Last week I posted The most amazing “You Are Here” map you’ve ever seen, which featured a map that referred to itself. In the closing paragraph I referred to a book—Godel, Escher, Bach—on recursion. I’d read and reread the book in the 1980s and it stuck with me. Not sure if anything would come of it, I wrote the author, Douglas Hofstadter, with a link. Beyond writing back that he[…] Keep reading →

I live in Greenwich Village. Here’s an old map of the neighborhood: It’s a tall building. From the roof, I can see across the street to a playground for a school between a couple brick buildings: You probably see marked on the ground the two basketball half-courts on the left and the blue track that curves beside them. You’ll also see a colorful block pattern inside the track. Let’s look[…] Keep reading →

Can we grow enough forests and use enough regenerative agriculture to sequester enough carbon to undo global warming? To answer this question you have to understand the two carbon cycles. I’m simplifying, but you can think of two different cycles of carbon. One is the regular life cycle of carbon-based life forms. When something lives, it contains carbon, including trees, humans, and everything living in dirt and the oceans. When[…] Keep reading →

Posting yesterday that Eating something healthy doesn’t offset something unhealthy suggested a parallel with polluting. People dream that if they do polluting things, they can do something nonpolluting to average it out, as if carbon offsets or recycling had negative pollution that averaged with flying’s positive pollution to zero pollution. Offsets don’t negative pollute. They’re nice, but they don’t put pollution we took from underground back underground permanently. You can’t[…] Keep reading →

People dream that if they eat unhealthy things, they can eat something healthy to average it out, as if broccoli had negative unhealthiness that averaged with ice cream’s unhealthiness to zero unhealthiness. Broccoli isn’t negative unhealthy. It’s normal. There is no negative unhealthiness. You can’t undo eating something unhealthy. If you’re just worried about empty calories, you can exercise, but it won’t undo all the unhealthiness of the ice cream.[…] Keep reading →

“Everyone could fit in Texas with room to spare,” people naively say, as if it was the relevant measure. Sadly, some who hear them don’t realize that a person needs a lot more space than just their person. They need farmland to grow their food, water to process their waste, and so on. When you factor all those things in, we need more space than exists on Earth. One big[…] Keep reading →

Following up my last video on what American culture is doing to what could be one of its jewels, here is a shorter, punchier view of Washington Square Park today. The quote, “Pride Destroyed the Park,” comes from a woman who stopped me while I was taking pictures to tell me the park had 10 times more garbage a few hours earlier. Several people told me so. You can see[…] Keep reading →