omenti

chindōgu flavored technologies

Chindōgu is the curious Japanese art form of inventing gadgets that seem to a clever solutions to  problems, but which end up causing more problems than they solve.  You may have seen examples like:

toilet paper dispenser hats: you never run out of tissue when you have to sneeze

baby mops: a baby outfit that also mops the floor

umbrella ties

many more .. search the Internet

 

To keep the art form pure you're not supposed to make money - almost guaranteed as the public will see the gadget as useless and won't buy it.  (there was a tragic mistake - the selfie stick started as chindōgu)  I know of an engineering professor who taught a course on creative engineering using it as a vehicle for student projects.

 

For a few years I've found it useful to extend the term to cover technical and social technical inventions that are seen as solving problems by the maker, but are clearly clueless.  A few examples from the past month:

Flat panel displays in cars are a bit of automotive chindōgu.

Blockchains are an example of computational chindōgu.

Meta's Horizon Worlds is pure techno-social chindōgu.

 

Perhaps you might find hunting for this kind of chindōgu useful.  I find it to be a nice way of thinking about what might represent meaningful and useful longterm change.  And of course sometimes you label things incorrectly and have to come back and rethink.  That may be even more useful.

 

And then there are potlatches..  the destruction of wealth to impress and gain status.  Fully autonomous (class five) vehicles, NFTs, Facebook's version of the meta verse, hydrogen powered cars ...  

 

 

 

 

 

the oscillating mind and the default mode network

666/(6 + 6 + 6) = 37

and

333/(3 + 3 + 3) = 37

37 and 73 are reversible primes , 37 is the 12^th prime and 73 is the 21^st - another reversible pair

and ....

and ....

and ....

 

It arrived in a lovely wooden box with polished brass hinges and was written in a nearly calligraphic hand. Skipping about fifty pages was the conclusion that said its author had found the number 37 was key to gravity and electromagnetism and was being unfairly ignored.

I thought about the first two statements for a few seconds  - they were of the form (100x + 10x + x)/3x  or 111x/3x = 37 for the integers x = 1 through 9.  No surprise.  

__________

 

Universities with famous physics professors get a lot of mail from people out to prove something.  The amount of effort is often as astonishing as how wrong the work is.  Some universities farm out this mail to upperclass undergrads and grad students as a filter as well as an education.  It's true that every once and awhile there's an unknown genius - Ramanujan's letter to Hardy being the most dramatic example in history - but those days are probably gone and Ramanujan was already known in India. 

 

Creativity isn't terribly useful without background and a level of competence. But where does it come from?  I'm certainly no neuroscientist, but talk to a few and there's quite a bit of new work going on these days.  Some of it is from fMRI imaging..  a technique that can map active areas in the brain while a person is thinking.  It seems most early work would have subjects were told to rest between tasks while new trials were prepared.  The machines are quite noisy and produced enough data that it only made sense to run them during the active trial.  Finally someone decided to look at what was going on when minds were just wandering.

 

Your brain accounts for about a fifth of your resting energy demand.  Surprisingly focusing and thinking deeply about something uses about the same energy as an unfocused wandering mind.   When fMRIs were finally used to look at the unfocused wandering state it was found the brain was lit up, often with widely separated areas firing at the same time.  It's known as the default mode network.  Mind wandering - like when you suddenly realize you can't remember anything about the past six miles you've driven - accounts for nearly half your waking mental state.  

 

Some cognitive neuroscientists - Moshe Bar for example - believe these ramblings may be associated with mood - ruminating ramblings and their connections can lead to worrisome states while creative wanderings can lead to happy moods (this is speculation and there are many other states). It's also noted that your more conscious states can range from exploratory to exploitatory.  You seem to be able to know when you should focus and get something done or be open to new things.  

 

Much of what Moshe says squares with how I think about creativity. That doesn't mean it's right, but it strikes this non-specialist as being on the right track.    I try to leave the day open and certain times and remove distractions to allow for small creative moments and put myself in the mood by drawing.   More important is building a supply of seemingly unrelated potential connections through reading, hobbies, travel, friends and so on.  In my case a curious set of friends is central.

 

The most creative organizations I know tend to have a number of foci and unrelated specialists.  I have a relation with one that has almost no overlap with what I do, but pre-pandemic they'd fly me out for a couple of days every year to wander around and drop in on their folks as well as give a little talk.  They seem to value it, but I'm the one who probably benefits the most.   In a few of these companies internal measures of creativity dropped during the pandemic.  Perhaps those semi-random face to face interactions are very important.  It's possible, but difficult, to recreate some of that online despite what Meta would try and tell you:-)

 

Of course there's a bit of speculation here and what works for one person may not for someone else. Major creative moments are rare, but at least we can make the smaller ones more likely.  And hopefully blending these moments of creativity with a background of expertise can be useful. 

 

I wish I could have kept the wooden box.  It was beautifully made. But its content made a big impression.

 

 

where nobody is average

The first military airplanes designed after WWII began to arrive in the late 1940s.  A number of these early jets were more complicated to fly and the number of incidents and accidents alarmed the military.  Incidents where something went wrong, but the pilot and aircraft came back safely, and accidents were more serious.  As the jets were mechanically more reliable than their piston powered WWII era cousins, it only seemed natural to blame pilot error.

 

A  few remarkable pilots would find themselves in a bad spot, but always manage to get themselves out of trouble - often saving the aircraft.  Chuck Yeager was the legendary master  and was sent to airbases to show pilots how to fly correctly.  But the fact was this was happening to very skilled pilots.  With pilot error and aircraft malfunction seen as less likely root causes, eventually cockpit design was questioned.

 

Military airplane cockpit measurements were based on an average of a few measurements of about a hundred airmen in the mid 1920s. Improved nutrition and larger pilots was suspected as changing the average, so a massive study was undertaken that took 140 measurements of nearly 4,100 pilots.  In theory this would lead to a better average cockpit.

 

Gilbert Daniels joined the medical division at Wright Patterson out of college and was one of the people tasked with making these measurements and coming up with averages.  It turned out he was biased.  In college he did some research trying to find an average hand size and found it impossible.  Sifting through the data he looked at ten measurements deemed most important for the cockpit and calculated an average range for each that included 30 percent of the measurements - a nice wide average.  The surprise was than none of the pilots fell within all ten of the wide averages.  Gilbert found if you picked any three of the ten, less than four percent of the pilots would be average.  No one was average.

 

It shouldn't have been a surprise. Women's clothing designers had known it for awhile - something attributed to women being "different."  Eventually the military believed Gilbert's work and mandated highly adjustable cockpits.  All new aircraft had to be adjustable for males in the 5 to 95 percentiles for each of about ten critical dimensions.  Airplane manufactures balked - "it can't be done",  but finally came around because .. well .. contracts.

 

The fifties saw more adjustability come to automotive interiors, but at a much slower and more incomplete pace than military aviation.  About ten years ago I found myself driving a friend's Japanese sports car on the Pacific Coast Highway.  A lovely car considered one of the best handling in the world, but I didn't fit - there was no way to adjust the seat or steering wheel enough.  I'm not particularly tall, but have short legs and a long torso.  I also have very long feet (in theory the right dimensions for a swimmer, but not my thing).  A few months later I was helping a friend move in a rented truck.  The same problem.  There weren't enough adjustments to prevent my feet from getting caught near the pedals.  And then there's automobile safety.  The instrumented dummies used in crash tests cover less than a quarter of adults bringing into question the tests themselves.  

 

And it's not just physical differences.  'What color is the dress?' became a popular question as people legitimately came to different conclusions.  Tonal language native speakers are much more likely than other populations to have "perfect pitch."  Some people are purely visual thinkers, but most are a mixture of audio and visual.  There are people with very poor stereo vision - I know one who is an animator.   Increasingly "on the spectrum" is a meaningless construct.  Our brains have so many differences - so many dimensions - that it's likely none of us are truly "normal."  This has become an issue in fMRI studies recently. For example studies showing differences between men and women are often in the noise and meaningless. The field will eventually get more rigor.  You really need to know what dimension you're measuring.

 

Finally there's neuroplasticity.  We know that kids undergo huge changes in neural connectivity as they grow and some areas of the brain aren't stable until the mid 20s.  (I have a neurological condition that is believed to have resulted from an incomplete severing of neural connections when I was a baby.  It isn't a big thing, but is different enough to be worthy of study).  One seen as stopping around 30, neuroplasticity is seen throughout life, albeit at different rates.  There are examples of dramatic repurposing of regions of the brain.  Helen Santoro's missing left temporal lobe is one of the more dramatic examples.

 

Differences are a feature.

 

 

 

that energy thing

Patent reading is something I avoid as recreation.  They're written in a humorless formal style that's perhaps a shade more entertaining than Vogon poetry.   Sometimes you have to go through them trying to sort out the claims and their feasibility.  I generally translate them into images and numbers I can understand in the process of plowing through.  It was during that process that my jaw dropped.  Someone had successfully patented something that was clearly impossible.  It violated the underlying physics - the patent office usually catches these mistakes early on.  Someone had already spent a fair amount of change. At least I could alert my client.

 

The patent was trying to harvest waste energy.  That's all and good - more of it should be done, but it claimed to be more efficient that was possible.  

 

A good deal of engineering is concerned with efficiency.  The story of the steam portion of the Industrial Revolution amounted to increasing the efficiency of extracting energy from fossil fuels.  Steam engines are a case in point.  There was a huge need for them pumping water from mines and the early engines made an impact even though they were extremely expensive to run. James Watt and others came up with clever hacks and improvements continued for over two centuries. (The chart shows how much energy can be extracted from a kilogram of coal.  The highest level corresponds to an efficiency in the mid forty percent region)

 

There are many forms of energy... heat, light, motion, electric, chemical, nuclear, gravitational , and so on. These are usually grouped into two types when considering how work is done:  kinetic and potential.   In general something happens when energy moves from one form to another.   But what is energy?  The dictionary and some high school science texts say it's the capacity to do work.   OK .. so what's work?   Dictionaries often say it's a measure of energy transfer when an object is moved.    Nothing like circular arguments, eh?  During the 19th century the definition was a point of contention in physics, but before going into that consider a roller coaster.

 

Roller coasters are great ways to explain the transfers between kinetic and potential energy.  If there wasn't any friction or wind resistance you could start a car off at the highest peak and it would move around the track coming back to where it started.  Gravitational potential energy would turn into kinetic energy as the car dropped and the kinetic energy would turn back into potential energy as it went uphill.  Of course there is friction from the wheels against the track and air resistance. The wheels, axle bearings and track heat up, pieces vibrate, air swirls and sound is generated.  If you add all of these up you can account for the total energy of the system.  You might even be able to harvest some of these, but in general that's a difficult task.

 

Much has been and is being done on recovering lost energy.  Regenerative braking in electric cars, using waste heat from power plants to heat buildings (combined heat and power), etc.  Unfortunately there are limits to how much can be recovered.  As the waste heat is closer in temperature to its surroundings, the less efficient extraction will be.  This was a fatal error in the patent I looked at.  It assumed air temperature was much colder than it really is. 

 

Back to a definition of energy.  Emmy Noether showed that for every conserved quantity in physics there's a corresponding symmetry and visa versa.     Noether's theorem is central to physics.  It's one of those things that makes you gasp when you first realize how it works.  Among other things it shows time invariant processes are those that conserve energy.  If you fall off a building at noon or two o'clock the result will be the same.  Falling under the influence of gravity doesn't depend on time and energy is conserved. Unfortunately really diving in requires some serious math.   You can get an idea of what's going one from this non-mathematical discussion by a physics grad student.  So if you're curious and remember some high school physics:

 

In the meantime note that we waste an incredible amount of energy.  Not only are we staring down the barrel of global warming, but paying for energy is expensive by itself.  There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there.  The problem is often getting people to imagine.

 

digging in a bit deeper

He would see something familiar in a cloud, the habit of a tree,  or a splatter of mud and use it as inspiration for one of his stories.  Lloyd loved stories.  Growing up, his would make up new stories to tell each other twice a month and, as an adult, he continued the tradition with his own family and the neighborhood kids.  I was one one of those kids. 

 

One night both of our families were camped near Two Medicine Lake on a spectacularly clear and dark June night.  The mountains cut pitch black outlines into the starry sky with new stars bursting into view as the Earth rotated. So many stars were visible it was difficult to find some of the constellations so Lloyd made up some of his own and started into his storytelling.  But two constellations survived - the Big and Little Dippers.  They were so well known to everyone that it was difficult seeing something else.   My contribution to the evening was pointing out some dark patches in the Milky Way. Like the mountains that seemed to be eating the sky and one looked like a galloping horse - enough to launch Lloyd on one of his ten minute excursions into fantasy.

 

Pareidolia is something familiar in otherwise unrelated objects.  It's seeing the face on the Moon or a bunny rabbit in a cloud.  It's a type of apophenia - our tendency to look for patterns in information.  Sometimes the patterns are there, often they're not.  The trick is to take a critical empirical look at the underlying information.  Exactly what is it? How was it measured and what steps were used to interpret it?  (this is where machine learning can fail  .. it's not just bad data sets).

 

Let's go back to the constellations - Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, in particular. Early on we learn that, with the help of culture, we're just finding familiar patterns as we connect the dots.  Stars are usually at different distances and brightnesses.  We're giving up the third dimension.  Nothing to see here .. or is there?

 

For years I considered the constellations to be nothing more than useful human constructions for finding one's way around the sky.  Ursa Major turns out to be special when you dig a bit deeper.  If you ignore Alkaid, the end of the handle, and Dubhe, the furthest point on the bucket, the remaining stars are all just a bit more than 80 light-years from Earth.   They also have the same proper motion - they're moving in the same direction at about the same speed.  Use a telescope and look at the distance and proper motion of dimmer stars you find over fifty that make up a physical cluster.  Spectroscopically they're very similar.  It looks like they were formed from the same dense cloud of gas about a half billion years ago - just after the Cambrian explosion on Earth.  With the exception of Alkaid and Dubhe they've moved in a slowly expanding formation and will continue along their way for some time 

 

And for years I thought the grouping must be nothing more than a human construct. A more critical look exposes a richer story.

 

 

 

 

communicating scale

Moonrise Kingdom by the wonderfully clever Wes Anderson is up there in my top ten list of films.  Anderson's films have strong visual and musical themes in addition to the storytelling.  A major theme by Alexandre Desplat repeats a few times.   Near the end of the film, in a homage to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, it's narrated by a child.  Individual instruments are identified and the listener gets a sense of textures and scale they build in combination. (go to part 7 at around 13 minutes .. the YT version of The Heroic Weather Conditions of the Universe  is low quality.  Try it on a high quality streaming service.  I recommend Apple's  .. if you subscribe.  I configure for lossless. )

So where am I going with this?  

 

It turns out we're bad - make that really bad - at recognizing the number of objects visually.  Most of us can tell the different between six and seven randomly arranged objects instantly, but it quickly falls apart at larger numbers.  We end up relying on other proxies, but it's difficult to get a gut feeling.  For example - the Sun's diameter is about 107 times that of the Earth. I sense that as really big, but I need to see a visual model to grasp it.  And how do you communicate something like the diversity of an ecosystem to the non-technical voting public?  Can you make an emotional connection?

 

Listening to CBC's wonderful weekly science program Quirks and Quarks came an answer that made me think of the music in Moonrise Kingdom.  Listen to the A scientist recreates avian soundscapes so we can hear what we're missing segment in the 21st of May edition. 

 

who are you going to call?

Drop two pieces of bread into the toaster and push the lever down.  You go about your business getting the rest of breakfast ready and then, after a few minutes, two pieces of toast pop up.  Have you ever thought about what's going on?

 

We usually think about the toaster receiving the bread and giving it back to us after a few minutes - electric heating somehow.  Someone from a few thousand years ago might wonder where the bread came from and what kind of magic transformed it into something similar but different after a few minutes.  He might wonder if the lever was some kind of prayer or incantation.  We can examine the process at a variety of levels and can find considerable depth.  We know the cord is plugged into a socket which has a path though a series of transformers and wires that usually lead to a generator that is turned by spinning a turbine with falling water or steam superheated by nuclear fission or the burning of fossil fuels.  When the switch goes on the load on the generators increases by a bit more than we're using.  The steps required advances small and large over the decades in science and technology.   For example getting the of generation and transmission of electricity to work efficiently depends on an understanding of Maxwell's equations and a fair amount of math.  

 

We don't think about these things because we trust them. There's a solid bedrock of reliable knowledge in much of our technology even though we're not one hundred percent sure of the science.  Our trust in science is nearly universal even though some of us chose to deny certain aspects.  Global warming deniers and flat earthers have no problem using the Internet - computer mediated communication built on silicon based semiconductor technology, fiber optics and much more.   Their mistrust is often based on something in their personal value system that to first order may seem orthogonal to the scientific arguments.

 

Not many people have a good handle on how science is done and how it progresses.  Many of us had to memorize the steps in "the scientific process" in elementary school, but it turns out it's messy and there's no formal process.  In college you may have come across Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts. Both of these models have been shown to be wrong.  The view among many scientists and philosophers of science is science is more or less makeshift, but produces reliable knowledge and tends towards self-correction and reliable knowledge over time.

 

A few years ago a few lectures by Naomi Oreskes at Princeton gave me the basis of something I'm more comfortable with even though it's not complete. She argues reliable knowledge is based on five factors:  method, evidence,  consensus, values and humility.  I won't go into these as each is a deep subject, suffice it to say that the last three are deeply social - something many "hard" scientists tend to have a difficult time admitting.  Science is deeply collaborative and these social aspects often determine what is worked on as well as how it, and the people who did it, are perceived. 

 

Although most people trust much of science, personal and group values can get in the way of trusting certain aspects as well as certain scientists.  We've witnessed this up close with the pandemic, global warming and evolution.  I worry that many scientists have made a mistake by hiding their values (that's changing with some of us) as well as separating science and technology.  The separation of science and technology was value based and began to become dominant after WWII. Somehow science was to be the pure pursuit of nature even though it's linked to technology at the hip.  Often technologists are well versed in the science underlying their work and some venture into applied science.  Scientists, particularly experimentalists, are by necessity amateur technologists.  I've done some technology and have a bit of a feel for it, but I'm certainly not skilled - I do much better on the science side.  I'm in as much awe of great technologists as I am of great scientists. 

 

A final point.  Who should you trust to do science?  If the light in your house keep going out when you plug the toaster in, it probably makes sense to call a licensed electrician.  When a pipe in your house bursts spewing out gallons per minute, you call a licensed plumber and not an electrician or dentist. A trip to the dentist and not the Ghostbusters is in order when you hit a cherry pit in a piece of pie and a tooth falls out.  And when you're thinking of the long term - say your children's lives - listening to experts on global warming makes sense while listening to Mobil-Exxon or the Farmer's Almanac doesn't.  In each of these areas there are mostly good players and a few bad ones. You find the good ones from the consensus of their community. 

 

things aren't always what they seem

I was asked why I didn't do a Pi day post. Sadly I didn't have any pie to celebrate, but  I'll try and make up for it a bit late.

 

π is a wonderful number. Deeply related to so much as well as being irrational and transcendental. But it turns out I’ve never needed more than five or six digits. Randall Munroe (xkcd) nails it:

 

 

 

My sophomore quantum mechanics professor liked to add a few math problems to homework assignments. Nothing deep, but unusual to encourage critical thinking. On the 14th of march he gave a pop quiz. We had twenty minutes to calculate the probability that the ratio of two random numbers x and y, where each is between 0 and 1, is even.

 

It turned out this was his Pi day fun. (he was Swedish where Pi day would be the 22nd of July, but he used the American date convention). He didn’t grade it - either you saw it immediately or 20 minutes wasn’t long enough.  He served apple pie afterwards. Apple, of course, for Newton although I’ve though cherry more appropriate as Einstein loved cherry pie and the 14th of March was his birthday.

 

Here's how I approached it:

 

 

I’m summing the areas for regions for ratios closest to even integers for all even integers by measuring triangles. The area for the region closest to 0 is 1/4, 2 is (1/3 - 1/5), 4 is (1/7 - 1/9) ... there’s a clear pattern. The pattern is almost the expansion of the arctangent of 1 which happens to be π/4.   Adding 1 gets us there.   The probability the ratio is even is 1/4 + 1 - π/4 or (5 - π)/4.  

 

A more important point is things aren't always what they seem.  Not only does π turn up, but our intuition about the answer was wrong.  The component for 0 isn't symmetrical and that leads to a 46.46% percent probability rather than 50%.    

 

Obvious first guess are often wrong and can lead to enormous problems.  We're bad at probability and risk analysis.  Not exactly a good thing given technology.

 

flavors of augmented reality

Augmented reality has been with us for a long time.  Glasses and contact lenses turn the eye into a two element lens to correct issues with our eye's lens.  We use sunglasses to change the intensity and/or polarization of incoming light.  Some of these are responsive to changes in the scene around us.  Some of us wear hearing aids.  A few use assistive animals like seeing eye and epilepsy dogs. 

 

Some of these applications like glasses have fixed characteristics. Others like dogs can be highly adaptable.   Apple offers good example of computationally adaptive AR with AirPods and the cameras on iPhones and iPods.  The technical press tends to describe AR as overlaying a computational display - often information from the cloud keying on local state information like who you are, what you're interested in, your location, and so on.  

 

As it happens reality is much richer than what we experience with our senses.  Visible light is only a tiny segment of the electromagnetic spectrum and soundscapes are much richer. There can be any number of useful and recreational explorations into the larger reality - science does this all the time.  Wearable AR can open up wider videos into the incredible richness of reality itself.

 

It's been interesting watching Apple's shift in how they position their watch.  At first there seemed to be an assumption that it was a fashion accessory like a normal watch with some extra complications.  After a few generations it evolved into a health and safety wearable.  Initially Apple's visual AR device will probably offer simple visual overlays that you might see on a smartphone but with time I suspect it develop a strong health component that will be a major attraction.  People with serious glaucoma could get a view of the areas their eyes are missing.  As displays get better perhaps a visual AR wearable could replace glasses entirely matching your prescription and becoming a computational tool with the tricks we see in computational photography.  "zoom to the moving target and slow motion..." or "reduce glare from the water.."    It's easy to sit down and come up with a dozen ideas that aren't games.  The list gets even richer when you start linking in other sensors. 

 

We'll see wearable AR used in many modes, but I suggest the augmentation of local reality will be very important in ways we don't yet appreciate.  There are a lot of hurdles that make me think early devices will be crippled, but after a decade this could be a very rich area indeed.

 

 

 

 

 

meshes and trees

A few weeks ago an unexpected email arrived from Germany.  A physics postdoc and had come across an ancient transition radiation detector in storage at CERN a few months before.  It seemed like it could be useful in an experiment her group was thinking about. She had a few questions and it turned out I was the best person to talk to.

 

Many people think science is done with sparkling new state-of-the-art kit.  A few pieces perhaps, but very old equipment is updated, repaired and repurposed where it might be useful.  An experiment I was part of in the early 80s required a very large magnet.  The best bet was one that had been a cyclotron at Berkeley fifty years earlier.  It worked well,  but we had to tap into institutional knowledge that had migrated out of physics entirely.  That knowledge combined with technology that hadn't been invented at the time gave us something fantastic.  

 

I have no idea how my old detector made its way from Brookhaven National Laboratories to CERN.  The documentation and lab books were packed with it, but they made assumptions that the people who built it would be involved.   That meant me.  I asked for photos of some of the lab book pages and then it came back.  I listened to her ideas, offered some suggestions and wished we had her experience back then..  Of course that experience came years later.

 

These interactions spanning several decades may not be common, but twenty year interactions of hardware, software and people.  It's all a mesh.  Old apparatus islands that have been repurposed and grafted onto new apparatus.  It's an organic process that's difficult to map out and impossible to predict.   Diagrams it would look like flocks of meshes that are grafted together with a lot of institutional knowledge.  No one has a complete picture and local expertise is critical.  A team sport spanning decades.  It isn't easy, but it works.

 

Last week I came across something by Frank Oppenheimer in the 30s:

 

 

 

It's one of the better commentaries I've seen on how science progresses.  The same is probably true for many other fields.  I suspect it's true for any infrastructure involved in messy and complex endeavors where creativity and insight come into play.  

 

I've been fascinated watching the techno-solutionist approach to cities - the so-called smart city.  These are often based on a "start with internet and build up" model.  They try to measure everything and automate control.  Sensors embedded everywhere and tree-like computational structures making decisions to smooth out - well - everything.  A fundamental problem is we don't know what is being measured and what the biases - social and technical - are.   A simple truth I've learned from my exposure to sports science is you have to know exactly what's being measured and exactly where it is useful. (duh!)   Often current measurements and/or models just don't work.  Something complex like a city is that on steroids with the tree-like information structures introducing a certain rigidity.

 

There are a few types of people who thrive in the messy environment of a city.  Impedance matchers - those who can connect and explain across disciplines, and synthesizers come to mind.  (many others too - artists for example)  They respond to intellectual and system friction and help spark creativity. They're ground zero essentials for  creativity and invention.  I have doubts that the techno-solutionist cities can be terribly creative in the long run.

a song by Malvina Reynolds comes to mind