Health is a product of genes, environment, and inputs, particularly air, food, and liquids. Genetics are beyond the scope of City governance, so the place where the greatest leverage is available is the health of the human environment. In the natural environment, humans have created a built environment in which they live, work, and play. The quality of that environment determines to a great degree whether people get ordinary exercise throughout every day, and whether clean air, healthy food, and abundant clean water are readily available. The vast network of cars and trucks in the City...

not alone From Aeon magazine: We don’t know what all this means. Or if it means anything at all. We know that we’re made of little parts that connect us to everything in the Universe, to the beginning of everything. And this is kind of a nice thought: You are not alone, you never were, and you never will be. NEXT

Quantum numbers Jillion, gajillion, zillion, gazillion. Perhaps in quantum weirdness we should use quillion. Or qillion, to add a touch of Strangeness.

dream Lewis Carroll said Ever drifting down the stream-- Lingering in the golden gleam-- Life, what is it but a dream? Or as millions of people, maybe billions down through time, suggest Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream. NEXT

believe Eleanor Roosevelt said “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” That is, the beauty of our dreams propels us to create our futures, literally, from energy and information mixed together by intelligence/consciousness over a period of time. NEXT

motive John D. Rockefeller said once: “God gave me my money.” That’s an interesting perspective and full of mystery given the unreality of money: a concept commonly manifested on paper and used to persuade people to do things or give things to you. After all, humans did everything it took to extract resources from the Earth to construct a massive rocket that would take three men to the Moon. It is said we could do that because the United States is rich. That is, the United States could “throw money” at the project. Certainly, the humans who collectively created the intellectual...

Very large numbers of houston's jobs are clustered around freeway intersections. Commuters - people going to and from work - need convenient, frequent service among those centers without needing their own cars, and not just morning and afternoon but all day. The infrastructure to deliver such transit service already exists and already belongs to the public. In the map above, 23 of the top 25 job centers in the Houston region are shown linked by transit ways in freeways or tollways. The section colored green - I-10 west - is a model for the network. The process to convert center...

The underlying principles of walkable urbanism are these: 1. The basic building block of a community is the neighborhood. A neighborhood standing alone can be a village or a small town. A cluster of neighborhoods forms a bigger town. Clusters of many neighborhoods make up a city. 2. The neighborhood is limited in physical size, with a well-defined edge and a center. The size of a neighborhood is usually based on the distance that a person can walk in five minutes from the center to the edge — a quarter-mile. Neighborhoods have a fine-grained mix of land uses, providing opportunities...

purpose Clearly, as people study this stuff and have insights, they go off on tangents and to the extent such people communicate about their knowledge and wisdom the discussion then becomes both clearer and more impossible. For instance, if we are all combined in one universal consciousness thing then what, exactly, are we trying to do? Or what should we do? Doesn’t this state of things suggest that we can basically think our way out of any dilemma and create any Universe we want? Some scientists think we can create other universes and are working on how to do that. Just what we need. Should...

Buddha mindfulness Buddha spoke of “mindfulness” and that is translated as “awareness.” He taught that you have to work on it and to the extent you work on it the more mindful or aware you become. That implies people can learn awareness, which suggests that many people who seem not to have much of it just don’t bother. Blame bad drugs, alcohol, television, car envy, whatever. Trouble and conflict derive from the scale of difference in awareness. NEXT