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Modern cities modelled as “super-cells” rather than multicellular organisms
- dr_dshiv 5y agoBrah, no way. If you get stoned on an airplane, you shall see that highways distinctly resemble veins and arteries. Cells don't have circulatory systems. Bam. My model fits better with Superorganism. Now, let me write a paper and invent words to rival your "eukarcity" and "cityplasm".
- gumby 5y agoYour work should cause you to cruise through tenure review.
- rubatuga 5y agookay dr dshiv, what about cytoskeletons, microtubules, filaments, and their associated proteins such as dynein? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intracellular_transport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intracellular_transport
- thanatos519 5y agoThose are building-level infrastructure. Girders, pneumatic tubes, elevators, staircases, segways ...
- dr_dshiv 5y agoI love intracellular transport videos like this. I want to see them set to Philip Glass: https://youtu.be/5dVIAISw68U https://youtu.be/5dVIAISw68U https://youtu.be/6aMq6dZkMyQ https://youtu.be/6aMq6dZkMyQ
- telesilla 5y agoNext best thing, animated DNA : https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY
- monsieurbanana 5y agoI have no words. This is fascinating. This conveys how mind blowing complex our body is better than anything I've seen before.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoIt's a computer based on vibrations. Every molecule has a different intrinsic oscillation!
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoReminds me of the game Factorio, but in 3D instead of 2, and under water.
- baq 5y agoThis single video could replace a whole month of boring biology lessons in high school… amazing really
- matheusmoreira 5y agoATP synthase! https://youtu.be/kXpzp4RDGJI https://youtu.be/kXpzp4RDGJI https://vcell.science/project/atpsynthase https://vcell.science/project/atpsynthase I think of it as a hydroelectric power plant. Hydrogen atoms are water, the electrochemical gradient is gravity and the enzyme is the turbine.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoI need me some proteins walking microtubules videos. Little damn machines almost make you want to believe in intelligent design, but natural selection and physics are just right to make it awesome.
- carapace 5y agoHeard of Michael Levin yet? :) ("What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 ) The work coming out of his lab seems to me to indicate that intelligence is ambient in living tissue, with the corallary that living systems are designed by intelligence: their own.
- failwhaleshark 5y agoYeap. ;-)
- matheusmoreira 5y agoAnd maps of cities are like histology slides.
- jameshart 5y agoNah, Sam Vimes in Guards Guards had it all worked out. And he was lying in a gutter at the time. “The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing. Woman. Thass what it was. Woman. Roaring, ancient, centuries old. Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, with her, then kicked you inna, inna, thingy. Thingy, in your mouth. Tongue. Tonsils. Teeth.”
- failwhaleshark 5y agoI tend to think of them as ant trails, but a circulatory system works too.
- proc0 5y agoI've had the same thoughts. Roads are basically moving around cars, which move people and resources. This is the same function as red blood cells. This analogy includes white blood cells-- highway patrol police. People are perhaps the oxygen which is the catalyst for everything to work, and the resources like food, materials, etc., are like the nutrients the human body needs. Buildings are also individual cells of different kinds, and you can see different buildings have different functions as well, just like cells. I think cities are clusters of cells, and just like clusters of cells in the body, they perform functions that could, in turn, categorize them as "organs", because there is a dominant industry in that city, and the buildings in that city serve specific functions that get exported out to the rest of the cities in the country or the world. I think the paper's analysis is interesting, but I also think the starting point for the analysis should be function and not hierarchical structure, which is mostly static.
- mrobot 5y agoI will have to read this. My hope is when i do read there is some stuff in about exploitation. I tend to see exploitative systems kind of like cancer. Many exploitative systems can exist in cities. I wonder if they have made space in the study for studying exploitative practices and reconcentration over time of the products of public effort and how much the networks produced and reproduced end up actually benefiting society, or how much more society could benefit (with different amounts of exploitation) if the system was reorganized in different ways.
- jhoechtl 5y agoSo more like cancer?
- Redoubts 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ5NlkHy3NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ5NlkHy3NY
- andrewl-hn 5y agoTokyo is an example of a "multicellural" city, with its Special Wards each functioning as a separate city with only some services shared among them. The wards each have a population of a few hundred thousand people, and some take top spots in the list of biggest cities in Japan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Japan The city has been run like this for decades, and it seems to work out for Tokyo pretty well.
- drak0n1c 5y agoThe Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex is similar. Separate cities that have grown into each other (conurbation) yet retain separate counties and governance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas%E2%80%93Fort_Worth_metroplex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas%E2%80%93Fort_Worth_metr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conurbation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conurbation
- samatman 5y agoNew York's boroughs are another fine example. Arguably the Bay Area is something similar, and I would further argue would be much better off if it were closer in governance and self-concept to Tokyo or New York than it is in fact.
- bobthepanda 5y agoNew York’s boroughs aren’t that decentralized, Manhattan is clearly the center with almost a quarter of metro area jobs and certainly not anywhere near a quarter of the metro’s population. Fun fact: Manhattan contains both the largest and fourth largest business districts in the US, Midtown and Downtown respectively.
- fridif 5y agoSoon to be the 10th and 17th id imagine
- bobthepanda 5y ago
- samatman 5y agoModeling cities as 'cellular' is a common mistake, well explored in A City is not a Tree by Christopher Alexander. http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf http://en.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexan... tl;dr we tend to talk about cities in heirarchical, enclosed terms, as having "limits", "neighborhoods", "blocks", "plots", and so on. This can be modeled as a tree, in the maths and computer science sense. But it's more accurate to model these systems as semilattices. Thus a city isn't multicellular (the cells being the enclosed units of the tree model) nor super-cells (which sort of punts on the internal structure, while still enclosing the city in a sort of membrane which even a walled city doesn't resemble), but a thing distinctly itself.
- siraben 5y ago> But it's more accurate to model these systems as semilattices. That's the first time I've seen order theory used to describe hierarchical structures like a city. Continuing the analogy, what would the join of a nonempty finite subset of parts of a city be? Say the set was an apartment block, road and grocery store, would the join of all these concepts be the "local neighborhood" that makes up part of a town?
- rosetremiere 5y agoIt feels to me this analogy is rather weak. Presumably, the point of semilattice (compared to tree) is that the hierarchy is not top-down but can have branches up and down. I'd say the algebraic structure of joins and meets is not really natural here… it's just some form of graph. Open to counter-arguments though!
- nemetroid 5y agoAre you arguing that the model proposed by the essay does not describe a semilattice? Or that the model proposed does not describe cities well?
- rosetremiere 5y ago
- xvilka 5y agoI can recommend a good book about this subject - Scale[1] by Geoffrey West. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31670196-scale https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31670196-scale
- cleorama 5y agoThanks for the tip. Could you tell us more about why you would recommend others to read this book?
- bregma 5y agoNot sure how this differs from Christaller's central place theory of the 1930s except the nomenclature relies on a trendy modern borrow from bioengineering. Perhaps the authors spent more time tuning the AI they used to write the article than studying the fundamentals of urban geography?
- iamadog4 5y agoThis is really interesting, but I think it's too literal. If you consider how radically different, but nonetheless alike the human body is from a cell, and how different but similar multicellular life can be - the scale, environmental, and dietary optimizations cause a significant disparity from one organism to the next. To me that says this is too literal, and an exceedingly close reading of the more figurative analogy. With that I think the sensibility erodes rapidly. I think what one really had ought to take from the cellular analogy is that humanity is inadvertently creating systems in the natural world that mimic evolutionary and biological systems - that the emergent forces of the mind and society are automatically following the very same patterns that selected them. Or perhaps even being forced into that range of development through a limit of range of the function leaving development what is only a handful of viable options. Obversely, we're given the same challenges as any other organism: for example signalling - at first we've a very slow inaccurate system kin to chemical messengers, it's improved upon us, and quite suddenly we've the telegraph and the telephone, it's improved further with coaxial transport. Perhaps we've even improved on the system with the use of light. I do suppose though there is some research in biology that points to quantum phenomena being leveraged by organisms. I don't know that this conception is applicable practically - you won't be able to do anything other than project the trends of evolution of society and probably quite badly but it is interesting food for thought.