Tootfinder

This reporting doesn't make clear the resolution is nonbinding: the departments are free to blow off not just the "deadlines" but the requested actions as well.
It does signal priorities the supervisors may go on to weigh at budget time, when evaluating mayoral appointees that need confirmation, or negotiating with Lurie about legislation he wants passed. But it may be a weak signal because supes who signed onto this did so knowing it was nonbinding.

Supervisors approve new traffic safety plan with deadlines for city departments
After San Francisco’s policy on traffic safety expired at the end of 2024, city supervisors on Tuesday adopted a new plan to curb traffic fatalities and injuries on city streets. The Board of Supervisors passed the Street Safety Act, sponsored by District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar, that includes actions with deadlines for seven city departments, […]

Ukrainian city Pavlohrad suffers 'hellish night and morning' of Russian strikes: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/19/ukrainian-city-pavlohrad-suffers-hellish.html

Post shared with me by @… about twenty minutes ago when I last heard from her to know she’s alive.
(israel’s occupation forces have surrounded her neighbourhood with tanks and are firing on houses and tents. The israeli genocide of the Palestinian people is being live streamed by its victims.)

Department of Homeland Security agents arrested 70 New Yorkers outside 26 Federal Plaza on Thursday afternoon,
with an additional 12 elected officials arrested upstairs,
after they had attempted to enter the building to assess the living conditions of immigrants detained there.
Some of the electeds had made it past the doors, and came upstairs
— only to be handcuffed moments later. 
Among the officials arrested include New York City Comptroller Brad Lander,

‘ICE Out of NY’: Dozens Arrested at Federal Plaza as Fight Over ICE Escalates
The arrests came a day after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan extended court oversight of the detention facility’s conditions.

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
AVON: What the hell is that? [to Dayna, who enters] What happened?
DAYNA: Bayban got away from me.
TARRANT: He'll be making for his ship.
NORL: No! Let him go. He has no men left.

How to bet the Chiefs in 2025: Super Bowl odds, win total, props, best bets, picks for Kansas City

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/how-to-

City Features VIII 👣
城市特征 VIII 👣
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

There’s a new #OpenStreetMap website feature related to #Wikidata!
When viewing objects in OSM that have a Wikidata tag, you can now click the Wikidata icon to turn the opaque QID values into human-readable info (plus a link to Wikipedia if any).

join the DSA SF social housing reading group!!
next Tuesday 7/22 7pm in person
#sfPol

Social Housing Reading Group
What could social housing look like in San Francisco, and how do we get there? Join DSASF for a reading of the Budget and Legislative Analyst's report on how the city can build its own publicly owned, deeply affordable housing. We will also read the SF Berniecrats report, Housing for the 99%, which lays out a vision for social housing for all in San Francisco.

City Matters, a free monthly newspaper serving the City of London since 2016, enters voluntary liquidation, citing rising print costs and declining ad revenue (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/reg…

Fleet Street's local newspaper goes out of business
City Matters launched in 2016, aiming to "fill a local news gap" for City of London which, at the time, had "no dedicated title".

∩️ Leftist lawmakers gather to answer a question: How to beat the global right?
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-07-31/leftist-lawmakers-from-across-the-hemisphere-gather-to-ask-a-questi…

A conference of leftists wants to know: How to beat the global right?
Political leaders from a dozen countries have gathered in Mexico City to discuss a key question: How can the left win?

Uspol, genocide
In case you're wondering whether "political violence" is escalating in the U.S.A. right now, of *course* it is as we move into an era of concentration campus and domestic military deployments. But both domestic genocides and purges as well as political violence targeted at individual prominent figures has been a *constant* throughout American history, from gun duels fought between political rivals to massacres of Native Americans in order to steal their land, to pogroms against Catholics, to literal wars on local Black success and political participation, all dating back before the American Revolution to the beginning of colonization. Thanks to Wikipedia, here's a *small sampling* where I attempted to whittle things down to about one event per decade before recent times.
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_political_violence_in_Washington,_D.C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States
Killings, woundings, and plots against political figures:
Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton in 1804
Sam Houston beats Rep. William Stanbery in 1832
Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson in 1835
Fight between Representatives Churchwell & Cullom in 1854
Caning of Sen. Charles Summer in 1856
Brawl on the House floor in 1858
Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865
Assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881
Assassination of President William McKinley in 1901
Attempted Assassination of William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz in 1909
Wounding of former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912
Bombing of the U.S. Senate reception room in 1915
Attempted Assassination of President Herbert Hover in 1928 (in Argentina)
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1947
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1950
The United States Capitol Shooting in 1954
Planned Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1960
Attempted Assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1963
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963
Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968
Weather Underground bombings in 1970, 1971, and 1975
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1972 (Alabama Governor George Wallace was targeted & injured instead)
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1974
Planned Assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1974
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Gerald Ford in 1975
Wounding of President Ronald Reagan in 1981
Attempted Kidnapping of Federal Reserve Board members in 1981
Planned Assassination of President George Bush in 1993 (in Kuwait)
Attempted Assassinations (x3) of President Bill Clinton in 1994
Attempted Assassination of President Bill Clinton in 1996
Anthrax attacks on US senators in 2001
Attempted Assassination of President George W. Bush in 2005 (in the foreign country of Georgia)
Planned Assassination of President-Elect Barrack Obama in 2008
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2009 (in Turkey)
Attempted Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2011
Shooting of Rep. Gabby Gliffords in 2011
Planned Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2012
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2013
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2015
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Donald Trump in 2017
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2018
Pipe bombs mailed to Democratic leaders in 2018, including former President Barack Obama
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2019
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2020
Kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020
Planned Assassination of Former President George W. Bush in 2022
Planned Assassination of Former President Barrack Obama in 2023
Attempted Assassination of President Joe Biden in 2023
Planned Assassinations (x2) of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Wounding of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Massacres and other mass killings, mostly with genocidal motivations:
The Acoma Massacre in 1599
The Paspaheg Massacre in 1610
The Wessagusset affair in 1623
The Mystic Massacre in 1637
The Pound Ridge Massacre in 1644
The Susquehannock chiefs massacre in 1675
The Apalachee Massacre in 1704
The Massacre at Fort Narhantes in 1712
The Norridgewock Massacre in 1724
The 1745 Massacre at Walden (in 1745)
The 1756 Massacre at Walden (in 1756)
The Killings by the Paxton Boys in 1763
The Yellow Creek Massacre in 1774
The Gnadenhütten Massacre in 1782
The Canyon del Muerto Massacre in 1805
The Battle of Tallushatchee in 1813
The Philadelphia Nativist Riots in 1844
The Bloody Island Massacre in 1850
The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857
The Sand Creek Massacre in 1864
The Opelousas Massacre in 1868
The Chinese Massacre in 1871
The Election Riot of 1874
The Haymarket Affair in 1886
The Buffalo Gap Massacre in 1890
The Wilmington Massacre in 1898
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre (in 1906)
The Ludlow Massacre in 1914
The Elaine massacre in 1919
The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921
The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921
The Bonus Army Conflict in 1932
The 1937 Memorial Day massacre (in 1937)
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963
The Kent State shootings in 1970
The Greensboro massacre in 1979
The MOVE Bombing in 1985
The 4 O'Clock murders in 1988
The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995
The September 11 Attacks in 2001
The Fort Hood Shooting in 2009
The Holocaust Memorial Shooting in 2009
The Isla Vista killings in 2014
The Charleston Church shooting in 2015
The San Bernardino attack in 2015
The Orlando Nightclub Shooting in 2016
The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting in 2018
The El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019
The January 6th Capitol Attack in 2021
The 2022 Buffalo Shooting (in 2022)

#NowPlaying for some wakeup music - The Cars' masterpiece from 1984, 'Heartbeat City'.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQxo8OvVvJ1UqHvsuYGZXb…

Omni Survey for Multimodality Analysis in Visual Object Tracking
Zhangyong Tang, Tianyang Xu, Xuefeng Zhu, Hui Li, Shaochuan Zhao, Tao Zhou, Chunyang Cheng, Xiaojun Wu, Josef Kittler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13000

Omni Survey for Multimodality Analysis in Visual Object Tracking
The development of smart cities has led to the generation of massive amounts of multi-modal data in the context of a range of tasks that enable a comprehensive monitoring of the smart city infrastructure and services. This paper surveys one of the most critical tasks, multi-modal visual object tracking (MMVOT), from the perspective of multimodality analysis. Generally, MMVOT differs from single-modal tracking in four key aspects, data collection, modality alignment and annotation, model designi…

blumenau_drug: Blumenau drug interactions (2019)
A network of drug-drug interactions, extracted from 18 months of electronic health records (EHRs) from the city of Blumenau in Southern Brazil. Nodes are annotated with drug information (separate file), and edges are weighted by the severity of the interaction, along with other information.
This network has 75 nodes and 181 edges.
Tags: Biological, Drug interactions, Weighted, Metadata

I still can't get over the fact that we're criminally charging bike riders in #NYC.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/06/16

Analyzing the Raiders' Chances at Winning the AFC West https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/news/kansas-city-chiefs-patrick-mahomes-pete-carroll-andy-reid-sean-payton

Bellevue is a relatively wealthy city, so when "residents claim a large presence of homelessness and crimes related to unhoused people [and] Bellevue crime statistics show otherwise", you know it isn't about crime, it's about othering the poor.
Bellevue neighbors voice safety concerns as city defends housing campus | Northwest | ncwlife.com
https://www.ncwlife.com/news/northwest/watch-bellevue-neighbors-voice-safety-concerns-as-city-defends-housing-campus/article_a139af5e-cc3d-58e5-b4ca-d47fd4238908.html

Remember the request I made to the City of Milwaukee to sweep/clean the bike lanes on Hampton Avenue? Here's the reply...
DPW: THE CITY OF MILWAUKEE DOESN'T SWEEP THAT FAR WEST ON HAMPTON AVE. THE COUNTY AND THE CEMENT COMPANY TAKES CARE OF THE BRIDGE AND SWEEPING OF THE ROCKS. SUPV RPW
So I guess I contact Riv/Crete or Milwaukee county now...
#mke

24 hours inside Pokrovsk as Russia closes in on key Ukrainian city: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/19/hours-inside-pokrovsk-as-russia.html

"It’s also a smart reply to the recent 'abundance' arguments made by many in the party’s establishment. Yes, we need to build out transit and increase housing development, but the public sector should do those things. A strong defense of the public sector against privatization, and a willingness to push for its expansion instead of opting for 'market-based solutions,' is an essential part of what it means to be a democratic socialist"

The Democratic Socialist Core to Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign
At a time when much of the left is in retreat or ducking for cover, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is championing democratic socialist politics and raising expectations.

City Features VII 🏙️
城市特征 VII 🏙️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

UK will recognise Palestine state after end of Trump state visit
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/britain-recognise-palestine-state-9fz0pvq87
Gisteren was nog een goeie dag voor Trump. T moment dat ie hoort dat het VK de Pa…

An analysis of ICE data by THE CITY shows that dozens of people are packed into locked rooms
and increasingly held for days inside a Manhattan building the feds say isn’t a detention site.
https://documentedny.com/2025/07/22/26-federal-plaza-ice-manhattan-…

‘Like Dogs in Here’ — Videos Expose ICE Lock-up Inside 26 Federal Plaza
An analysis of ICE data by THE CITY shows that dozens of people have packed into locked rooms and increasingly held for days inside a Manhattan building the feds say isn’t a detention site.

Environmental Risk Assessment via Nonhomogeneous Hidden Semi-Markov Models with Penalized Vector Auto-Regression
Marco Mingione, Pierfrancesco Alaimo Di Loro, Francesco Lagona, Antonello Maruotti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14387

Environmental Risk Assessment via Nonhomogeneous Hidden Semi-Markov Models with Penalized Vector Auto-Regression
Motivated by the study of pollution trends in the city of Bergen, we introduce a flexible statistical framework for modeling multivariate air pollution data via a nonhomogeneous Hidden Semi-Markov Vector Auto-Regression. The hidden process captures unobserved environmental conditions, while the vector autoregressive structure accounts for temporal autocorrelation and cross-pollutant dependencies. The model further allows time-varying environmental conditions to influence both the average levels…

Intressant om Shut the System, en ny och mer radikal grupp av klimataktivister i Storbritannien, som använder sabotage som metod. https://novaramedia.com/2025/08/18/why-climate-activists-are-slashing-jp-morgans-electricity-cables/

Why Climate Activists Are Slashing JP Morgan’s Electricity Cables
On Monday morning, climate activists cut the electricity cables that supply the JP Morgan and Allianz offices in the City of London. Novara Media spoke to them about why they think it’s time the movement turned to sabotage.

Amsterdam is celebrating its 750th anniversary. Tomorrow, this will be celebrated with activities on a large section of the ring road: for one day, there will be a bit more city for people and less for cars. Hopefully, this will be an appetiser for more.
https://opdering.amsterdam/en/

Anyone know this senior lady from #Toronto who speaks Portuguese? She has memory loss. Maybe she's your neighbour?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-lost-se…

I'm going to do some longer post on our new #data jobs at the City of #CapeTown over the next day or two. I would greatly appreciate it if you could read, and share with anyone that you think has the right stuff! And also just boost for general reach.
Something that we really prioritise, other t…

Giants Hangout | Prep for the Home Opener https://www.giants.com/video/giants-hangout-prep-for-the-home-opener

Following the "Geo-Erlebnis-Tag" during the weekend, preceding the Geo4Göttingen conference, the Geo4Change | Earth, Life, Climate, Resources, Materials | main program will start with plenary sessions for registered conference participants today.
https://geo4goettingen2025.de/
The full pro…

Get in loser, we're halfbiking to work today… ½🚲
#Halfbike #FediBikes #MastoBikes #Cycling

"""
But there is no certainty that madness was content to sit locked up in its immutable identity, waiting for psychiatry to perfect its art, before it emerged blinking from the shadows into the blinding light of truth. Nor is it clear that confinement was above all, or even implicitly, a series of measures put in place to deal with madness. It is not even certain that in this repetition of the ancient gesture of segregation at the threshold of the classical age, the modern world was aiming to wipe out all those who, either as a species apart or a spontaneous mutation, appeared as 'asocial'. The fact that the internees of the eighteenth century bear a resemblance to our modern vision of the asocial is undeniable, but it is above all a question of results, as the character of the marginal was produced by the gesture of segregation itself. For the day came when this man, banished in the same exile all over Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, suddenly became an outsider, expelled by a society to whose norms he could not be seen to conform; and for our own intellectual comfort, he then became a candidate for prisons, asylums and punishment. In reality, this character is merely the result of superimposed grids of exclusion.
The gesture that proscribed was as abrupt as the one that had isolated the lepers, and in both cases, the meaning of the gesture should not be mistaken for its effect. Lepers were not excluded to prevent contagion, any more than in 1657, 1 per cent of the population of Paris was confined merely to deliver the city from the 'asocial'. The gesture had a different dimension: it did not isolate strangers who had previously remained invisible, who until then had been ignored by force of habit. It altered the familiar cityscape by giving them new faces, strange, bizarre silhouettes that nobody recognised. Strangers were found in places where their presence had never previously been suspected: the process punctured the fabric of society, and undid the familiar. Through this gesture, something inside man was placed outside of himself, and pushed over the edge of our horizon. It is the gesture of confinement, in short, which created alienation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Ok time to load the car and head into the city to play with #MaggieSpeaks at Taste of River North. If you're in #Chicago looking for something to do come on out!
8:30pm | Ontario & Wells
P.S. if you saw this def come say hi!!

Can the Chiefs get back on track? We stacked every Super Bowl loser that started the next season 0-2 https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46283747/2025-kansas-city-chiefs-winless-0-2-super-bowl-losers-rank-nfl-history

CAN Networks Security in Smart Grids Communication Technologies
Ayman W. Baharia, Khaled T. Naga, Hesham S. Abdelfattah, Shady A. Maged, Sherif A. Hammad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12181

CAN Networks Security in Smart Grids Communication Technologies
The rapid evolution of smart grids requires effective communication protocols to transfer data reliably and securely. Controller Area Network (CAN) is one of the most recognized protocols that offer reliable data transmission in smart grids due to its robustness, real-time capabilities, and relatively low initial cost of its required hardware. However, as a smart city becomes more interconnected, it also becomes more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. As there are many mechanisms to secure the CAN no…

Two European incidents revealed last week -- an attack on a Norwegian dam by a Russia-friendly group known as Z-Pentest Alliance and a supposedly Russia-linked attack on a Polish city's water supply -- underscore that water utilities should intensify their focus on cybersecurity.
Check out my latest CSO piece. Thanks to former White House cyber official Jake Braun and ICS security specialist Ron Fabela for their insights.
Russia-linked European attacks renew concerns over wat…

Russia-linked European attacks renew concerns over water cybersecurity
Suspected sabotage in Norway and a foiled cyberattack in Poland highlight the growing risk to under-protected water utilities, experts warn.

'The city is dead': D.C. restaurant reservations drop amid federal crackdown (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2025/08/19/dc-restaurants-business-down-police-crackdown/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250819/p137#a250819p137

Brighton's Wild Park rainscape project filters out pollutants from road runoff, protecting the water supply and enhancing community access to nature. #climatechange #climatesolutions #climate

rest in paint 🕯️ https://criminalmindedartist.neocities.org/rip

A Garden Aloft ⛲️
空中花园 ⛲️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Unified Crew Planning and Replanning Optimization in Multi-Line Metro Systems Considering Workforce Heterogeneity
Qihang Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14251 https://

Unified Crew Planning and Replanning Optimization in Multi-Line Metro Systems Considering Workforce Heterogeneity
Metro crew planning is a key component of smart city development as it directly impacts the operational efficiency and service reliability of public transportation. With the rapid expansion of metro networks, effective multi-line scheduling and emergency management have become essential for large-scale seamless operations. However, current research focuses primarily on individual metro lines,with insufficient attention on cross-line coordination and rapid replanning during disruptions. Here, a …

I just got an email from the city asking me to sign up to get emails from the city. I thought that I was already getting emails from the city?

What the Raiders Need to Go Their Way This Season https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/news/ashton-jeanty-bo-nix-denver-broncos-kansas-city-chiefs-afc-west-jim-harbaugh-los-angeles-chargers

IT'S OFFICIAL: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York State, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New York City have formed the Northeast Public Health Collaborative.
The collaborative will issue their own vaccine recommendations and coordinate public health efforts.
https://www.…

Sheriffs with shields and batons.
You don't often see it expressed in a visible way like this, but such state violence ultimately backs up all property ownership. Homelessness only exists because if people entered and made a home in a vacant or underused property, the state would use essentially unlimited force to evict them.

Venerable S.F. dive bar in Tenderloin evicted by sheriff’s deputies with ‘shields & batons’
The foreclosed-upon pub was known for hosting punk shows in the 2000s and had one of the last smoking rooms in San Francisco.

Russia launches overnight drone strikes on Sumy and Odesa regions, at least 18 injured: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/20/russia-launches-overnight-drone-strikes.html

us_air_traffic: U.S. air traffic
Yearly snapshots of flights among all commercial airports in the United States from 1990 to today. Metadata include passengers, distance, carrier, airport located city, state, and month of the flight.
This network has 2278 nodes and 6390340 edges.
Tags: Transportation, Airport, Unweighted, Metadata, Temporal

Gestern bin ich auf "The Disintegration Loops" von William Basinski gestoßen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjnAE5go9dI
Heute ist der 11. September, und zieht Euch bitte den Wikipedia-Artikel zu den Disintegration Loops rein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disintegration_Loops). Wahnsinn!
Auszug:
Basinski finished the project the morning of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, and sat on the roof of his apartment building in Brooklyn with friends as the World Trade Center collapsed. He filmed the fallout during the last hour of daylight from a roof, and the following morning he played "Disintegration Loop 1.1" as a soundtrack to the aftermath. Stills from the video were used as the covers for the set of four CDs, and several weeks later Basinski dedicated the work to the victims in a postscript in the liner notes. He said that "the events gave new meaning to the musical pieces created by catastrophic decay in my studio a few weeks before."

Defending a City from Multi-Drone Attacks: A Sequential Stackelberg Security Games Approach
Dolev Mutzari, Tonmoay Deb, Cristian Molinaro, Andrea Pugliese, V. S. Subrahmanian, Sarit Kraus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11380

Defending a City from Multi-Drone Attacks: A Sequential Stackelberg Security Games Approach
To counter an imminent multi-drone attack on a city, defenders have deployed drones across the city. These drones must intercept/eliminate the threat, thus reducing potential damage from the attack. We model this as a Sequential Stackelberg Security Game, where the defender first commits to a mixed sequential defense strategy, and the attacker then best responds. We develop an efficient algorithm called S2D2, which outputs a defense strategy. We demonstrate the efficacy of S2D2 in extensive exp…

Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
DAYNA: They boobytrapped the box. Simple enough to do.
CALLY: They're a simple people, according to Tarrant.
AVON: And completely unaggressive. A slight exaggeration perhaps.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/92 B7B4

My favorite photo from a recent trip to the West Coast.
#VictoriaBC #photography

1/2 Thanks to @… for this interesting article. It speaks to me. :)
I’ve been weather blogging @… since 2005. It is interesting how it has changed, and how I have changed.
My website used to be just data from the (expensive) station I bought when I moved back to Port Alberni. It was a hobby and a side project to practice web/coding skills I use at work. My focus was on creating useful data for people that was more local/relevant than the official EC station outside of the city.
Then I put up a webcam and learned how to make timelapses. This got the attention of local media… because pictures. :)
Then I added a blog and started to write about the weather almost daily. This was before Facebook. There was a popular local online forum where I would post things. The media would also follow my website and they started to call me when there was extreme weather (usually very hot or very wet/stormy).
Then Facebook started to get big and I made a page that eventually had a few thousand followers. I would blog often. Lots of traffic from Facebook… this was 2010 and on. I blogged about climate and weather pretty equally.
Like anyone in Port Alberni, I was/am obsessed with the Martin Mars and got wrapped up in that issue along with others which combined with the weather following probably gave me just enough exposure to have me elected as a councillor in 2014.
I continued through that 4 years, blogging often in addition to councillor duties and work, heavily on facebook, then it all went sideways on my own poor judgement (go ahead and google it, it’s ok :)) and I was not reelected, but Facebook by 2018 had also changed. Cambridge Analytica, etc.
….Continued…
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-weather-apps-data-wildfires-storms-preparation-obsession-social-media/

Anatomy of a QB failure, plus the rookie with an eerily similar profile to Jefferson https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6565116/2025/08/20/colts-qb-situation-nfl-emeka-egbuka-fantasy-scoop-city/

Western countries can watch this genocide unfold without lifting a finger. That is their prerogative. But what they cannot do – what they will never again be able to do – is to pretend that they give a damn about human rights or democracy or international law. What they cannot do is claim to be civilised.
If you cannot or will not stop genocide, you are not a civilised society.
You cannot lecture anyone on ethics or morals or values. You are barbarians who have accepted the law o…

Palestinians march south as Israel ethnically cleanses Gaza City
Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza’s north are making the journey south in a mass exodus with no guarantee of safety.

‘As thrilling as driving a sports car’: the Tokyo capsule tower that gave pod-living penthouse chic
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jul/07/pod-living-nakagin-capsule-tower-tokyo-architectural-marvel-pent…

Vice President JD Vance is set to travel to Los Angeles today (June 20) amid tensions in the city over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Vance will “tour a multi-agency Federal Joint Operations Center,
a Federal Mobile Command Center, meet with leadership and Marines, and deliver brief remarks,” according to a readout of the vice president’s travel plans.
The trip comes after Los Angeles had been rocked with significant anti-ICE protests for which Donald Trump…

Bookmarked because sometimes you gotta rage against the machine https://plush.city/@fluffy/114860481742649232

Oof. Ellen Meiksins Wood, writing in 1995:

Self-Supervised Sparse Sensor Fusion for Long Range Perception
Edoardo Palladin, Samuel Brucker, Filippo Ghilotti, Praveen Narayanan, Mario Bijelic, Felix Heide
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13995

Self-Supervised Sparse Sensor Fusion for Long Range Perception
Outside of urban hubs, autonomous cars and trucks have to master driving on intercity highways. Safe, long-distance highway travel at speeds exceeding 100 km/h demands perception distances of at least 250 m, which is about five times the 50-100m typically addressed in city driving, to allow sufficient planning and braking margins. Increasing the perception ranges also allows to extend autonomy from light two-ton passenger vehicles to large-scale forty-ton trucks, which need a longer planning ho…

Muscle beaches, drag racing, and drones falling into the sea. Summer in Odesa hasn’t stopped: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/18/muscle-beaches-drag-racing-and.html

LIVE: Israel ‘burning the ground’ in Gaza City assault, thousands flee
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/9/16/live-israel-pounds-gaza-city-muslim-leaders-condemn-strike-on-qatar

LIVE: Israel pounds Gaza City; Muslim leaders condemn strike on Qatar
Israeli forces intensify attacks on Gaza City as Arab and Muslim nations denounce Israel’s attack on Doha.

⚡ Food Vendors Ditch Noisy Generators as City Explores Cleaner Power Options
#nyc

Food Vendors Ditch Noisy Generators as City Explores Cleaner Power Options
From halal carts to hot dog stands, sellers have long relied on noisy, polluting fossil fuel generators. Enter battery-powered alternatives — but the transition isn’t cheap or simple.

Chiefs in danger zone with impotent offense, while Steelers disappoint on defense; plus, 3 NFL closers https://www.nfl.com/news/chiefs-in-danger-zone-with-impotent-offense-while-steelers-disappoint-on-defense-plus-3-nfl-c…

foursquare: Foursquare NYC restaurants (2012)
Two bipartite networks of users and restaurant locations in New York City on Foursquare, from 24 October 2011 to 20 February 2012. In one network, an edge denotes a check-in event of a user at a restaurant. In the other, an edge exists if a user left a tip/comment on a restaurant. Metadata include comments.
This network has 6410 nodes and 10377 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted, Metadata

the most overlooked generation is probably GenTwitter (I refuse to call it X)

City Features VI 🏙️
城市特征 VI 🏙️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Donald Trump observed a few tents on public land and some garbage under an overpass.
Perturbed by the imagery, he issued a sweeping demand via his social media site, Truth Social:
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.”
“We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” Trump continued in his Sunday post. “Be prepared!”
The command came as he made plans to deploy 800 National Guard members to DC and temporarily federalize the city’s police department, …

DC’s homeless have nowhere to go. Trump might send them to jail.
The president's crackdown is causing fear and uncertainty among the city's unhoused and their advocates.

Russian drone strike on Ukraine's Sumy Oblast injures 12, including children: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/20/russian-drone-strike-on-ukraines.html

City Features III 🌆
城市特征 III 🌆
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

safe to say Joel Engardio is being recalled. he's down 30 points in the first drop
@…'s map also shows the 3 precincts added to the district in 2022 which allowed him to run (he lives in one of them), and which accounted for his margin of victory over Gordon Mar, voting most strongly to recall him. wild!

Masked ICE agents are only the start of the assault on government transparency.
Now, government attorneys that are arguing to deport immigrants are doing so in secret.
The Intercept reports on two separate instances immigration judges in New York City declined to identify the government attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the first case Judge ShaSha Xu said,
“We’re not really doing names publicly.”
But that’s not really true. Because she *did* ID…

Government Attorneys Now On Board With The Whole Secret Police Thing
Judges are letting government attorneys do the ugly work of mass deportations anonymously.

Xavier Worthy (shoulder) questionable to play vs. Giants as Chiefs look for first win https://www.nfl.com/news/xavier-worthy-shoulder-questionable-chiefs-giants

The Ukrainian voices left out of Trump-Putin meeting: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/15/the-ukrainian-voices-left-out.html

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Angles ↕️
在路上 - 去西安/ 角度 ↕️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Fujifilm Neopan F, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

best take so far on what the Engardio recall is really about. #sfpol https://sf.gazetteer.co/one-battle-after-another?giftLink=843bcd9f82560e755a6f0613…

One battle after another
A highway fight sparked Joel Engardio’s recall, but race and class conflicts sealed the deal

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Signs 💚
在路上 - 去西安/ 表象 💚
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Fujifilm Neopan F, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

I’m so tired of this big lot in the Mission sitting fenced and vacant in the midst of a housing crisis. For a while I thought vacancy tax, now I’m thinking eminent domain. Reportedly owned by an old lady in the Sunset who refuses to do anything with it.

Pawn shop owner admits to fencing Burrow items https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45781024/pawn-shop-owner-admits-fencing-joe-burrow-stolen-property

Rich Lyons,
the University of California, Berkeley, chancellor,
challenged US House Republicanson Tuesday
as they questioned Lyons and leaders of Georgetown University and the City University of New York
in the latest hearing on antisemitism in higher education.
The committee accused the schools of failing to respond adequately to allegations of bias or discrimination,
however the university leaders said that disciplinary action had been taken where approp…

Bad year for bicycling at the California State Capitol. Caltrans quick-build bill died, among others.
https://www.calbike.org/bike-friendly-bills-bite-the-dust/

Bike-Friendly Bills Bite the Dust - CalBike
After several years of successful campaigns, including passing the Freedom to Walk Act,the Complete Streets Bill, and securing $1 billion for the Active Transportation Program, 2025 is shaping up to be a dismal year for active transportation efforts in Sacramento. A combination of budget shortfalls, literal and metaphorical fires, and a federal government openly hostile […]

As Russia closes in on Pokrovsk, battle for key city enters its final act: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/17/as-russia-closes-in-on.html

City Features V 🌆
城市特征 V 🌆
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Jameis and the Big Apple (and Eli too): Winston relishes a day immersed in New York https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46016829/jameis-winston-eli-manning-spend-day-new-york-giants

One of the RV dwellers Lurie plans to displace is a staffer helping Joel Engardio fight his recall. #sfPol
https://sfstandard.com/2025/07/11/l…

Lurie has a plan to get RVs off the streets. RV dwellers say it's cruel and misguided
The residents react to City Hall's voucher proposal: "That's a step down."

Russian city of Voronezh comes under massive drone attack, multiple casualties reported: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/15/russian-city-of-voronezh-comes.html

Mismatched Bills-Dolphins, plus the lopsided Brady/FOX results, why Green Bay's defense shines https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6641264/2025/09/18/bills-dolphins-week-3-nfl-brady-fox-packers-scoop-city/

"Lurie’s silence on the ICE invasion of his city is damning. It’s also depressing.
"Rather than show some public backbone against ICE, Lurie is posting like someone who just found out about getting TikTok famous in the year of our lord 2025. The mayor is chasing micro-trends and linking up with celebrities."
htt…

Video shows moment Russian drone hits Kharkiv university building; 4 injured in the city: https://benborges.xyz/2025/09/16/video-shows-moment-russian-drone.html

On the Bay Area regional transit measure: "A gross receipts tax [rather than sales tax] would ensure that the largest and wealthiest companies contribute their fair share to the infrastructure that helps make their record profits possible. This approach avoids placing an additional burden on families already struggling with the crushing cost of living in the Bay Area." #SB63
🎁🔗:

i just had a terrifying thought. what if the vehicles... become autonomous

Another tree planted this year that no one watered so it died. I don’t know why it isn’t a bigger scandal Public Works let dozens of street trees die through inaction after their contractor went bankrupt. Only one Chron article mentioned it and only from the angle of “nonprofit shuts down.”

TIL Baltimore has been drastically decreasing homicides for the past several years through non-police interventions focused on conflict mediation and treating "root causes of gun violence, such as poverty, mental health, and housing issues"
https://popular.info/p/the-secret-to-b

The secret to Baltimore's extraordinary year
This April, Baltimore saw five homicides.

the SFBOS unanimously passed Melgar's Street Safety Act, a nonbinding resolution asking several agencies the BOS doesn't have jurisdiction over to do things to promote street safety. text: https://sfgov.legistar.com/View.ashx?M

All 5 SF YIMBY endorsed supervisors—Sauter, Engardio, Mahmood, Dorsey, and Melgar—voted to take $34 to $53 million away from building permanent affordable housing, *and* to ban RVs from all city streets.
So much for "legalize housing." With YIMBYs like this, who needs NIMBYs? #sfPol

Ritual Coffee’s parklet has been there for over a decade, but is still considered temporary by the city. A tree planted there 10 years ago could be relatively mature with a large canopy by now. SF needs a path from parklets to permanent spot sidewalk widenings.

SF folks: please call your supervisor and ask them not to redirect permanent affordable housing funds to temporary shelter
it’s likely illegal and it’s nonsense: the shelters would free up if people could exit to permanent housing!
https://dsasf.org/ocoh/

San Francisco is About to Defund Solutions to Homelessness
After a late-night session on June 26, the Budget & Appropriations Committee of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is moving forward with a set of proposed resolutions regarding the budget. T…

this potential — for AI companies to tweak their chatbots to give pro-Trump answers to appease MAGA — is one of the reasons I'm avoiding LLMs as a political practice. they are inherently extremely centralized, requiring massive resources to crawl data and train. to become dependent on such products is to subject ourselves to the owners' power. this is just one of the ways that can go disastrously wrong

The campaign to make it illegal for ChatGPT to criticize Trump
The conservative pressure campaign against social networks was hugely successful — and now it's coming for AI

I liked the premise of this The Dig podcast, that it was going to tell me why Chicago's left-wing mayor is seemingly so unpopular, but it's very in the weeds and didn't provide much of an overview of the issues. Feels like it's only for people who are already Chicago politics junkies
https://

street art spotted on Valencia