TIFI

Posted by Dan Hill to cityofsound.

Friedrich’s article, when taken with images of the wildfires in California, and those around Australian cities in recent years, gave me pause to consider how urban form and fire are related. I don’t want to use the terrible fires around California, and in Australia before them, as my own spurious token in an academic argument about urban planning. And yet I can’t help but correlate urban sprawl with placing more and more people into areas consistently threatened by fire. In this, the contemporary form of the sprawling city is not only something that is bad for the city in general – you could argue that point of course, but I don’t think it can really be doubted  – but also just supremely dangerous.

Posted to The Economist.

The conclusion:

Nobu, the young salaryman, likes his job but plans to start his own business one day. The older men in his office struck compromises that he is not prepared to endure. “After 1945, we were left with nothing, so we had to work together, with the same goal and as one team. We were a success, and Japan grew,” he says. “But this organisation doesn’t work any more. It has stayed the same for too long. The system has rusted.”

Since the late 1980s, computer scientists and engineers have been researching ways of embedding computational intelligence into the built environment. Looking beyond the model of personal computing, which placed the computer in the foreground of our attention, “ubiquitous” computing takes into account the social dimension of human environments and allows computers themselves to vanish into the background. No longer solely virtual, human interaction with and through computers becomes socially integrated and spatially contingent, as everyday objects and spaces are linked through networked computing.

Conversation between Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard.

Go read, this is important.

Via Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond.

Simon Garfield in The Observer

I dropped into Quinto, the second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Granta was about to celebrate its 100th edition, and I wanted some early copies – those classic ones with writing by Richard Ford, John Berger, Martin Amis and Angela Carter. The man at the counter wasn’t impressed. ‘What’s Granta?’

I could have given him the usual: about how it was a river in Cambridge, or the upper part of one, and its name spawned a student magazine that began in 1889 and was revived in the late 1970s. I could have said that this magazine became home to some of the best writing in the English language, and was edited for half its life by a man, Bill Buford, described to me as ‘a crazy, inspiring, absolutely absurd lunatic’. But instead I said: ‘It’s a literary magazine, but it looks like a book.’

Via Arts & Letters Daily.