[ExI] Greener Urban Environment

[William Flynn Wallace]

 sb  I really should go to college >.<

​
adrian wrote
​   ​
​
Despite what you may hear from others, college is usually a worthwhile
investment of time and money - so long as you major in something you
will likely be using in your career.  (So: "fill-in-the-field
engineering" yes, "fill-in-the-human-type studies" no.)
-
​-----------------

I could not disagree with Adrian more.  Of course as a college professor I
could be biased.

​You will get experiences you can get nowhere else, or at least for far
less cost.  If college helps with your career - fine. If it doesn't, you'll
still have your art, music, literature, psychology, sociology, anthropology
etc. as well as the free concerts and a lot more.  You will meet people
from all over the world; you will experience more diversity of everything
than you will anywhere else.  Those really will make you a more
well-rounded person.

I read where some medical schools are urging the college age person not to
take all chemistry and biology etc., but to get outside their future area
of expertise​
​
​.

If you don't need or want any of that, go to a technical school, but even
those have some of the above.

bill w​

On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 4:23 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 4:43 AM, SR Ballard <sen.otaku at gmail.com> wrote:
> > So, with this information, a few things have been said, such as "well,
> > then for their own good, humans need to abandon cities". But of
> > course, we would want to take this the other way. Why not make cities
> > conform to the psychological needs of humans? (or I suppose we could
> > find a way to change the psychological drives of humans to better
> > adapt to a city environment...)
>
> Indeed.  Humans have flocked to cities since ancient times for good
> reason.  Thoughtlessly driving humans out of cities because of a
> half-baked analysis of one aspect will undo all of that, and wind up
> making humans suffer more.  So, keep the good and fix the bad part.
>
> > A major issue in urban areas is water-runoff, caused by the blocking
> > of soil through building construction, but more pointedly through the
> > building of paved, multi-lane roads. Suppose here, we were to kill 2
> > birds with one stone, and develop a grass-like structure to replace
> > concrete and asphalt roads.
>
> The reest of this is a good analysis, if only the thing could be made
> - and as cheaply as concrete or asphalt.  (Don't forget, economics is
> ever the driver of these things.  Humans may do what's good for them
> but they will, almost always, do what's most economically efficient -
> and when they don't, it's often because they either can't afford the
> short-term investment or simply don't know better.)
>
> > Similarly, light posts could be re-imagined as local varieties of
> > trees, the leaves gathering sunlight during the day, and emitting
> > light from the underside of each leaf after dark, transmitting excess
> > energy produced down through it's trunk, into the lines created by the
> > grass.
>
> There are light poles like this.  Almost all you'd need to do would be
> to paint them green (or brown for the trunks), maybe dress the trunks
> up with fake wood.
>
> > Of course, solar currently has a long way to go, especially
> > considering the toll it takes to produce cells and batteries, but this
> > is a bit pie-in-the-sky I suppose. Comments? Critiques?
>
> Imagine if you were to build a city for 100,000 from nothing - around
> some new mining or other rich, fixed-location resource, for an excuse,
> or if you were just handed design responsibilities for one of the new
> cities China's popping up all over the place in anticipation of future
> population.  (If you haven't heard of those, google "China ghost
> cities".)  How would you plan it?
>
> > I really should go to college >.<
>
> Despite what you may hear from others, college is usually a worthwhile
> investment of time and money - so long as you major in something you
> will likely be using in your career.  (So: "fill-in-the-field
> engineering" yes, "fill-in-the-human-type studies" no.)
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