Questions

An idea inspired by Patrick Collison. A running list of questions I have about the world. I’ll try to answer them as I go, and move them to the bottom once I have an answer I believe.

Cities, Transit & Bikes

• Why did Freiburg keep its trams when most of Europe tore theirs out? In the 1960s trams were seen as too expensive and inflexible, and Freiburg dismantled part of its network along with everyone else. But it kept a core, and from 1983 rebuilt it as modern light rail on green track beds with signal priority. Was that foresight, geography, money, or a handful of stubborn people? Which cities came close to keeping theirs and didn’t?

• Why can a city still build a Vauban or a Rieselfeld, but almost nobody does? The usual rule is that the nice part of town is the old part. These two districts are recent, planned, and genuinely pleasant to live in. Freiburg’s rule that every new district gets a tram line from day one seems to matter. What else does? And what stops a city like Fort Collins from doing the same? See Urban Planning.

• Is door-to-door travel time really what decides how people get around? Express bus line 37 cut the trip from Munzingen to the Hauptbahnhof from 44 minutes to 25 by skipping stops, and ridership followed. If speed is the dominant variable, then most transit improvements (comfort, branding, price) are second order. How big is the effect, and where does it stop being true?

• Why did US road deaths rise about 30% since 2010 while the EU’s fell about 36%? Vehicle size, independent type approval versus self-certification, street design, phones, enforcement. How much of the gap does each one explain, and which would transfer?

• What would it take for American kids to get around on their own again? Here my kids take the tram across town by themselves, and nobody blinks. Haidt traces the American change to parental fear that started in the late 1970s, before phones. Is it infrastructure, law, or culture, and does one have to change first for the others to follow?

• Why does a university make a city feel alive? I’ve decided I will always live in a university town. Is that effect real and measurable, or are lively places simply where universities get built and where people like me choose to live?

Germany & Europe

• Why were the Dutch so much more meticulous than the English in the spice race, and does that still show? In Nathaniel’s Nutmeg the Dutch voyages carry spare masts and anchors and their pilots take navigation lessons five days a week, while the English keep putting the wrong men in charge. Was that a cultural trait, a better institution (the VOC), or survivorship in the telling? Does it show up in Dutch planning today?

• Why do three countries sharing one valley run things so differently? From Freiburg, Basel and Mulhouse are each about an hour away. Same river, same climate, same museum pass. Yet trains, prices, bureaucracy and even bakeries change noticeably at each border. How much is policy, how much is culture, and how much is just currency? (Patrick asks the broader version about Switzerland.)

• Why is Germany so precise about some things and so analogue about others? World-class engineering and trains that run on dedicated green track beds, next to fax machines, paper forms and cash-only cafés. Is it privacy culture, federalism, an older population, or a rational preference for things that already work?

• What did the Black Forest look like before scientific forestry, and what happened to Waldsterben? Seeing Like a State opens with German Normalbaum forestry: neat rows of spruce that made the forest legible and then made it fragile. In the 1980s Waldsterben was supposed to kill the forest outright. It didn’t, at least not the way people predicted. What actually happened, and what is the forest becoming now?

Nature & Climate

• Where does Freiburg’s rain come from? Jenny Odell asks where her rain comes from in How to Do Nothing, and I realised I couldn’t answer for my own city. Freiburg is one of the sunniest cities in Germany, yet the Black Forest behind it is one of the wettest places. How do the Rhine valley, the Vosges and the Schwarzwald divide the weather between them?

• Which street trees will survive Freiburg in 2070? Inventorying trees in Fort Collins changed how I see every street. Cities are now planting for a climate that doesn’t exist yet. How do foresters choose, how wrong are they allowed to be, and what does Freiburg’s own tree data say about what’s already struggling?

• Why do doom predictions survive being wrong? Paul Ehrlich still argues the right world population is about one billion. Not the End of the World and Factfulness make the opposite case with data. Collapse forecasts keep failing and keep getting attention. Is it that pessimism sounds smarter, that slow improvement never makes headlines, or something else?

Reading & Learning

• Why is Middlemarch the novel so many serious readers come back to? It keeps showing up at the top of other people’s lists. I’m partway through Middlemarch and enjoying it, but I want to understand what makes it the canonical one rather than Bleak House or Anna Karenina.

• Why do I start books faster than I finish them? I had 33 books open at once this year. Short literary novels I finish in days; big important books stall for months or years. Is that about length, about mood, or about choosing books I want to have read rather than books I want to read?

• Why do so few books that need maps have good ones? The most common complaint about The Silk Roads is the maps. McPhee needs cross-sections. Travel writing, history and geology all depend on space, yet the map is usually an afterthought on the endpapers. Is it cost, rights, habit, or just that authors think in words?

• Does spaced repetition build understanding, or only recall? I’ve started turning my reading into flashcards (see Spaced Repetition). Matuschak argues isolated facts are brittle and that understanding is connection. Can a well-written card carry an idea, or only a fact about one?

• How far can an adult get in a language by learning only from the mail that actually arrives? My German curriculum is increasingly my inbox: school letters, the coworking space, health insurance, the utility company. It’s relevant, so it sticks. But it’s also narrow. Where does that approach plateau, and when do you need a textbook again?

• Why do I remember systems and rules but not names, faces or details? Linus Torvalds describes exactly this in Just for Fun - The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. Is that a real cognitive type, a trade-off, or just a story people like me tell ourselves?

Work, Data & AI

• Is every canonical data model a legibility project waiting to fail? James Scott’s argument is that the simplification that makes a system administrable is the same simplification that makes it brittle. Schema design, tracking plans and canonical customer models are exactly that kind of simplification. What’s the data equivalent of mētis, the local knowledge that refuses to be written down, and how do you design for it?

• What happens to integration work when AI writes most of the glue code? A lot of enterprise data work is translating between systems that were never meant to talk. If that translation becomes nearly free, does the work disappear, move up to deciding what should be connected, or get harder because there’s so much more of it?

• Will AI follow social media into enshittification? Feeds are already a misaligned AI: brilliant at short-term engagement, indifferent to long-term preference. The incentives that broke social media (ads, scale, lock-in) are all present again. What, if anything, is structurally different this time? See Artificial Intelligence.

• What happens to markets when almost everyone indexes? I only own index funds, and I’ve never really examined the system I’m free-riding on. If price discovery is done by a shrinking share of active money, at what point does that break, and would anyone notice before it did?

People & Life

• What actually tips a family from “someday” into moving abroad? Plenty of people talk about moving countries. Very few do it. We did. Looking back, I’m not sure which factor was decisive and which were the justifications we found afterwards. Patrick asks the general question: what’s special about the few days people decide to change their lives?

• Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult, and harder in a new country? Language is the obvious barrier, but not the only one. German friendships are said to be slow to start and very durable once they do. Is that true, and what are the structures (clubs, Vereine, school, neighbourhoods) that actually produce friendship? See On Friendship.

• Why do rituals matter more to me the older I get? Rappaport argues rituals helped make us human in the first place. I used to find them faintly silly. Now I want more of them: solstices, family traditions, small repeated things with no obvious purpose. Is that age, parenthood, or something the move has made more visible?

• Why did some humans let the Neolithic revolution pass them by? Carlo Rovelli writes about the Hadza, who still hunt and gather, never know famine, and went back to the nomadic life when Tanzania gave them houses. He speculates the difference was curiosity, a desire to see over the next hill. Was farming a choice, a trap, or an accident? From There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness.

• What happens to identity for kids who grow up between two countries? Third-culture kids are often described as belonging everywhere and nowhere. Which parts of that are fixed by the age you move, and which are shaped by what the family does at home?

Answered (For Now)

• Why is Germany’s busiest airport in Frankfurt and not Berlin? Post-war division. Berlin sat inside East Germany and was badly placed to serve the far richer West. Frankfurt was central, was Lufthansa’s base, and had roughly half the West German population within reach. Path dependence did the rest.

• Why does a tall, blunt-fronted pickup kill more pedestrians than a car? Geometry. A car’s low bonnet tends to scoop a pedestrian up onto the hood. A tall vertical front hits the torso or head and knocks the person down and under the vehicle. The design is for looks, not safety.