Sustainable Yada Yada Yada

This is a blog about sustainability, urban design, scientific and technological progress, and what the future may hold. As well as interesting or random stuff on occasion. I'll try my best to avoid politics!

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facts and figures on homeless in Philadelphia

Axios has some facts and figures on homeless in Philadelphia. This represents a snapshot in time (summer 2026). 5,163 total 4,676 using shelters (711 sleeping outdoors) The average number of homeless between 2019 and 2026 was about 5,100, with a peak just before the pandemic and slight decrease in 2026 compared to 2025. I have compassion for any homeless individual, particularly one sleeping…

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food shortages and system thinking

Some are still predicting dramatic food shortages on the horizon due to the U.S. war of aggression on Iran. I don’t doubt that this is possible. When headlines were suggesting this was imminent shortly after the war started in the spring (of 2026, in case you are reading this in the far future), I was asking myself if it made sense that fertilizer and pesticides coming out of the Middle East at…

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Invading a sovereign country is still illegal

I’ve been listening to some contrarian voices like John Mearsheimer, Michael Hudson, and Max Blumenthal on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I acknowledge the idea that aggressive NATO expansion and possible/probable CIA meddling in the 2014 Ukraine election were probably seen by Russian leadership as threatening. I respect Mearsheimer in particular, but I still strongly disagree with the idea…

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Spanish cities are great!

Spanish cities are great. That’s it, the entire thesis of this article. I haven’t been there. My favorite cities that I have been to are in the Netherlands. But the article says Spanish cities are fantastic across housing, transportation, walkability, public and open space, clear urban/rural boundaries, and affordability, although the latter is beginning to fray. Sign me up, I’m ready to go! One…

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malaria vaccine

There is a new (ish? to me?) malaria vaccine being used in Africa. It is effective but requires four doses over a period of months to remain effective long term, which presents some challenges. Researchers are working on a one-dose version.

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prediction markets

A site called Contrary Research has a deep dive on prediction markets. They are similar to sports betting and options trading mathematically, but different in terms of legal and regulatory treatment (which is constantly litigated and evolving). There are concerns about insider trading. Despite all this, I like them just because they give us some more data points to look at. On political events,…

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We want walkable neighborhoods...with big houses, big backyards, driveways, garages, and free parking

Survey after survey shows a shift in favor of Americans saying they want to live in walkable communities. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents said they would pay more to live within walking distance of parks, shops, and restaurants, according to the latest Community and Transportation Preference Survey from the National Association of Realtors®—shared first with Realtor.com®. But intelligent…

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July 2026 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The idea of a bursting AI investment bubble is pretty scary, especially to those of us approaching retirement. The recent boom in private capital spending seems to be the major thing propping up the US economy. The short-term stimulus effect is fairly obvious, but the question is whether the longer-term productivity effects the markets seem to be…

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more on Chinese EVs

Here’s another article (by an American who toured Chinese factories) on how great Chinese electric vehicles are, and how far behind American industry seems to be. So are we going to just keep protecting and bailing out our failing auto industry, while using propaganda to try to keep the public from realizing what we are missing out on? There are, apparently, some possibly legitimate concerns…

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homicide clearance rates in Philadelphia

Homicide clearance rates in Philadelphia are way up in 2026. I learned from this article that clearance rate is basically the number of arrest warrants issued on open homicide cases divided by the number of homicides during a calendar year. Some homicides get solved in later years, so it’s not a perfect measure of cases solved but it’s a reasonable proxy. The rate in 2025 was 71% compared to…

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Sebastian Mallaby

Sebastian Mallaby is a Washington Post columnist, among other things. I found this too-long-didn’t listen podcast had some interesting things (I skimmed the transcript – thank you to all podcasters who choose to post a transcript!). Here’s just one quote, but there is a lot in the article. So the case for believing that getting first to artificial general intelligence or AGI is the key metric is…

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Urban greening roundup

I have a bunch of urban planning, urban greening, landscape architecture and engineering journals in my RSS feed. Sometimes a lot of time goes by in between articles that I find interesting. But today an interesting cluster popped up, so here are a handful of highlights. The words below are my musings, not necessarily a summary of the papers. Click through if you are interested. From Landscape…

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the state of health in 1776

This article describes what even wealthy Americans would have gone through around the Revolutionary War era. Lice abounded. Bed bugs interrupted sleep. Scabies, ringworm, rashes from numerous unknown sources and unwashed skin was wrapped in clothing of stiff linen, smelly woolens or coarse calico. The byproduct was irritated, itchy skin with the discomfort of scratches, scabs and the stink that…

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leap seconds

This just in – the Earth’s rotation speed is not perfectly constant, and it has recently sped up. This has to do with tiny changes in the relative movements of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. It probably has always been happening and we have just recently developed the technology to measure it more accurately. …starting in 2016, Earth started to spin unusually fast. For instance, on July 4 of 2024,…

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Albert Einstein - not the nicest guy?

Albert Einstein might not have been a guy you would want to sit down and have a beer with. He was happiest thinking alone in a quiet room (or entire house). His first marriage sounds quite rocky, although it lasted 16 years and produced three children. His second marriage was to a cousin – a first cousin, their mothers were sisters and she did not have to change her name because it was already…

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the case for an AI bubble

I feel like I’ve been at least somewhat of a cheerleader for the AI boom, so let’s talk a little bit about the case for an AI bubble. The Guardian talks about it mostly in stock valuation terms, with a little discussion of corporate debt. In focus at the moment is the concentration of equity in just seven companies, the Magnificent Seven: Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Nvidia, Meta (Facebook),…

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the Dialog leak

Wired has published a leaked list of attendees to a conference organized by Dialog, a secret-ish group originally organized by Peter Thiel. It makes a fun seed for conspiracy theories, but I don’t think there is much here beyond another chance for the wealthy and powerful / Epstein class / tech bros / finance bros / military-industrial complex to get together and bask in each others’ presence.…

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