Postmodern Ideas and Their Limitations

Those Fabulous Confabs: "If TED’s platinum brand is at risk of becoming a generic, it has been with the full support of the brand’s owner. As the TED Talks online uncovered a far-flung global yen for idea videos, TED’s TEDX program, in which the company grants would-be curators licenses to organize local mini-TEDs, has been unexpectedly popular. Since it launched in March 2009, there have been more than 3,000. There has been a TEDX Hunstville (Alabama), a TEDX Timisoara (Romania), a TEDX Gujranwala (Pakistan). There is now one TEDX, and usually more, every day somewhere in the world."

'via Blog this'

Try cyber-communities that actually exist.

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes

A thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure

Christopher Alexander Needs to Be Heard in the 21st Century - Associated Content from Yahoo! - associatedcontent.com: ""It must be emphasized, lest the orderly mind shrink in horror from anything that is not clearly articulated and categorized in tree form, that the idea of overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity of aspect and the semilattice are not less orderly than the rigid tree, but more so. They represent a thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure.""


Global Online Privacy

Beyond Pattern Language: Cyber-cities evolve from ecumenopolis and pattern language

Pattern language is too diffuse a term these days to be of much use 

It  was originally way of looking at building things naturally with human beings in mind.

Today that the demands of commerce trump pattern language as originally promulgated

Now opposed to this person-ignoring commerce is the idea of the cyber-city

The cyber-city is a cluster of cyber-communities

A cyber-community is an intentional gathering pf persons who want 

to have all elements of a city within walking distance

A cyber-community is up to 10,000 persons living and working and being educated and healed within a square mile on no more than four levels

A cyber-city is a cluster of some ten cyber-communities

Cyber-cities are the human units of the global ecumenpolis

Out of the original pattern language and ecumenopolis the cyber city evolves

Ecumenopolis was the term used by the late C. A. Doxiadis to denote the coming urbanized world 

Today there is a confusion about what a city is 

People still believe that cities should be ranked by their greatness 

and that only such great cities can actually be real cities

The truth today is that any place can be a city

And should

Global Online Privacy

A little slow on the uptake

Norway police arrive 90 minutes after firing began - Digg: "news.yahoo.com — Police arrived at an island massacre about an hour and a half after a gunman first opened fire, slowed because they didn't have quick access to a helicopter and then couldn't find a boat to make their way to the scene just several hundred yards (meters) offshore. The assailant surrendered when police finally reached him, but 82 people died before that."

My cyber-cities would have vastly better security than today's communities do. We are eons behind where we should be on conceptualizing the future. Christopher Alexander had it half-right decades ago but nobody listened.


Global Online Privacy