The owners of the Empire State Building are objecting to a proposed 69-story skyscraper that would be built two blocks away. The new building, called 15 Penn Plaza, would go where the Hotel Pennsylvania is currently located, at 32nd Street and 7th Avenue, and would rise to about 1200 feet — or just 25 feet lower than the top floor of the Empire State Building.

And the owners of the Empire State Building are putting up a fight. “New York will have a giant black eye on the world stage for allowing such poor city planning to take the vision of New York and marring it in a billion people’s minds around the world,” said Anthony Malkin, the president of Malkin Holdings, LLC, part owner of the iconic building. “Would you put this building next to the Eiffel Tower? Would you put this building next to London’s Big Ben tower? Would you put an oil derrick next to the Statue of Liberty?”

– Matthew Schuerman, WNYC News.

Who knows if this thing will actually get done because obviously 1200-foot skyscraper is a pretty big undertaking, but it’s not exactly an oil derrick. Plus one of Malkin’s examples of iconic beauty — the Eiffel Tower — was denounced as an eyesore when it was first built.

And in living, breathing, growing cities, skylines should be fluid things. I suppose the preservationist urge is always a factor, and so what Malkin and his ilk are doing is just sort of part of the natural progression, but if another skyscraper gets built near or next to the Empire State Building then it will just become, in time, every bit as much a part of what we see when we picture Manhattan.

I happen to love the Empire State Building. Maybe it’s because it’s the first skyscraper I knew, and the central one in the city I grew up near. But to me it seems perfectly befitting its name, like the architectural epitome of the American Empire. Wham. Here I am. Yield to my awesomeness.

But from the certain angles on the Jersey Turnpike it does look a bit lonely. Not sure how the proposed Penn Plaza building will affect that, nor do I know how I feel about the building — it’s hard to get a good sense from the renderings, but it certainly doesn’t look inexplicably awesome like this. We will probably find out, I suppose:

One tradition requires the villagers to murmur invocations during the bone-chilling night to the deified mountains surrounding Rapaz, asking for the clouds to let forth rain. Then they peer into burning llama fat and read how its sparks fly, before sacrificing a guinea pig and nestling it in a hole with flowers and coca.

– Simon Romero, N.Y. Times.

Pretty fascinating story from the Times about the struggle to decipher khipus, ancient Inca woven knots that some believe may have been that society’s secret to communication without written language.

Basically, there are these ropes with a series of intricately woven knots in them. A bunch of ancient towns have a bunch of these ropes, but no one knows how to read them anymore, in part because the Spanish colonials stamped them out. There are some that are used for math, but those are a different thing, apparently.

It’s not mentioned in the article and I’m sure the people working on it are smart enough to figure this out, but I wonder if there’s greater variance in the dialects, so to speak, of the ropes than there would have been in written languages in other ancient societies since the Incas didn’t have the wheel. Doesn’t it seem like that would make everything go a little slower, so the rope-language change a little bit more from town to town? Just a thought.

Also, and I mean no disrespect: Really, Inca civilization? No written language and no wheel? I mean, I totally appreciate what you’ve done with the llama, and I understand Macchu Picchu is about the most beautiful place in the world, but, you know, seriously?

“I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation – cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts will be a fact,” said Mr Sutton.

The tech-savvy Los Angeles “transplant” credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life.

“I think the shift to all digital formats in all methods and forms of media consumption is inevitable and coming very quickly,” said Mr Sutton.

– Matthew Danzico, BBC News.

I’ll fully admit that I’m a little bit paranoid. Not like tinfoil-hat paranoid, just like a guy who has read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and spent a lot of time thinking about how it all could go wrong.

So articles like this one, about the new and pretentious so-called 21st-Century Minimalists, freak me out a bit. The piece highlights a growing number of people who have parted with all their old-media possessions to go all-digital, including at least a few that tossed their apartments out with their DVD collections, preferring the enormously presumptuous route of crashing on people’s couches.

And look: I realize this (outside of the drifter thing) is the direction the world is going and its sort of silly to fight it. Eventually I’ll have a Kindle or an iPad or something like it, and most of the books I own will be in electronic format even if I love the feeling of making progress through pages in print.

But since many of the largest entities putting books online are corporations — beholden to different standards than schools or the government — what happens as we begin depending on eBooks more and more? What if Google wins a bunch of lawsuits and someday completes the Google Books project and we become reliant on it? Then we’re at their mercy, and if Google decides to move into Phase 2 and start working on thought control then, well, whoops.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I just still think there’s value in having something actually exist in some hard form of media, if only for posterity.

Also I didn’t even mention how desperately the guy quoted above is begging to be plugged into The Matrix. OK, bro, you want a fully digital existence? You got it. Now you’re powering Keanu Reeves’ war against the machines.