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Comment by HCIdivision17 | Hacker News Reader

The images truly are breathtaking.

His note about the streets seeming like neurons is interesting, but I hope I'm not the only person who immediately thought the shots resembled an exaggerated extruded version of a chip's layered layout.

(Here's sort of a small version: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Cell-Proc... )

It's a bit odd: the scale of the city is not quite large enough to look like a modern processor's layout, yet is tens/hundreds of thousands of times larger. The scale of complexity is boggling.

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New York as a Microchip layout was the main theme of the intro of 'Hackers'. Check out around 0:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c4KG_8iTZM

That intro was responsible for introducing me to Orbital as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(band)

Wow perfect reference.

Btw just in case you didn't know, you can link to specific times in youtube videos, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c4KG_8iTZM&t=55s

Yeah, it's a metaphor that gets explored a bit from time to time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJuy7LTBJk0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDB9g7l5srA

Koyaanisqatsi and Tron both did it in '82. I'm sure there are probably other, earlier examples, too.

Another breathtaking "circuit board" is Los Angeles -- at night. I immediately likened what I saw to a glowing circuit board without thinking twice. What a resemblance! Very computational.

Flying in from the east, descending over Riverside and heading towards LAX, presents an absolutely astonishing view below. Lit up in orderly sequence are a vast range of square blocks, freeway arteries, commercial corridors, and industrial complexes housing warehouse "chips" that are eerily reminiscent of a giant, organically-built, human-habitable computer. Tron-style. Hardly an end in sight if the weather works it out.

All breathtakingly illuminated in varying, relative intensity and motion (streetlamps, autos, traffic signals, spotlights, etc.), "powering" the whole damn machine of a human ant colony with electric life.

Please excuse my poor attempt at a poetic description, I have not been able to find a proper photo to share here, yet.

I used to do a lot of aerial photography over Los Angeles, typically in a Cessna with my head out of the window (very scary when you have glasses...). rashiedamini.daportfolio.com

Never was able to take photos of LA at night.

I love seeing what other people can do, though. Taking night photos while flying is a really daunting task! These really are great photos.

Cool photos! Yeah, after flying over NYC, Chicago, San Fran, Detroit, etc. at night, NOTHING has come close to LA circuitry. Perhaps Las Vegas and Phoenix, on a smaller scale, but I haven't had a chance to view those cities personally. Southwest suburbs are much denser than elsewhere (which I assume is due to water, among other constraints).

I've done the same w/ my head outside of a Cessna. Nothing like knowing exactly how the atmosphere really "feels" to the wings (in other words, the feel of the pressure of air required to lift the Cessna!)

I was reminded of the quote from TRON Legacy:

> I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways?

These shots definitely capture the city-to-circuit transitions from the films.

The original Cosmos by Carl Sagan [1] has a fantastic episode called "The Persistence of Memory" in which he compares the collective intelligence and pathways of cities to the brain, DNA, etc. if you've never seen it, I highly recommend it.

1: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage

Lately I have been wondering if macro-behaviors themselves aren't something like streets in an old world city -- laid out thousands of years ago for long-forgotten purposes. I was in a meeting with a senior (in both age and position) technical advisor, asking about an HR issues in our organization. "Why haven't we tried [optimizing]?" I asked. Sparing HN the details, my organization conducts HR to minimize risks, not to maximize gains. "We tried once, but failed. The system now works. There's no need to change it." This system, originally programmed in DOS (yes, that DOS), was ported years ago over into an emulator that runs atop HTML (that's right -- to use this system our operators boot up an old version of IE that pretends it's DOS). And nobody has ever thought that perhaps there's a better way to do business. Solidified pathways. Cognitive arteries caked over in plaque over years of use. Like paved-over cobblestone.

You might enjoy the book http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incer...

have been meaning to tackle that, actually -- thanks for the nudge. i read The Bed of Procrustes a few years ago...

Chicagoan here. Everytime I fly into O'Hare at night, its light being on the set of Tron; not that Tron actually had lit up sets of course. The city becomes a huge lit up grid. Unlike NYC, Chicago is fairly contiguous with no bodies of water breaking up the metro area. So you get views like these for as far as you can see:

http://blogs.voanews.com/tedlandphairsamerica/files/2010/07/...

very much so.. no doubt how the "Grid" in Tron was conceived.. in fact, these photos have a "tron" kind of feel to them (the saturation of some of those neon colors looks very EL)

Definitely reminiscent, though it's even more interesting when you compare different cities, especially those outside of America... here in Europe the layouts look very different, you don't have the same "grid". For example, London:

https://oxfordschoolofphotography.files.wordpress.com/2012/0...

If you haven't watched Koyaanisqatsi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi), you really should.

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