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The Lost Oaks of California Ave

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#101

Post by fnid »

hedgehog wrote: post #9

I like Cal Ave partly because it's about as close as you can get in this area to my favorite neighborhood in Seattle (15th Ave). A photo I took yesterday while they were taking the last one down: http://openbs.org/photo/wehavenotrees.jpg Quote from the notice they sent out: "The City of Palo Alto Public Works Department ... shall be replacing most of the street trees on Cal Ave ... most of the existing trees are Holl…

When I read the post from pg, I thought, what's the big deal. I hadn't been to that particular street or remember it from one or two travels to Palo Alto, but when I saw your picture, the before and after, I got sad inside. Why do that?

I felt a sense of lost power. Lost depth and age and history. The trees were tall and powerful and wise.

And now they are gone. :( I miss them and I never knew them.

Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#102

Post by hernan7 »

bkovitz wrote: post #88
ardit33 wrote: post #36

It is sad though, that Cal. Ave, is considered on the most nicer areas of Sillicon Valley. There is nothing really special in it that you can't find in any dinky town in the us, minus the charm that small towns have. Compare to any nice areas to Cambridge, or W. D.C. or NYC, or Boulder. With the money flowing in the area, that that's what they can achieve? At least during the gilded age, the rich folks built memorial…

When I first moved to the Bay Area, I was puzzled by how "blah" Silicon Valley is. The land of innovation is suburbia and strip malls? A cultural desert? My manager at Palm, who had grown up in Cupertino, said that Sunnyvale and Cupertino were "the two most boring towns in America". Did they outside all beauty and culture to San Francisco? Or did they just not care ?

Same here. My biggest whitebread shock was a couple of weeks after my arrival from Argentina. We went to have a coffe after dinner with a friend, and the Starbucks closed on us at 9:00PM!

We ended up drinking our coffees in the parking lot. So much for the Silicon Valley bohemian life...

Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#103

Post by gjm11 »

TriinT wrote: post #94
gjm11 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One genuine full-entropy bit of information on an important subject can be very valuable. You can double your wealth with one bit. (Toy example: you know whether a roulette wheel is going to come up red or black next time. You stake everything you own on the outcome. There are of course less-toy examples and less hair-raising ways to make money out of bits.) It doesn't take all that many bits to state (e.g.) Maxwell'…

"One genuine full-entropy bit of information on an important subject can be very valuable." Oh, it sure can! For instance, suppose that we're back in 1986. The Microsoft IPO has just taken place. I ask God if Microsoft will ever be a huge success, and God tells me: "yes". There you go, 1 bit of information that would have made me very rich. However, despite the worship, I have doubts that PG has become himself God. H…

Assuming for the sake of argument that in 1986 you'd have expected Microsoft not to be a huge success, a "yes" answer to that question would have been considerably more than 1 bit of new information for you. (And therefore, of course, a "no" answer would have been somewhat less than 1 bit of new information.)

Of course I agree that a bit from PG is not as reliable as a bit from God (making the obviously-necessary assumptions about God). But that's not a problem about bits. :-)

Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#104

Post by ja30278 »

pg wrote: post #7
callmeed wrote: post #2

Interesting. Where I grew up (San Luis Obispo county in CA), you'd need an act of congress to touch a mature oak tree–even on your own property. Our church actually had to build around one when they did a building project. I bet if an entrepreneur or real estate developer wanted to cut down oak trees for a building project, they wouldn't get past the first step in the permit process ... but I guess when city wants th…

You can't cut down a mature tree on your own property in Palo Alto either. But apparently the city can.

I'm sure I'll be in the minority here, but doesn't that seem to stretch the meaning of 'your own property'? I mean, if you can't even cut the trees down, what exactly makes it 'yours'? (aside from the privilege of paying takes on it)

Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#105

Post by Psyonic »

ja30278 wrote: post #104
pg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't cut down a mature tree on your own property in Palo Alto either. But apparently the city can.

I'm sure I'll be in the minority here, but doesn't that seem to stretch the meaning of 'your own property'? I mean, if you can't even cut the trees down, what exactly makes it 'yours'? (aside from the privilege of paying takes on it)

"Owning property," at least in the United States, is just a fancy term for describing renting property from the government. The price you pay for the property buys you the contract, property taxes are your rent, and anytime they feel like it they can evict you (eminent domain). And like all landlords, even those as generally hands-off as the government, at the end of the day, they make the rules.

Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#106

Post by jacquesm »

pg wrote: post #7
callmeed wrote: post #2

Interesting. Where I grew up (San Luis Obispo county in CA), you'd need an act of congress to touch a mature oak tree–even on your own property. Our church actually had to build around one when they did a building project. I bet if an entrepreneur or real estate developer wanted to cut down oak trees for a building project, they wouldn't get past the first step in the permit process ... but I guess when city wants th…

You can't cut down a mature tree on your own property in Palo Alto either. But apparently the city can.

Someone joked a while ago that they suspect you are tailing the logfiles to see who votes you up, I thought it was rubbish at the time, but after seeing this comment and the number of votes I'm beginning to doubt ;)

Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#107

Post by johnnybgoode »

krakensden wrote: post #95
johnnybgoode wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it the student's responsibility to protect the teacher's ego? Here is the admittedly unusual way in which I look at it: In most cases, the school system (including the teachers) is implicitly claiming that students are better off in school with them than anywhere else. When a ludicrous claim like this is being made and enforced, I don't see why they should be cut so much slack.

It's not the student's responsibility to protect the teacher's ego, it's the student's responsibility to be reasonable. Standing up and yelling because the teacher forgot a semicolon in some example code, for instance, is a waste of everyone's time, not just the teacher's.

Your somewhat extreme example notwithstanding, are you saying it's unreasonable for a student to point it out when a teacher is giving incorrect information to the class?

Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#108

Post by kevbin »

bkovitz wrote: post #88
ardit33 wrote: post #36

It is sad though, that Cal. Ave, is considered on the most nicer areas of Sillicon Valley. There is nothing really special in it that you can't find in any dinky town in the us, minus the charm that small towns have. Compare to any nice areas to Cambridge, or W. D.C. or NYC, or Boulder. With the money flowing in the area, that that's what they can achieve? At least during the gilded age, the rich folks built memorial…

When I first moved to the Bay Area, I was puzzled by how "blah" Silicon Valley is. The land of innovation is suburbia and strip malls? A cultural desert? My manager at Palm, who had grown up in Cupertino, said that Sunnyvale and Cupertino were "the two most boring towns in America". Did they outside all beauty and culture to San Francisco? Or did they just not care ?

Silicon Valley does have some of the most beautiful, innovative office parks in the world. They're huge and isolated, however. Maybe the combination of strict zoning and ubiquitous automobiles aggregates retail into malls and strip malls, commercial into office parks, industrial into warehouse districts, etc.? Regardless, it's produced a grand, metropolitan brutalism of inhuman scale, navigable only by automobile, with the humane portions grandfathered-in between the cracks and targeted for extinction by city-planners, bureaucrats, and real estate developers.

Re: The Lost Oaks of California Ave

#109

Post by krakensden »

johnnybgoode wrote: post #107
krakensden wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the student's responsibility to protect the teacher's ego, it's the student's responsibility to be reasonable. Standing up and yelling because the teacher forgot a semicolon in some example code, for instance, is a waste of everyone's time, not just the teacher's.

Your somewhat extreme example notwithstanding, are you saying it's unreasonable for a student to point it out when a teacher is giving incorrect information to the class?

I'm saying "It depends." My experience with that behavior indicates that it's usually counterproductive- either nitpicking like my previous example, or axe grinding that isn't really helping. Think an Ayn Rand follower interrupting a class on Marxism every few moments.

The problem, really, is that it's impossible to make a fully qualified statement and still be engaging. As a speaker, you have to skip over some detail somewhere, thus there is always going to be a place to jump in and act an ass.

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