Pietro

It’s alive!

Yesterday I returned from the Association of American Geographers conference in NYC, and walked through a remarkable exhibit in the San Francisco Airport on animated dolls. SFO is actually certified as a museum, and the general quality of the exhibits is excellent. This exhibit provoked me to think again about the modern world, through the […]

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Appeal for “Sheduled Ring” on mobiles

Anyone who has gone to church, synagogue, mosque, or any regularly-scheduled meeting over the last twenty years has encountered the irritating interruption of cell-phone ringing. Yesterday such an embarrassing event disrupted the NY Philharmonic’s performance at the Lincoln Center. It occurred to me several years ago that most of these appalling interruptions are entirely preventable.

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In praise of sidewalks

One of the core challenges of urban planning is to sift through complex, entangled social-political-economic-environmental-political problems to find policies that are feasible and really helpful. One of those policies is the promotion of good sidewalks: no trip-hazards, no projecting hardware or branches, wide enough for two people to pass each other, and connected with curb

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Birthday in South Lake Tahoe

Thank you to all of you who wished me Happy Birthday by various 21st-century means! At Lizzie’s strong encouraging we took a 3-day road trip to Tahoe. Of course we did not check the news to discover that Tahoe is about as snow-free as San Francisco at the moment–actually that became front-page news the day

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From Corporations to Nation-States

Today we assume that modern nation-states are the successors to early-modern kingdoms and royal colonies. In a spatial sense, I still agree with this: the Republic of France occupies the same territory as the prior Kingdom of France; India occupies space formerly ruled by the British Crown Colony, and so forth. However, something less obvious

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A bird in the hand

Today Gabriel and his friend Clark learned a powerful lesson. We were at the local park, throwing tennis balls, when the fellow who was on the other side of the wall remarked that he had found two baby birds on the tennis court. He looked up into the nearest tree, but there was no visible

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Proposed post-codes for Kabul

09 Novem ber 2007 / 18 Aqrab 1386 Last spring I pointed out that Kabul now has an address system in the form of Google Earth coordinates. On Wednesday I saw a presentation of USAID’s Land Titling and Economic Reform Assistance (LTERA) project of assigning addresses on streets. They way they do flexible, universal addressing

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