Civic planning is a tough gig, because your ability to experiment with new ideas is limited – you can’t just knock down a housing estate to see how it changes the traffic flow, for instance. Which makes it an obvious market for computer modelling, with a team at Arizona State developing sophisticated simulations of human crowd behaviour to help planners and architects make cities safer and more efficient. Which is all well and good, I suppose – but will it lead to the increased homogenisation of urban spaces? And how will they factor in the ways that people change the use of objects and spaces over long periods of time? And how much more complicated do these simulations have to become before turning them off becomes a question of ethics?

This one just in from the “Now I feel really old and unsuccessful” department – 13 year old CEO pitches business idea to entrepreneurial convention. Kudos – that kid’ll go far, though perhaps not with his current idea. If anyone needs me, I’ll be weeping quietly in the corner.

Now how’s this for old-school science fiction sensawunda: solar-powered ‘Solid State’ planes that fly by flapping their wings like a bird. Granted, they’re just a concept on an NIAC drawing board at the moment, but it’s pretty awesome to think that something like that could be considered plausible from an engineering perspective. [Gizmodo]

Pretty much everything we do in the real world gets mirrored in the metaverse, too. Even there, a person can set himself up as a spiritual guru, gather an interdenominational group of devotees around him, and then fall from grace by asking awkward questions. A fascinating story in its own right, and one of the best examples of Second Life journalism I’ve seen so far.

OK, here’s a challenge – think of five tasks you might build a robot to accomplish.

Done?

Right. I’ve got five British Pounds Sterling right here that says you didn’t include ‘giving promotional presentations about vinegar‘ in your list.