I saw this map on reddit:

And noticed that most of these Combined Statistical Areas are richly connected with infrastructure / high-capacity transportation links, or soon will be - most notably: Acela in the northeast, Brightline / Virgin Trains USA in Florida, Texas Central in Texas, and California High Speed Rail in California.

As a lover of cities, and a believer in agglomeration effects, I set out to analyze the CSAs on a connected, aggregated basis, as meta-cities. For reference, because I extend beyond the top 15, here's a more complete but less clear map of the top 30:

As you'll see, there are limited and vastly different prospects for each region, and I expect this to inform an indication of future development.

Note I refer to each CSA by its population rank, in an intentional attempt to separate these narratives from your existing ideas about these cities. I address each aggregate roughly by combined population, and the population numbers below are necessarily imprecise as they engage at the level of the CSA, so do not consider other populations not captured by the CSAs. Finally, when I list a combined population together with a rank, ala #1, the rank refers to the rank of that aggregation relative to the existing CSAs. That is, if two cities combined, how would they compare to the largest existing US cities.

-LA + Vegas

-Capitol Corridor

Great Lakes

The midwest, centered around Chicago has a strange arrangement relative to the other possibilities. Chicago's population dwarfs the others, which perhaps explains why they have not seen cause to invest in high-speed rail improvements to connect the others.

#3 and 33 (combined population 12 million) are linked by Amtrak's Hiawatha at an average of 57 mph (90 minutes).

#3, 16, and 33 (combined population 16 million) are linked by Amtrak's Empire builder at an average speed of 50 mph (8 hours).

There's a proposal to increase frequency but not speed on this route, but for this to qualify as a practical megalopolis, you'd have to run the trains much faster.

#3 and 12 (combined population 15 million) are linked by Amtrak's Wolverine at an average of 48 mph (5 hours 20 minutes)

#3 and 20 (combined population 13 million) are linked by Amtrak's Lincoln Service at an average of 52 mph (5 hours 25 minutes)

Speed improvements seem to be in the works, if stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire. Local leaders would like the Governor to take the lead on this.

Virgin's Hyperloop One has identified #3, 24 and 26 (combined population 15 million) as a winning route for Hyperloop development.

Texas

-The Triangle

Virgin's Hyperloop One has identified #7, 9, and 25 (combined population 18 million) as winning route for Hyperloop development. They are engaged in a feasibility study of the route and have initial engagement with the Texas government.

I think it's remarkable that as a combined megalopolis, Texas would compete directly with Los Angeles and New York City on the level of economic network effects.

Florida

#14 and 19 (combined population 8 million) are served by the Amtrak Cascades route, at an average speed of 50 mph (3 hours 30 minutes)

These also naturally associate with nearby Vancouver, Canada (combined population to 10.5 million, or #3). But the Amtrak Cascades route that serves all 3 does it at an average speed of 40 mph.

Improvement has been incremental and slow, in part due to set-backs like the 2017 derailment due to "gross complacency" that significantly delayed adoption of an improved route pending positive train control.

Deep South

#20 and 27 (combined population 5 million). They are linked by Amtrak's Missouri River Runner at 50 mph (5 hours, 40 minutes).

Virgin's Hyperloop One has identified has completed a feasibility study (video) of the route.

Analysis

A few things jump out at me here:

Few Potential Megalopoli

Many urban areas are relatively isolated which means travel time and/or infrastructure cost would weigh against their incorporation with nearby neighbors. Examples: Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix. After Cascadia, the benefits of aggregation drop of substantially, and according to my own intuition, tend toward depending on broader integration to justify themselves. Similarly, many urban areas are relatively low-population which weighs against their incorporation with nearby neighbors.

That leaves us with only 6 potential near-term megalopoli, which in my mind elevates the significance and urgency of each.

Unbalanced pairs may not support strong connections

Take Chicago, for example. It has many nearby neighbors, but because it's the largest by far, it has relatively little to gain from enhancing rail, presumably because a relatively small satellite primarily draws from the smaller to the larger city. In contrast, Dallas / Houston, Cascadia, have mutually obvious benefit due to relatively balanced travel interest between the pair. I suspect in unbalanced cases, the pride of the larger city may weigh against investing in integration.

Wildly Different Prospects for and Rates of Progress

I think it's quite remarkable that Texas, California, Florida, and the Great Lakes have such dramatically different prospects for progress. California's bold efforts are mired in a failure of management, Chicago is not setting its sights so high, and having difficulty at that, while Texas and Florida are having substantial new high speed rail development thanks to functional, incentives-aligned approaches to this development.

Leaves me glad we have so many different experiments running in this country, as it seems there are many ways to get this grossly wrong.

Conclusions

These assume the expected successful timely completion of the Texas Central and Virgin Trains USA Orlando link.

Short California, Long Texas & Florida

The long-term prospects for connectivity and relative commercial significance of these areas is substantially connected to their ability to create an arrangement of infrastructure and services conducive to supporting business and quality of life in their areas, which leads to a virtuous cycle of population growth and further agglomeration benefits, such as ability to justify and accrue benefits from large infrastructure projects.

The difficulties apparently experienced most clearly by California, but also by New York and Chicago, augur a future in which other regions gain relative prominence over them, by way of successful infrastructure projects and increased connectivity / agglomeration. Consistent with these signs, population growth in the top CSA of each region is significantly higher in Texas (17%) and Florida (14%) than California (6%), the Northeast (3.7%), or the Great Lakes (1.6%).

Design your Infrastructure incentives well

Texas and Florida are taking substantially different approaches to their high-speed rail than those which have foundered or are otherwise improving quite slowly in other regions, and I expect them to benefit from these differences. In particular, they are following the examples of private rail transit in Asia, and using a combination of fares and real estate development around the station to fund the rail service. This is a variant of land-value capture that aligns incentives, because it creates a material monetary reward for those for fast and efficient construction efforts, accruing to those with the ability to manage construction costs. In the Northeast and California, lacking such incentives alignment has meant that construction projects are seen as a windfall to be exploited by those doling out and receiving construction funds, which then leads to project cost blow-up. This is devastating because there is no upper limit to the cost of construction inefficiency - that is the cost inefficiencies can dwarf the project construction costs.

An alternative to fully-private infrastructure ownership, is to choose a project delivery method which creates a natural incentive to control construction costs, such as through Design-Build-Operate-Maintain contracts.

Expect new technology to further change the game

Nascent technologies such as Hyperloop could significantly improve prospects for agglomeration by making private construction feasible in more cases - smaller city pairs, longer distances.

[1] Dividing the distance (457 miles) by the expected future journey time (5 hours).
[2] Dividing the distance (168 miles) by the average journey time (3.25 hours) listed on Wikipedia. 

Disclaimer: this article is NOT personalized medical advice and I hold no responsibility for what you do to your body. I give no individual medical advice. Schedule a visit with your physician for that.

I realized at a relatively young age that the medical industry has little interest in keeping me well, but rather focuses on identifying and treating malady after it occurs, whereas I've set out (as I think all people should) to avoid malady wherever possible. As I studied and practice engineering, I study and apply that view to my own body as a system. I've personally successfully treated a few symptoms in my own life, and as far as they report, at this point people perceive me to be younger than I am. I offer below a few tips on not growing any older than you must, based on about 10 years of thought and study of the subject.

Arrange your life to include ambient exercise as a daily practice

For example, take more than one stair step at a time. Most are capable of taking at least 2 steps at a time,[1] it may be difficult at first, you may have to strain against your body's limitations, you may even have to do some lunges or squats to develop the strength necessary to do it, but doing so will pay many dividends, as most people will face many more staircases than treadmills in their lives, and climbing more than one step at a time exercises a greater range of motion at less mechanical advantage than a single step. Among other benefits, this will help you maintain more strength than strictly necessary to make it through your daily life, so as to maintain greater mobility for longer when your muscles naturally decline with age. In addition, incidental exercise like this will benefit your cardiovascular system, and your metabolism. Quite a lot of benefit from such a simple change.

This is an example of what I call ambient exercise, and IMO there is no better exercise - it gets you where you are going anyway, but often faster, and with more benefit, at the same time it gets you exercise without dedicated time. Other examples include cycling for transport, and favoring stairs even when escalators or elevators are available. Even walking quickly has significant health benefits over walking slowly.

Pay attention to habits that have cumulative health effects

In risk, it's the things you do daily that will someday go sideways and kill you, and in aging, it's the damage that you accumulate daily that will wear you out. Wear protection from the sun, particularly to protect your face and neck, wear sunglasses to protect your eyes. Being aware of the UV Index can guide when these interventions are most important. Personally I recently switched from a ball-cap to what I call my "adventure hat" for daily life.

If you drink alcohol regularly or enthusiastically, consider cutting down and taking NAC when drinking as a countermeasure. Consider wearing earplugs in loud environments and plugging your ears in the presence of sirens.

For the same reason start your health practices early, before problems manifest, and you’ll reduce the aggregate damage your body sustains over time, thus keeping yourself safer, healthier, and living longer for it. Far better to protect your hearing before it’s noticeably lost. Far easier to avoid injury than recover from it.

But you don't have to take my word for it:

“when it comes to age-related diseases, the medical technologies of the past few decades are just not all that good. Treatments have failed to address the causes of aging, and instead took on the impossible task of trying patch over the consequences in a failing system. The result, with very few exceptions, such as treatments to control blood pressure and blood cholesterol, is therapies offering only marginal, unreliable benefits and little impact to mortality. It remains the case that in the matter of aging, maintaining fitness and slimness is more reliable or even more effective than most of what has been offered by medical science over recent decades.”
— source

Pay attention to the signs of age and do what you can to address their causes

As where there is smoke, there is fire, and to whatever extent possible, it’s important to identify the cause and put that fire out. For example, research has uncovered that gray hair is a consequence of buildup of Hydrogen Peroxide, which bleaches the hair follicle. Hydrogen Peroxide is an example of a harmful Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) that is produced continuously by your metabolic processes, and should be naturally dispatched by your body before building up, if your body is functioning as well as it should. While dyeing your hair will conceal the evidence, treating the cause will prevent those same ROS from wreaking other havoc: DNA damage, etc.

But can you help your body dispatch with it? Chemically, there are at least two important antioxidants which reduce it, which are Catalase and Glutathione Peroxidase. Catalase is abundant in wheatgrass, so I take wheatgrass powder in a shake from time to time. Another important element is Superoxide Dismutase (SOD) - if Hydrogen Peroxide is Water + Oxygen, Superoxide is Hydrogen Peroxide + Oxygen, and Superoxide Dismutase reduces it to Hydrogen Peroxide. This combo, of Catalase and Superoxide Dismutase, if it could be applied simultaneously throughout your body, would reduce these two ROS to just water and oxygen.

Support your body’s own restoration and maintenance pathways

A big shift in my understanding of health came with the awareness that your body generates cancerous cells all the time - it’s just that for almost everyone, almost all of the time, inbuilt protections cause the cell to shut down, or the immune system effectively dispatches them. So cancer can be viewed not so much as a specific dysfunction in the cell cycle, but rather a systemic immune failure. This indicates it may be much more helpful to support your own body’s intricate, long-evolved system for protecting itself than to try to do its job for it after it has failed.[2]

For example, not directly related to cancer, your body has its own inborn mechanisms for maintaining and repairing itself on the cellular level. One such category of these is called the Sirtuin pathways. The 7 Sirtuin pathways have been shown to play important roles in aging, metabolic function, and more. For example, just one of these, SIRT3, has been shown to:

• Support energy production
• Prevent cardiac hypertrophy
• Prevent Parkinson’s disease
• Support insulin sensitivity
• Support cell survival
• Suppress tumors
• Prevent DNA damage
• Prevent noise-induced hearing loss

Much of the above is a consequence of SIRT3's effects in producing countermeasures to the ROS mentioned above, as illustrated here:

The trick with the Sirtuins is that they are powered by an energetic molecule call NAD+, and NAD+ declines with age. So, as with avoiding cancer by boosting your immune system, you reduce the acceleration of aging that occurs over time by boosting your own body's ability to restore and maintain itself. Personally I take NMN, the direct precursor to NAD+, sublingually. As with all anti-aging mechanisms, it's difficult to assign direct effect to any given intervention, but this one has given me the most significant subjective benefit, both in terms of energy level, and notably in terms of skin quality (I saw a significant subjecting improvement within the first month or two of use).

Conclusion

There's certainly much more to be said and considered, given that the body is enormously complex and complicated, but the high-level points cover much of what I judge to matter. Will be happy to hear questions, critiques, theories, or queries on any of the above.

Take care, and be well.

"An optimist invents the airplane, a pessimist invents the parachute"

Interesting fact: the two prominent areas of study in which there is an explicit internal divide between "Orthodox" and "Heterodox" perspectives are religion and economics.

Sometimes when looking up artists I like, I spot a certain theme in their parentage:

Bjork: Electrician father, Mother who left him to join a hippy community

Lorde: Civil Engineer father, Poet Mother

Here's to chaos and order, art and collective. Here's to fostering them in ourselves, and in the groups we form.

I ran into this problem with Olark and Turbolinks tonight, and it seems I’m not the only one, so I wrote out how to fix it:

In the current olark configuration code, there’s a script tag, some javascript, then a noscript tag. The javascript is the important part. It starts with “window.olark||”, then a big minified function, and ends with a call to olark.identity.

The window.olark|| is just there to prevent the script from being re-run on the same page, the rest is the initialization. You can extract the initialization function, and give it a name, e.g. init_olark. Then you can rewritethe initialization as:

function init_olark(c) {/*big initialization function*/}           
window.olark||init_olark({/*your initialization hash*/});
olark.identify(/*your identity*/);

You’ll need your identity string to call olark.identity, it’s right there in your js snippet, and you’ll need your initialization hash, which is the argument passed to init_olark, also included in the snippet. My initialization hash should include a loader, name and methods key, so I guess yours should too. Once you’ve done this, all that’s left is to call the init_olark() function with your initialization vars and call olark.identity on every turbolinks page load. With jquery that looks like:

$(document).on('page:load', function(){
  init_olark({
    /*your initialization hash*/
  });
  olark.identify(/*your identity*/);
});

It’s not perfect – there are some js errors in the depths of the olark code, but it doesn’t seem to interfere with the operation of the chat widget or any other JS on the page, so I judge it a success.

Hope that helps!

Note: updated to call "identify"

Some time ago I picked up a simple system for keeping my bash configuration files organized and sane. It's served me well and doesn't seem widely-known so I suppose it's worth sharing.

What's the problem with bash config? Well it gets to be a mess. Once you start configuring many bits of software, and many projects, it can be rather difficult to parse through the mess of environment variables and other interventions.

Comments can help, but they're easy to overlook. A better solution is a system of organization which is self-enforcing. So what I do is banish all my config from the .bash_profile, and load it from project-specific files in the ~/.bash/ directory.

That is, my .bash_profile looks like this:

function load {
        [ -f $1 ] && . $1
}

function load_dir {
        for path in $( ls $1 ); do
                load "$1$path"
        done
}

load_dir ~/.bash/

And my ~/.bash folder looks like this:

$ ls ~/.bash/
amazon_keys.bash        git.bash                node.bash                r.bash                        rvm.bash                vote_smart.bash
bundler.bash                google.bash                mail_chimp.bash                open_congress.bash        rbenv.bash                sunlight_labs.bash        votereports.bash
campaign_monitor.bash        history.bash                mate.bash                paperlex.bash                recaptch.bash                terminal.bash                yahoo.bash
fixmta.bash                homebrew.bash                meetup.bash                postgres.bash                rpx.bash                twitter.bash

Here's a few examples from that batch:

$ cat ~/.bash/node.bash 
export NODE_PATH="/usr/local/lib/node_modules:$NODE_PATH"
$ cat ~/.bash/rbenv.bash 
export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
$ cat ~/.bash/postgres.bash 
export PGOPTIONS='-c client_min_messages=WARNING'
$ cat ~/.bash/git.bash 
# load completion installed by homebrew
load "/usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash"

All clean and tidy. And if you want to view the entirety of your config settings, you can just use:

$ cat ~/.bash/* 

Files are loaded in the order that they're returned by 'ls', so if you want to override the alphabetical default ordering, you can simply prefix an order number to the files you want to load early.

In any case, I hope this helps. I'd be happy to hear any tips you have.

I've noticed that my emotional states are often much more subtle than the abstract notion that they follow. For example, when I'm depressed I'm not sad, I'm as calm and relaxed as ever, just unmotivated. When I'm anxious, I'm not shifty or shaky or stammering, I just calmly hesitate and reflect a bit more.

Unfortunately, because I didn't identify these states for what they were, I didn't treat them as problems to be solved, but as "just how I feel right now." Only later, when my motivation and agency returned did I diagnose and treat my own light deprivation (SAD), or test an anxiolytic.

If there's a lesson here, perhaps its to always trust that improvement is possible, and to make efforts regardless what we think is "just us".

Is an ideal society entirely filled with rule-abiding characters? It would seem so, but what if every set of rules has necessary, unavoidable breakdowns, which when unattended accumulate back-ups, detritus, or misallocations within the system?

It may be then, that some occaisional creative rule-breaking helps to break-up these back-ups and to disrupt an ossified order to replace it with the more natural and functional after-effects of small episodes of chaos. It may sound dubious, but it's been modeled in traffic studies and argued via simplified versions of society.

If social rules are somehow subject to Gödel's incompleteness theorem as well, then pranksters, jokers, comedians, and creative rule-breakers may be all that's there to save us from an accumulated absurdity.

Setting a firmware password on your Mac laptop makes it much less useful to a thief and much more likely to be recoverable, as they won't be able to easily circumvent "Find my Mac" or Prey. It's also super easy.

On Lion, just restart your computer while holding "comand-R" - you'll boot into the recovery partition and have the Firmware Password utility available from the utility menu dropdown. Enter your password twice, restart, and you're done!

For earlier versions, check this.