This is one of my Christmas gifts. And it is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that gets me excited. Thank you Bianca. You clearly know me.

I am endlessly fascinated by cities. I keep a running list of places I want to explore (everywhere from São Paulo to Shanghai). And frankly, I consider it to be an important part of my job to think about how to make our cities better.

As I was flipping through the book this morning, I was reminded of something that I have been saying for years on this blog. Toronto could use a floating public pool like the Badeschiff ("bathing ship") in Berlin:

Constructed from the hull of an old cargo vessel, the Badeschiff opened in 2004. The Spree itself is too polluted to swim in (or at least that was the case back in 2004), and so this has become an important swimming outlet for the city.

Paris is in a similar situation with the Seine, but it's looking to clean it up in time for the Olympics.

The real benefit of a floating pool is that you're mostly in a big body of water, but now you can also heat it. In the winter, the Badeschiff is covered and turned into a spa/sauna. This would be particularly useful in a place like Toronto.

It's easy to bring people to water in the summer. Apparently Summer-Badeschiff even has a bar and regular DJ sets (presumably all techno given this is Berlin).

The real challenge is in the winter. And if you've ever read an RFP involving a public space in Canada, you'll know that this question invariably comes up: So, how do we, like, get people to come here when it's 10 below?

Hot water, nice views, and a little food & drink. I promise that's all you need.

This morning, I came across an FT article talking about how mainland Chinese people are right now flocking to Macau to receive western mRNA vaccines. Apparently the Special Administrative Region has a single hospital offering the western varietals to "tourists", and lots of people now want them and presumably think they are more efficacious than the Chinese alternatives. This is not surprising.

So what actually stood out to me was the photo that FT chose for the article. It's of the half-scale Eiffel Tower replica that was built as part of a $2.5 billion casino resort in Macau known as The Parisian Macao (pictured above). There's even a faux Louvre-like building behind it and a "Jardin" in front of it so you can get that axial view of the tower. Welcome to Paris!

Of course, this is not the sort of thing that excites me in the least. I understand why it is done and that there is clearly a market for it, but I don't get it. It feels totally empty. Have we really run out of new ideas? So I decided to tweet something out to this effect and, in it, I included the fun fact that Macau is a former Portuguese colony and currently a Special Administrative Region of China, just like Hong Kong.

But it turns out that you can't say this on Twitter. I don't know why, but my tweet was immediately filtered out of my feed -- twice. Instead what you can say is "Macau is a SAR of a country that starts with C and ends with A." Apparently, this is acceptable Twitter language. Hmm. This has never happened to me before.

Thankfully, I have my own domain (which you are now reading from) where things are much freer. And collectively, we have things like the Ethereum Name Service, which is trying to create an even more censorship-resistant version of the internet. So today I decided that it was time to cancel my Twitter Blue account and put some more money into ENS tokens. This feels more like the future.

We don't like coal today, but it certainly transformed Victorian-era architecture:

“It is the biggest transition in the history of our species, with the possible exception of starting to use fire at all in the first place,” says Barnabas Calder, author of the groundbreaking study “Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency.” Fireplaces had to be redesigned for coal, smaller, and more efficient, and could now be distributed throughout the house, warming a sequence of smaller rooms that contained heat more efficiently. Brick, which also requires substantial amounts of energy to produce, became affordable. And glass, too, was accessible to ordinary people. “Coal affects the way you can achieve comfort conditions in a building, and it is a very affordable way of producing a significant amount of warmth, which allows for bigger windows. Even more significant is that it opens up a series of new building materials.”

But as new technologies transformed how we thought about it architecture, they also transformed how we thought about climate. Buildings used to have to be carefully "tuned" to their local environment. You had to think about where the sun was coming in, how you were going to trap it during the winter months, and how you were going to release it during the summer months, among many other things.

Eventually though, this stopped mattering.

We had building systems that could take care of these matters, which then meant that we were free to aspire to build the exact same architecture in Phoenix as in London. But we now know that that this doesn't make much sense. And this recent architectural tour from the Washington Post, which starts in 16th century England, is a good reminder that the lessons learned many centuries ago are in fact still relevant today.

Maybe even more so.