Flutterby™!

Man's case reveals cars slam into storefronts like 7-Eleven with alarming frequency — "This accident doesn't happen if somebody had spent about $800," co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council said.

Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. - an average of 1.14 per day.

7-Eleven apparently fought in court to withhold that data from the public.

Suburban man's case reveals cars slam into storefronts like 7-Eleven with alarming frequency

Rob Reiter is co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council. He was retained as an expert by Carl's attorneys in this case.

"If you install bollards, you pretty much solve that problem," he said of the danger.

Road Hazard: Evidence Mounts on Toxic Pollution from Tires

Both natural and synthetic rubber break down in the environment, but synthetic fragments last a lot longer. Seventy-eight percent of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust. These fragments are ingested by marine animals — particles have been found in gills and stomachs — and can cause a range of effects, from neurotoxicity to growth retardation and behavioral abnormalities.

“We found extremely high levels of microplastics in our stormwater,” said Rebecca Sutton, an environmental scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute who studied runoff. “Our estimated annual discharge of microplastics into San Francisco Bay from stormwater was 7 trillion particles, and half of that was suspected tire particles.”

Previously

Trying to record an instructional video this morning. I can deal with the birds. And the neighbor's wind chimes, and all of the parents driving their kids to school past my house, and whatever that large truck backing up was, but if those airplanes keep circling around I am going to lose my shit.

Hindsight ins 2020, but if I could go back two and a half decades.... <ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llAZpNd5v44">Mayor John Bauters shows us some of Emeryville’s Best Streets (YouTube video)

Well, Vibe Gallery in Petaluma is going out of business. If only there were an easy change the city could do that would bring more foot traffic to downtown, maybe while also raising quite a bit of revenue for the city?

It's interesting that we make a distinction between "the good shit" and "holy crap".

Charlene's CPAP was one of the ones affected by the recall, though we never saw the symptoms: ProPublica: Philips Kept Complaints About Dangerous Breathing Machines Secret While Company Profits Soared

Office is in a shared coworking space, and there was just the far-off laughter of little kids, and the office dog woke up, gave a low growl, and then settled back into her bed.

And I feel so much empathy right now...

I don't live in this neighborhood, just walk through it, but as I compare the only occasionally open fence here vs the impacts of utility system maintenance, the "stop the big dig" outrage starts to fall into perspective...

Though I do think we should have more discussions about parking *maximums*. (Added picture)

I don't live in this neighborhood, just walk through it, but as I compare the only occasionally open fence here vs the impacts of utility system maintenance, the "stop the big dig" outrage starts to fall into perspective...

Though I do think we should have more discussions about parking *maximums*.

As we were measuring the Upham and Basset roundabout to understand how such a thing at Mission and Middlefield might work, a guy stopped to tell us about the great deal he got on a car from someone who apparently drove over/through it at relatively high speed. Yay for speed enforcement through physical damage!

Just ordered one of these traffic counting devices. Kinda feeling like I need to get people all around my neighborhood to install them, because knowing how far up Mountain View that morning surge of traffic (that we assume is school related) goes, and how fast people really are going up Mission, could be super useful.

https://telraam.net/en/S2

British Museum asks public and experts to help recover stolen artifacts.

Via Jay Miller @kjaymiller@mastodon.social who asked the obvious question:

Wait the UK government is asking people to steal back from their museums?

Ugh. Now I'm back to the "okay, how do I make the new Slack not suck" stage of finding all of those several day old Mastodon posts that walk me through this.

Just imagining what it would cost to create an LLM of it had to pay for ingested text at the same rate as humans pay for textbooks.

Thinking about how the contractors presenting to the Petaluma GPAC on climate change are using sea level rise guidelines from California, how long it takes IPCC data to filter down into those guidelines, and how developers were, a year ago, voluntarily planning for what those guidelines say is the 0.5% likely worst-case.

Anyway, the prediction is that sea level rise won't impact runoff issues here in Petaluma too much, so at least look at elevation when you're buying.

How Oliver Tester named Higgins' Tester Park after himself. Interesting look at the power of names for places (and abusing Google Maps).

Via

Daaang: Ahmed Eltantawy Targeted with Predator Spyware After Announcing Presidential Ambitions

In August and September 2023, Eltantawy’s Vodafone Egypt mobile connection was persistently selected for targeting via network injection; when Eltantawy visited certain websites not using HTTPS, a device installed at the border of Vodafone Egypt’s network automatically redirected him to a malicious website to infect his phone with Cytrox’s Predator spyware.

Of course the recent WebP bug is further evidence that all you have to do is visit a malicious website, and HTTPS is no guarantee that the website itself isn't malicious, but here's proof in the wild that one can definitely not trust the network.

Via @evacide@hachyderm.io

Just playing with Unicode... ⸮?

Not as cool as I thought it was going to look.

Listening to Kitty Stryker with the Multiamory folks talking about consent (and how we've all violated it), and, combined with recent discussions about the decision making process in local politics, I'm having all of the "huh"s with no good answers. But I'm appreciating the questions.

Some glue ups are weirder than others

It's getting to where I don't even notice when it's a Rapture weekend any more....

Priming cardboard and plywood for the slow streets sign painting party next weekend.

Can I just say fuck this latest XCode release? Every single project I work on is breaking in some weird-ass way because of it. Currently trying to figure out why qmake has decided to hork up a hairball on building SquareDesk.

Idea shamelessly stolen from a picture on Facebook. I may redo it because my attempt at waterproofing soaked through the paper.

Image is of a sign next to our driveway which reads:

There may be trouble ahead

All site visitors please note that

while there is:

• Moonlight
• Music
• Love
• Romance

It is advised that you:

• Face the music
• Dance

Butterfly!

Thinking about how my car has better battery charge management options than my laptop...

RT Swiff @swiff@wizzzard.online

Remembering, once again, that Victor Hugo was well known to the sex worker community of Paris at the time and his death was so mourned by them, so beloved was he, that brothels were closed city wide so their workers could grieve.

Which, personally, i take as the single best marker of the man's character that I could imagine.

To not only treat sex workers well but be lionized by a city's worth of them, i cannot imagine that being the case without good reason

Evidence of a Wooden Structure That Predates Our Species Uncovered. The speculation (and it sounds like there's a lot of "well, this kinda looks like") is that the half-a-million year old evidence is of logs that were apparently carved to be interlocking.

I'm seeing all of these articles about "almost all NFTs completely worthless", and I think the real news here is that someone found any value at all in some small fraction of NFTs. Like that's the real story here: why aren't *all* NFTs completely worthless? What did you find?

Takeaway from last night's General Plan Advisory Committee meeting: developers are using the 2100 .5% likely worst case scenario, the city is using the 1% scenario. There was concern about how quickly guidance is filtering from the scientific community to the IPCC to the state guidelines, and it's interesting to see who's responding to what.

Neighbors just demoed their garage, and the crew has the corner coned off, and wow what a traffic improvement. Makes me even more convinced that what we're need is a length or two of K rail a little further into that corner.

Pondering when it's appropriate to deal with pollution through dilution by placing facilities far from cities, or when we should be aware of our impacts on the world around us by putting the processes which keep our lifestyle practical close in, so we're aware of what's really happening. Also thinking about the 101 widening.

In other news, if anyone has good data on cleanup situations and actual operations emissions and enforcement of those from modern enclosed asphalt plants, I'm interested.

Holy fuck, Nextdoor, the *last* thing I want is more Nextdoor users reading my web site.

Oh snap: SF Streetsblog: City has Concrete Barriers for Salesforce But Not to Stop Traffic Violence?

But morally confused bureaucrats and careerist officials believe, correctly, that it's in their interest to temporarily erect concrete barriers to protect those attending a $90 million conference, while residents and commuters are left with plastic bollards, and green and white paint. So they just did it.

In other words, Salesforce's Mark Benioff draws a lot of proverbial water in this town.

Cyclists and pedestrians, including dead children apparently, not so much.

Yow. Yesterday we were concerned about trying to fill two theaters, today we were concerned about overflow. Petaluma's Better Cities Film Fest is a success! Get your tickets now for next Thursday's event. https://www.urbanchat.org/upco...g-events/film-festival-2023-0928

Fetterman for President: Fetterman pledges to wear suit if government avoids shutdown

“If those jagoffs in the House stop trying to shut our government down, and fully support Ukraine, then I will save democracy by wearing a suit on the Senate floor next week,” said the first term Senator.

It was interesting hearing people "Brought to you by Healthy Petaluma" talk about being post-Covid...

But then the Blue Zones website did just tell me that I needed to raise my alcohol consumption, so, uh.

It's amazing how much people apparently enjoy hearing themselves talk at visioning exercises.

And I'm struggling with yet another one of these. Why do I subject myself to this? I should have known that this event was going to be like this, but I hoped that this time...

Thread on tactics for fighting insurers on Long Term Disability, probably of use to folks suffering from long Covid.

CDC's bridge access program to help those whose insurers won't pay for the current booster shot

a search engine for Oglaf!

I don't know that I can capture the extent to which the designated "bike lane" here is covered in debris, but....

Decided o needed to beat myself up on the bicycle a bit this morning, but abridged the abuse. Usually I don't come back from Novato along this route, so I've completely missed this barn mural on previous trips.

Charlene and I are watching the Oyster Cove proposal to the City Council, and at one point we looked at each other and said "I wonder if we can swing selling this place and moving there".

Listening to public comment at tonight's city council meeting, and I'm sympathetic to the idea of moving to electric racing, however harping on fossil fuels at the racetrack is kind of a tell: most of the races use alcohol as fuel. If you've got a cause, please do the homework...