1. What good fiction is available about dealing with emergent systems and behaviour?

    Most of our culture teaches us to look at figureheads and individuals — cut off the villain’s head and the story ends happily. But life is too complex to be reasoned about like this.

    Off the top of my head, the only non scifi work of fiction I can think of which talks about this is Grapes of Wrath. Any others spring to mind?

  2. Found this interesting piece of from my GCSE Geography project whilst digging through site archives whilst trying to fix some dead URLs:

    Apart from the obvious flaw of hard-to-read text, and the more subtle distortion of the results due to them being overlaid onto a contoured 3D landscape, it’s actually not that bad.

  3. How to emulate standard front-controller behaviour of routing static assets statically, otherwise calling index.php using the PHP 5.4 built-in server:

    // file: index.php
    // Route static assets from CLI server
    if (PHP_SAPI === 'cli-server') {
        if (file_exists(__DIR__ . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) and !is_dir(__DIR__ . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])) {
            return false;
        }
    }
    
    // do usual front-controller stuff