In recent years urban transport professionals globally have largely acquiesced to the view that automobile demand in cities needs to be managed rather than accommodated. Rising incomes inevitably lead to increases in motorization. Even without the imperative of climate change, the physical constraints of densely inhabited cities and the corresponding demands of accessibility, mobility, safety, air pollution, and urban livability all limit the option of expanding road networks purely to accommodate this rising demand. As a result, as cities develop and their residents become more prosperous, persuading people to choose not to use cars becomes an increasingly key focus of city managers and planners. Improving the quality of alternative options, such as walking, cycling, and public transport, is a central element of this strategy. However, the most direct approach to managing automobile demand is making motorized travel more expensive or restricting it with administrative rules. The contribution of motorized travel to climate change reinforces this imperative.

Much of what we call political risk is in fact uncertainty. This applies to all types of political risks, from civil strife to expropriations to regulatory changes. Political risk, unlike credit or market or operational risk, can be unsystematic and therefore more difficult to address in classic statistical terms. What is the probability that terrorists will attack the United States again? Unlike earthquakes or hurricanes, political actors constantly adapt to overcome the barriers created by risk managers. When corporations structure foreign investments to mitigate risks of expropriations, through international guarantees or legal contracts, host governments seek out new forms of obstruction, such as creeping expropriation or regulatory discrimination, that are very hard and legally costly to prove. Observation of a risk changes the risk itself. There are ways to mitigate high-impact, low-probability events. But analysis of these risks can be as much art as science.

An invention or discovery that is too far ahead of its time is worthless; no one can follow. Ideally, an innovation opens up only the next step from what is known and invites the culture to move forward one hop. An overly futuristic, unconventional, or visionary invention can fail initially (it may lack essential not-yet-invented materials or a critical market or proper understanding) yet succeed later, when the ecology of supporting ideas catches up. Gregor Mendel's 1865 theories of genetic heredity were correct but ignored for 35 years. His sharp insights were not accepted because they did not explain the problems biologists had at the time, nor did his explanation operate by known mechanisms, so his discoveries were out of reach even for the early adopters. Decades later science faced the urgent questions that Mendel's discoveries could answer. Now his insights were only one step away. Within a few years of one another, three different scientists each independently rediscovered Mendel's forgotten work, which of course had been there all along.

Since human beings are at once both similar and different, they should be treated equally because of both. Such a view, which grounds equality not in human uniformity but in the interplay of uniformity and difference, builds difference into the very concept of equality, breaks the traditional equation of equality with similarity, and is immune to monist distortion. Once the basis of equality changes so does its content. Equality involves equal freedom or opportunity to be different, and treating human beings equally requires us to take into account both their similarities and differences. When the latter are not relevant, equality entails uniform or identical treatment; when they are, it requires differential treatment. Equal rights do not mean identical rights, for individuals with different cultural backgrounds and needs might require different rights to enjoy equality. of whatever happens to be the content of their rights. Equality involves not just rejection of irrelevant differences as is commonly argued, but also full recognition of legitimate and relevant ones.

Not all Golden Rules are alike; two kinds emerged over time. The negative version instructs restraint; the positive encourages intervention. One sets a baseline of at least not causing harm; the other points toward aspirational or idealized beneficent behavior. While examples of these rules abound, too many to list exhaustively, let these versions suffice for our purpose here: "What is hateful to you do not do to another" and "Love another as yourself." Both versions insist on caring for others, whether through acts of omission, such as not injuring, or through acts of commission, by actively intervening. Yet while these Golden Rules encourage an agent to care for an other, they do not require abandoning self-concern altogether. The purposeful displacement of concern away from the ego nonetheless remains partly self-referential. Both the negative and the positive versions invoke the ego as the fundamental measure against which behaviors are to be evaluated.

There are times when we hold contradictory views and we know it, at least at one of the deeper levels of consciousness. Most of us could not comfortably live with ourselves if we made a habit of holding flatly contradictory statements at the forefront of our consciousness. For example, I could not explicitly say to myself "I tell many deliberate lies to Stephanie" and "I never lie to Stephanie." What I do, assuming the first statement reflects objective facts, is suppress the second statement. Another way I can allow myself to hold on to statements that contradict the facts is deliberately to refrain from examining the facts to which the statements refer. This attitude is expressed by the quip "Don't bother me with the facts; I've already made up my mind." Mental operations of these kinds are not so much instances of reasoning as evasion of reasoning. Obviously, this can have nothing to do with logic. Those forms of unhealthy reasoning can be known as "rationalization." Rationalization is reasoning in the service of falsehood.

Anger and empathy-like matter and antimatter- can't exist in the same place at the same time. Let one in, and you have to let the other one go. So when you shift a blamer into empathy, you stop the person's angry ranting dead in its tracks. And what about the person who's on the defensive? Initially, this human punching bag is frustrated because no matter what he or she is trying to mirror outward the ignorant blamer is blind to it. As a result, the person who's under attack is usually in a state of quiet, barely controlled rage. Suddenly and unexpectedly, however, the blamer knows just how sad, angry, scared, or lonely the defender feels and spontaneously turns into an ally. When the defender feels understood by the blamer and that they are on the same side, there's nothing to defend against. The defender's wall, and with it his unspoken rage and frustration, disappears. The relief from no longer feeling "fear or hatred" toward the blamer spontaneously triggers a tremendous rush of gratitude and-miraculously- the person's quiet rage turns into forgiveness and, beyond that, a willingness to work toward solutions.

The earliest humans had access to only a very limited number of materials, those that occur naturally: stone, wood, clay, skins, and so on. With time, they discovered techniques for producing materials that had properties superior to those of the natural ones; these new materials included pottery and various metals. Furthermore, it was discovered that the properties of a material could be altered by heat treatments and by the addition of other substances. At this point, materials utilization was totally a selection process that involved deciding from a given, rather limited set of materials, the one best suited for an application based on its characteristics. It was not until relatively recent times that scientists came to understand the relationships between the structural elements of materials and their properties. This knowledge, acquired over approximately the past 100 years, has empowered them to fashion, to a large degree, the characteristics of materials. Thus, tens of thousands of different materials have evolved with rather specialized characteristics that meet the needs of our modern and complex society, including metals, plastics, glasses, and fibers.

The role that sleep plays in evolution is still under study. One possibility is that it is an advantageous adaptive state of decreased metabolism for an animal when there are no more pressing activities. This seems true for deeper states of inactivity such as hibernation during the winter when there are few food supplies, and a high metabolic cost to maintaining adequate temperature. It may be true in daily situations as well, for instance for a prey species to avoid predators after dark. On the other hand, the apparent universality of sleep, and the observation that mammals such as cetaceans have developed such highly complex mechanisms to preserve sleep on at least one side of the brain at a time, suggests that sleep additionally provides some vital service(s) for the organism. This is particularly true since one aspect of sleep is decreased responsiveness to the environment. If sleep is universal even when this potential price must be paid, the implication may be that it has important functions that cannot be obtained just by quiet, wakeful resting.

"Craftsmanship" may suggest a way of life that declined with the arrival of industrial society-but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stand in the way of the craftsman's discipline and commitment: schools may fail to provide the tools to do good work, and workplaces may not truly value the aspiration for quality. And though craftsmanship can reward an individual with a sense of pride in work, this reward is not simple. The craftsman often faces conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to do something well for its own sake can be weakened by competitive pressure, by frustration, or by obsession.