A whole day of one-liners

Sundays are great for one liners.

If you have real player please, please watch this movie made by American Institute of Planners in 1939. File part one, part two. It documents the urban blight brought by industrialization, the rapid pace of '30s city life (I especially enjoied the shots of the mechanization of food), and the ideal community of the future. It was written by Lewis Mumford. The movie is about 30 minutes (15 a piece), it starts out slow and boring but it picks up.

In my ecology class a student asked how you could track the migration and habitat of Giant Squid. There are major technical difficulties such as the depth they live at and their oceanic range. So when I saw this I was interested.

The bug-eyed sea creatures, believed to be Humboldt squid, normally reside in deep water and only come to the surface at night. Why approximately 500 of them began washing up on the sands of Laguna Beach and Newport Beach on Tuesday isn't clear.

And this was strange. I tried it for myself and got the same result. It would be cool if MSN could get its act together.

Bad Places. Really Bad Places.

I really don't want to be pessimistic but I've got some articles about hellish cities.

The City of Dis is the term for the lower four layers of Dante's Inferno. Here is a handy cross section of Hell. Clicking the Down Arrow brings you to Dis.

Feral Cities

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power.

Its even got a handy graph to determine if your town is "goin' feral."

The idea of "rent seeking" was totally new to me. It's really pretty simple, but the economic definition is really opaque. Basically it means that a group (government or corporation) is trying to extract revenue without investing in improvements. An illegitimate, corrupt government is rent seeking by collecting taxes for pure profit (not invested in public services). A corporation is rent seeking if it lobbies to exclude outside competition. That would lead to higher prices for the corporation's product without any actual improvement in quality.

I found out about rent seeking when I was researching Kleptocracies.