The Toilet Door

So one of the things on my mind is about cities and towns. Specifically, why do we always try and organically grow and modify a city to support a larger and larger population.

An alternative solution to overcrowding and overpopulation is to design a city from ground up to function and support a population of x  +/- y.  The city should be self sustaining. The total population x is the ideal number of inhabitants for the city, the ratios of population to roads, cars, health services, police services, legal services etc. The city however can accommodate some fluctuations in population as it's unlikely that birth and immigration rates will match death and emigration rates and this would be represented by y.

Ideally you want the population to remain at the same level with minor fluctuations indefinitely. So this means that we'd need to do some calculations on average life spans of citizens and average birth rates. The problem I suspect is that of the 4 factors affecting population, there's no way to easily directly control them all. It would be unethical to make people die sooner, so that option is out. People will naturally want to have children, so that's good, but there's no easy way to tell people that you must have a certain number of children (besides financial incentives or disincentives). All research seems to indicate that the average number of children goes down as education increases anyway. So effectively it would be necessary to control the population through immigration and emigration. Immigration presents challenges, firstly this city needs to have some qualities that make it more attractive than a different city. Employment opportunities, different laws, certain industries. Secondly, emigration can come one of two ways, either by the existence of a more desirable city for certain denizens, or forcefully by enacting laws and effectively kicking people out of the city. Kicking people out is unlikely to be looked upon kindly by anyone, so it's not really an option either.

So this leads me to my conclusion for now. How is it possible to maintain a stable population in an ideal city when the 4 factors affecting the population cannot be easily controlled, and the feedback for changes that can be made take years to realise.

So short update.

I've been playing around with LaTeX quite a lot. I'm really liking it's capability for producing and organising documents. What I've discovered is that figures created in LaTeX using TikZ are actually very good. Ideally I'd like all my figures done in TikZ in time, I know it's possible to draw them in powerpoint or inkscape but that often means that making a small change can be a bit trickier. It also means that symmetry and having objects placed efficiently and neatly together is a lot more work.

Enter TikZEdt. It is a WYSISWYG editor that also produces the code required for the TikZ figure

That is all for now.

So I'm teaching myself LaTeX which means it's taking me a while to update my blog because I don't want to just do a regular update if it doesn't include some fancy LaTeX stuff. Unfortunately, the formatting between what I'd use in something like writelatex.com. I haven't mastered it yet.

So I had some issues with my glasses. Fortunately got them eventually, was a long story. Currently fending off an annoying cold.

Just wanted to make an update.