secretrepublic: smartercities: What Can Urban Planners Learn from SimCity? | StateTech The newest version of SimCity, the 24-year-old video game that made urban planning cool, is set to arrive in March. The game allows users to build and manage a city, forcing them to make decisions about education, energy, water, sewage and transportation.  This may be a new guilty pleasure soon.
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smartercities:

What Can Urban Planners Learn from SimCity? | StateTech

The newest version of SimCity, the 24-year-old video game that made urban planning cool, is set to arrive in March. The game allows users to build and manage a city, forcing them to make decisions about education, energy, water, sewage and transportation. 

This may be a new guilty pleasure soon.

Source: statetechmagazine.com

A 2013 Toyota Prius has an 11.9 gallon fuel tank. The Hess station near my apartment in Brooklyn is charging $3.85 for a gallon of regular unleaded which means you’ll drop $48.82 on a fill up from empty to full. The Federal government’s cut: $2.19. Let’s say that instead of charging per gallon, we treat gas like any other commodity and slap New York City’s 8.875% sales tax on the final price. The Federal government’s new take: $4.34. You’re paying an extra $2 when you fill up and the HTF is essentially doubling its current tax intake.
Theodore Brown on rethinking the way gasoline is taxed in the US. (via thisbigcity)

A Beginner's Guide to Crazy Wisdom

utnereader:

Crazy wisdom is more than a tradition—it’s something you can taste and try. A good place to begin is with The Essential Crazy Wisdom, by Wes “Scoop” Nisker (Ten Speed Press, 2001). It’s a somewhat sketchy history of the crazy wisdom tradition around the world—but its strength lies in its wonderful assemblage of life-changing quotes and stories. Tidbits like “Reality is a wave function traveling backward and forward in time” (physicist John L. Castri), “Only the shallow know themselves” (Oscar Wilde), and “God has no religion” (Mahatma Gandhi) keep your brain nicely off-balance, and Nisker’s Buddhist-tinged skepticism about ultimate issues like God is bracing, even though it gives somewhat short shrift to the devotional side of crazy wisdom.

newyorker: Paris, the “capital of the nineteenth century,” as Walter Benjamin called it, was meant to be painted. Its streetscapes, with their exquisite filigree and ornamental splendor, seem to be art itself, an ethereal creation that’s as wondrous and enduring as nature. The city’s lines and details seem to have been conceived as the very brushstrokes in which they’re captured. The great paintings of Paris keep its industrial vigor on the margins, whereas New York, the capital of the twentieth century, wears its working energy on the outside… Yet, even if the walls of the Met’s Bellows exhibit weren’t festooned with quotations from the artist attesting to his ambition to fill his canvasses with the raw energies of life and finding them exemplified on the streets of New York, the paintings themselves provide ample proof that the city offered him a unique subject—one with which he wrangled mightily… Continue reading Richard Brody on George Bellows’s paintings of New York, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 18th: http://nyr.kr/WKIGOn
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newyorker:

Paris, the “capital of the nineteenth century,” as Walter Benjamin called it, was meant to be painted. Its streetscapes, with their exquisite filigree and ornamental splendor, seem to be art itself, an ethereal creation that’s as wondrous and enduring as nature. The city’s lines and details seem to have been conceived as the very brushstrokes in which they’re captured. The great paintings of Paris keep its industrial vigor on the margins, whereas New York, the capital of the twentieth century, wears its working energy on the outside…

Yet, even if the walls of the Met’s Bellows exhibit weren’t festooned with quotations from the artist attesting to his ambition to fill his canvasses with the raw energies of life and finding them exemplified on the streets of New York, the paintings themselves provide ample proof that the city offered him a unique subject—one with which he wrangled mightily…

Continue reading Richard Brody on George Bellows’s paintings of New York, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 18th: http://nyr.kr/WKIGOn

utnereader: “When you think of 1950s Atomic Age design, a handful of images probably pop into your mind: The Ball Clock. The Marshmallow Sofa. The Sunburst Clock. What you probably don’t realize is that the designer of these Mid-Century Modern icons spent decades living in obscurity, filling his upstate New York farmhouse with 300-some whimsical handmade paper sculptures of animals, Pre-Columbian and Southeast Asian figures, Cubist abstractions, and African masks.”—  Lisa Hix, “Paper Wizard: Mid-Century Modern’s Unsung Visionary Gets His Due,” Collectors Weekly.
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utnereader:

“When you think of 1950s Atomic Age design, a handful of images probably pop into your mind: The Ball Clock. The Marshmallow Sofa. The Sunburst Clock. What you probably don’t realize is that the designer of these Mid-Century Modern icons spent decades living in obscurity, filling his upstate New York farmhouse with 300-some whimsical handmade paper sculptures of animals, Pre-Columbian and Southeast Asian figures, Cubist abstractions, and African masks.”
—  Lisa Hix, “Paper Wizard: Mid-Century Modern’s Unsung Visionary Gets His Due,” Collectors Weekly.