City Untangled

    Personal Thoughts on Physical Limits, Complexity, City Planning, and Community

    • Political Tension 03: Public Documents about Northampton, MA

      *For a list of all the articles in this series and other political articles, please go here: https://cityuntangled.com/category/politics/. This is going to be a very short article since I will be pointing to public comments and letters I already wrote and sent to the Northampton City Council and School Committee… More ⇢

    • Political Tension 02: Censorship and Verbal Violence in Holyoke, MA

      Warning: This article is lengthy, technical, and personal. I will work to write future articles in a much simpler and impersonal way, but I felt that writing about specific personal incidents is worth sharing to help others become more comfortable about speaking up. *For a list of all the articles… More ⇢

    • Political Tension 01: Introduction

      *For a list of all the articles in this series and other political articles, please go here: https://cityuntangled.com/category/politics/. To warn readers, I am going to write about my experiences with and opinions on the darker aspects of politics in this series titled, “Political Tension”. I went back and forth between… More ⇢

    • Heads-Up for More Political Content

      To give readers a heads-up, I will be putting up more political content, focusing on national political and social issues that could be applied to local politics as well. [Update on 08/19/2025: The following category and link on local politics are no longer there since I merged them into a… More ⇢

    • Peak Complexity, Part 3

      Reader Warning: Critical discussions of government mistakes and human costs. In Part 1, I had a more technical discussion of peak complexity with real-life computer failure examples. Part 2 was a brief article with mostly links to make up for my long period of no new articles. It focuses on… More ⇢

    • My Presentation on the South Korean Coup of 2024

      On the Writings page at https://cityuntangled.com/writings/, under Political Topics, you will find my recent presentation on the failed self-coup by South Korean president Yoon Seok Yeol (윤석열) on 2024-12-03. Presentation date was 2025-07-09. Both the YouTube recording and the PDF of the presentation slides are there. To give people a heads-up, this… More ⇢

    • Peak Complexity, Part 2

      [Initial publication had a lot of errors, including duplicate links. My apologies.] This will be a mini article, mostly listing some relevant links. I was writing a much longer article about the human costs of complexity and excessive complexity in government agencies when many issues started occurring at the national… More ⇢

    • Please Use the Subscribe Feature Instead of RSS

      A reader told me that the RSS feature is not working. I read people recommending the Subscribe feature over RSS, and this incident proves the point. I removed the RSS feature. People should instead go to the bottom of the pages and use the Subscribe feature. It is on the… More ⇢

    • Feds Took Down Their Own Anti-Disinformation Video

      Some time in 2024, I watched a helpful 5-minute video about disinformation by foreign service officer Chris Smith. It was listed on both the State Department website and Facebook. I noticed that as recent as March 19th, 2025, the State Department has taken it down. I was able to find… More ⇢