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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • It was also never originally about fire safety. It was about making it more difficult to build multi-family homes.

    Lawrence Veillier, an early influence on zoning laws in the US, wanted to “do everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two- family dwellinas, because the two-family house is the next least obiectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind… If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction: if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even where there are only three families; if we require fire escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds, because that can be iustified as a leqitimate exercise of the police power… In our laws let most of the fire provisions relate solelv to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever” (NHA Proceedings 1913, 212)



  • That’s because human perception exists on a logarithmic scale! It’s called the Weber-Fechner law, and it was one of the first studied psychological phenomena, before psychology as a field was even defined.

    Interestingly, our sense of the “bigness” of numbers is also logarithmic. This is why there have to be explicit explanations of the massive difference between a million and a billion - our brains instinctively and erroneously think “eh, it’s like double.”

    ~edit I can’t type~