because is exposed me to an interesting idea that I understood enough to appreciate.

Book Review: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Fun, kinda harmless”

This was a…nice book. I don’t think it was very ambitious, but it basically just explains why humans love stories. It does this from a few different angles: dreams, games, rationalizing, etc.

I can’t really say that I learned a lot from this book. In large part, it was just kind of a confirmation and elucidation of what I knew intuitively. It’s well-written and it’s interesting and I enjoyed reading it.

But it’s not a very…challenging book. There wasn’t a lot of chew on or disagree with here.

I’m not criticizing it for that. Some books are just… nice? Some books just let you enjoy an idea without trying very hard to disrupt it or reframe your world view.

This is one of those books.

Book Review: The Gentle Romance

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Just didn’t get it”

I did not get (almost) any of the stories in this book, and I feel badly about that.

The book was recommended highly by Kevin Kelly in Recommendo.

They are hard sci-fi, with technically plausible scenarios, played out many levels deep in very consistent worlds, explored by a very fertile imagination. I found more insights per page in Ngo’s The Gentle Romance than in any other book I’ve read for a long time.

It’s written by a guy who researches AI. He’s not a typical novelist. He’s kind of an industry analyst.

…I just didn’t get it.

It’s an anthology of short stories. I don’t think I understood one of them. I got about 75% of the way through the book before I abandoned it. (Maybe I understood one, about how a worker abuses his AI agents. I’m not sure there was a larger point to it, but it didn’t completely mystify me, anyway.)

Every story was the style of “tell them as little as possible and have them figure out the details.” Lots of in media res starts, flowery writing, and vague endings.

I feel dumb about this, and pretty disappointed (in myself?). The book was promoted as some big package of insights, but maybe I’m just not destined to get any of it. (Sad trombone…)

Book Review: Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A little tedious, but still interesting”

This is a story of a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. It lost power, was surrounded by water with backed up sewers, and there weren’t enough boats or helicopters to evacuate everyone. Lots of people died. Maybe too many people.

When the hospital lost power, all the ventilators shut off. A lot of patients were in immediate distress, compounded by the 110-degree indoor temps and the humidity. Conditions in the hospital deteriorated sharply. There wasn’t enough equipment or people to serve everyone, and without power, many of the patients had little to no chance of surviving.

What happened next is the big question. The District Attorney maintains that a doctor named Anna Pou and two nurses entered the rooms of several doomed patients – many with standing Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders – and knowingly injected them with enough morphine to kill them.

But did they? There were 45 bodies at Memorial – stacked up in a makeshift morgue in the chapel – and very high percentage of them tested positive for morphine, even though the patients were not prescribed the drug. It was clear that they were administered morphine, but was it to kill them, or just ease their suffering while they died naturally?

There were three people in the various rooms when it happened, and they have steadfastly refused to say what happened, assuming they even agree on what their individual intentions were. Before they entered the rooms, there had been fleeting discussions and fragmentary conversations between multiple people about the possibility of euthanizing patients. It was an idea that was apparently floating around in the heads of a lot of people during the crisis.

If they did intend to euthanize patients, would it have been the right decision? How many of the patients were days or even hours away from dying anyway – even under normal conditions – and the injections just gave them relief in their final hours? And did the conditions the hospital was operating under at the time justify any of this?

The book is divided into two parts. The first is an tight narrative describing what happened at Memorial during Katrina. The second part covers a few years afterwards when people are investigated, arrested, and charged with crimes. (If you want to know what happened, here’s a Wikipedia page which explains it all.)

The book ends with an extended epilogue about efforts in the last decade to define how medical professionals should act in situations like what happened with Katrina, when medical support starts failing and decisions have to be made about who receives the limited care available, and who is evacuated first when capacity is limited.

This is the second book I’ve read about Katrina (after The Great Deluge). It gets a little tedious in places – these are lots of names and locations, to the point where there’s a map of the hospital in the front of the book.

Still, a solid read.

Annotated Link: The gentrification font: how a sleek typeface became a neighborhood omen

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

There’s a specific font that has become associated with the early stages of neighborhood re-development.

Annotated Link: When the New Neighbor Arrived, They Were Excited. It Turned Into a Seven-Year Nightmare That Had Liberals Losing Their Minds.

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A man opened a bookstore in a downtown building and set off a multi-year conflict over a homeless encampment.

Annotated Link: He Wants a New Start. So He Is Taking the Hardest Driving Test in the World.

Thu, 9 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Uber drivers in London are embarking on a multi-year journey to pass the black cabbie test, whcih requires them to memorize most of the street in London.

On AI-Generated Music...

Tue, 7 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’m struggling with how much a really like AI-generated music.

A lot of time, I just have music on in the background while I work., Instrumentals are great for this. Lately, I’ve been listening to “Spy Jazz” which is some moody stuff that sounds like it’s from the 60s. It’s… mindless. It just plays in the background, like the soundtrack to “Oceans 12,” and I don’t think about it much.

But then I found Eddie Dalton. And this has me a little worried.

Eddie doesn’t exist, clearly. You can tell from the picture on the YouTube channel that he’s purely a figment of AI. He’s supposedly a graying Black man that sings soulful tunes about love – some lost, and some not.

What has me concerned are that the lyrics are kind of amazing.

“I still buy that same old red wine,
even though you ain’t been here in a long, long time.
A glass or two and you’re back in this place,
sitting over there with that smile on your face.”

When you identify with a human songwriter, there’s some sense of solidarity in that. There’s another person who went through the same thing you did. You and the creator are in this together.

“And I remember you laughing in the candle light,
bare feet on the floor on a Friday night.
You were talking about forever like it’s yours and mine,
Now it’s me in this bottle trying to turn back time.”

But what do you do when there’s no human behind it? Can you identify with music that was generated by an algorithm?

“Oh, I tell myself one day I won’t reach for the shelf,
find a way to raise a glass to somebody else.
But tonight I’m running back to what was mine,
Drowning what we had, one sip at a time.”

Eddie has become a bit of a sensation. Apparently he’s in the Top 5 of iTunes. Judging from the YouTube comments, either a lot of people don’t realize he’s not real, or they’re all AI-generated too.

(Interestingly, I think lots of people are generating Eddie Dalton songs now. Outside of the “official” channel, there are other channels with slightly different sounds, which suggests that other people are uploading existing Eddie Dalton songs to AI and saying, “Make me something like this,” which is a weirdly fascinating concept. If Eddie doesn’t exist, who “owns” him?)

At Content Marketing World a couple years ago, I watched Elizabeth Banks say something like, “AI will never surprise us, because it basically IS us. It’s the sum total of recorded human experience.”

Well, music is built on cliches. Part of the strength of music is that we identify with it. This means it’s ironically easy for AI to generate a song that really speaks to the human condition.

Honestly, I wish I didn’t like Eddie. But I really do, and I find it unsettling.

Book Review: Project Hail Mary

Sat, 4 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Solid storytelling”

I read this because the movie came out, and I wanted to read the book before I watched the movie (I did the same thing with Shogun a couple years ago). I finished the book at 1:00 p.m. one afternoon, and I was watching the book at 2:30.

The book is very good. It’s the story of a middle school science teacher who wakes from a coma and finds himself on a spaceship with no idea how or why he got there. Through a series of flashbacks, he learns that the sun was being drained by a new, parasitic lifeform that was systematically infecting stars throughout the galaxy. One star was unaffected, so he was part of a mission to travel to that star and find out why, in an attempt to return that knowledge to Earth and save humanity.

Problem: the trip to the star takes 14 years. And there’s only enough fuel for a one-way trip.

Also, an alien shows up.

The book is the story of how this guy figures out his circumstances, learns to communicate with an alien, and makes use of what might be his final years of existence. It’s a lot like The Martian in the sense that it’s about one guy, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, trying to survive. And it has a lot of the same vibes to it.

Unlike The Martian, there’s the alien. That’s the one part of the book that’s not strictly “hard” science fiction. But it’s a nice story that highlights the commonalities that any sentient species would have with each other, and how we can use that to communicate with an understand each other.

However, the movie was better. I don’t say that lightly, because it’s rarely true, but the movie was an absolute triumph. There was a lot of science in the book that the movie found some great ways to summarize understandably, and Ryan Gosling gave a fantastic acting performance.

Regardless, it’s a great book.

On Self-Improvement...

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve never been a big Tim Ferris fan. “The Four-Hour Work Week” just kind of pissed me off, really.

But this is a good article, where I feel like he calls himself to account.

[The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me])(https://tim.blog/2026/03/04/the-self-help-trap/)

“You can spend your whole life preparing for, instead of playing, the game of life. But why would anyone, including yours truly, succumb to this? … Subconsciously, it spares you from the messiest but most rewarding game of all: human interaction.”

Life is really messy, and we (me, and yes, you too) generally suck. We’re irrational about some things, we have bad habits, we’re inconsistent, etc. etc. etc.

I get tired of people claiming they can remove all the negative aspects of the human condition. Because they can’t. And when someone tries to follow their advice and fails, they think it’s a deeper problem with them, rather than with the stupidity of the advice itself.

Someone once told me that “guilt” is when you think, “I did something bad.”

But “shame” is when you extend that thought with, “…because I am a bad person.”

Too often, the self-help addiction takes guilt and turns it into shame.

Book Review: The Most Beautiful Book Places in the World

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Lovely pictures”

The title of this book is key: it’s “the most beautiful book places.” Not libraries or bookstores specifically, but just places with books.

That said, it’s lovely. Some wonderful photographs of different places around the world that have a lot of books. The pictures of often two page spreads, which makes the binding a little annoying, but it was still amazing in places. Some of the pictures almost literally took my breath away (I mean, just look at this).

Lots of libraries and bookstores, of course, but also a fair amount of coffee shops, bars, and restaurants.

I especially liked The Library at The NoMad, which is in a hotel in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. The website says:

The Library is a members-only workspace by day that transforms into an intimate cocktail lounge by night.

That sounds like a dream. I’ll have to look that up next time I’m in the city.

Book Review: In the Beginning Was Information

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Reread

Added on March 22, 2026

So, this is actually a reread, even thought I didn’t have any notes back when I read it for the first time (probably in 2010, or so?). I do remember this was recommended to me by a guy I sat next to on a plane. He was reading the Bible, and we got into a discussion about that, then realized we were both in IT, and he recommended this book.

I reread the book because I was hoping I would get some amazing insight from it that I missed the first time, but the basic message is the same: it’s an attempt to prove the existence of God via Claude Shannon’s information theory.

The author – who is a German mathematician, and Young Earth Creationist – goes deep into examining Shannon’s theories, to prove a seemingly simple point: the transmission of “information” requires an intelligent sender. Meaning, the formation of information requires that a being with a thought process was able to form the message and transmit it, otherwise everything is just gibberish.

I’m onboard so far, and I don’t think this is disputed much in science.

However, the author then extends this to say that DNA is the “original information” of the world. It fits all the criteria for information, and it – by definition – existing before Man did, therefore we must accept that the creation of man was via information (hence the title of the book), and this requires us to accept an intelligent designer.

I actually like the theory. But the author makes a massive tonal shift in the third part of the book when he attempts to prove that all this validates the Bible. That’s a illogical extension of his core theory I think: he goes from proving that some intelligent designer existed, to saying that the Hebrew Bible is therefore valid. I just don’t think his central theory – which, again, I rather like – supports this.

I’ve often thought there are different “levels” in someone’s journey of faith. They kind of go like this, using myself and my current faith position as a destination.

Atheist: “There is nothing”
Agnostic: “I don’t know if there’s anything”
Supernaturalist: “There’s… something”
Theist: “There’s… someone(s)”
Monotheist: “There’s a single someone”
Christian/Jew: “There is the God of the Hebrew Bible”
Protestant: “Martin Luther was right! The Pope is bad!”
Baptist: …I have no idea
Converge Baptist: …no idea about this either

If you accept what this author is saying, that takes you from #1 to… #4? Maybe #5? His argument really has no relevance beyond that.

Outside of the third part, the book is actually a really good discussion of information theory in general. And his central point about an intelligent designer proven by the existence of information is thought-provoking. It’s not an unassailable point, by any means, but it’s interesting.

But the third part is a big leap, and I’m just not sure the prior portions of the book support it.

Book Review: The Essence of Software: Why Concepts Matter for Great Design

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Interesting, prescient ideas”

This author is claiming that the “essence” of software isn’t code, rather it’s concepts. He’s arguing that we should design software more on the conceptual level.

Concepts are the user’s mental model of how the software works, and how the big pieces of the software interact. He argues for designing these concepts along multiple axes:

Structure: what is the concept?
Purpose: why does it exist?
Composition: how does it relate to other concepts?
Dependency: what other concepts depend on it?
Mapping: how does it manifest in the UI?
Specificity: does it serve only one purpose?
Familiarity: is it shared with other applications?
Integrity: how does it “protect” itself from encroachment by other concepts?

I’ve known this as a “noun” analysis. When trying to learn new software, sometimes it’s helpful to analyze the “nouns” – the… things, in the software, that you do stuff with. That really helps you organize the software in your head.

What’s interesting is how relevant this is in the new era of AI-driven software development. Writing code is no longer the critical thing. What’s becoming more important is understanding how your users will use the software, and the models they will use to think about the problem domain.

Future software will likely be designed at the conceptual level, and here’s a great example:

Configuration Language: Specification

This is a configuration language that I designed (…or maybe “evolved” over years of use). I wrote a detail specification for it, delineating the concepts behind it. Since then, I’ve had Claude Code implement it – write the actual code – for two different languages. It’s neat because it works the same in both, because the concepts are the same.

This is the future of software development. The book was ahead of its time.

Also, the book has an interesting format, in that it’s divided into two halves. The first half is the meat of the argument, without much elaboration of asides. The second half is basically an extended set of “notes” to the first half, in which the author tells colorful anecdotes and explains the concepts with more narrative. (The author is a professor at MIT, so if he was using this as a textbook, I think the students find that helpful.)

Finally, the author has an entire website in support of the book. It’s not just promotional – some of the content expands on and reinforces the concepts of the book.

March 17, 2026

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Est. Time:
Gear: bike, sled

4x
---
2,500m BikeErg
35m Sled Push (450#)

This was murder. The sled push, specifically.

I had 450# on it – 360# in plates (8 x 45#), and then the sled weighs somewhere between 80-100#. But, of course, everything comes down to the contact patch and the floor surface, so the weights of sleds are really hard to equate. What is hard on one surface and one sled, would be much easier or harder if either were swapped for something else.

Anyway, the sled push was very difficult. I want to say it took me about 30 seconds each way, and it just wiped me out. I was resting at least 30 seconds before starting the second push each round, and then getting back on the bike was the absolute worst feeling. My legs were jelly.

I was really proud that I hadn’t stopped the sled once in eight pushes (four down, four back). And then, literally 10-feet before the end, on the last push, something happened and the sled just seized up and stopped moving. I thought I had just literally run out of gas at that point, but there was a suspicious skid mark on the floor which makes me think something happened – it slipped off its caster, or something. (See my prior point about the sled and the surface playing very heavily into the effective effort.)

Rough, rough workout. I was a mess when I left the gym.

March 16, 2026

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Est. Time:
Gear: bench press, bike

6x
---
Max Effort Bench Press (#225)
Max Effort BikeErg until 5:00

This was a pretty simple one. I would do a set of bench, which would take about 50 seconds (the bench was 20-30 feet from the bike), then get on the bike to finish the round. I did this for 30 minutes today.

I got about five reps every round of bench after the first (in which I got, like, eight – I’m way off my peak, from before the shoulder injury).

All told, I got about 11,500m of bike, which is about right. I can get 15,000m in 30 minutes. With the bench, I effectively biked for 80% of that time, which is 12,000, so I’m in the ballpark.

Annotated Link: The $500 Million Mystery Will, Signed by Ghosts

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:02:00 -0500

A random, bizarre will for a half-billion estate was “discovered,” and no matter how ridiculous it seems, the court is forcing lawyers to adjudicate the matter.

Book Review: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “An amazing experience you will never forget”

This was an amazing…experience. I call it that because I listened to this book on audio during a long road trip. I loved it so much that I ordered the hardcover before I even got home.

The audio version is read by a multi-voice cast of almost 50 voice actors. They need to do this because the book is a literal oral history – it’s a thousand (two thousand? three?) little vignettes of the 24 hours after the first 9/11 plane took off from Boston, told in the first person.

It goes through the day in chronological order, step by step, minute by minute, telling the stories by the people who lived through it. There are hundreds and hundreds of individual retellers. Many of them you come to know, because the story keeps coming back to them over and over again, throughout the day.

When introduced, the speakers give their name, what they were doing (like, which company they worked for), and – ominously – which floor of the towers they were on when the planes it.

The people are from all walks – some survivors, some rescue workers, some celebrities. There are stories and anecdotes from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Dennis Hastert, even George Bush.

This is what I believe to be the most comprehensive account of what happened on 9/11. The audio book was 16 hours long. It goes into excruciating detail, from every possible perspective. It’s a staggering work of compilation.

Some things I learned –

The biggest immediate fear was that the rescuers didn’t know if there were more hijacked planes. Until the FAA got all the planes on the ground, rescue work would stop when a plane got near, because they didn’t know which planes were weapons.
The Pentagon crash would have been much worse, except they crashed into a section of the building that had just been remodeled, and not everyone had moved back in.
Some people still in the Twin Towers survived the collapse. The building came down around them, but they managed to be in a pocket of space, like an elevator shaft. Several people were pulled out of the wreckage after the collapse.
A “shootdown” order was given, to bring down any threatening planes. There was one plane inbound from Europe that was the only plane left, and discussion was had about whether or not to intercept it, but it eventually turned back.
The President was genuinely desperate to get back to Washington, but his security wouldn’t allow it until they were sure all the planes were down. He went from Florida, where he was reading to an elementary school, to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, then to Offut AFB in Nebraska because it had better communications. Then they flew back to Washington so fast that the fighter escorts had trouble keeping up without running out of fuel (apparently Air Force One is a very fast plane).
During the travels of Air Force One on 9/11, the Secret Service posted an armed guard at the bottom of the stairs leading to the upper deck where the president was. The implied message was, “We don’t even know for sure that a terrorist isn’t on this plane right now.”
United 93 – the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania – was delayed at takeoff. This meant that they were in the air later than planned, and the passengers had seen news reports of the other planes hitting buildings. This is why they stormed the cockpit – the passengers on the other flights had acquiesced to the hijackers, but the United 93 passengers had seen what was going to happen to them. If their plane had taken off on time, they might have stayed in their seats, and it might have hit the Capitol (where investigators believe it was headed).
The F-16s that took off to intercept United 93 were not armed. They left before they could be loaded with missiles or bullets. The pilots debated whether or not to ram the plane out of the sky, but it crashed before they intercepted it.
There is audio recording of the struggle on United 93. I do not know if this is public, but apparently there is very clear audio from the cockpit recording of the fight for control of the plane. They cannot tell if the passengers ever got in the cockpit, but the terrorists voices are heard responding to the passengers trying to get in. The last words recorded are “Allahu Akbar” repeated eight times.
When the towers collapses, dust and ash became a huge problem. People couldn’t breath. Multiple people tell of having to literally scoop gobs of ash out of their mouths so they could breath.
In the afternoon of 9/11, boats of all kinds started pulling up to docks in Lower Manhattan to ferry people across the East River and the Hudson to safety. It turned into one of the largest maritime boat lifts in history, far bigger than even Dunkirk. An estimated 500,000 people were evacuated.
The hospitals in New York braced for a massive influx of patients… that never came. They realized, to their horror, that almost everyone had died, and that there were relatively few injured to care for.
Falling bodies from the towers was a significant problem for the rescue workers. More than one firefighter was killed by a jumper landing on them.
Some of the most harrowing survival stories are people who had to make it down the stairs of one of the two towers. They descended hundreds of flights of stairs in darkness and smoke. Lots of people died on the way down. Survivors headed down were constantly being passed by firefighters heading up.
When the plane hit the North Tower, a massive fireball shot down an elevator shaft and exploded into the lobby, killing people all the way down on the ground.
Rudy Guliani happened to be in the area when the planes hit. He was a few blocks from Ground Zero for most of the day. Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld was in the Pentagon and went to the affected area to help survivors.
An American Airlines ticket agent had unwittingly helped two of the hijackers make it onto their flight. He didn’t realize what he had done until the next day. He struggled with it for years afterwards.
Lots of survivors didn’t know what to do when they got out of the towers. A lot of them just walked home across the closed bridges to New Jersey, Brooklyn, or Queens.
The last survivor at Ground Zero was rescued at about 10 a.m. on the next morning. No one else was found alive after that.
In the weeks after 9/11, tow trucks were dispatched to train stations in New Jersey to remove all the vehicles that hadn’t moved since that day. These were owned by people who never returned for them.
An older woman named Josephine was rescued from one of the towers by a group of firefighters. When she died of natural causes years later, she asked that the firefighters be her pallbearers.

A couple things in particular struck me –

There was so much bravery. There are so many stories of people running back into the buildings, and people helping other people at huge personal risk to themselves. I kept wondering: would I be that brave, if I was there?

Another theme was the sheer physicality of survival. Many people who survived went to hell and back to get out. They carried other people, they moved heavy things, they through fought dust and heat and smoke.

There are other heartbreaking stories of people in poor physical condition who didn’t make it. Bodyweight was an unavoidable factor – there are several stories of obese people who couldn’t be easily moved, or who just gave up and couldn’t go on. I kept wondering: would I survive? Would I have had the physical capacity necessary to make it out? Would I have had the tenacity to carry on?

This is just an amazing book, and a rare instance where I’m going to say: listen to it on audio. The voice acting is very well-done. Clearly, each of the actors speak multiple parts, but I didn’t start to notice that until the end.

I did not speed up the audio of this book like I usually do. I listened to every last minute of the 16 hours.

It was an incredible experience. I am a different person for having listened to it all.

On Command Line Interfaces...

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve gotten weirdly obsessed with command line interfaces (CLIs) lately. I’ve always liked the speed and precision of them, and I have a strange love affair with plain text (markdown 4 life, yo…).

In the last couple days, I wrote a CLI for Staffbase user management. There’s a video below, if you’re interested. It’s just kind of a POC (meaning, a solution in search of a problem…), but it’s got me thinking about CLIs and how they relate to AI, from a user interface perspective.

(Also, I watched the original “Tron” for some reason the other day. Turns out there were lots of command lines in 1982. Don’t get me started on the philosophical implications of text being converted into anthropomorphic homunculi inside the machine that sort of resemble how we perceive LLMs…)

With the current state of AI, we’ve almost reverted to a CLI orientation. We type, something types back, we type again, etc. The only difference is that the syntax is more relaxed and the capabilities are far more vast. But the type/reply model is still there.

And we eventually fall into patterns – at least I did. When I want a word defined, I type “define [word]”. This is awfully similar to the command/argument model of a CLI. When I get coding error, and the conversation has context to what I’m doing, I just type “error [paste the error text].”

Browsers did the same thing: the address bar is another CLI. In some browser I used (Firefox?), I would type “!w [term]” to have it just pass the search to Wikipedia. Decades back, I remember being amazed at being able to type “showtimes sioux falls” into Google and get back movie listings. That’s basically a CLI.

How long until we wear “channels” into AI engines by using CLI-ish shorthand so much that it comes to expect that, and we all kind of accidentally, collectively define a syntax for common operations just from using them so much?

The Grand Canyon represents millions of years of erosion – the Earth eventually adapted to the incessant “usage patterns” of water. Will our usage of AI eventually “erode” our way to some common input language? What will that look like?

And, in the end, are we just walking in a big circle back to the command line?

Book Review: James Bond: 50 Years of Movie Posters

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

TLDR: “Exactly what it claims to be”

This is a huge coffee table book. So big that I’m having trouble finding a place to put it, as it won’t fit in my of my bookshelf spaces.

True to the title, it’s essentially a picture book of movie posters of all James Bond films through SPECTRE, with one image of the Skyfall teaser poster as that must have been the only thing released when the book was printed.

Each image has a caption and some discussion. After looking through all of them, I have some observations.

Here is the classic Bond poster: James Bond, staring intently into the camera, holding a gun, flanked by the two Bond girls (because there’s always two…). Surrounding them is a montage of action sequences from the film. This is an uncannily common formula, I imagine because the films don’t need much explanation – everyone knows what a James Bond film is, these days.
I don’t know why I was surprised that different countries have different posters. Obviously, there are language differences, but the tone of the poster is often different as well, to emphasize some aspect more or less, based on the local culture and appetites.
The Bond women are extremely prominent on every poster, seemingly more so in other countries. During the 1960s, they were mostly illustrated, with clearly exagerrated breast size.
Bond’s gun is most often silenced – meaning, it has a long silencer attached. This is so common as to be odd. I supposed it makes Bond seem “secret,” but it’s also an interesting visual thing – it draws more attention to the gun, and it makes it seem… ungainly. Like, this is a thing you would do to a gun only if you know what you were doing and has a specific reason. (I’m avoiding the phallic implications…)
I was a little surprised to see that Grace Jones was incredibly prominent on the A View to a Kill posters. She almost the focus of every poster – where as Tanya Roberts was almost nowhere to be found. I suppose it’s because of Jones’ exotic looks and her adversarial role in the film’s plot.

This was a fun book. I spent about a month paging through it.

Now, if I could only find a place to put it…

Annotated Link: Leaked Chats Expose the Daily Life of a Scam Compound’s Enslaved Workforce

Mon, 2 Feb 2026 05:17:00 -0600

Scam call center operating from East Asia hold victims’ passports and keep them in debt bondage, while presenting themselves – and even internally operating – as legitimate businesses.

The lost art of XML

Mon, 2 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Preamble There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. “Oh, XML,” they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. “We use JSON now. Much cleaner.” This is nonsense. XML was not abandoned becaus

There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML.
XML was not abandoned because it was inadequate; it was abandoned because JavaScript won. The browser won. And in that victory, we collectively agreed to pretend that a format designed for human readability in a REPL was suitable for machine-to-machine communication, for configuration, for anything requiring rigor. We relinquished the logical formalism for convenience with our tools.
It looks “heavy” compared to JSON’s minimalism. These are aesthetic complaints dressed up as engineering concerns.
JSON, by contrast, is an object literal from JavaScript. It is a notation for initializing dictionaries. It was never designed to be a data interchange format; it was promoted to that role because it was already in the browser and developers were already familiar with it. Convenience over correctness.
A format can be pleasant to work with and still be fundamentally inadequate.
We could have just used XML.
We could have simply used the binary XML encodings that already existed. But that would require admitting that XML was right all along.
I am tired of lobotomized formats like JSON being treated as the default, as the modern choice, as the obviously correct solution. They are none of these things.
Sometimes the old way was the right way. This is one of those times.
We threw away schemas, namespaces, validation, self-description, all because we didn’t like angle brackets.

RIP Low-Code 2014-2025