firehose

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It appears Portlanders will be spared a second debate on the future of city's water system this year. The grassroots activists behind a proposal to give citizens more oversight over Portland's drinking water supply tell the Mercury they've suspended the campaign.

"We've been regrouping and presenting to major organizations for a 2016 run," says Jonah Majure, chief petitioner behind the Cascadian Public Trust Initiative. The campaign would have needed to submit nearly 30,000 valid signatures by July 7 in order to make the November ballot.

Announced in late October—just a few months after the now-failed effort to put Portland's water and sewer services in the hands of a new board—the trust was a novel idea. As the Mercury reported in November, it cribbed notions from a newly viable front in environmental law. In short: If you didn't think Portland was managing its water supply in the public interest, you could sue.

But the proposal also contained a wish list of sorts for activists. It would have required a citywide vote before chemicals like fluoride can be added to the water supply. And it would have forced officials to keep fighting federal rules that have the city building costly new reservoirs on Kelly and Powell buttes, and preparing to close open-air reservoirs on Mount Tabor and in Washington Park.

According to Majure, much of the momentum for the proposal was lost to the fight against the Portland Public Water District, which was trounced in the May 20 election. The opposition to that effort was headed up by Mayor Charlie Hales.

"The PPWD debate confused a lot of folks and a lot of community organizations spent a lot of their energy working on Charlie Hales' (political action committee)," Majure says. He says his group will rewrite its proposal and resubmit it in coming months.

The decision to suspend the campaign means Portland won't have three votes on its water supply in just two years. In May 2013, voters rejected a proposal to add fluoride to tap water.

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Modern Toss

Historical Map: TriMet Bus and MAX Routes, Portland, Oregon (early 1990s)

Certainly no later than 1998 as the MAX light rail only consists of the original Westside route (later to be the Blue Line).

Of note is the continued use of the service zone icons – fish, rain, snow, beaver, leaf, rose and deer – that defined Portland’s downtown transit mall for decades. I’ve featured them before on this map from 1978, but it’s on this map where their main failing comes to the fore. Because each icon is colour-coded, each respective service area just becomes a tangled web of lines, all represented by the same colour. Cross-town routes like the 75, – which have their own colour – just go to show how much easier a route is to follow when it contrasts against nearby routes, rather than matching them exactly.

Also a little odd: not naming any of the MAX stations on the map, and labelling regular frequency bus lines against very similarly-colured background boxes, which makes the route numbers a little difficult to discern.

All in all, an interesting look at the earlier days of MAX and the later days of the service area icons. It’s also fun to see which routes have survived to the current day and which have disappeared or been combined into one route (for example, the Fish-1 and Leaf-35 have become the modern day Greeley-Macadam 35).

Our rating: A nice piece of transit history from my adopted city, if a little imperfect. Three-and-a-half stars.

Source: Screaming Ape/Flickr

sexicancore:

i-o-u-an-assbutt:

mintmeow:

i’ve got 99 problems and being a decaying organism that’s born to die in a society run by money that i can’t escape is one of them 

do you need a hug

i think we all need a hug

Jerry Only has filed a countersuit.

The post The Danzig/Misfits Lawsuit Just Got Real, Yo appeared first on MetalSucks.

Earlier today, five men agreed that closely held corporations with anti-birth control religious beliefs cannot be required to provide contraceptive coverage to female employees. Corporations are people, my friend. Women? Not so much.

Things we did not know existed until today: Barbie's Dream Hearse, which is perfect to ferry Barbie from her Dream House to the Dream Morgue, and then the Dream Cemetery Plot or wherever her preferred resting place is. What a fun thing.

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A teaser trailer for the upcoming series of the television show Doctor Who focuses on whether the Doctor is a good man. The new series, starring Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor and Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald, is scheduled to premiere on August 23rd.

image via Doctor Who

In the first millennium CE, Vikings wore little replicas of Thor's hammer Mjölnir, like this one discovered recently in Denmark. What's incredible about this find are the runes on the hammer.

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Anthony Mackie Joins Cast of 'The Avengers: Age of Ultron':

deducecanoe:

earthsmightiestheroestype-thing:

Actor Anthony Mackie has been cast as The Falcon once again in the upcoming summer blockbuster The Avengers: Age of Ultron, according to GotchaMovies.com.

hell yeaaaaah

I peed a little. 

TAKE MY MONEY! TAKE IT!

I just got back from a meetup of Machinekit developers hosted by Tormach, a maker of professional CNC machines. There I got a glimpse into the future of personal CNC machines and 3D printers. Building on the long successful LinuxCNC project, Machinekit has added support for additional platforms, including BeagleBone Black, and additional real-time Linux strategies, including Xenomai and stepper motor driving using the on-board PRU microcontrollers.

What struck me is that software running on BeagleBone for controlling machines is the same as what CNC companies use in real CNC products… and it runs on some very remarkable (and personally affordable) machines in development I got glimpses of at Maker Faire Bay Area. Building incredible machines out of BeagleBone Black just got a whole lot easier and expect to see a lot more examples

All of the sessions at the meet-up were recorded on YouTube for those looking to catch up on the development of this project.

Read more.

Shawn Lindsay, a former Washington County legislator and council's legal counsel, called the decision "good news for religious freedom advocates" and said it would strengthen their case.

Meanwhile, Beaverton attorney Herb Grey, who represents the owners of Sweet Cakes, said he also planned to cite the Supreme Court decision in his defense of the couple.

Yo, Hodor is a Game of Thrones-themed messaging app by Tyler Hedrick that parodies the recently released Yo app (see previous post) and sends “Hodor” push notifications to people. This is an homage to the character Hodor from Game of Thrones, a bulky young man that can only say his name. Yo, Hodor is currently available on iOS.

I wrote an app called Hodor because Hodoring someone is so much cooler than Yoing someone. #yo #hodor #got pic.twitter.com/5VQ8F4Er33

— Tyler Hedrick (@tyler_hedrick) June 20, 2014

image via Yo, Hodor

via TechCrunch

The cybersecurity bill making its way through the Senate right now is so broad that it could allow ISPs to classify Netflix as a "cyber threat," which would allow them to throttle the streaming service's delivery to customers.

Even for South Florida, where absurd news events are routine and the sheriff went to prison for corruption, the spate of judicial scandals has raised serious questions about whether the arrests in Broward are a bizarre coincidence or underscore a larger systemic problem.

Mary Downey had a rougher commute than you did this morning.

While you were binge-watching the new season of "Orange is the New Black," you had no idea that you were, in essence, eating away the opportunity to view classics like "Rocky," "Taxi Driver" and "Spaceballs."

It's a beautiful 90-degree day in Portland, Ore. Where does a 23-year-old nanny take a 3-year-old and 1-month-old? To a tanning salon, according to court documents, where the young children were left locked in a van until their screams led the cops to be called.

submitted by babylon_dude [link] [39 comments]

Greendale lives on. The folks behind Community announced today that they'll be making a sixth season thanks to Yahoo.

A Vancouver police officer was shot Monday morning following a routine traffic stop. A suspect is on the loose. The Columbian reports that the shooting happened around 11:30 a.m. The officer was taken to a trauma center, but the extent of his injuries was not immediately clear.

Paramedics discovered the child with a gunshot wound after police received a call at 7:35 a.m. regarding a suicide attempt. After efforts to revive him failed, the boy was pronounced dead at the camp, according to a spokesperson for San Diego Fire Rescue.

Woodblock print cats, Tadashige Nishida