Month: April 2005

It was such a nice day, I decided to take my Eight Year Old out for a bike ride. We drove out to Woodinville and headed for Marymoor Park in Redmond, about 6.5 miles.

It went pretty well: he was riding along just fine, we were checking out the farms, lots of tulips, some horses, and lots of people on the trail. Not all of them were careful, I suppose. We were just riding in Marymoor, crossing the bridge, when I took a look behind me to see where my riding buddy was. I didn’t see him right away, but I did see two adults, as close as close could be. I ended overcompensating into the rail, wedging my handlebar between uprights and breaking two teeth on the bridge deck, a long with various and sundry other scrapes and road rash. They were crowns, as it happens, but the impact was severe enough to break one of them at the gum line.

So I had an emergency root canal in an OR that was set up like a field hospital: things incomplete, mislaid, and generally hard to manage. The resident and the student(?) did a fine job, based on what they had to work with: since the tooth was broken off at the gum line, there was nothing else to do but dig out the nerve, seal the canal, and because they both had a refined sense of esthetics, remount the crown as best they could.

There’s nothing wrong at present that Vicodin won’t fix, but I have to see a dentist sooner than quicker, like tomorrow. This is patchwork at best.

While I was waiting for my prescriptions, I was chatting with a fellow sufferer who did way better than me: half a dozen or so stitches, a cervical collar, road rash all over the side of his head, a ripped jersey and lots o’ blood. I know right where he had his wreck and that’s why I don’t ever ride there. There are tree roots cracking the pavement, 3 and 4 inches high: they contributed to the wrist problems I was having, and they really are a menace. So all in all, it could have been much worse: we’re both going to need new helmets.

Not how I planned to spend the day, that’s for sure. My partner rode 13 miles, though, and did just fine. I’ll remember that part more clearly, I hope.

So suppose one of your body parts goes numb (no, not that one), say something like part of your foot.

When the inevitable question — “How long have you had this condition?” — comes up, what’s the answer?

Seriously, I noticed this afternoon that the outside of my left foot is numb: not like it’s asleep with that prickly sensation, just numb. I suspect it has something to do with my 18 mile bike ride yesterday, but I’ll see how it is in the morning.

No, I don’t know how long it’s been like that. It is the same foot where I broke my fifth metatarsal 6 years ago (on my son’s 2nd birthday) and it really hasn’t been quite right since.

From a Stewart Brand presentation, via Tim O’Reilly:

O’Reilly Radar > A World Made of Cities (1):

Every week in the world a million new people move to cities. In 2007 50% of our 6.5 billion population will live in cities. In 1800 it was 3% of the total population then. In 1900 it was 14%. In 2030 it’s expected to be 61%. This is a tipping point. We’re becoming a city planet.

One of the effects of globalization is to empower cities more and more. Communications and economic activities bypass national boundaries. With many national governments in the developing world discredited, corporations and NGOs go direct to where the markets, the workers, and the needs are, in the cities. Every city is becoming a “world city.” Many elites don’t live in one city now, they live “in cities.”

Massive urbanization is stopping the population explosion cold. When people move to town, their birthrate drops immediately to the replacement level of 2.1 children/women, and keeps right on dropping. Whereas children are an asset in the countryside, they’re a liability in the city. The remaining 2 billion people expected before world population peaks and begins dropping will all be urban dwellers (rural population is sinking everywhere). And urban dwellers have fewer children. Also more and more of the remaining population will be older people, who also don’t have children.

I conjured some with a diagram showing a pace-layered cross section of civilization, whose components operate at importantly different rates. Fashion changes quickly, Commerce less quickly, Infrastructure slower than that, then Governance, then Culture, and slowest is Nature. The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain. The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power.

I found the same diagram applies to cities. Indeed, as historians have pointed out, “Civilization is what happens in cities.” The robustness of pace layering is how cities learn. Because cities particularly emphasize the faster elements, that is how they “teach” society at large.

Interestingly, the lesson of the 2004 US election was not about red states vs blue states or “moral values” but about urban vs rural voters. Progressive, tolerant, diverse values are more likely to be found in cities (as well as in the people who live there).

I haven’t read this through but that section jumped out at me, especially as I remembered the election analysis/post-mortem.

Now playing: Money by The Buzzcocks from the album “A Different Kind of Tension” | Get it (2)