Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Complexity Science and Social Systems
The New England Complex Systems Institute recently had a a webinar titled, “2024 Election and Complexity Science: Insights for Collective Action and Governance.“ As I do with most YouTube videos, I asked Claude to summarize it for me and then asked questions about it. I often keep notes on interesting conversations, but this seems relevant…
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A Local Bookstore Profile
In August 2022, my wife and I relocated to Oregon to purchase a local bookstore. What better way to understand local economic development than directly struggling with it? The store had been in the community for 40 years as Laurie’s Paperback Exchange. Its business model was essentially exchanging inexpensive paperbacks. As you can imagine, there…
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Touring Poundbury
Last month, I attended the 2023 International Making Cities Livable conference as a speaker and presented a paper titled “Public Understanding and Adoption of Ecological Placemaking Principles through Simulation and Gaming.” The conference was hosted in Dorchester and Poundbury in the UK. The subject of the conference was more generalized urban ecology but was specifically…
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Rezoning for Student Housing near UT Dallas
The image above is an image from UT Dallas’ Master Plan. The subject parcel of this post is specifically designated “Potential Future Acquisition”. Yesterday was a City Planning Commission meeting to consider whether a landowner will be able to build off-campus student housing nearby UT Dallas. Normally it sounds boring and fairly straightforward. Not this…
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Realigning a Toastmasters District
As a fun side project, I decided to write some code to realign my Toastmasters district. I’m also on the realignment committee so the project will hopefully get some real-world use. For reference, I’ve posted the code here on GitHub: https://github.com/LouisRBurns/Toastmasters_district_realignment The technical details for implementing it are there. Here, I wanted to reflect on…
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A Letter to the Texas Redistricting Committee
I apologize that I haven’t posted anything in about a year because, you know, pandemic. I’ll catch up on what I’ve been doing later but I wanted to drop a note that I’m back at it. I got an email from Fair Vote today encouraging us to write our state legislators and ask them to…
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Starting to Playtest the Walkability Game
I finished printing out a set of pieces, wrote some rules, and we finally began playtesting. The goal of playtesting is to figure out what adjustments you need to make to make the game work better. See where the sticking points are. Figure out if the game is unbalanced for certain players or strategies. At…
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More Building Models and Maps
I’ve gone through a couple more iterations of building types and now the maps. I’ve also started working on the next version of the mechanics and rules. One of the central challenges of the game is to integrate community well-being with economic development. That’s essentially internalizing an externality. In other words, recognizing a systemic value…
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Prototyping Game Building Types with 3D Printing
For the game I’m developing, I’m prototyping a selection of the different building types available from the Missing Middle housing types. There is also Missing Middle retail building types: I’m trying to capture the essence of these dynamics in the game. I’m partial toward fourplexes for a number of reasons I wrote about earlier. Accessory…
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Fourplexes and Flexibility
Fourplexes have many advantages for communities and their residents. Some of the advantages, when compared generally to single-family on the same parcel size, are: Higher property values and tax income Promote the density needed for retail investment and therefore walkability Great first-time investor owner-occupied opportunities (aka house hacking) Consolidated maintenance Can be financed through single-family…
Got any book recommendations?