Last month I left Last.fm after a little over three unforgettable years. We did some good work. I got to hang out with a group of people with immense talent and grew in all kind of ways that can't be quantified, charted or spreadshot. So much remarkable stuff took place in such little time I wouldn't even know where to begin telling. So I'll spare you.

A week after my voluntary unemployment kicked in I walked into an interview at the multi-disciplinary research unit, CASA, for a funded PhD in the application of complex systems & network theory to matters of urbanism. These matters interest me.

My presentation contained three quotations that served to illustrate why I was sitting in front of the project leads. They clinched me the PhD,

I have confirmed Pascal’s observation that imagination tires before Nature.

- Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature

The fact is, that the creation of a town... is fundamentally a genetic process. This conclusion, simple though it is, calls for a shattering revision of our attitude to architecture and planning.

- Christopher Alexander, The Timeless way of Building

The key systemic property of a city is nodality rather than centrality... Since network cities easily exercise control at a distance, the influence of a town has little to do with propinquity...

- Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Non-linear History