Month: April 2006

Author of one of my favourite books of all time, and one of the clearest and most original thinkers I’ve ever read. A real loss.

Link: CBC News: Urban thinker Jane Jacobs dies.

Toronto-based urban critic and author Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning.

• RELATED: Remembering Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, shown in 2004, influenced a generation of urban planners with her critiques about North American urban renewal policies. (Adrian Wyld/CP)

Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and most recently, Dark Age Ahead, was 89.

Her powerful critiques about the urban renewal policies of North
American cities have influenced thinking about urban planning for a
generation.

Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Penn., Jacobs had made her home in Canada since the late 1960s.

Educated at Columbia University, she met her husband, architect
Robert Jacobs, at the Office of War Information in New York, where she
began writing during the war.

Known for protesting sprawl

The strong themes of her writing and activism included opposition to
expressways, including the Spadina Expressway in Toronto, and the
support of neighbourhoods. Jacobs has been arrested twice while
protesting urban plans she believed to be destructive.

She also explored these ideas in books such as The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in
1961, questioned the sprawling suburbs that characterized urban
planning, saying they were killing inner cities and discouraging the
economic vitality that springs organically from neighbourhoods.

Inspired ‘Ideas That Matter’ gathering

Jacobs settled in Toronto in 1969. There she supported developments
such as the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, an inner-city development for
people of all income levels.

In 1997, the City of Toronto sponsored a conference entitled Jane
Jacobs: Ideas That Matter, which led to a book of the same name.

Her most recent book, Dark Age Ahead is "a grave warning to a
society losing its memory," jurists said in awarding her the $15,000
Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2005.

"In spare, exquisite prose, Jane Jacobs alerts us to the dangers
facing the family, higher education, science and technology, the
professions, and fiscal accountability. Drawing on history, geography,
and anthropology, this book reflects a lifetime of study and
observation, offering us lessons to avoid decline," the jury said.

Dark Age Ahead finds comparisons between our current North American
culture and European culture before the fall of the Roman Empire and
the subsequent Dark Ages.

Interviewed by Canadian Press when she won the Shaughnessy Cohen
Prize, Jacobs said, "People really know themselves that the dark age is
ahead. They’re worried, and they haven’t articulated it, but they feel
it."

"I think it’s late but we don’t need to go down the drain," she said. "But we will if we aren’t aware. It’s a cautionary book."

So far as I know, there is only one person in history who can legitimately claim to have saved the world. We only found out about him in 2002, and still seem to know very little about him (here is the little that Wikipedia has to say – no birth date, no indication when he died, even the rank is not clear).

He was some kind of second-in-command on a submarine during the Cuba
missile crisis and made the call not to launch a nuclear torpedo when it
seemed like perhaps the US had attacked them with depth charges.

It is wonderful that the person who can make this singular claim was so unlike the usual idea of a hero. Not a "visionary leader", not at the pinnacle of a career, not a Dirty Harry/Rambo go-get-em type. Basically he was a civil servant doing his job, calming someone down (in this case the captain), and advising caution and wait-and-see.

How very non-heroic for a hero.

Update: perhaps Stanislav Petrov can make the same claim.

Following up a fine article on why the BBC should make video games, I came across the McDonald’s Video game, which looks like an enjoyably subversive pastime.

Via Mark Thoma, an unbelievably arrogant article by Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace. He is now in favour of nuclear power. I don’t mind that, even though I don’t agree with him — changing your mind is not a bad thing. But something about his article really pisses me off, and it’s the conceit of the man. Look at these excerpts:

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that
nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my
compatriots. … Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the
environmental movement needs to update its views, too…

Here we go. Because he has changed his mind, Moore is now absolutely certain that everyone else needs to change their mind too. There is no modesty here; no asking the question: if I was wrong then, why should anyone listen to me now? no asking the question: if I was wrong then, might I be wrong now? No. Mr. Moore is as certain in his position now as he was then, insisting that everyone else needs to listen to him. Sorry. No can do.

I
don’t want to underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the
hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every technology that is dangerous….

Some years ago I took part in hearings on nuclear power in Ontario where thoughtful people from both sides took part. I was asked, by a member of the Ontario nuclear industry, exactly this question. I answered that it was a non-question. The statement is true of course, but that doesn’t mean you adopt every technology despite its dangers. You look at each case and make a decision. In fact, most of the arguments that Moore makes now in favour of nuclear energy are exactly the same as the ones being made then. For example, regarding Three Mile Island:

What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in
fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was
designed to do — prevent radiation from escaping … And although the reactor
itself was crippled, there was no injury or death…

See what I mean? Just because Patrick Moore didn’t notice that Three Mile Island was a success story, he assumes no one else did either. Well, people did, on both sides of the debate. And some of us who opposed nuclear power then knew that it was kind of a success story, and wrestled with that, and decided that we still opposed nuclear power. But Moore apparently wasn’t among those wrestling with that problem, because he doesn’t listen to other people, he just tells them what to think,

And I am not alone among seasoned environmental
activists in changing my mind on this subject. On occasion, such opinions have been met with excommunicationfrom the
anti-nuclear priesthood…

This is Mr. Moore trying to maintain for himself the position of rebel-with-a-cause. Not only was he a rebel then (an outspoken, independent-minded activist) but he’s a rebel now, against the people he was then a part of. But now he calls Friends of the Earth "the anti-nuclear priesthood" as if they are some kind of power centre. Give him a year or two and he’ll be railing against political correctness.

There are signs of a new willingness to listen, though, even among the
staunchest anti-nuclear campaigners. …  nuclear is, by elimination, the
only viable substitute for coal. It’s that simple.

Oh come on. Here is that certainty again, that arrogant "if I can’t think of alternatives, then no one else can either" black-and-white thinking. He is so certain of his own opinions that they are now obvious. Until he changes his mind, and then his new position is obvious too.

Let me be absolutely clear. It’s not the mind changing I object to. When it comes to that, I am firmly of the John Maynard Keynes school of thought (in response to a question about what he does when he gets new information, he answered "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?") And it’s not the support for nuclear power that I object to, even though I don’t agree. Many thoughtful people are in favour of nuclear power. It’s the self-importance of his simple-minded thought that gets my blood pressure up.

And happy Easter to you too.

Link: Economist’s View: Global Warming and Nuclear Power.

1. That global warming is a big deal. It’s because of listening to the radio in the mid ’70’s and hearing all those stories from experts about how there wouldn’t be any oil in 1990. They made sense at the time, global warming makes sense now. But I don’t really believe it.
2. That open source software is new and different. What puts me off is the hype about the whole Cathedral and Bazaar, Coase’s Penguin, Sand Pile & Power Laws, Economics of Networks, and Long Tail thing. It’s all what I think of as "Wired Thinking" (after the magazine) — it’s not entirely without merit, and it’s not completely stupid, but it has no sense of history and so it’s not nearly as smart or original or new as it thinks it is. Speaking of which….
3. That quantum computing will ever amount to anything. Anything that features the word "entanglement" so prominently is more new age than physics. The EPR thought experiments were dreamed up 70 years ago. Nothing interesting came out of them in the first 60, so why should anything interesting come out of them now? This is a field driven by its cool-sounding name (remember "quantum chaos" anyone?), and it’s just possible enough that it could be important, complicated enough that it can be portrayed as cutting edge to likely patrons and smart-but-impressionable graduate students, and far enough out to be not easily disproved.  Speaking of which…
4. That nanotechnology is new. Come on people, it’s just chemistry and engineering. All that talk of "self-assembly" is just a new word for "chemical reaction" but it sounds oh-so-edgy. Get over it.
5. That the world is flat (in the Thomas Friedman sense of the world). This one really should not need saying. It’s clearly a case of what Daniel Davies calls "globollocks" but it seems to be taken as obviously true by a big section of the business community. ‘Nuff said.
6. (Because no one expects the Spanish Inquisition). That whole idea of memes. Yes, I enjoyed Dawkin’s Selfish Gene, Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and Blackmore’s Consciousness, An Introduction. But I just don’t see what the idea of a meme adds to any discussion about anything at all. Really.

Why do I think I’m entering the "grumpy old bastard" phase of my life? Anyone else got any things they don’t believe?

I’m trying a new way tp make this weblog work with the book. This is why it’s good to start before the book gets published – it takes me months to figure this stuff out.

Anyway, there is now a category for each chapter (see over there on the right, unless you’re using an RSS reader, which you probably are), and any material relevant will be categorized by chapter. What that means is that the pages over on my book site can have links that go straight to some relevant material. I’ve added some links to the table of contents page and the links page. I hope these will get expanded in the next few weeks and months, especially as I finished the index tonight, so it’s one step closer to actually being printed.

Written (based on a talk, so it is a bit casual and disjointed) a little while ago, but newly relevant given the fuss about the Seymour Hersh New Yorker piece. Sample paragraph:

THE US BUNKER BUSTER | The US government ought to
recognize the taboo is in its favor and not try to develop a new
generation of weapons with the aim of making them somehow useful on the
battlefield. I’m afraid a lot of people in the Pentagon think, “We are
so rich in nuclear weapons, it is a shame not to use them.” They should
learn we are so rich in people and infrastructure that we will risk
losing that if we encourage others, by our own example, to look
positively on the use of nuclear weapons.

Link: NPQ.