Sometimes coincidence can generate unexpected connections. I happen to be reading Jane Jacob’s incomparable The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In it, Jacobs skewers several planning archetypes that she saw as dominating (in 1961) orthodox urban planning. One of these archetypes was Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, or “towers in the park”. In this design, 95% of the ground is left as open space, while all housing and commerce is contained in isolated skyscrapers. This ideal ended up being influential in the design of American public housing, mostly lower-income but some middle-income projects as well. Jacobs goes on to criticize this type of design as creating open spaces that nobody actually uses because of the lack of street level commerce.

Then, last week, I took my daughter to see the Disney movie Tangled, a modern retelling of the Rapunzel story. Continue Reading »

About 2½ years ago I made the switch to Linux. I figured getting a new home computer was as good a time as any. While I was already going off the beaten path with Linux, I decided to not go too far off by choosing Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution. I kept Windows Vista (pre-installed) on its own partition, just in case I changed my mind.

While I was able (and more than willing) to tinker in order to get things to do what I wanted, my wife, who like me would be using the computer for both personal and professional purposes, needed things to “just work”. Any technical problems she had were going to get kicked to me. I asked her to give it a couple of weeks, but her verdict after one day was “This isn’t any different from Windows.”

I think most end-users would, like my wife, find no real difference for email, web browsing, word processing, and spreadsheets. Continue Reading »