**This week’s random notes, as we re-learn how to do things in these uncertain times. (I intentionally choose to avoid one thing on everyone’s minds).
This week I have finished “The Language of Cities” by Deyan Sudjic - a delightful little book that should probably be classified as musings on what makes a city. The most fascinating discovery from the book was how humans try to create artificial / ‘planned cities’ and how rarely these projects result in success. Here is the list I found of famous planned cities:
Liuzhou, China, Forest City
But many many new cities are going up. Hundreds of entirely new cities have been sprouting up across Asia and Africa since the early 2000s. They are totally new dots on the map with names like Putrajaya, Naypyidaw, Nanhui, Kangbashi, Dompak, and Khorgos. There is a Forest City, a King Abdullah Economic City, a Blue City, a Gracefield Island, a Tbilisi Sea New City , a Port City, a Waterfall City , and, yes, even a Robotic Future City. In all, over 40 countries — such as Malaysia, Nigeria, China, Morocco, India, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Oman, Kazakhstan, and Kenya — have dumped billions of dollars into developing new cities from the ground up. Indonesia alone is busy at work constructing no less than 27 new cities. China is without a doubt the global epicenter for new city building, having established more than 600 new cities since the Communist Party came to power in 1949 and it’s doing it in the ‘2.0 style of city construction’. I found documentaries about Songdo and Duqm, but I am certain I have only scratched the surface, as Wikipedia lists a significant number of past and future’ planned cities’ .
The new city building movement that we are currently in the middle of is one of the most under the radar and most misinterpreted social and economic developments happening in the world today. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested as new dots are being emblazoned upon the map.
Remember the Joy of Painting? Remember [Bob Ross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ross)? Talking about pre-Youtube era of how-to tutorials and “with me” movement. Nevertheless, I think his encouragement and style of speaking should definitely serve as inspiration for contemporary content-creators. As I winded-down that rabbit hole, it was delightful to read some little known facts about Joy of Painting as well as NYT piece “[Where Are All the Bob Ross Paintings? We Found Them”
“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy” “The count of Monte Cristo” by Alexander Duma
This week during the struggle to co-edit an online excel spreadsheet with my co-workers over a video conference, the name Martin Shkreli came up. Apparently YouTube is full of videos showing ‘Excel Magic’ of Shkreli doing magic with the spreadsheets. I did not know who he was, so I took to watch a YouTube summary about him. Yes, I was not very impressed with his Excel spreadsheets, as my business school classmates, in my humble opinion, had a much more superior skills of this craft.
Douglas Engelbart is the engineer credited with the invention of the computer mouse, hypertext and email. In 1968, Engelbart demonstrated the potential of all these new tools at an event called “The mother of all demos” where Brand was operating a remote computer. This cross-fertilization between utopian speculation, physics and mathematics is fascinating to watch and shows how far we came and I am not sure if Mr. Engelbart could envision ‘Elevator Pitch’.
