Greg A. Brown

Building cities to be insurgency-proof, and other resurgences of medieval-era defensive tactics under a shroud of air superiority.

1. build a giant labyrinth of tunnels under my house. Essay penned by the wonderful author behind BLDGBLOG.

I’ll figure out everything else once I get that done.

Top Gear is one of the best shows out there. Where else can you see a race between a jet fighter and a really fast car?

The New York Times Magazine this Sunday featured an excellent article on the clash in southeastern US between diminishing water supplies and ever-growing cities. A teaser:

A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

Documentary called “Guys and Dolls” on realdolls, the anatomically correct, life-sized artificial female facsimiles that often serve as a replacement for human companionship. Ultra-weird. Weird beyond weird. Typically I consider a documentary to be good if it totally surprises me at least one or two times. Even knowing of realdolls’ existence for a few years, the documentary still managed to surprise me every one to two minutes. It just screams surreal, and is stranger than any possible fictional attempt at covering the subject. See also: Uncanny Valley.

Late last night, the New York Times published an article on how Al-Qaeda sympathizers use the internet to spread propaganda supporting their ideological causes. I was able to track the site down shortly after the article was published, but it was quickly forced offline (maybe by the traffic of bloggers independently finding the site and pointing to it?) with only Google’s cache remaining. But luckily for our little academic investigation here, the author of that site previously maintained a mirror on Wordpress.com that allows you to look through the archives for interest’s sake.

Gliding around mountains using a special wing-suit; easily up there with parachute skiing as one of the scariest and most exhilarating things I can think of.