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Here is New York, circa 2003

So this morning I'm doing my daily walk back from the Sheridan Square Starbucks, and as I pass the Christopher Street subway station, a dark, armored van pulls up in front of the subway entrance. I catch a set of initials subtly inscribed on the side of the vehicle: CDC. I do a visible double-take. CDC! Center For Disease Control! I walk past to the other side of the truck, and three uniformed men with badges climb out. My brain is instantly filled with about fifteen separate thoughts: If the smallpox is below ground in the subway, am I in danger standing right by the entrance? Can they treat Ebola if you go the emergency room before you start showing symptoms? I knew I should have read Demon In The Freezer!

And then I notice the insignia on the other side of the van: Coin Devices Corporation. The guys who empty out the token machines.

Never mind.

The Swarm

My latest Discover column, on Tim Blackwell and Peter Bentley's brilliant "Swarm Music" project, which uses mathematical models of bee swarming behavior to create the loosely structure flow of improv music. Here's a taste:

"Blackwell thinks it may be most useful as a compositional tool, not as a replacement for the creative process. Just as the flight of a real-world bumblebee inspired Rimsky-Korsakov to write his now-ubiquitous melody, the flight of these virtual swarms may inspire a new generation of composers, creating passages of music that would then be shaped and refined into final renditions. The swarm doesn't write songs; it suggests new avenues to explore.

I find this idea enticing precisely because it swarms in the face of the preconception that computers are there to store our files and record our keystrokes and nothing more. Swarm music suggests that this virtual-stenographer role may be an artifact of computing's early days. Simple digital machines are good at capturing and storing information. Complex machines are good at generating new kinds of information and triggering new connections, even if that information must eventually be polished by humans. What they produce is more launching pad than archive. That's why I suspect the rough-edged quality of the swarm compositions may turn out to be, as they say, a feature -- not a bug."

Empower Law

I'm inclined to agree with Clay Shirky that the growing power law distribution of the blogging world -- which basically means that a certain inequality of attention is built into the system right now -- is Not Necessarily A Bad Thing, or at least that the current system, in Clay's words, is "mostly fair." But the most interesting thing to me about Clay's essay -- and the subsequent response -- is that the active participants in the power law system are having a conversation about the distribution and what it means, and whether they want their little ecosystem to look like that.

Most systems that display this kind of behavior 1) don't have component parts with that level of self-awareness, and 2) don't have the opportunity to change the dynamics of the system if they choose. We hear a lot about architecture being destiny in the digital world, but the fact is that architecture has never been more flexible, and there have never been so many connected smart people interested in flexing its joints for good causes. A few years ago, when I was writing in Emergence about the limitations of the one-way linking built into the Web, there were very few practical applications out there that attempted to remedy this flaw. Now the web is teeming with them (Trackbacks, various Google hacks, Blogdex.) To a certain extent, the increased feedback of two-way linking may have amplified the scale-free phenomena that Clay describes. But the key point is that the one-way architecture isn't necessarily our destiny anymore, partially because some very smart people started to think that two-way links would be better for the system as a whole, and they set out to add them to mix.

So the question that I'm wrestling with is this: let's say we decided that the existing power-law distribution isn't quite fair enough, or that there's some other justification for encouraging a more egalitarian spread (equality of results, and not just opportunity.) If we decided that this was our goal, how would we go about doing it? What architectural changes would fight against the power law trend, without doing it in a command-and-control kind of way? Clay's piece suggests that perhaps the distribution is inevitable, but I doubt it. Clearly, to get a more even spread, there has to be a mechanism that amplifies the signal of new arrivals, since the 80/20 split is usually the result of early arrivals getting a disproportionate share of subsequent links.

Just to start things off, here's one idea I had today, inspired by a fascinating conversation over coffee with Meg: keep separate tabs on blogroll links and pointing-to-a-specific-story links ("story links" for short.) Then create a public ranking of sites with a high ratio of incoming story links to incoming blogroll links. So when Dave Winer, who has 1504 blogs pointing to him right now according to Technorati, manages to get 100 people to point to a new entry, it's no big news. But when Joe Newcomer, who is only mentioned on five blogrolls, manages to write something that gets twenty links -- that's a front page story. The great and powerful Sifry, as you might expect, is already working on something like this at Technorati, though his criteria is a little different.

The beauty of the model is that it creates a kind of "hot prospects" index, highlighting blogs that are punching above their weight. Then all you have to do is persuade the A-list bloggers to run an RSS feed of the index in their sidebar. It wouldn't change Jason's charts overnight, but it would be a start.

Jacobs and Mumford go for a drive

Anyone who has read Emergence knows that I have a minor obsession with the feud between Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs that broke out after she published her Death and Life book in the early sixties. The other day I stumbled across this fantastic, amazingly wide-ranging interview that James Howard Kunstler (another big influence on me) conducted with Jacobs in 2000. She talks a little about her interactions with Mumford, who was the "Sky Line" architecture and urbanism columnist for the New Yorker for many years. I loved this little tidbit -- one of those stray personal details that changes your whole assessment of someone's work:

I had my doubts about him because we rode into the city together in a car. And I watched how he acted as soon as he began to get into the city. And he had been talking and all pleasant but as soon as he began to get into the city he got grim, withdrawn, and distressed. And it was just so clear that he just hated the city and hated being in it. And I was thinking, you know, this is the most interesting part.

The people have spoken.

Whoa. This today on Salon:

At the end of the first week of January, the Princeton Survey Research Associates polled more than 1,200 Americans on behalf of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. They asked a very simple question: "To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens?"

Of those surveyed, only 17 percent knew the correct answer: that none of the hijackers were Iraqi. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that most or some of the hijackers were Iraqi; another 6 percent believe that one of the hijackers was a citizen of that most notorious node in the axis of evil. That leaves 33 percent who did not know enough to offer an answer.

Well, I guess the plan to roll out the new war product in the fall worked out pretty well -- they're certainly getting good brand recognition. Maybe they can pin Pearl Harbor on the Iraqis if they keep at it.

This story should be on the cover of every national newsweekly, with the headline: "People! Can we please just try to pay the slightest bit of attention?"

Columbia: The unanswered question

Here's what I want to know about the Columbia explosion. Maybe I've missed this somewhere, but it seems to me the really interesting question is this: if, ten days ago, they had determined beyond the shadow of a doubt that the debris impact had damaged the craft on launch, such that a return trip through the atmosphere was inevitably going to end in tragedy, what would NASA have done? I've seen a couple of reports that begin to pose that question, and always end with someone saying, "But there's sadly no way to repair the insulation tiles, so there was nothing we could have done."

But presumably, repairing the insulation tiles isn't the only potential option, right? I mean, I saw Apollo 13. If they were absolutely convinced that returning in the shuttle would be a death sentence, I can't believe NASA would have just said, "Folks, sorry about this. Enjoy your last few weeks." They've got other working shuttles, and a space station -- couldn't they have attempted some kind of rescue?

I'm sure this scenario has been explored somewhere online -- suggested reading is welcome...

Updated Feb. 5, 12:24 PM: Space.com has an FAQ that partially addresses rescue options. The space station was definitely out of reach, as a number of you have pointed out, but perhaps there was another possibility: "Could another shuttle have been sent up? Shuttle Atlantis might have been rushed into service, and if normal testing were skipped, it might have been in space in a week or so. The Columbia crew had enough supplies to last through Wednesday, Feb. 5 and might have been able to stretch those supplies a few more days."

Drive, He Said

I've been playing Mafia for the past few nights -- it's a driving-based crime game set during the Depression, basically a Grand-Theft-Auto-meets-The-Untouchables kind of thing. Like GTA3, it has a mode where you can just drive around in a cab, picking up passengers and taking them to their destinations: no shooting, no prostitutes, no running over pedestrians. I find this part incredibly fun, and strangely calming. The combination of a force-feedback steering wheel and the amazingly vivid city graphics makes for a convincing simulation of what it feels like to drive in an urban environment. I drove everywhere when I was in LA last week, and was reminded how fun driving can be, if you're not pressed for time, or stuck in a traffic jam. I missed it a little on my return. So these driving games are a perfect antidote for NYC-dwellers who never get to tool around in their own cars. Maybe they'll make a crowded subway platform simulator for the LA residents and the circle will be complete.

THINK again

Just as support for the Daniel Libeskind design seemed to be reaching critical mass, Herbert Muschamp comes out with a thunderous endorsement of the THINK proposal for ground zero: "It is a work of genius, a towering affirmation of humanism in modern times." The THINK plan had been my initial first pick as well, but I'd started to come around to the Libeskind design, since everyone seemed to be talking about that one, and I generally change my opinions about these things based on what the cool kids are saying. (Muschamp himself had written of the Libeskind plan: "If you are looking for the marvelous, here's where you will find it." Is this the Peter Travers Syndrome?) But apparently, the THINK proposal has been the top choice overseas, at least according to Muschamp. The Lower Manhattan Development team is scheduled to pick one or two plans tomorrow, so we'll just have to wait and see....

SimCity redux

Two months after the epic launch of The Sims Online, which for a while seemed to be dueling with the Iraq situation for national magazine cover treatment, Maxis quietly unleashed SimCity 4 on the world. Now, I know there are a million reasons why open-ended multiplayer games like TSO are more interesting than old-school simulators, but the truth is I've building cities furiously since I got my hands on an early copy of SimCity, while I haven't found myself wanting to check in with my online Sim since the beta. For whatever reason, SimCity is the great love of my gaming life: I find it hypnotic in the way that Tetris is hypnotic, and yet it has an amazing intellectual depth to it as well. I like to play the game with my seven-year-old nephew, just to relish the moment when we start arguing over the merits of increasing the commercial real estate tax rate.

That said, I'm a little disappointed with this release of the game, even though I've been playing it incessantly. Sure, it looks a little nicer than the last version, but anyone who last toyed with SimCity in 1994 will instantly recognize 99% of the gameplay. You zone out your residential and industrial regions, connect them to the grid, build some roads, and suddenly your neighborhoods are teeming with virtual residents. After that, it's all about tweaking the details: building a police station, raising tax rates on the wealthy, and so on. There are a handful of new features in SC4, like being able to track the history of individual Sims, and the ability to simulate entire regions of interconnected cities. But on the whole, I really feel like the title is stagnating. You should be able to experiment with radically different models of urban design (a city of Segways and pedestrians, where cars are forbidden); you should be able to encourage different kinds of businesses in specific neighborhoods; you should be able to create new forms of urban government. The title is also ripe for historical nuance: the buildings age architecturally as you play the game, but there's no way to build a medieval citadel, or a 19th-century Coketown.

If you ignore the graphics, there's not much in SimCity4 that wasn't present in the version released ten years ago. Compare that to the evolution we've seen in multiplayer networked games: ten years ago the state of the art was text-based MUDs. Now we have entire economies thriving in virtual space. If the SimCity franchise had evolved at the same rate -- well, let's just say I wouldn't have found the time for this post right now.