🚀 go-pugleaf

I apologize to those of you in the first four groups who've seen this and
I'm throwing a monkey wrench into references, but in the interest of getting
things in front of all those who might be interested...

[And yes I know I'm violating the net.guideline that new text should be at least
 as long as quoted material, but I hope you all understand.]


In article <l327lvINNd4g@jethro.Corp.Sun.COM> jdr@starflight.Corp.Sun.COM writes:
>In article 92Jun5201150@SAIL.Stanford.EDU, jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy) writes:
>> My main objection to Dantzig's compact city, other than that compact
>> cities are entirely unnecessary in the next 100 years, is that in
>> order to make efficient uses of facilities, they are scheduled 24
>> hours per day.  Everyone has a phase, i.e. his schedule of using
>> the different facilities.  Presumably the members of a family
>> would all have the same phase.  If people of different phases
>> wanted to marry, at least one of them would have to abandon his
>> own family.  One of the first things people wanted to do at the
>> end of World War II was to get rid of shift work and put almost
>> everyone on the same phase.
>> 
>> Why does Jon Roland believe that the high efficiency of the compact
>> city is required?
>> --
>> John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
>
>24-hour phased utilization of facilities was something Dantzig suggested,
>but it is not essential to the design. I would envision such cities operating
>much like cities do now, with some facilities operating 24 hours a day and
>others not.
>
>For why I think such efficiency is required, see my posting "Thirty-Seven
>Percent Rule", an attempt to put into simple, grade-school arithmetic terms
>a way to get order-of-magnitude estimates of the materials-retention
>efficiency required to support a given sustention period. In more immediate
>terms, it can be argued that much of the suffering people are enduring today
>is the result of the inefficient ways we are investing our capital, and
>most of that inefficiency arises from sprawl.
>
>Unless you simply don't care about people beyond a century from now, then we
>can't wait until compact cities become essential to begin building them.
>I estimate that we can probably not afford to build more than about one such
>city a year, for a million inhabitants each, over the next hundred years,
>and providing a capacity for 100 million persons is probably a minimum needed
>to support a vital civilization thereafter.
>
>---
>
>jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
>Jon Roland
>Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
>Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141
>


-- 
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 Ken Sheppardson                                       kcs@leland.stanford.edu
 Dept of Engineering-Economic Systems                   on graduate leave from
 Stanford University                              NASA-Langley Research Center