firehose

The U.S. Forest Service is about to learn a tough lesson about budgeting.

A Broadway Cab driver accused of dumping out a lesbian couple on the side of Interstate 84—after he saw them holding hands, the woman claimed—has had his license revoked by the city agency that oversees taxis and other for-hire driving outfits.

The driver, Ahmed Egal, has 10 days to appeal the finding (pdf), which doesn't delve into the specifics of the complaint but accuses him of failing to uphold his main duty as a cabdriver under city code: taking passengers safely to their destination via the quickest route possible. The city's letter to Egal also says he lobbied a second cab driver not to pick up the women and that he repeatedly hung up on investigators and wouldn't acknowledge his duties under city code.

The city's Private For-Hire Transportation Board also sent a notice (pdf) to Broadway Cab, fining the company $1,000 for failing to promptly respond to complaints by the two women—directing them to leave a voicemail after they were forced from Egal's cab instead of sending another cab to pick them up.

The women, Shanako DeVoll and Kate Neal, went public about the July 25 incident on their Facebook pages late last month. They said they were taken home by a Portland police officer who responded to the scene, after they climbed up an embankment from Interstate 84. Egal called 911 to report that the women were drunk and wouldn't pay.

The city says it reviewed the 911 call, Broadway records, and taxi recordings. Egal's license has been suspended since the incident was reported. Broadway said, at the time, it was conducting its own investigation.

Though an appeal is possible, Kathleen Butler of the city's Revenue Bureau says they are few and far between.

As for how often a finding is reversed? "It's quite rare that a decision is overturned," she says.

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Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tom Groenfeldt reports in Forbes that the U.S. Postal Service has awarded a contract to SecureKey to implement the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCXX) designed to enable individuals to securely access online services at multiple federal agencies — such as health benefits, student loan information, and retirement benefit information — without the need to use a different password or other digital identification for each service. SecureKey already operates a trusted identity service in Canada using identification keys provided by one of five participating Canadian banks. It allows Canadians to connect with 120 government programs online with no additional user names or passwords for everything from benefits queries to fishing licenses. The SecureKey program is designed to connect identity providers — such as banks, governments, healthcare organizations, and others — with consumers' favorite online services though a cloud-based broker service. The platform allows identity providers and online services to integrate once, reducing the integration and business complexity otherwise incurred in establishing many-to-many relationships."

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No word on what he did to incur God's wrath. Or if it was God's wrath.

Concept Sketch


Concept Mockup

Historical Concept Map: Circular Berlin U- and S-Bahn Map, c.1990

Circular transit diagrams are certainly all the rage at the moment. I’ve reviewed two different takes on London here and here, and Maxwell Roberts’ circular New York diagram is generating a lot of internet buzz at the moment.

That’s not to say that it’s a completely new and original concept, however. Harry Beck tried his hand at a circular Underground diagram in 1964, and Berlin’s Ringbahn was abstracted into a perfect circle as far back as 1931.

Also from Berlin, here’s another addition to the pantheon of circular diagrams, one that I haven’t seen before and I’m pretty excited by. Designed by the famed German typographer/designer Erik Spiekermann, these photos were taken at an exhibition of his work at the Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin in 2011.

Judging by the stations shown, the concept seems to be roughly contemporaneous with the work he did in the early 1990s to design the first post-reunification diagram for the BVG. At first glance, the concentric circles, arcs and spokes make a compelling visual image, but many of the routes have to jump around all over the place to accommodate this visual metaphor, weaving in and out to retain their correct relative position to other lines. Station spacing – a prime consideration in the design of a diagram – becomes very uneven as a result, especially along the outer edges of the map, where huge virtual gaps open up between stations.

The Spiekermann-designed diagram that was eventually used by the BVG was far more traditional than this, and still governs the visual language used by Berlin’s diagrams today, 20 years after its completion. What we see here is almost certainly a concept that was explored and then abandoned as unworkable or too radical a departure for public acceptance (I note that the second mock up has angled type for just  one station label – something that Erik has always held as a mortal sin in transit diagram design). 

However, as an insight into the design process and thinking that goes into making transit diagrams, I find pieces like this absolutely fascinating.

Update (2/7/2017): Erik Spiekermann has filled in a lot of the details about this concept map in a comment on this post. I reproduce it here for those on mobile devices or the Tumblr dashboard who can’t see comments:

That first sketch was done by Brigitte Hartwig, the designer in our team at MetaDesign at the time (1990-1994) who did all the research into ways to visualize transit networks. Brigitte also made the artwork for the final diagram, using one layer each for 23 lines, which Freehand’s latest version had just enabled us to do. We tried all sorts of diagrams, but in the end it was important not to shock people too much. Berlin had only just been re-united after almost 40 years with two separate transit systems, so at least partial familiarity was an important factor. We cannot design against history and habits if we want to communicate to everybody.

(Source: Top photo/Bottom photo – Glyphobet/Flickr)

littleforeigner:

Honolulu backstreets #streetart #graffiti #hawaii

Sorry

You probably know where the gas tank is on your car, but if you rent a car, share one with your family, or get a new one, you probably forget. Here's an easy way to always know where the gas tank is.

Admiral Grace Hopper was on Late Night with David Letterman on October 2, 1986.

More than half of China's donated organs come from executed prisoners. The Chinese government now says it will begin phasing out that practice, starting in November. All new organ donors must volunteer. Of course, there's good reason to be skeptical of this announcement. As Smithsonian points out, the practice has already been illegal since 2006 with not much done to change it. Meanwhile, a harrowing 2011 investigative report by Ethan Gutmann in the Weekly Standard revealed a system that leaves plenty of room for "volunteer" loopholes.

Got a bald baby? Perfect unisex Captain Picard cosplay. (Geeks are Sexy)

The debut yesterday of Al Jazeera America has prompted plenty of chatter among the chattering classes about whether a nation accustomed to a steady cable news diet of hype, shouting heads and celebrity shenanigans will take to the Qatari television network’s promise of serious journalism.

Time will tell—but it’s already clear that when it comes to climate-change coverage, Al Jazeera has made its mark. In just its first few hours on the air the network devoted half as much broadcast time to the subject as rival network news programs did in all of 2012, according to Media Matters, a left-leaning non-profit that monitors news coverage.

In fact, the 24 minutes allotted to climate change on Al Jazeera’s “Inside Story” program exceeded the total air time that CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” and “Anderson Cooper 360” and Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity” gave to the topic over the past four-and-a-half months, Media Matters said.

“Perhaps most significantly, ‘Inside Story’ explored public opinion on climate science, and even presented differing views on climate policy, without once offering marginal contrarian viewpoints as a ‘counterbalance,’ the Media Matter analysis stated. “Notably, no politicians were interviewed, as few politicians are credible sources of information on, say, sea level rise. Instead, the guests – Michael Mann, Heidi Cullen and Klaus Jacob –were all scientists familiar with the topic at hand.”

The downside is that many US residents won’t see that coverage. A little under half the country’s 100 million homes will be able to get Al Jazeera America through their cable providers, and in order to win deals with those carriers, the network has blocked Americans from viewing its internet stream or videos on YouTube.

In The World's End, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost gather their former best friends to drink their old hometown dry. But when we talked to Pegg, Frost and director Edgar Wright, they told us how this apocalyptic comedy isn't like your usual "drunken midlife crisis" film. Plus the secret of using genre to tell a personal story.

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Next month, The Gallery at Black Iris Music in Richmond, Va. will feature a GWAR exhibit like no other. "Let There Be GWAR!" will run from Sept. 6 through Sept. 28 and feature more than 400 objects from GWAR's almost-30-year career. Some of these objects include, but are not limited to: arrest reports, lawsuit transcripts, and acid drawings. More personal items will be part of the exhibit as well, like genitalia molds and some members' personal sketchbooks. The money earned from the exhibit will help fund a book and documentary celebrating GWAR'S 30-year anniversary in 2014. 

 

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Not to be outdone by Community when it comes to melding the universes of Internet-beloved television shows, Parks And Recreation has cast Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany for an upcoming guest arc. According to Deadline, Maslany will play a love interest for Aziz Ansari’s Tom Haverford—hopefully one who is better served than that bartender girl who maybe seemed like she was going to become a recurring character, only to disappear into whatever Phantom Zone is currently imprisoning Mark Brendanawicz. Anyway, that’s all the details on Maslany’s character, though it’s worth noting that she’s only playing one person this time, so it should be super easy.  

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You probably haven't heard of Legend of the Red Reaper. The passion product of Tara Cardinal, who also stars, it's about a Reaper, or guardian of humanity, who goes on a quest for vengeance against those who betrayed her kind. It's the sort of high-fantasy action story that's gotten more popular since Game of Thrones hit it big. But you probably won't be seeing it in a theater, since Legendary Pictures passed on it. Why? They don't think people want to see action movies with female leads. Because Sucker Punch failed. Yeah.

Nhooooooooommm!!! Olha que fofinho!!! Oooowwwnnnn!!! Cuti-cuti!!

O felino mais famoso, mais querido, mais popular de Asgard!! Um gatinho Thor!!! Ou seria um CaThor??? (kkkkkk desculpa, não resisti, tava entalada essa aqui!) OOOOOWWWNNNNN!!

Defendendo o mundo dos cães raivosos, dos vilões que maltratam os animais, de toda a escória da humanidade que odeia os gatinhos.

É… não sei se esse martelinho fulero aí faria uma estrago tão grande contra os vilões, mas que ficou bonitinho, aaaaaaaahhh isso ficou!! Hhahahahahaha

In-office imbibing used to be common. Was that true in government, too?

ANTHROPOLOGIST David Graeber has written an amusing essay on the nature of work in a modern economy, which seems to involve lots of people doing meaningless tasks they hate:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

It is not the case, he writes, that people have to keep working to produce the consumer goods for which the rich world hungers. Outrageously, meaningless employment—in what he calls "bullshit jobs"—is concentrated in “professional, managerial, clerical, sales,...Continue reading

WASHINGTON — A recently revealed National Security Agency program that searches the contents of Americans’ international Internet communications for people who mention foreigners under surveillance violated the Constitution for several years, according to an October 2011 top secret court ruling made public on Wednesday. The 85-page ruling by Judge John Bates, then serving on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, held that the N.S.A. was mishandling as many as tens of thousands of unrelated and purely domestic communications it was picking up — on United States soil and without warrants — as a consequence of filtering Internet data for such messages. The release of the ruling, under pressure by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was the latest effort by the Obama administration to contain revelations about N.S.A. surveillance prompted by leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden.

It's been a long time since Steve Martin was that helpful waiter in Idaho, good to see that he's made a name for himself. I'm sure all this exposure with the Muppets will really help. Previously in The Muppets

Its code name is "Loki," and this silent, stealthy snowmobile is being developed by the Canadian military to transport troops on secret operations in the terrorist hotbed known as the Arctic. No, seriously.

Musician Jester Jacobs sings “I’m Dog,” a rap song from the perspective of a dog about going to the park, chewing on sticks, eating food, and pooping.

via Tastefully Offensive

Another classic from The Onion.

Wait, what?