Science fiction writers beginning with Arthur C. Clarke have put forward the idea of a “space elevator” that could lift things into orbit far more cheaply than by rocket. The idea surfaces again from time to time; if I had the money, I might make a Long Bet that we’ll see one of these within 25 years or so.

I went to a lecture last Friday by David Orr, who teaches Environmental Studies (nee’ architecture) at Oberlin. He’s one of those that belive that the environment is the issue of the 21st century, and that everything else — including global economic and social health — stems from sustainability and minimal-impact human presence on the land. The theme of this month’s Metropolis is “Architects Pollute” — a design “manifesto” for architects, designers, planners and builders to help lead the transition to a sustainable economy. This article isn’t available online, but they have posted a good interview with Jeff Speck, the new Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts. Jeff was former director of town planning for Duany Plater-Zyberk, the founders of the New Urbanism movement.

The Economist reports this week on the latest progress in the project to install massive gates protecting Venice from high water… And I’m thinking about doing a paper on “third-wave” tourism in small towns in Baja for one of my classes this semester.

Other than that, I’m exhausted. Taking four classes, along with local work and AdMonsters, and trying to have a personal life, is beating me up. My free time at this point is down below the threshold of recharge. We’ll see how long I can keep that up.

I might have joked about DWR, but if you do love design you’ll understand why Design Within Reach has met with such success. DWR makes good, thoughtful design easy to find — mostly in furniture, but founder Rob Forbes also writes a weekly newsletter that makes remarkably good reading (if you’re into this sort of thing). While the topics are often product focused, he often covers urban design topics as well — see these articles on Cinque Terre, and transit design in Portland and San Francisco.

Metropolis has long been the magazine for those interested in architecture, design, planning, and related fields — although it’s focused on physical design, Metropolis often carries great writing on urban planning issues. More recently, Dwell is much more of a consumer mag focused primarily on residential design, but often with good writing about urbanism, planning, neighborhoods, etc… You can complete the design circle by furnishing your loft with the latest repros from DWR. Consumerism aside: launched earlier this year, The Next American City is concerned with topics “including but not limited to transportation, urban economies, planning and development, architecture, housing, environmental issues, labor issues and workforce development, education, crime, and religion…” with tone suitable for both professionals and educated ‘civilians’ interested in planning, land use, and urbanism. Check it out!

What’s wrong with Internet Explorer? Although I don’t have a categorical anti-Microsoft bias, it does seems that, given their overwhelming share of the brower market at this point, MS doesn’t have much incentive to develop innovative browser features or even to work on improving IE’s performance. I’ve looked at Opera on and off over the years, and the latest version is pretty slick. While the Google Toolbar gives you integrated search and popup blocking in IE, Opera adds tabbed browing and (seemingly) improved performance, as well as better (and fully customizable!) keyboard shortcuts and a bunch of other features without any real side effects. As nice as Opera is, I thought I should check out Mozilla too. It appears that the main Mozilla development track is being deprecated in favor of Firebird, a streamlined browser-only product that doesn’t bother with integrated email and a bunch of other jive. Firebird essentially claims to offer many of the same benefits as Opera, and is freeware as opposed to adware (my main annoyance with Opera being that it wastes a huge amount of space displaying an ad banner when running in “free” mode — understandable of course). It took me an hour or so of low-level hacking to customize Firebird to duplicate my favorite Opera keyboard nav features (z=back, x=forwards), and I had to install the TabBrowser Extension to make tabs work propertly, but with that done, it seems to work pretty well. It seems quick, but Opera still seems faster — although that may just be a perceptual artifact due to Opera’s busier feedback UI. At this point, I’m going to try Firebird as my default for a while, before I shell out the $29.95 (well, $20 with the student discount!) for the ad-free version of Opera.

Here are a couple of other Opera vs Firebird comparisons:

   http://nontroppo.org/wiki/WhyOpera
   http://www.flux.org/pipermail/linux/2003-July/013175.html
   http://www.tntluoma.com/opera/beyond30/2003/08/opera_vs_mozilla.html

I must admit, sometimes I feel a little self-conscious about my bright orange Vespa. But sometimes the wisdom of my choice is redeemed — last week, I got not one but two “cool scooter” comments in a single day! Now, you might think it’s amusing that both came from girls under the age of ten, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. Today I actually got two more “cool Vespa” comments — from adults this time. And I think there was one yesterday — the second soccer mom “nice color!” comment. I’m going to start keeping a tally…