I just saw a TED talk by Paul Romer, who spoke about what he called ‘charter cities’. His entire talk had this vague neo-con subtext, and it was all about ‘us’ bringing things to ‘them’. He has many good points, but I think most of them will not see the light of reality because of the evil capitalist world we live in.

But he did make several interesting points about cities. Here’s a brief, transformed summary :

In complex systems like nations, cities are nuclei of rapid change. And villages and de-centralised habitations have a lot of inertia, and are extremely resistant to change. He advocates moving everyone from the villages to the new cities, to radically transform them into capitalist consumerist pigs. (This is what economists call progress and growth)

But what I’m worried about is that no one seems to see the flip side : when will we start thinking of moving people back to the villages, once we’ve radically transformed them? We can’t — and we shouldn’t — sustain a pace of rapid transformation and change all the time. That said, the City should be viewed as a transient structure.

Given this, it’s interesting — and disappointing — that the urban organism we live in has a skin of indestructible concrete.

The web page of the guy who made Tofu.

Tofu : A free text viewer that breaks down text into columns. Fantastic for reading long text. Couple this with Project Gutenberg, and you have 95% of the best books in the world, in your computer, for free. Link

Licensed : A free application to manage your software licences. No more emailing yourself passwords or printing MacHeist receipts. Link

…completely functional, with dock icon badge support and an awesome icon.

Here’s a complete tutorial : http://devthought.com/blog/desktop/2009/10/integrate-google-wave-into-your-os-x-system-with-fluid/

Only two things to add to this :

1) Once you’ve finished the installation, go to [Wave SSB]>Preferences>General.

uncheck “restore last browsing session on startup” This avoids problems when Google Wave is taken down for maintenance.

2) go to [Wave SSB]>Preference>Advanced

Choose “allow browsing to any URL”

otherwise it keeps launching Safari at random moments.

A fantastic collection of Icelandic Neo-Classical music, one for each day. You can download, for free, a low-resolution version of the album.

The Olympus E520 icon for Mac.

[link]

There used to be a time when one collected eccentricities and mannerisms like postage stamps, because there used to be a time when this metaphor made sense because people actually collected postage stamps.

Pea coats, Van Gogh’s Terrace de café la nuit, à Arles, a sufficiently faded Ché t-shirt, Zen Buddhism, Toulouse-Lautrec prints, Darren Aronofsky films, Eric Arthur Blair, the fine art of making a Ratatouille (and the finer art of pronouncing it right), the correct number of diacritics in ‘résumé’, Apple computers, latte macchiatos, Maurits Cornelis Escher, an obsession with punctuation, Bach’s Das Musikalische Opfer, shaded paper lamps, Origami cranes, Winnie-the-Pooh, climbing Chimborazo (or Cotopaxi), Lebanese food, The Onion, a love for the word ‘inarticulate’, Philip Glass, fair-trade coffee, and our little collection of Vilhelm Hammershoi prints : these were the badges we collected through Life’s expedition; these were the milestones that marked the long miles from being someone common to someone you could actually talk to.

Chaotic storms have since erased these lines in the sand : it’s hard now to find a room without the obligatory De sterrennacht on the wall. Adolescence, then, was nothing more than switching from Gerald to Lawrence Durrell (and maturity and adulthood was when we realised Gerald was better). Now, we can’t create our personae with these passports any longer : the more people use them, the more their meaning leaches into the light of common day, and the more it is nothing more than a lingering symbolism of an imagined, decrescendos past.

We’re caught in the vice of a sunset age : clinging to relics infused with our pagan, powerful magic, refusing to see them reused, looked at anew, modified, by tribes outside our own.

Want to remap keys on your Windows XP keyboard? Here’s how :

1. Download RK Tools from Microsoft
2. Install ‘em.
3. Run C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\remapkey.exe
4. There’s a little “Save and close” button, which if you don’t click, nothing happens.

Since this makes changes to your registry, you need to reboot your computer for it to take effect.

Mac users running XP as a virtual machine : The option and Command keys are interchanged in this application’s map.

Venice

A photo essay of Burmese Refugees in Delhi can be found here. Apologies : Flash is needed to view this.

Here’s a fun fact about the GRE :

When you register for the test, they send you a email with a confirmation number.

When they confirm your scores, they send you a paper mail with a registration number.

Typically, I lost the paper mail, and dicovered to my dismay that the confirmation number was 16 digits long. No chance of passing that off as the six-digit-long registration number.

Solution : Call 8664734373 (Toll-free) and ask them for your registration number. You’ll need to confirm your address, date of birth and test date.

Here’s the simplest, best way :

1) Save your figure as a EPS.

2) OS X users : Convert the EPS to a PDF using Preview.

Linux/Windows users : Bung the EPS into LaTeX. It won’t look nice on screen, but it will print well.

DON’T save the figure (ever) as a JPEG.

(This conversion into EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) smoothens out the horrible pixel-looking 1pt plots.)

Evgeny Morozov reminds us of the flip side of networks at TED : How the internet can aid dictatorships.

In breif, his points are :

- Computers and the internet aren’t a catalyst to change. People in an oppresive universe are more likely to use computers hednoistically, rather than in a (properly) revolutionary manner.

- The Internet makes Big Brother’s job a lot easier.

Where the best chaat in the world is found.

Lovely Hall, terrible food.

Sunlight through the winter forests, near Kreinsen, Germany