New York, New York...

This summer, I work with my friend Ken at Brown University. I'm in his home country first time, so we decided to visit as Frank Sinatra sings "New York, New York...", the so called Big Apple, and it was even close enough to get there (2-3 hours by train). And what do you think was the most exciting part for us in such anomalously big city ?
Geometry, of course!


We decided to go to Empire State Building observatory during the night, and it was the right thing to do, the city lights are just breath-taking! You can enjoy the full power of human civilisation in just one spot!
Now, I consider sunset to be even more exciting time to go, especially if you wait after it will get completely dark and lights start to appear slowly - as far as my imagination is right about it (just be prepared for a very long waiting line or simply pay extra fee for VIP pass through).
After listening to interesting audio tour with a lot of nice, but sometimes a bit fake/artificial impressions, like "I just looove this city, as a young boy I loooved to walk on Brooklyn Bridge, etc..." (similar style of making audio tour you can experience at Boston's Prudential Tower aka Skywalk Observatory), I noticed that, there are two interesting aspects you should take into account when developing... NY-like city generation algorithm.
Can you spot so called Flatiron Building on the photo ? This was the most inspiring example to me. Generally, I divided buildings into two categories: first contains bulidngs that shape fits into street design, the second category contains the rest (buildings that for some reasons, use inefficient amount of space - as Ken noticed). And what is apparent in New York, there are many buildings that efficiently and as many that are inefficiently occuping space between streets (and in general, there are too many of them ;)). Flatiron has sharp angle and is efficient, while there are some with angle more than 90 deg. (where Broadway cross Avenues at more than 90 deg. angle, just note the small building on the bottom-right), some are just square-shaped even if there is so much room around them. I was so excited about this discovery that I almost forgot to enjoy the view in ehm.. humanistic kind of way :)

Politics is about software development

As a computer scientist I know how hard it is to predict some processes, that are defined by set of rules. Treating our political and economical reality as a mathematical model doesn't give us any simple answers - many things are still very hard to predict (global crisis is a cliche now, but kind of related to it). Also regulations seem to be like a code that you can't change easily when you encounter a bug.
Recently I've heard about the idea of social revolution. I can imagine, we could make a revolution by rebooting the social system. Rewriting it from scratch.
It sounds like a good idea at a time when nobody really believes in those regulations (global crisis again). So why not? It would be a new world order you may say (and no wonder some people say that global crisis is made up on purpose by illuminati ;P).
The only problem that bothers me is how to make a new system stable. There are several ways to do it that works in computer software reality. One way is the concept of beta-testers. At the cost of losing productivity of the most brave users, they try to work with betas and figure out most of bugs. In new social model you should never accept political products if they are not at least release candidates. How to organize beta-testing though ? You might select a good sample of citizens or institutions (i.e. if you plan to change some adminstration service regulations start from one or two districts, but not all of them) and upgrade their system to beta with full support if something will fail (emergency service). It is much cheaper to provide emergency service to just a sample, than whole society, right ?
Amazingly changes "on a living organism" are still the most common practice.
The other point is: maybe it's a new (safe!) way of making revolution (aka bigger changes) ?