Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Scaling laws...don't predict how cities scale between different urban systems. The overall of the various metrics...depends on the overall economy, culture, and individuality of each national urban system" - at which point these individual differences become far interesting than the scaling law itself.

"...the whole point of a city is to bring people together, to facilitate interaction, and thereby to create ideas and wealth..."

"the nuclear option, like that of traditional fossil fuels, keeps us trapped in a paradigm of a closed system, whereas the solar option has the critical capacity for potentially returning us to a truly sustainable paradigm of an open system" - our sun will die in 7 or 8 billion years: it is also a closed system. Nuclear fusion however is the technology of making stars.

"To put it another way: more energy is delivered by the sun in just one hour than is used by the entire world in a single year" - entire human 'world' that is. What will be the consequences of diverting what we need from what the planet needs?

"Cities have evolved as the engine we invented for enhancing and facilitating social interaction, thereby stimulating idea creation and innovation" - the internet may have rendered the science of cities stillborn.

""Science of Cities", by which I mean a conceptual framework their dynamics, growth, and evolution in a quantatively predictable framework" - the quantitative predictions so far - of biological size, age and metabolism - seemed to have wide margins of error, it's not like this in the physical sciences.

'Also I should have got to know my father, which would have been a joy to me.' - or so he assumes. Having raised my three teenagers at home, with similar results to me having been at school, I not sure how it works when out of sight, is out of mind or absence makes the heart grow fonder.

"We were taught to look down on the grammar school prime ministers, the proles, the women, the blacks, the queers and the foreigners..." - I wasn't, I must have gone to a different sort of school.

"One of those Cambridge spies. Anthony Blunt, worked for the Queen and had the codename 'Johnson'." - now we're drifting away into conspiracy theory

"In 'Heart of Darkness' Crusoe's near namesake Kurtz is emotionally isolated cut also 'hollow to the core' - neither were intended by their authors to be English, let alone an English Archetype, and neither went to an English boarding school.

"[Opium is] as good a way of becoming supernatural," he answered "as looking at one's nose or one's navel, or not eating, or repeating a word over and over again, till it loses its sense and you forget how to think"

"Even Cameron's Eton teachers, according to Sonia Purnell, claimed not to remember teaching him. The point is, any of us could have been prime minister" - this isn't true, and if Beard would be less disappointed if realised it.

""The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root." Which is surprising, because that was how our childhood was shaped." - speak for yourself, I agree with Orwell, our childhood was shaped by custom not power. This is the difference between Cameron and Johnson: one resigned, the other hangs on to power at all costs.

"And when public school politicians pose as populists and radicals, the fraudulance is close to absurd." - this is true of any populist politician, from Caesar to Trump. Populism is always led by a disaffected member of the elite.

"Private schools account for 70 per cent of the ... barristers in the country..." - if you can afford private school you can afford a pupilage.

"It helped that ambition was essentially a confidence trick, and a socially acceptable method to outrun a damaged self." - he overlooks the private schoolboy trope of effortless superiority, ambition was never acceptable, success is simply expected.

"As middle-aged, these boys make for a desperately sad film. A commodity broker, single in his late forties and living in Hong Kong, has savings to cover the private education of the children he doesn't have" - so many living abroad, so many still single: a consequence, of the huge burden their education placed on them.

"The message I get is that I can go there, but not with his permission, and not while he's watching on." - eerily familiar from similar discussions with my students.

"I ask her if she keeps in touch with anyone. /'Not really. I made a conscious decision not to.' - I actually changed my name.

"We invented and destroyed ourselves at will, a talent useful for actors, comedians, spies, politicians and writers." - it would be interesting to see the degree of private school overrepresentation in this careers, something Anthony Sampson used to provide for his Anatomy of Britain series.

"In our case, the Hugh Grant charm had this quality of need but also acted as an extra layer of defence. It was how we never quite said what we meant, or what we wanted, and so avoided exposure to emotional risk." - I'm glad he brought up Hugh Grant, much more representative of his generation of public schoolboys (Latymer Upper School) than BJ. We can hardly blame the ruin of England on Hugh, can we?

"The lesson learned from the Falklands War, at the domestic polling booths, was that a futile and costly act of bravado could be political dynamite" - Blair more than Cameron or Johnson, unless you see Brexit as a 'futile and costly...'

'they had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen', Orwell - true of any elite, more obviously applies to Fidesz.

"Of all subjects, it was fine to be bad at maths" - probably true, but for all schools.

"Tennyson's Light Brigade sent us the same message as the Roman emperors - the fact of being remembered was more important than the reason." - again nothing to do with 'public' school exceptionalism, but with the syllabus design.

"Orwell, like us, was the result of two distinct worlds: school and the holidays, with their conflicting emotional demands." - there might be something in this, but the majority of independent school children don't board.

"We read a lot of books." - Beard doesn't seem to realise that an adolescence spent in a boarding school is not immensely different to an adolescence spent anywhere else. So he blames the place he was rather than the biological procress he experienced. (The Nurture Assumption)

"We stalked across to the playing fields. Sick with excitement and anxiety, the realisation dawned that we didn't anywhere else to go. The school was all we knew, and we might as well head back to bed." - that was my first attempt. On my second, we were picked up by the police in the neighbouring village of Combe Florey. On my last, I spent a day in London before phoning my mum. Mabel Chin got to Chicago.

'[Rav] chose to send his own children to private schools' - private schools were far more multicultural than the local comprehensives, check out the racial and educational background of BJs cabinet if you want evidence.

"We kept putting ourselves forward, believing that we were the best people for the job." - he's at it again "we, we, we" when really he means "me, me, me".