877 884 887 888 Chapter 10; The City: Relational Summaries

Message no. 877[Branch from no. 839] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Thursday, April 26, 2007 11:01am Subject: Re: Relational Summary

Wonderfully creative approach to writing a summary of the City -- thanks for the links, the pictures , the film references , the song lyrics and the discussion of "poetry". Hope you had as much fun creating this colorful interactive summary as I did reading it!

Message no. 884[Branch from no. 728] Posted by DAWN WRIGHT (dparker3) on Friday, April 27, 2007 3:31pm Subject: Re: Patricia Friedrichs Chapter 10 The City Relational Summary

"Say we do develop ways to survive on Mars, aren't we going to create problems there like we did on earth? Are we creating a band-aid effect without actually fixing the original problem. It's kind of like drugs, they treat the symptoms, not the cause."

Message no. 887[Branch from no. 881] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, April 28, 2007 4:49pm Subject: Re: Relational Summ.....Varshawn

My wife and I really enjoyed the film "The Pursuit of Happyness" with Will Smith -- based on a true story. It shows the value of not judging somebody who is homeless and giving people a chance to develop their fullest potential. Thanks for your enlightening points -- you are right, chance plays a huge element. In the book "Critical Mass, How one thing leads to another" by Philip Ball he points out that despite the faith economists put in economic models chance seems to play the biggest role in whether or not people or firms succeed or fail.

Message no. 888[Branch from no. 879] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:02pm Subject: Re: Adrienne Chapter 9

Adrienne, that was great of you to bring up the Palestinian refugee camps -- my wife and I did a tour of refugee camps in Palestine last summer, and I had toured several times in years previous, and they are as you describe. Most of America has very little concept of the misery the Palestinians have to endure every day, so it was great to have you relate their situation to this chapter! Shukran!

My memories of Jones Beach are a little different from yours -- in high school we would drive out there after midnight on a winters night, park in front of the empty beach and put on pink floyd tapes and watch the sun rise. For us it was an environment of solitude to "get away from it all". The difference in our Jones Beach experiences reminds me of something Bill Mollison said in his book on Permaculture "sometimes the best thing to do when you see a crowd going in one direction is to go exactly opposite". I often wonder, though, if, as the world gets more and more crowded and we still continue to try to avoid crowds, we will find that even winter nights at Jones Beach will be packed like Sardines... will there be any such thing as "off peak"? I notice that here in Cairo there is rarely any time that the streets aren't crowded. The same is true of public buses in Los Angeles -- even at 2 in the morning on the Wilshire Line you can't get a seat, and often can't even get on the bus.

This is known as "latent capacity" in Urban Planning circles, and it explains why it is useless to build more freeways to try and solve the traffic problem -- the more roads you build the quicker they fill.