Anyway, having this as an internal statement is not particularly surprising. But you have to wonder why they didn’t state the exact same thing at a public event.
Editor’s note: For the last few years I have made a list of awesome things that other people did (2015, 2014, 2013). Like in previous years I’m making a list, again right off the top of my head. If you know of some, you should make your own list or add it to the comments! I have also avoided talking about stuff I worked on or that people here at Hopkins are doing because this post is supposed to be about other people’s awesome stuff. I write this post because a blog often feels like a place to complain, but we started Simply Stats as a place to be pumped up about the stuff people were doing with data.
Thomas Lin Pedersen created the tweenr package for interpolating graphs in animations. Check out this awesome logo he made with it.
Yihui Xie is still blowing away everything he does. First it was bookdown and then the yolo feature in xaringan package.
Jenny Bryan is working literal world wonders with legos to teach functional programming. I loved her Data Rectangling talk. The analogy between exponential families and data frames is so so good.
Hadley Wickham’s book on R for data science is everything you’d expect. Super clear, great examples, just a really nice book.
Julia Silge and David created the tidytext package. This is a holy moly big contribution to NLP in R. They also have a killer book on tidy text mining.
Julia used the package to do this fascinating post on mining Reddit after the election.
It would be hard to pick just five different major contributions from JJ Allaire (great interview here), Joe Cheng, and the rest of the Rstudio folks. Rstudio is absolutely churning out awesome stuff at a rate that is hard to keep up with. I loved R notebooks and have used them extensively for teaching.
Konrad Kording and Brett Mensh full on mike dropped on how to write a paper with their 10 simple rules piece Figure 1 from that paper should be affixed to the office of every student/faculty in the world permanently.
Yaniv Erlich just can’t stop himself from doing interesting things like seeq.io and dna.land.
DataCamp continues to do great things. I love their DataChats series and they have been rolling out tons of new courses.
Sean Rife and Michele Nuijten created statcheck.io for checking papers for p-value calculation errors. This was all over the press, but I just like the site as a dummy proofing for myself.
If you like computational biology and data science and like super detailed reports of meetings/talks you MIchael Hoffman is your man. How he actually summarizes that much information in real time is still beyond me.
I really really wish I had been at Alyssa Frazee’s talk at startup.ml but loved this review of it. Sampling, inverse probability weighting? Love that stats flavor!
I have followed Cathy O’Neil for a long time in her persona as mathbabedotorg so it is no surprise to me that her new book Weapons of Math Descruction is so good. One of the best works on the ethics of data out there.
A related and very important piece is on Machine bias in sentencing by Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner at ProPublica.
Dimitris Rizopolous created this stellar integrated Shiny app for his repeated measures class. I wish I could build things half this nice.
Sherri Rose’s post on economic diversity in the academy focuses on statistics but should be required reading for anyone thinking about diversity. Everything about it is impressive.
If you like your data science with a side of Python you should definitely be checking out Jake Vanderplas’s data science handbook and the associated Jupyter notebooks.
I love Thomas Lumley being snarky about the stats news. Its a guilty pleasure. If he ever collected them into a book I’d buy it (hint Thomas :)).
Dorothy Bishop’s blog is one of the ones I read super regularly. Her post on When is a replication a replication is just one example of her very clearly explaining a complicated topic in a sensible way. I find that so hard to do and she does it so well.
Ben Goldacre’s crowd is doing a bunch of interesting things. I really like their OpenPrescribing project.
Lucy D’Agostino McGowan made this amazing explanation of Hill’s criterion using xckd.
It is hard to overstate how good Leslie McClure’s blog is. This post on biostatistics is public health should be read aloud at every SPH in the US.
The ASA’s statement on p-values is a really nice summary of all the issues around a surprisngly controversial topic. Ron Wasserstein and Nicole Lazar did a great job putting it together.
I really liked this piece on the relationship between income and life expectancy by Raj Chetty and company.
That’s all I have for now, I know I’m missing things. Maybe my New Year’s resolution will be to keep better track of the awesome things other people are doing :).
We've all seen progress bars that move slowly for twenty minutes, then rapidly fill up in the last 30 seconds. Or the reverse, where a once speedy bar takes 50% of the time covering the last few pixels. And bars that occasionally jump backward in time are not the rarity you'd expect them to be.
Even this past month, when I installed the macOS Sierra update, the process completed when the progress bar was only two-thirds full. DOOM 2016 has a circular progress meter for level loads, with the percent-complete in the center. It often sits for a while at 0%, gets stuck at 74% and 99%, and sometimes finishes in the 90s before reaching 100%.
Clearly this is not a trivial problem, or these quirks would be behind us.
Conceptually, a perfect progress bar is easy to build. All you need to know is exactly how long the total computation will take, then update the bar in its own thread so it animates smoothly. Simple! Why do developers have trouble with this? Again, all you need to know is exactly how long...
Oh.
You could time it with a stopwatch and use that value, but that assumes your system is the standard, and that other people won't have faster or slower processors, drives, or internet connections. You could run a little benchmark and adjust the timing based on that, but there are too many factors. You could refine the estimate mid-flight, but this is exactly the road that leads to the bar making sudden jumps into the past. It's all dancing around that you can't know ahead of time exactly how long it should take for the progress bar to go from empty to full.
There's a similar problem in process scheduling, where there are a number of programs to run sequentially in batch mode. One program at a time is selected to run to completion, then the next. If the goal is to have the lowest average time for programs being completed, then best criteria for choosing the next program to run is the one with the shortest execution time (see shortest job next). But this requires knowing how long each program will take before running it, and that's not possible in the general case.
And so the perfect progress bar is forever out of reach, but they're still useful, as established by Brad Allan Meyers in his 1985 paper ("The importance of percent-done progress indicators for computer-human interfaces"). But "percent-done" of what? It's easy to map the loading of a dozen similarly sized files to an overall percentage complete. Not so much when all kinds of downloading and local processing is combined together into a single progress number. At that point the progress bar loses all meaning except as an indication that there's some sort of movement toward a goal, and that mostly likely the application hasn't hasn't locked up.
Yan, who is director at Simon Fraser University’s City Program, looked at the impact of transportation costs on housing affordability.
In the City of Vancouver the average cost of transportation over 25 years — assuming two per cent inflation per year and that nothing changes to improve the current situation — works out to be $298,459, according to Yan.
By comparison, if you live in the Township of Langley, the 25-year cost of transportation would be $563,755.
Across the Metro Vancouver region, if you add in amortized 25 year average annual transportation cost estimates, the percentage of homes with a cost of over $1 million rises significantly from 43 per cent to 92 per cent.
In areas such as Vancouver, the North Shore, Burnaby and Richmond, adding in such transportation costs increases the percentage of home values, but it’s in Coquitlam, New Westminster, Surrey, Delta, Port Coquitlam and the township and city of Langley where the contrast is most pronounced. In Coquitlam, the percentage of home valued over $1 million goes from 22.4 per cent to 97 per cent if you account for estimated amortized transportation costs. In the township of Langley, the percentage rises from 4.8 per cent to 90 per cent.
“This is only looking at the (straight) cost of transportation, not even the time,” said Yan.
He continued: “There is ‘phantom affordability’ too, if you will. This idea that you can drive (further from the city) until you qualify (to buy a home) doesn’t take into consideration that as home mortgages (cost less) transportation mortgages (in some areas) go up.”
Yan said this is precisely the direction seen in some U.S. cities, where the areas hardest hit by affordability woes have been the outskirts and suburbs rather than the city centres even when they have seen some of the highest home prices.
Some days, it’s just not happening. So I remind myself of the process. 1. Go to trello. 2. Organise the things 3. Start at the top – half an hour later I’ve fallen down a twitter shaped rabbit hole…
There’s a bunch of skills needed for future digital workers (and me). How will we ever get stuff done?
I'm kind of an A/V nerd. Now I'm not hardcore enough to have a vinyl collection or have an amp for my TV, but all my headphones cost over $100 and I have a Sonos Playbar so I don't have to put up with crappy TV speakers. What I'm trying to say is that I care about the A/V equipment I use, but not to the extent that money is no object when it comes to my enjoyment of a movie (I'm not that rich and my wife would kill me if I spent that kind of money on electronics). That means I tend to research extensively before making a major A/V purchase since I don't do it very often and I want quality within reason which does not lend itself to impulse buying.
Prior to September 1, 2016, I had a 2011 Vizio television. It was 47", did 1080p, and had passive 3D. When I purchased the TV I was fresh out of UBC having just finished my Ph.D. so it wasn't top-of-the-line, but it was considered very good for the price. I was happy with the picture, but admittedly it wasn't amazing; the screen had almost a matte finish which led to horrible glare. I also rarely used the 3D in the television as 3D Blu-Ray discs always cost extra and so few movies took the time to actually film in 3D to begin with, instead choosing to do it in post-production (basically animated films and TRON: Legacy were all that we ever watched in 3D). And to top it all off, the TV took a while to turn on. I don't know what kind of LCB bulbs were in it, but they took forever to warm up and just annoyed me (yes, very much a first-world problem).
So when UHD came into existence I started to keep an eye on the technology and what television manufacturers were doing to incorporate the technology to entice people like me to upgrade. After two years of watching this space and one of the TVs I was considering having a one-day sale that knock 23% off the price, I ended up buying a 55" Samsung KS8000 yesterday. Since I spent so much time considering this purchase I figured I would try and distill what knowledge I have picked up over the years into a blog post so that when you decide to upgrade to UHD you don't have to start from zero knowledge like I did.
What to care about
First, you don't care about the resolution of the TV. All UHD televisions are 4K, so that's just taken care of for you. It also doesn't generally make a difference in the picture because most people sit too far away from their TV to make the higher resolution matter.
No, the one thing you're going to care about is HDR and everything that comes with it. And of course it can't be a simple thing to measure like size or resolution. Oh no, HDR has a bunch of parts to it that go into the quality of the picture: brightness, colour gamut, and format (yes, there's a format war; HD-DVD/Blu-Ray didn't teach the TV manufacturers a big enough lesson).
Brightness
A key part of HDR is the range of brightness to show what you frequently hear referred to as "inky blacks" and "bright whites". The way you get deep blacks and bright whites is by supporting a huge range of brightness. What you will hear about TVs is what their maximum nit is. Basically you're aiming for 1000 nits or higher for a maximum and as close to 0 as possible for a minimum.
Now of course this isn't as simple as it sounds as there's different technology being used to try and solve this problem.
LCD
Thanks to our computers I'm sure everyone reading this is familiar with LCD displays. But what you might not realize is how they exactly work. In a nutshell there are LED lightbulbs behind your screen that provides white light, and then the LCD pixels turn on and off the red/green/blue parts of themselves to filter out certain colours. So yeah, there are lightbulbs in your screen and how strong they are dictates how bright your TV screen will be.
Now the thing that comes into play here for brightness is how those LED bulbs are oriented in order to get towards that 0 nits for inky blacks. Typical screens are edge-list, which means there is basically a strip of LEDs on the edges of the TV that shine light towards the middle of the screen. This is fine and it's what screens have been working with for a while, but it does mean there's always some light behind the pixels so it's kind of hard to keep it from leaking out a little bit.
This is where local dimming comes in. Some manufacturers are now laying out the LED bulbs in an array/grid behind the screen instead of at the edges. What this allows is for the TV to switch dim an LED bulb if it isn't needed at full strength to illuminate a certain quadrant of the screen (potentially even switching off entirely). Obviously the denser the array, the more local dimming zones and thus the greater chance a picture with some black in it will be able to switch off an LED to truly get a dark black for that part of the screen. As for how often something you're watching is going to allow you to take advantage of such local dimming due to a dark area lining up within a zone is going to vary so this is going to be a personal call as to whether this makes a difference to you.
OLED
If I didn't have a budget and wanted the ultimate solution for getting the best blacks in a picture, I would probably have an OLED TV from LG. What makes these TVs so great is the fact that OLEDs are essentially pixels that provide their own light. What that means is if you want an OLED pixel to be black, you simply switch it off. Or to compare it to local dimming, it's as if every pixel was its own local dimming zone. So if you want truly dark blacks, OLED are the way to go. It also leads to better colours since the intensity of the pixel is consistent compared to an LCD where the brightness is affected by how far the pixel is from the LED bulb that's providing light to the pixel.
But the drawback is that OLED TVs only get so bright. Since each pixel has to generate its own light they can't reach really four-digit nit levels like the LCD TVs can. It's still much brighter than any HD TV, but OLED TVs don't match the maximum brightness of the higher-end LCD TVs.
So currently it's a race to see if LCDs can get their blacks down or if OLEDs can get their brightness up. But from what I have read, in 2016 your best bet is OLED if you can justify the cost to yourself (they are very expensive televisions).
Colour gamut
While having inky blacks and bright whites are nice, not everyone is waiting for Mad Max: Fury Road in black and white. That means you actually care about the rest of the rainbow, which means you care about the colour gamut of the TV for a specific colour space. TVs are currently trying to cover as much of the DCI-P3 colour space as possible right now. Maybe in a few years TVs will fully cover that colour space, at which point they will start worrying about Rec. 2020 (also called BT.2020), but there's still room in covering DCI-P3 before that's something to care about.
In the end colour gamut is probably not going to be something you explicitly shop for, but more of something to be aware of that you will possibly gain by going up in price on your television.
Formats
So you have your brightness and you have your colours, now you have to care about what format all of this information is stored in. Yes my friends, there's a new format war and it's HDR10 versus Dolby Vision. Now if you buy a TV from Vizio or LG then you don't have to care because they are supporting both formats. But if you consider any other manufacturer you need to decide on whether you care about Dolby Vision because everyone supports HDR10 these days but no one supports Dolby Vision at the moment except those two manufacturers.
There is one key reason that HRD10 is supported by all television makers: it's an open specification. By being free it doesn't cut into profits of TVs which obviously every manufacturer likes and is probably why HDR10 is the required HDR standard for Ultra Blu-Ray discs (Dolby Vision is supported on Ultra Blu-Ray, but not required). Dolby Vision, on the other hand, requires licensing fees paid to Dolby. Articles also consistently suggest that Dolby Vision requires new hardware which would also drive up costs of supporting Dolby Vision (best I can come up with is that since Dolby Vision is 12-bit and HDR10 is 10-bit that TVs typically use a separate chip for Dolby Vision processing).
Dolby Vision does currently have two things going for it over HDR10. One is that Dolby Vision is dynamic per frame while HDR10 is static. This is most likely a temporary perk, though, because HDR10 is gaining dynamic support sometime in the future.
Two is that Dolby Vision is part of an end-to-end solution from image capture to projection in the theatres. By making Dolby Vision then also work at home it allows for directors and editors to get the results they want for the cinema and then just pass those results along to your TV without extra work.
All of this is to say that Dolby Vision seems to be the better technology, but the overhead/cost of adding it to a TV along with demand will ultimately dictate whether it catches on. Luckily all TV manufacturers has agreed on the minimum standard of HDR10 so you won't be completely left out if you buy a TV from someone other than LG or Vizio.
Where to go for advice
When it comes time to buy a TV, I recommend Rtings.com for advice. They have a very nice battery of tests they put the TV through and give you nice level of detail on how they reached their scores for each test. They even provide the settings they used for their tests so you can replicate them at home.
You can also read what the Wirecutter is currently recommending. For me, though, I prefer Rtings.com and use the Wirecutter as a confirmation check if their latest TV round-up isn't too out-of-date.
Ultra HD Premium
If you want a very simple way to help choose a television, you can simply consider ones that are listed as Ultra HD Premium. That way you know the TV roughly meets a minimum set of specifications that are reasonable to want if you're spending a lot of money on a TV. The certification is new in 2016 and so there are not a ton of TVs yet that have the certification, but since TV manufacturers like having stamps on their televisions I suspect it will start to become a thing.
One thing to be aware of is that Vizio doesn't like the certification. Basically they have complained that the lack of standards around how to actually measure what the certification requires makes it somewhat of a moot point. That's a totally reasonable criticism and why using the certification as a filter for TVs consider is good, but to not blindly buy a TV just because it has Ultra HD Premium stamp of approval.
Why I chose my TV
Much like when I bought a soundbar, I had some restrictions placed upon me when considering what television I wanted. One, the TV couldn't be any larger than 55" (to prevent the TV from taking over the living room even though we should have a 65" based on the minimum distance people might sit from the TV). This immediately put certain limits on me as some model lines don't start until 65" like the Vizio Reference series. I also wasn't willing to spend CAD 4,000 on an LG, so that eliminated OLED from consideration. I also wanted HDR, so that eliminated an OLED that was only HD.
In the end it was between the 55" Samsung KS8000, 55" Vizio P-series, and the 50" Vizio P-series. The reason for the same Vizio model at different sizes is the fact that they use different display technology; the 50" has a VA display while the 55" has an IPS display. The former will have better colours but the latter has better viewing angles. Unfortunately I couldn't find either model on display here in Vancouver to see what kind of difference it made.
One other knock against the Vizio -- at least at 55" -- was that it wasn't very good in a bright room. That's a problem for us as our living room is north facing with a big window and the TV is perpendicular to those windows, so we have plenty of glare on the screen as the sun goes down. The Samsung, on the other hand, was rated to do better in a glare-heavy room. And thanks to a one-day sale it brought the price of the Samsung to within striking distance of the Vizio. So in the end with the price difference no longer a factor I decided to go with the TV that worked best with glare and maximized the size I could go with.
My only worry with my purchase is if Dolby Vision ends up taking hold and I get left in the cold somehow. But thanks to the HDR10 support being what Ultra Blu-Ray mandates I'm not terribly worried of being shut out entirely from HDR content. There's also hope that I might be able to upgrade my television in the future thanks to it using a Mini One Connect which breaks out the connections from the television. In other TVs the box is much bigger as it contains all of the smarts of the television, allowing future upgrades. There's a chance I will be able to upgrade the box to get Dolby Vision in the future, but that's just a guess at this point that it's even possible, let alone whether Samsung choose to add Dolby Vision support.
It's been 48 hours with the TV and both Andrea and I are happy with the purchase; me because the picture is great, Andrea because I will now shut up about television technology in regards to a new TV purchase.
On October 1, 2016, I stopped volunteering for open source projects -- including Python -- for a month. While I still did open source work for Python as part of my job, I spent absolutely zero time helping any project outside of work (so no evenings, no weekends). This was the first major break I have taken from Python development since I started participating on python-dev in June 2002, over 14 years ago (even on vacation, there is always email).
Why did I take a month off?
What led to this month-long break after 14 years of continual volunteering? It was basically a culmination of several things in July and August (and the usual small things), all capped off with a report that helped put into perspective how mistreated I have felt. To start, someone wanted a bug fixed which I had commented on. When the bug didn't get fixed, they personally emailed me asking me to fix it as a consultant within three days. When I said I didn't have the time, they then asked me to do it anyway for free because they still had their own three-day deadline and shouldn't I just want to help them out?
Then there was a bug which had a patch in a comment that I had assigned myself. I unfortunately got side-tracked with some things that had to land before the Python 3.6 feature freeze, so I missed fixing the bug for Python 3.5.2. People then started to state that it should have been a release blocker (although none of these people were core developers). Someone then commented about how they couldn't understand how I couldn't have made this "two-click" fix, even though applying a fix to Python is not as simple as two clicks (and especially not when it spans multiple versions like this fix did). When I explained the complexity of applying a fix in Python, I was then told that it seemed like a "reasonable excuse" instead of acknowledging they didn't realize how hard it is to keep Python functioning. Two months later I had different people that I respect on Twitter complain about the exact same bug. All of this for an issue in an venv activation script for a non-mainstream shell (in other words, it was not vital to the execution of Python so no systems were going to fail due to the patch slipping).
And then there was the question on the issue tracker about why something worked the way it did with an offer to "fix" the semantics. On a Saturday morning I replied back explaining why the semantics were the way they were to prevent the person from needlessly spending their weekend developing a patch that wouldn't necessarily be accepted. Unfortunately my attempt to save someone from needless work led to a passive-aggressive response about how I was preventing them from contributing. When asked if their message was meant to be passive-aggressive -- giving someone the benefit of the doubt is always good and they may have just had a bad day -- they fully admitted it was meant to be passive-aggressive and continued to act aggrevated towards me. All of this over me trying to save someone wasting hours of their weekend (the person did later apologize to me).
And on python-ideas there were a few threads which went over the top. Now normally one wouldn't take what happens on a mailing list personally, but as one of the creators and administrators of python-ideas, I take the tone of that mailing list seriously and when I see people not acting nicely towards one another it's rather frustrating as I feel partially responsible for the aggregate tone of python-ideas.
Finally, Nadia Eghbal's Road and Bridges report on OSS maintenance for the Ford Foundation helped me recognize the abuse I have tolerated for well over a decade (everyone who uses open source should read that report; the page count might seem high, but the font is big and the margins are wide 😉). That report really made it clear how people have made demands on my free time simply because I previously gave them that same gift to help make Python, as if the gift of my free time is in perpetuity. It also helped clarify how that claim is often hypocritical as most of people wanting me to do something for them in my spare time actually work with Python professionally and so have a business justification to help improve things while that wasn't true for me (only since joining Microsoft have I had any form of direct business case to working on Python as part of my day-to-day work, so that's for only just over a year out of 14).
An analogy of open source development
For some people, when they realize how me and all other project maintainers out there are treated, they are horrified (and I'm not exaggerating when I say all project maintainers; I have yet to meet a maintainer who doesn't suffer this kind of abuse). Others, though, don't quite get it, so I've tried to come up with an analogy to help explain it.
Imagine you're a 10-year-old kid and you've just come up with a new game (it can be a board game, something you play on the playground at recess, etc.). You tell your friends about the game and its rules and they also find it fun. You and your friends start playing it regularly and some other kids notice. These other kids come over and ask what you're playing, and so you explain it's a game you came up with and tell them the rules. Those new kids go run off and play the game and find it fun. Those kids tell their friends, and suddenly you find yourself explaining the rules constantly. To make your life easier and to help other kids playing the game, you take the time to type up the rules to the game and make paper rulebooks using your allowance. So now, instead of explaining the rules verbally, you're handing out a rulebook you paid for out of your own pocket.
Then the first suggestion comes in for changing the rules since you started printing them. They ask if you have ever considered adding some rule, and you say it makes sense. So you update the rules, make new copies of the rulebook, and then hand out the updated rules to anyone who wants them. This happens a couple of times, and honestly you don't mind because people have been nice about it and it makes the game better, even if it does lead to more work for you to integrate the rules and print out new copies since it improves the game for everyone (you included).
And then some kid who you don't know walks up to you and says "you need to add a rule about getting to hit people". Now you don't exactly appreciate someone phrasing it like you have to do something, but the other issue is you disagree with adding something that includes violence. You politely say you don't think it is a good rule to add to the game. The kid proposing the rules says, "screw you!" and storms off. And yet this same kid grabs a copy of the latest rulebook as he walks away. Not exactly something you would have liked as a kid, nor would you want to see your own child treated this way.
How I'm treated on a regular basis
Now imagine the game is Python and that jerk who demanded you change something is actually an adult software developer and there's way more than just one of them. And that tone of "needing" me to change something is constant. People saying things like "this needs to change", or "you should change this", or "I think you should change this" really gets exhausting because you know they are not coming from a place of openness if they have already stated upfront that they think you're wrong (and when they don't get their way, they often don't just say "okay" as they leave). People who ask if you "have considered this?" or "why is it this way?" have a much better chance of being listend to.
But it's not just about people constantly thinking I'm wrong and letting me know that. The entitlement that people bring with them when talking to me is also exhausting. Simply because people use Python some folks seem to think I owe them something. People forget that they were given Python for free and at worst they had to download it and run an installer (if you're on Linux there's a decent chance you just had to type the six letters in "python" to launch the interpreter since Python was already installed). There was absolutely no money exchanged, I didn't get directly paid at all for any of the time I put into helping Python at all, and yet people who chose to use Python seem to act like they paid me to use Python and so I need to react to their needs as such. The best guess I can come up with as to why people act this way is they feel that by using Python and helping to make it popular I owe them my career or something. Basically I gave people the gift of my time and energy to produce some code they received for free, and yet some seem to think that gift has an addendum that attaches my time and energy in the future.
Adding some perspective
Now obviously the general Python community does not act this way at all. When I'm at any Python-related conference -- e.g. PyCon, PyData, meetups -- I never feel like people are there internally fuming at me for some design decision I made or hating on Python in general. I of course do run into the occasional bad actor at PyCon when they realize who I am, but then I can just look at the rest of the space I'm standing in and realize everyone else I can see is quite happy with the work I have put into Python.
But while it's nice to get proper perspective roughly 2 weeks out of the year, I don't get that perspective automatically the other 50 weeks. While people at PyCon do say "thank you" for the work I put in (which is always very touching and appreciated), the rest of the time I only get a "thanks" when I complain about how someone mistreated me. Otherwise the only people I hear from outside of core developers and regular participants online are people wanting something from me, and unfortunately the ratio of people asking nicely to those that don't isn't great (they say it takes 10 acts of kindness to cancel out one bad act, and I don't think that the ratio of good-to-bad is as good as 10-to-1).
Defining expectations for open source
So what the heck am I going to do? I don't want to burn out and completely stop contributing to Python. I have enough friends in the community now and have fun when left alone that I don't want to walk away entirely, but something does have to change. But to know what to change, I need to know how I think things should be to identify where things are out of alignment.
To start, I view open source software development as doing development in the open to help share the maintenance and responsibility of that software with others. That means I don't view open source like some do with free software as some philosophical imperative but as a way to foster collaboration with others who also have a use for the same software to make maintaining that software easier. All of this means open source and its success comes down to the relationship between project maintainers -- who have gotten to that position by showing the most dedication to maintaining the project -- and everyone else (I'm obviously ignoring whether the project is actually useful).
Let's look at this relationship in regards to the different types of people involved. The largest group is those that don't even use the project. This group includes people who are just curious about the project, considering using the project, or those who have already decided the project doesn't work for them. When interacting with project maintainers, people in this group typically ask questions to help them decide if the project is right for them, e.g. "does this project help with this use-case?" Where it goes wrong is when people start to say things like "this project doesn't solve my use-case so it's trash" without stopping to realize that not every bit of software is meant for everyone (and that inclues programming languages). This also means project maintainers should never say things like "your use-case is ridiculous".
The next group of people is actual users. This group typically comes to project maintainers with questions about how best to accomplish some problem. People who fall into this group are also the people who promote a project the most. Where people in this group tend to falter when interacting with project maintainers is making demands. As I said earlier, I view open source as a collaboration among people to help maintain a project. What this means is that users are free to ask project maintainers to do something on their behalf, but they are in no position to make demands of the project maintainers if they aren't helping with the maintenance. In other words it's fine to ask "have you or would you consider adding this?", but it's not okay to say "you need to add this" as project maintainers by the sheer fact that they are volunteers and you are not paying them means they really don't have to do anything.
After users are bug reporters. This is a group of people who are not only users, but actually took the time to report an issue they found with the project. For this relationship, bug reporters should expect project maintainers to provide a place to report issues and to triage them as they arrive, while project maintainers should expect bug reporters to not demand that their bug be fixed. For project maintainers triaging bugs is never fun, but when someone puts in the effort to report an issue you should at least make sure it's managed properly so no one else accidentally reports the same issue. For bug reporters, I think there are two key things to remember: there are a lot more bugs being reported than just yours every day, and just because you think your bug is a priority, that doesn't mean it is for those doing the work to fix your bug (which I know is not exactly a comforting response when the bug is affecting you, but unfortunately fixing bugs is not simple or easy).
The next group are patch contributors. This is probably the hardest relationship to manage as patch contributors are doing hard work, but that work can only come to fruition if project maintainers let it. Because patch contributors have to do a lot of work to make a patch happen, they deserve to have their patch reviewed. For project maintainers, they deserve some patience from the patch contributor as it's not easy to review all the patches that come in, nor can all patches be accepted as not all changes make sense to accept. I will be the first to admit that this relationship is the one the Python project needs to improve (and thus why I'm working to move the project to GitHub so we can make patch reviewing as easy as possible for all involved).
There is also the relationship among project maintainers. As the direct representatives of a project, we all rely on each other to act accordingly. We also try not to prevent others from doing what they can to help maintain the project. Probably the trickiest bit is trying to reach consensus on design choices (although in the case of Python we can always ask Guido to just make a final decision, sometimes to his reluctance).
Going forward
After spending a month away from volunteering, what will I change so that the next time I step away from open source it's because I'm on vacation rather than to prevent burnout? In the end I think I will focus on things that directly help with increasing the collaboration between me and the community.
Between me and users I don't specifically see anything directly changing. I will probably continue to not read volunteer-related emails on evenings and weekends to avoid getting upset from how someone treats me (I will do code work on evenings and weekends as time and the mood strikes me, though).
Between me and bug reporters, that relationship will change a lot as there won't really be much of one going forward. While I completely appreciate people taking the time to report bugs, I think it will be most productive for me to essentially stop fixing bugs. This is actually surprisingly difficult to do as fixing simple bugs allows me to do work that isn't challenging and yet feels rewarding. Be that as it may, by me no longer fixing bugs, it frees me up to focus on another relationship within the community.
What I want to do is focus on my relationship with patch contributors. Learning as much as I have from contributing to Python's source code has been a continual driver for me to improve Python's software engineering practices so others can also have the chance to learn like I have (hence why I'm leading our move to GitHub). I also realize that if I keep fixing bugs then there's nothing that requires patching which leads to a dearth of starter projects for people who want to get involved. It also isn't the most effective use of my time if I truly want to help spread the collaboration and maintenance load of Python. So by practically fixing no bugs I give other people a chance to learn from fixing them, freeing me up to spend the time to guide people through the process of fixing those bugs, with the hope that some patch contributors will become project maintainers themselves and help maintain Python.
As for my relationship with project maintainers, I don't really see that changing much. I might step in a bit more to try and calm down flare-ups on the mailing lists when technical discussions get out of control, but otherwise I'm happy with the relationship I have with other project maintainers.
And that's it. During my month off:
I clearly defined for myself that open source is about collaborating around a project to help share the maintenance burden.
Came to terms with the fact that people who make demands of me who are not my employer are in the wrong and I don't have to put up with it.
In order to help others more effectively share the maintenance burden, I need to stop fixing bugs and focus on helping them with patch submissions.
When moving this blog from Silvrback to Ghost(Pro) the one thing I had to figure out was how to get syntax highlighting for source code. Silvrback supported the GitHub-style code block markup, e.g.:
```python
def foo(): pass
```
Ghost's default Casper theme, though, has no included syntax highlighting (I assume so every blog doesn't have to pay the overhead cost). That meant I had to find a solution to this problem, else I would not be switching to Ghost.
In the end I found highlight.js. It's hosted on Cloudflare so I was able to use Ghost's Code Injection feature to add the appropriate tags in the header (and specify a non-default theme to get richer Python highlighting):
The only real hitch is that the on-load registration that highlight.js uses doesn't seem to mesh with Ghost and/or the Casper theme. In the end I just followed the docs for highlight.js to turn on the highlighting in some JavaScript I put in a <script> tag in the footer (along with tweaking the code to not rely on jQuery):
If the above is syntax highlighted then it works. 😊 The last step was to visit highlight.js on libraries.io to register for release notifications. That way I know when I need to update the URLs to newer versions.
Overall not complicated and I'm happy with the final outcome!
A couple days ago in
New Home Network
I posted a request for advice on a home NAS box and networking hardware.
Now I have the storage box, and boy was it ever easy and straightforward
and anxiety-relieving. If you haven’t done this already, you might want to.
What’s a NAS?
It’s a box, usually with no screen and no controls, a power plug, and a network
connection. You hook it up to your home network with a cable (not WiFi)
and it looks like another disk on all the computers in your house.
Except for, it’s usually a lot bigger and more reliable disk than any
single computer would have. It’s like your home has a built-in disk drive.
The online reviews favor QNAP and Synology; the
comments on
my blog suggested Synology or build-your-own-it’s-fun.
I have opinions about “fun” and about “storage for my irreplaceable digital
life” and they don’t intersect. So I bought a
Synology DS416j and two
Western Digital “Red” 6T drives from fave
local retailer
NCIX — if
you’re in Canada, you can’t beat ’em.
(Yes, I only half-filled the enclosure. I splashed out because I smell
bigger cameras and the possibility of video in the future, and dropping in two
more drives at some future point is going to be easier than shifting
boxes.)
It’s easy to set up if you’re not scared of a screwdriver, and comes with
Ikea-style cartoon instructions.
Once you
have it plugged into your network it’s easy for a browser to find, and the
configuration isn’t challenging. It doesn’t want you to bother your pretty
little head about filesystem types or RAID configurations, just mirrors the
two drives. Various pieces of software disagree how much space you have; on
my Mac, Time Machine says 5.95 TB, but df says 5.47. But what’s 500
gigabytes between friends?
There’s no reason to have it accessible, but also none to hide it
away, it’s not very big and nicely quiet even when working hard.
Gripes
It takes 4 screws for each 3.5" drive and they only shipped 8. If I’d
had 4 drives I would have had to track down more.
To actually mount it on your Mac first time, you have to know its IP
address (which to be fair the web admin app shoves in your face), and then go
to the Finder, type Command-K, and then a URL-like-thingie beginning
afp://. I wonder how many old farts’ eyes will roll the way mine
did?
The Synology Web client is annoyingly cheerful and smells like Windows
3.1.
What I did
Well, I have all sorts of ambitions about Plex and iTunes and so on and so
forth, but the real reason I bought this is that I have a lot of
pictures and music and so on spinning on old disks with a backup
strategy that involves a combination of Time Machine on an old
Airport, and manual rsync between two computers. Yes, you are all allowed
to sneer at me, and I was having a background rumble of uneasiness.
So, I did these things:
Set up the Synology as a Time Machine disk.
Arranged for it to back up everything to Amazon S3, encrypted by the
NAS before sending.
Arranged for S3 to shuffle it off to Glacier after 30 days.
Which involves multiple steps and, in the S3 case, making credentials
and cut-n-pasting; probably out of the reach of civilians.
Which is a real
pity.
Because, while I try not to promote my employer excessively in this space, I
know a lot about S3 and am pretty convinced that
it’s is about the safest place in the known universe to store information you
really care about.
Seeing that Time Machine readout makes me happy. Yes, that’s kind of slow,
but at least one other loved one is simultaneously dumping a MacBook-full of data
in.
Security
It’s a mixed bag.
I must have fat-fingered the account name on initial setup because it
wouldn’t let me log in and I thought I’d bricked the
thing. Turns out that if you have physical access to the Synology, and a paper
clip, you can reset all the passwords. Which, at the time, I appreciated.
But…
Then there’s this thing called
QuickConnect:
“Access your Synology NAS over the Internet and share files”, they say.
Eek! I think that sharing my files across the Internet is exactly
what I don’t want my basement storage appliance to do.
Uh safe? Read
the explanation and make up
your own mind. I turned it off.
What the world needs
Is something like this, only easy, so you turn it on and hit the
“Next” button four times, and you have it all set up like I do, with Time
Machine and S3 and Glacier. So ordinary smart people who aren’t Internet
geeks can have safer data.
RIP Mary Hessel Bumgarner. Born April 2nd, 1926. Died December 11th, 2016.
AKA Mom.
Many have asked how Mom wanted to be honored and remembered. She had three causes that she actively supported in the past years and asked that others support them as well.
For straight donations, please support The Food Bank of Central Missouri or a like minded organization in your area. Alternatively, Mom supported The Rainbow House and encouraged others to do the same.
In more recent years, Mom was very vocal in her support of The Slow Food Movement. She asked that we encourage everyone to join.
Not just Mom to her three children, but a matriach.. a muse… an advisor… a mentor… a critic… a master chef… and many many more roles to many many people.
While I — we — will miss her and we do grieve, she would tolerate no sadness in this passing. Mortality is unavoidable and her’s was a life fully lived.
She lived a 90 year long life that can only be called extraordinary. She spent 67 of those years happily– nay, passionately– married to my father, Roger Bumgarner, a man whose compassion, strength, humility and patience is equally as extraordinary.
Beyond all the people whose lives were enriched by knowing her, she left a legacy of many stories. Stories that underscore that up until her last breath, she did it her way. And stories that we can all learn from and, in so doing, if we act upon their lessons, the world will be a better place.
Stories that ultimately center largely around a few central themes.
Be kind. Through kindness, you’ll find friends and gain knowledge in the most surprising of places.
Be curious. Everywhere you look — truly, everywhere — there is something to be learned. New science. New art. New patterns. New ideas. New ways. Open your mind and it will be enriched.
Be accepting and kind. No religion, no skin tone, no orientation, no nationality, no age, nor any other difference means automatic condemnation. Every person deserves a chance.
Embrace change as it is the nature of the world. To do otherwise, is to be left behind.
Think. Observe. Experiment. Problem solve. Debate. Argue. Embrace being wrong. Correct. Move on. Repeat. Share.
Be generous. Not just with money, but with your time. Share your knowledge and experience with others. Catalyze growth in those new to the world. Encourage their creativity and interests. Mom was a muse to many, sometimes directly and oft indirectly. Many a career was accelerated, if not made, because she provided a bit of guidance or support at a critical time.
A wonderful woman has left this world. The world, though, will reap the benefits of her presence for years to come.
A quick word on that photograph. It was taken a couple of years ago, well after her COPD diagnosis and many many months more life than anyone was led to expect (Mom did not like to be told what to do).
If you know Mom, you know that she absolutely hated having her photo taken. I was surreptitiously trying to get a decent photo a couple of years ago and she was, as is usual, giving me lens melting glares of disapproval.
Finally, she said, “I’m going to die soon and you’re going to share a photo of me with everyone. I’ll be dead, I won’t care if it is bad or not, but… here.. I’ll pose once.” Credit to Christine for teaching Mom a proper pose.
May we all live a life so full of adventure, love, beauty, and so totally on our own terms.
Miss you, Mom. So long and thanks for all the fish (and everything else).
Distinguish carefully between a one-off activity that spikes a particular type of engagement and a long-term process.
There is no shortage of one-off activities which will spike activity for a short amount of time. Discussions about politics, designed lurker days, and many off-topic discussions can spike engagement for a short amount of time.
But looking for spikes isn’t a strategic approach to achieve success over the long-term.
The novelty quickly wears off. Metrics return to what they were before. You’re still left facing the same problems. If you can’t run the same activity every week, you have to wonder if it’s worth running the activity at all.
A big win is different. A big win is a change in processes (i.e. how you approach tasks and allocate time) that achieves a very different outcome. A big win often begins from the mindset of ‘what can we collectively work towards that will benefit us the most?’
Building a definitive knowledge base for your field can be a big win, hosting a secret Santa is a big spike.
Sometimes you need a spike to blow-off steam and remind members you exist. Most of the time, however, you should be working towards the biggest possible benefit for your community’s collective energy.
1.If you find that the taskbar does not appear when the x86 image is booted, please see here for a workaround.
2.If you find the image doesn’t boot on a Mac, you can try the fix here
Our vision in establishing the Raspberry Pi Foundation was that everyone should be able to afford their own programmable general-purpose computer. The intention has always been that the Raspberry Pi should be a full-featured desktop computer at a $35 price point. In support of this, and in parallel with our hardware development efforts, we’ve made substantial investments in our software stack. These culminated in the launch of PIXEL in September 2016.
PIXEL represents our best guess as to what the majority of users are looking for in a desktop environment: a clean, modern user interface; a curated suite of productivity software and programming tools, both free and proprietary; and the Chromium web browser with useful plugins, including Adobe Flash, preinstalled. And all of this is built on top of Debian, providing instant access to thousands of free applications.
Put simply, it’s the GNU/Linux we would want to use.
The PIXEL desktop on Raspberry Pi
Back in the summer, we asked ourselves one simple question: if we like PIXEL so much, why ask people to buy Raspberry Pi hardware in order to run it? There is a massive installed base of PC and Mac hardware out there, which can run x86 Debian just fine. Could we do something for the owners of those machines?
So, after three months of hard work from Simon and Serge, we have a Christmas treat for you: an experimental version of Debian+PIXEL for x86 platforms. Simply download the image, burn it onto a DVD or flash it onto a USB stick, and boot straight into the familiar PIXEL desktop environment on your PC or Mac. Or go out and buy this month’s issue of The MagPi magazine, in stores tomorrow, which has this rather stylish bootable DVD on the cover.
Our first ever covermount
You’ll find all the applications you’re used to, with the exception of Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica (we don’t have a licence to put those on any machine that’s not a Raspberry Pi). Because we’re using the venerable i386 architecture variant it should run even on vintage machines like my ThinkPad X40, provided they have at least 512MB of RAM.
The finest laptop ever made, made finer
Why do we think this is worth doing? Two reasons:
A school can now run PIXEL on its existing installed base of PCs, just as a student can run PIXEL on her Raspberry Pi at home. She can move back and forth between her computing class or after-school club and home, using exactly the same productivity software and programming tools, in exactly the same desktop environment. There is no learning curve, and no need to tweak her schoolwork to run on two subtly different operating systems.
And bringing PIXEL to the PC and Mac keeps us honest. We don’t just want to create the best desktop environment for the Raspberry Pi: we want to create the best desktop environment, period. We know we’re not there yet, but by running PIXEL alongside Windows, Mac OS, and the established desktop GNU/Linux distros, we can more easily see where our weak points are, and work to fix them.
Remember that this is a prototype rather then a final release version. Due to the wide variety of PC and Mac hardware out there, there are likely to be minor issues on some hardware configurations. If we decide that this is something we want to commit to in the long run, we will do our best to address these as they come up. You can help us here – please let us know how you get on in the comments below!
Instructions
Download the image, and either burn it to a DVD or write it to a USB stick. For the latter, we recommend Etcher.
Etcher from resin.io
Insert the DVD or USB stick into your PC or Mac, and turn it on. On a PC, you will generally need to enable booting from optical drive or USB stick in the BIOS, and you will have to ensure that the optical drive or USB stick is ahead of all other drives in the boot order. On a Mac, you’ll need to hold down C during boot*.
If you’ve done that correctly, you will be greeted by a boot screen.
Boot screen
Here you can press escape to access the boot menu, or do nothing to boot through to the desktop.
Spot the difference: the PIXEL desktop on a PC
Please note that this initial experimental version is only available as a live image to boot from USB or DVD. In future releases, we may create an installer so it can be permanently installed on your computer’s hard drive, but for now this is can only be temporarily booted for trial purposes.
* We are aware of an issue on some modern Macs (including, annoyingly, mine – but not Liz’s), where the machine fails to identify the image as bootable. We’ll release an updated image once we’ve got to the bottom of the issue.
Persistence
If you are running from DVD, any files you create, or modifications you make to the system, will of course be lost when you power off the machine. If you are running from a USB stick, the system will by default use any spare space on the device to create a persistence partition, which allows files to persist between sessions. The boot menu provides options to run with or without persistence, or to erase any persistence partition that has been created, allowing you to roll back to a clean install at any time.
Boot menu
Disclaimer
One of the great benefits of the Raspberry Pi is that it is a low-consequence environment for messing about: if you trash your SD card you can just flash another one. This is not always true of your PC or Mac. Consider backing up your system before trying this image.
Raspberry Pi can accept no liability for any loss of data or damage to computer systems from using the image.
2016 has been quite the year for the world at large and for tech specifically; it has certainly been a productive one for Stratechery. This year I wrote 143 Daily Updates (including tomorrow) and 46 Weekly Articles, and, as per tradition, today I summarize the most popular and most important posts of the year.
You can find previous years here: 2015 | 2014 | 2013
It’s a Tesla — Tesla is not a disruptor, but then again, neither is Apple, the closest comparison: both succeed by building a brand around being the best (Editor’s Note: That’s not to say that Tesla will have Apple’s success; there are lots of reasons for skepticism ($) especially after the unjustifiable Solar City acquisition ($)).
Apple’s Organizational Crossroads — A core part of what makes Apple Apple is its organization structure; Tim Cook has said it will never change. However, if Apple is serious about being a services company, change it must.
The Future of Podcasting — Podcasting is stuck between the open model of the past and the push for monetization in the future. Might there be a third way that actually benefits publishers?
The Curse of Culture — It is very fair to say that Apple is threatened by the potential rise of AI. Google, though, is also threatened by its inability to own customers’ attention. The solution for both companies may entail changing their culture, a very tall order indeed.
Everything as a Service — We have likely reached Peak iPhone, and if not, it’s only a matter of time; physical goods can only scale so far. The future, thanks to the Internet, is everything-as-a-service.
The Voters Decide — An apolitical analysis of what is happening in U.S. politics through the lens of Aggregation Theory (Editor’s Note: I’m biased but believe more than ever that this is a critical piece to understanding what is happening in western democracies).
The Brexit Possibility — Brexit’s downsides are clear; might tech help realize upsides in building something new based on a new world order? (Editor’s Note: This could have been written after Donald Trump’s election as well).
Antitrust and Aggregation — The European Commission’s antitrust case against Google is likely to be the first of many against aggregators, because the end game of Aggregation Theory is monopoly.
The Reality of Missing Out — Tech is entering a period of inequality where the big winners lift the sector as a whole even as smaller companies suffer. The best example is Facebook, Google, and digital advertising (Editor’s note: Over the last year this has gone from projection to reality).
The Amazon Tax — Amazon is building a lot of businesses that look like AWS: taxes on major industries that work to everyone’s benefit. The reason, though, is that AWS is a lot like Amazon itself.
Beyond the iPhone — Apple’s event may have been lacking on the surface, but it laid the groundwork for innovations that will be revealed in time. And yes, it was courageous.
Oracle’s Cloudy Future — Larry Ellison has declared that Oracle is a cloud company, but their customer offering seems more suited to the world that was.
I slightly expanded this list this year, in part because Daily Updates have continued to become even more in-depth; they are still very timely in covering the news of the day but contain their own strategic insights as well (please note that these are subscriber-only links; you can sign-up here).
February 16 — Kanye West and Tidal, The Problem with Exclusivity
February 17 — Apple Versus the FBI, Understanding iPhone Encryption, The Risks for Apple and Encryption (See also this Weekly Article: Apple, the FBI, and Security)
February 25 — Stripe Atlas, An Interview with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison
May 4 — Doubting the iPhone Revisited, What Has Changed, On Being Bearish
May 16 — Apple, Didi, and Occam’s Razor; Uber in China (See also: August 1 — Didi Acquires Uber China, Why Uber China Was Doomed, Was Uber China Worth It?)
June 9 — Apple Makes Major Changes to App Store, The App Store and Apple’s Nature, Additional Notes
September 20 — Does Uber Have a Strategy Problem?, Netflix and Aggregation Theory
October 3 — Nutanix and Hyper-Convergence, The Conservation of Attractive Data-Center Profits
October 10 — Coupa IPOs — and Pops, Why (Most) IPOs are Under-Priced, Why the IPO Process Doesn’t Change
November 9 — Donald Trump is the President-Elect, Tech Under Trump, The Big Picture
December 20 — Uber Losses (But China Gains?), Uber and Unit Economics, Reconsidering Uber
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I’m looking forward to a great 2017!
Numerous Nexus 6P owners have been complaining about battery issues with their handset post updating to Android 7.0 Nougat. While the blame was initially put on the Nougat update, the issue persisted for many Nexus 6P owners even after they flashed back to Marshmallow.
Continue reading →
This animated visualization from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center shows a model of carbon dioxide swirl around the planet, “using observations from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite.”
Recently, I Googled Jessica to see how the internet has remembered her. Jessica died in 2004, when we were both 14. She was killed in a hit-and-run on Hempstead Turnpike, Long Island’s deadliest corridor for pedestrians. At around 11 p.m. on a Friday night in May, she was leaving a pizzeria and heading to a sleepover with two friends when she was struck in the middle of a road she had crossed countless times. If she had run across the Turnpike a little faster or a little slower, she would still be here, instead of lying inside a silvery-purple coffin, wearing a velour Juicy Couture sweatsuit, six feet under and forever stuck in 2004.
I think about Jessica frequently, even though we were no longer friends when she died. We had gone to school together since kindergarten, and we used to play together at her house on a quiet cul-de-sac, but we grew apart over the years. Still, when Jessica — or, as her real friends called her, Jayy — died, she became a local celebrity: because she died so young and in such a sudden and cruel way, her death rippled outward and affected everyone in our community.
Jessica’s death meant something different for each of us. For me, it was all wrapped up in my parents’ deaths: Jessica had died a few months after my father died of prostate cancer and two years after my mother died of lung cancer. It was just another sign that things couldn’t go back to the way they used to be, that the past was irretrievable, that nothing — not even the lives of my childhood friends — was a given.
“RIP Jayy” was a hashtag before hashtags existed; everyone wrote it in purple, her favorite color, in their AIM profiles, which were then our primary online personae
Jessica’s death was the first I knew that caused an eruption of public grief of the kind I see play out so often now on social media. “RIP Jayy” was a hashtag before hashtags existed; after the hit-and-run, everyone wrote it in purple (her favorite color) in their AIM profiles. Back then, our AIM profiles were our primary online personae. Myspace was founded in the summer of 2003, though it didn’t officially launch until January 2004; it exploded in popularity among teens in November of that year. Shortly thereafter, someone created a Myspace page for Jessica. The pictures on it seem like such relics of the early 2000s: in one, she’s wearing a Von Dutch trucker hat.
I rediscovered that Myspace memorial through MyDeathSpace, a website that bills itself as “collecting the deaths of social networkers since 2005!” — it’s one of the first search results for her name. Jessica’s MyDeathSpace page features an account of her death that appears to be culled, without attribution, from Newsday and Long Island Herald articles. MyDeathSpace includes an active forum for discussing the deaths it features, and as I first read the posts about Jessica, I felt the blood drain from my face. They were written by people who had no idea who Jessica was, with usernames like “MorbidCuriosity,” “super_ghey,” and “FemmeFatality.” People who have paid for premium accounts enabling special article and forum access ($14.95 for a six-month membership, or $49.95 for 20 years) and who have posted, in some cases, upwards of 10,000 times.
“K. Why was a 14 year old out walking on the streets at 11 p.m.? I wasn’t allowed to leave my own room at 14!” wrote pincushionqueen, three years after Jessica’s death. Super_ghey replied, “//look both ways?” MorbidCuriosity posts a picture of Punky Brewster, claiming the two resemble each other. Daybreaksdisdain responds, “Not anymore.”
There are 84 posts like this, blaming Jessica and her parents for her death, blaming her for being struck by a car that never once slowed down or stopped, a car whose driver was never apprehended. I thought about posting a takedown, reminding commenters that people who did know Jessica could see their callous and petty words, and that she was a human being. But from other forum threads, I could see that when people who knew the deceased objected to the dehumanizing tone of the commentary, they were routinely cut down or mocked. Jessica had simply gotten the standard MyDeathSpace treatment, in which posters scavenge online memorials and concern-troll the dead.
MyDeathSpace was initially created as a LiveJournal account, and launched as a website in January 2006 by Mike Patterson, then a 26-year-old paralegal in San Francisco. According to an article from Salon in 2007, “Patterson claims he created the site to teach teens a ‘lesson’ about risky behaviors, especially when it comes to driving automobiles. The idea came to him, he says, after reading about a Bay Area murder in which a man killed his wife and two daughters before committing suicide. He wondered if the two girls had Myspace pages. They did.” MyDeathSpace seems to belong to a tradition that includes everything from true crime shows like 48 Hours, which allege to seek justice for victims by sensationalizing their pain, to the now-defunct subreddit /r/fatpeoplehate, which claimed to promote good health. The moral coating covers up a more perverse allure.
Back when Salon featured MyDeathSpace, there were about 8,000 registered users on the site; now, there are 49,480. Most of the deaths featured are those of young people who have died unexpectedly, and listing a cause of death is a requirement — users won’t draw up an article featuring, say, a Facebook user’s passing until they have discerned how that person died, through updates that Medical Examiner offices post online in some states; information posted on the Facebook profiles themselves (Patterson says that 99 percent of the profiles featured are now from Facebook); online obituaries; and crowdfunding sites set up either before the person’s death, to allay medical bills, or after, to cover funeral costs. Some recent headlines from the site’s article archive highlight a 20-year-old from New Jersey who died after he fell from the roof of his frat house; a 24-year-old who died from a gunshot wound in Oxnard, California; and a 21-year-old from Franklin, Ohio who died in jail of a heroine overdose.
The MyDeathSpace forums look like relics of the early 2000s, complete with signature images and avatars. In a way, they continue a tradition dating from the internet’s more nascent, id-steeped years. Rotten.com, a shock and gore site that made its debut in 1996, thrived through inspiring a combination of outrage, disgust, and compulsive viewing: It was vile, but you couldn’t look away. The site (which is still online, though rarely updated) describes itself as “the soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see.” It features images of limbs caught in meat grinders, massive goiters, orange juice enemas, and corpses: dismembered corpses, exhumed corpses, corpses displaying the aftermath of fresh gunshot wounds. In late 1997, the site posted a photo of a bloodied blonde woman amidst the wreckage of a car crash and claimed it was Princess Diana. It wasn’t. Another MyDeathSpace predecessor, the Darwin Awards, launched in 1993 and still somewhat active, describes its purview as “commemorat[ing] individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives.” Earlier this year, they posted about the death of a woman in Virginia who fell from a moving vehicle while trying to secure a king-sized mattress to its roof with her body weight.
The impulse to partake in this kind of information-seeking, or opinion-sharing, is natural. After Jessica died, I cut out all the articles about her that ran in Newsday and saved them
On MyDeathSpace’s forums, as the Salon piece notes, “things get cruel quickly” — users note the “stupidity” of those prematurely deceased, and often belittle friends and family who join in discussions to defend their loved ones. On Halloween, Olivia, a moderator, posted about the death of 20-year-old mechanic from Arkansas. His mother found the discussion, and responded; users made fun of her choice of the word “famine,” when she wrote “This is sad that all you people have to do is famine over someone’s passing.” The MyDeathSpace Facebook page, which has 15,699 likes, features a similarly callous commentariat. On a post about a man who died by suicide while filming himself on Facebook Live, people have commented “pussy,” “shame he didn’t use a tripod,” and “ehh who cares anymore.”
The callousness might spring from a more neutral urge: If you can figure out how a Facebook user died, maybe you can better understand your own relationship with death. One 20-year-old interview subject, in school for forensic psychology, told Salon that she used MyDeathSpace to theorize about deaths that seemed unresolved. “Asked why she thought she or anyone else had a right to pry so deeply and comment on the death of a stranger, Perry admitted this was ‘a good question,’ though she fell short of an answer. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just like to put my opinion out there.’” This reminded me of a line from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir chronicling the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne: “In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.”
Perhaps the people who discussed my childhood friend’s death felt that by voicing their opinions about her supposed carelessness, they were making sense of the senseless. To those of us who knew her, Jessica’s death did feel senseless: a 14-year-old girl struck dead in a split-second. Gathering articles about her death was a way of gaining power over fate, or at least the illusion of power; the impulse to partake in this kind of information-seeking, or opinion-sharing, is natural. After Jessica died, I cut out all the articles about her that ran in Newsday and saved them.
“I believe visitors who only view the death articles and don’t participate on the forum are here to lurk and possibly fulfill their morbid curiosity,” Mike Patterson told me via email, “whereas forum members interact with one another on a closer level. We’ve had certain forum members who have been on the site for nine or 10 years and have forged real-life relationships/friendships/marriages/etc.” When I reached out to some of MyDeathSpace’s highly active users to find out more about their motivations, most either ignored me or told me they “must get permission” from Patterson to answer. The only user who responded to me was daisylane from Melbourne, Australia, who joined the site in March of this year, has a premium account, and has already posted more than 2,000 times. She said that what originally drew her to the site was “morbid curiosity, because no one really speaks openly about death.” To her, MyDeathSpace is “a website, separate from any media bias, where you can see the sheer numbers of gun related deaths, suicides, domestic violence-related incidents, etc … (for instance, we’re seeing a lot of laced heroin deaths, which is a change from the past year).”
The desire to seek out some sort of unvarnished truth, beyond the influence of “media” — that vague, omnipotent, manipulative behemoth — reflects the same cultural current that has brought us hyperpartisan Facebook echo chambers and fake news. It’s a confirmation bias of sorts. The “truth” that MyDeathSpace users are seeking to confirm is one in which death is neither wholly random nor taboo; a “truth” to match an understanding they can live with. MyDeathSpace both quantifies and qualifies death, in a way that death, in reality, resists. You could say that MyDeathSpace puts a face to statistics merely cited by the CDC. But why does it matter how a person died, in the face of all of the things that made them them?
A community formed around understanding death makes sense, and the idea of a “digital graveyard” need not necessarily be perverse, if it’s imbued with respect. We grieve on social media — according to the Digital Beyond, a company that offers services for managing your digital afterlife, an estimated 972,000 Facebook users will die in 2016 — and online memorials on Facebook and elsewhere can be a place to visit the dead as if they were still alive, to scroll through posts about the mundane and the extraordinary. I found myself doing this earlier this year, after my colleague, the poet Max Ritvo, died of cancer at age 25. Visiting his Facebook was a way of accessing his ebullience and humor, and reading the tributes that Max’s friends posted about him felt like participating in a boundless digital memorial service.
Searching for “silver linings” always runs the risk of obscuring the person being abstracted. Grieving respectfully requires awareness that a person, in all their complexity, is not an idea
But even online memorials that seem respectful can risk papering over the painful reality of death. In her piece “The Space Between Mourning and Grief” for the Atlantic this past June, Toronto-based writer Claire Wilmot argues that the seemingly well-meaning platitudes of friends and acquaintances on Facebook can be tone deaf at best, and, at worst, cause the deceased’s family to feel like their own grief isn’t being respected. Wilmot’s sister, Lauren, died at age 20 in March 2015 — she had a rare form of neurological cancer. Many found out about Lauren’s death via a Facebook post by a former high school classmate: “The classmate selected what is perhaps the only picture of the two of them together, and decided to post it on Lauren’s timeline. Beneath it, she wrote ‘RIP’ and something about heaven gaining an angel.”
That first post then set forth what Wilmot called a “cascade of statuses and pictures, many from people who barely knew her … syrupy posts that profoundly misrepresented who she was and sanitized what had happened to her.” Wilmot found that Facebook mourning wasn’t the “outlet for public grief” we might hope it to be. Rather, she writes, “social media often reproduces the worst cultural failings surrounding death, namely platitudes that help those on the periphery of a tragedy rationalize what has happened, but obscure the uncomfortable, messy reality of loss.” The posts mourning her sister were full of redemption narratives and “silver linings,” and Wilmot felt that they were “so far removed from the horror of the reality that I found them isolating and offensive.”
Meaning-making in the face of death is both natural and necessary, but searching for answers, for “silver linings” — for ways of making sense of why and how a person has left this earth — always runs the risk of obscuring the person being abstracted. I realized this at 12, when my mother died and my cousin started calling her “a guardian angel”; I felt it again at 14, when my father died and I was told that he was “in a better place,” with my mother again.
When Jessica died, and our town exploded in public displays of grief, I realized how the desire to make sense of what had happened, and to participate outwardly in mourning Jessica, transformed her from a person to our “purple angel.” The day after the accident, friends and acquaintances and people who hadn’t even known her gathered around a telephone pole near where she was hit and smothered it with a purple-stained tribute to her. The pole remained covered in pictures and Sharpie notes and flowers and teddy bears and prayer candles and helium balloons for days, weeks, months; years later, when the dead flowers and deflated balloons and moldy teddy bears were removed, the Sharpie tags of “RIP Jayy” remained. Even as I attended that telephone pole memorial, I wondered about my place in the grieving hierarchy, and I wondered what her family must have felt. Grieving respectfully in public requires awareness that a person, in all their complexity, is not an idea; it requires realizing that the only sense that death makes is its inevitability.
This deserves some thought, not because of it running on Bloomberg, but due to the breadth and depth of the piece and the way it portrays the current state of affairs.
I’m not shocked that Apple is devoting less resources to the Mac, but rather that they persist in being spread so thin (and apparently also lacking internal focus) over years given the way the company has ballooned in revenue – their first priority ought to have been to reinvest in bolstering their engineering teams.
What do art handlers, the perennially uncelebrated workers behind your favorite exhibitions, have to do with the looming presence of 2017? For the third consecutive year, a group of these anonymous laborers are releasing their Art Handlers Calendar, fusing the comic absurdity of FDNY-style calendars with an earnest plea for increased visibility as the rarely appreciated backbone of the art world.
The 2017 edition of Art Handlers Calendar departs from the goofy, oversexualized aesthetics of the calendar’s previous iterations, opting instead for a serious but sensual, black-and-white look for the 12 monthly images. “For 2017, we gave the creative reins to fashion photographer Max Bernetz and art director Hans Maharawal,” tells Zaq Landsberg, one of the few individuals involved in the calendar who chooses not to remain anonymous.
Whether carrying a crate, measuring a wall, or slicing open a box of art, the new images of the art handlers possess a certain majestic but stoic quality, reminiscent of high-end editorial images of artists getting their first cover story in a major art publication. “The images have an emphasis on the aesthetics of work, revealing what remains unseen on the job. The aim is to put the handlers in natural context and draw out the raw character of the models. The sexiness comes not from the skin revealed, but from the visible confidence and conviction,” adds Landsberg.
Art Handlers Calendar began as a reaction to a sense of art world disregard felt by Landsberg and his co-handlers, exemplified by a particularly obnoxious instance of neglect: “I had recently started working at a particular institution and learned that as ‘independent contractors,’ we were not invited to the company Christmas party,” Landsberg tells The Creators Project.
“The original idea was to use the calendar as a way to raise money to have an independent contractors Christmas party. But then we got a piece in an art blog at a very good time and it blew up all over the internet, and we did well enough to throw the party and still have money left over, which we donated to The Bowery Mission. We were all unified in wanting to give it to a charity that was not art-related, and have focused on tangible and immediate causes since.”
A couple years later and the project has become increasingly focused on philanthropy and less concerned with funding an unforgettable Christmas party. The majority of the proceeds made from Art Handlers Calendar 2017 will not only be donated to The Bowery Mission, but also to Sangsangai, an organization providing relief for victims of the 2015 Nepal Earthquake, and to Planned Parenthood, in light of possible defunding as Trump becomes head of the state.
The 2017 edition of Art Handlers Calendar can be purchased from the group’s Etsy page, here.
Snow at Tsukijima, 1930. Images courtesy of The Ronin Gallery
As winter approaches, dark, moody landscapes might be increasingly common sights throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Only few of these scenes, however, are likely to be as beautifully composed as the work of one celebrated Japanese artist, currently on view at The Ronin Gallery in Manhattan. Kawase Hasui: Quiet Elegance features over 50 signed woodblock prints collected by U.S. military officers between the end of World War II and the end of the Korean War. Owner of The Ronin Gallery David Taro Libertson tells The Creators Project why Hasui’s work is so unique: “Known for his night scenes and meticulously rendered snow or rainfall, Hasui’s work is revered for its ability to capture atmosphere. Characterized by their serenity of mood and flawless compositions, his prints convey the natural world with an unmatched sensitivity to the splendor of each time of day, to the particular beauty of each season.”
Sudden Shower at Imai Bridge
Japan is famous for its woodblock printmaking tradition, specifically works made during the Edo Period (1603 to 1868) in the ukiyo-e style, which translates to “pictures from the floating world.” Hasui’s work is significant for its role in reviving the ukiyo-e tradition in the 20th century and infusing it with Western art concepts, like realism. “Hasui worked at the threshold of memory and modernity. He was a leading artist of the shin-hanga, or “New Print” movement. Together Shin-Hanga and Sosaku Hanga (or “Creative Prints”) brought the woodblock print into the modern age. Competing with lithography, photography, and the spectrum of Western technique, the woodblock medium asserted its significance and expressive power through these movements,” says Libertson.
Print publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō, with whom Hasui worked extensively throughout his career, coined the shin-hanga term. Amongst the works exhibited by The Ronin Gallery is one print of particular historical significance that was published by Watanabe Shōzaburō. “In 1956, the Japanese government’s Committee for the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage designated his print Zojo Temple in Snow at Shiba and the documentation of its production as Intangible Cultural Treasures, the greatest artistic honor in post-war Japan. While he was inspired by the Western artistic influence that permeated Japan at this time, Hasui retained a passionate allegiance to traditional subjects,” says Libertson.
Zojo Temple in Snow at Shiba, 1925
Although Hasui started making print editions in 1918, there is a reason that nearly all the work on view was published after 1923. “Unfortunately, during the earthquake of 1923, all of his woodblocks and over 200 sketches were destroyed. The works that predate this event are extremely scarce and in great demand today,” says a statement from The Ronin Gallery. But Hasui carried on producing prints despite that tragic setback, much to the benefit of the Japanese printmaking tradition. As Libertson points out, “By championing the woodblock print, Hasui and his fellow 20th century masters ensured the dynamic woodblock print scene we have today.”
Snow at Mukojima, 1931
Shuzenji in Rain, 1933
Rain at Maekawa, 1932
Kaminohashi at Fukagawa, 1920
See more the works in Kawase Hasui: Quiet Elegancehere.
In the video, crystalline metallic flakes multiply and branch into beautiful frost-like fractals, visualizing the chemical reactions that form white silver (Cu + 2AgNO3 → Cu(NO3)2 + 2Ag) and black lead (Zn + Pb(NO3)2 → Zn(NO3)2 + Pb). The film turns chemicals and equations into a glimmering audiovisual feast, pairing each sequence with a fittingly light or dark soundtrack. White (Silver) is accompanied by “Clear Visions” by Cymatix, while Black (Lead) is scored to “Off Limits” by Score Squad.
"For Black (Lead) and White (Silver), we were going to shoot many metal displacement reactions with a microscope. During the process, we discovered that the growth patterns between silver and lead were quite different. So, we decided to create a short film to compare the difference between the two metals. And luckily, we found two pieces of music that could enhance the contrast," filmmaker and BOS founder Yan Liang, Ph.D. tells The Creators Project.
The film is just one of the gorgeous scientific films produced by BOS. Their series Envisioning Chemistry visualizes reactions like elemental burning and precipitation, while their Cool Experiments series showcases the magic of physics experiments. See Black (Lead) and White (Silver), in full, below:
Check out more gorgeous, 4K scientific films from Beauty of Science (BOS), here.
Lindley Estes caught up with Tim Owens yesterday to talk about the new Reclaim Hosting offices in Fredericksburg. Tim and Lauren have already written about the space, and just today Lauren posted an update with pictures of the demo work going on as well as some insights to our thinking about the redesign.
On top of that, Lindley published an article for the Freelance Star today based on her conversation with Tim. What was cool about the article is how she connected the new offices with our earlier collaborations at UMW. Tim’s first day on the job at UMW in 2011 was being thrown into a nutty office space with a makeshift TV studio and a missing Dr. Oblivion, as well as hysterical teaching assistant-once-removed Martha Burtis. The fabled Summer of Oblivion!
When Tim and I were still at UMW one of the things we talked about was having a space like the DTLT offices for Reclaim. Three years later that is becoming a reality, and that’s truly awesome. As noted in the article and Lauren’s post, we’re opening the space up, exposing the ceilings. adding a glass-enclosed conference room, laptop bar, collaborative table, private desks, booths, as well as a recording studio, green screen, and 3D printing. We even have awesome sonic professionals folks like Mark Snyder who have already offered to help out.
That said, I’ve seen enough to know posh offices don’t necessarily make the magic, that’s about the people, the vibe, and the freedom. And after our trip to Portland, it was clear we have those three right now—in fact it was being together for that week that made us think about doing this. We are all locked-in, and very much taking care of business as I suggested in a recent braggy post about just this topic. In fact, Brian Lamb commented on that post asking how we managed our distributed workflow, which brought me to the post I wrote over a year ago about settling into distributed work from Italy. All of which seems ironic given I am writing a post about our new collaborative office space in Fredericksburg, right?
Maybe, but it all seems related to me. We know we can effectively run Reclaim Hosting in a distributed manner around the globe—and I’ll remain distributed for the foreseeable future. But the idea of creating a dynamic space that can become a headquarters for Reclaim as well as a communal hub for distributed workers in and around Fredericksburg is a new challenge. And if it has any of the energy and goodness of ds106, as Lindley suggested in her Tweet above, then I can’t help but think it will be a most fun and creative one at that.
Just weeks after unveiling Waymo as the next step in its autonomous journey, Google has released images of modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans.
Speculation around Google’s driverless ambitions have been circulating for quite some time, as the company released tidbits of information on the project every few months.
Over the course of the past year however, the announcements seem to be coming more frequently. This year alone, Google announced a partnership with Fiat Chrysler to outfit the Pacifica Minivan with the latest in autonomous technology, commenced partnerships with several auto manufacturers, and split off its autonomous vehicle development unit into its own company under Alphabet.
While the news of the Chrysler partnership broke this past May, the department split came to light over the past few weeks. Waymo will be headed by John Krafcik, the former head of Google’s autonomous vertical, and will focus solely on developing self-driving cars.
This past May, Google committed to put 100 self-driving Pacificas on the road. The tech giant confirms the pledge with its most recent announcement and shares a first look at the completed vehicles. The latest announcement from the Google spinoff includes images of modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans outfitted with autonomous technology.
This news comes just after rumours surfaced that Google might be scaling back its autonomous dreams to include just the software included in a driverless vehicle.
According to a statement posted by Google, production on the vehicles will begin this coming October and are aiming to have them on the road by 2017.
At Spark we use a wide variety of tools to communicate, coordinate, and cooperate (the three C’s that make up what is often called collaboration).
Spark is an email culture, inevitably, since we have to work with our clients. So we pass a lot of information around in email, which is pretty bad for the three C’s internally, although it’s immensely useful communicating with external others. Gmail is a great email platform, however.
The company has adopted Google Drive/Docs for ‘productivity’ apps and file sync-and-share, which is great for sharing content that is intended to be shared externally, and also as a system of record. However, Google Docs are not closely integrated with Slack, and the editing interface is a bit old school.
Internally, we are using Slack for the three C’s, too, and many people use it frequently. I’ve been tracking Bold, a new Slack-oriented internal blogging tool, with a design that owes a lot to Medium. For example, Bold supports side notes in a Medium-like way. Here’s a screenshot of a comment thread on this very paragraph [the post was drafted in Bold, originally].
[I like the feature that allows a user to turn a comment into a post, as well. Would be good to have @mentions supported in comments, though, which is coming soon.]
Medium-like formatting is built-in to Bold. Here’s the palette of styling options:
Formatting issues spelled the end of my investigation, however. I learned that it was — just barely — possible to create a table in Bold by creating it externally in markdown and pasting that into Bold. Like this:
But I couldn’t edit the table, or even delete it.
I discovered that typing ‘>’ at the start of a paragraph led to the paragraph being indented, a style tweak that doesn’t show up on the menu, anywhere.
Apparently @mentions are supported in text, but I never invited anyone else to Bold before giving up on it. This is where the Bold integration with Slack could shine, I think. I’ll be able to create a table like this in Bold, and the people @mentioned would be notified via Slack. The company says @mentions in comments will soon be supported.
The Bottom Line
In the final analysis, there are too many shortcomings — particularly the lack of support for tables — to consider Bold as a replacement for Google docs, or even as a better version of Slack posts.
Fearing the high costs of hydro in Ontario, one of the world’s largest tech companies is fleeing to Quebec.
Amazon recently revealed that it has created two data centres just outside Montreal in order to offer internet services to its “Canada region.” Amazon announced the launch of these centres earlier in December, though Ontario’s provincial regulators are reeling at the tech giant’s reasoning.
MobileSyrup previously reported that Amazon would launch two new data centres in Montreal, though there was no reason as to why the computer made the decision at the time. It seems Ontario’s high hydro-electricity costs are the reason for Amazon leaving the province.
In addition to Canada, Amazon is running data centres for its clients in 15 other locations around the world. Teresa Carlson, vice-president of public sector with Amazon Web Services, told the National Post that Amazon primarily chose Quebec because of its economical hydro-electricity costs.
Amazon reportedly conducted a thorough review of its options in Canada, specifically Ontario, which included the cost of hydro-electricity.
In 2013, Quebec welcomed the launch of a data centre from the French cloud computing giant OVH. OVH went on to set up its North American research and development labs in the province in 2016. In addition, IBM, Bell Canada and Cogeco Data Services have also opened data centres in the province.
This revelation comes at a time when the Ontario Liberal Party is feeling the backlash from an unpopular energy policy that’s seen provincial hydro-electricity costs skyrocket over the past few years.
This past November, Ontario Premiere Kathleen Wynne admitted at a press conference that the increasing energy costs across the province were her “mistake” and pledged to address the problem in 2017.
However, the announcement of Amazon’s Montreal data centres spiked the attention Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party leader Patrick Brown, who claimed that Ontario’s rising hydro-electricity prices are making it less competitive for investments from large businesses, in particular the world’s tech giants.
Amazon web services is currently the largest provider of cloud computing services in the world, accounting for 30 percent of the global market.
This quarter, Amazon Web Services completed $3.23 billion USD in sales, which totals a 55 percent increase from the $2.1 billion USD is made last quarter.
Translink has sold its Oakridge bus barn for $440 M, which will become a one-time (but welcome) part of the financing of the Broadway and Surrey transit projects, among others in the Mayors’ 10-year Phase 1 Plan. Thanks to Glen Korstrom for the story in Business In Vancouver.
To me, this is the third largest parcel of land (13.8 acres) now heading for redevelopment in Vancouver, right after Jericho (92 acres when combined) and the Heather Street Lands (21 acres). And the $440M, which will arrive in various payments by 2022, is somewhat larger than the $150M Translink surplus land sales revenue forecast by the Mayors as “Local/Regional contribution” in their April 2016 funding strategy.
No matter what, this is great news, since transit can make vast improvements to regional mobility. Good for individuals, good for the economy, good for the environment too. And we edge closer to regional mobility pricing.
TransLink has sold its 13.8-acre transit centre on West 41st Avenue to a consortium that includes Vancouver developer Intergulf and Beijing-based Modern Green Development Co. Ltd., which operates as Modern Investment Group, for $440 million. . . . . . “The proceeds from this property sale will provide additional regional funding for the Broadway and Surrey rapid transit projects,” said TransLink CEO Kevin Desmond.
The recently adopted Phase One funding of the 10-Year Vision included $150 million from the anticipated sale of the Oakridge Transit Centre – a key element of the regional contribution, which allowed TransLink to access funding made available from the new Federal Public Transportation Fund (PTIF) and new Provincial funding. The Phase One plan funds ongoing pre-construction work for the Broadway Millennium Line extension and the Surrey-Newton-Guildford light rail projects. The remaining proceeds from the sale of Oakridge Transit Centre will be reinvested back into property needs required to support projects identified in the Vision.
TransLink announced on Tuesday the six-hectare Oakridge Transit Centre has been sold . . . . for an amount triple what the agency estimated it could get for the land five years ago.
“At the end of the day, we’re extremely excited to be able to announce this,” said Derrick Cheung, TransLink’s vice-president of strategic sourcing and real estate….
……. Mr. Cheung said the prospect of the high sale price has allowed the agency to start buying properties for stations along the planned new rapid-transit lines in Vancouver and Surrey, and sites needed for the new Pattullo Bridge and a bus exchange.
They’re sticking chips into everything these days. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.
Well, here’s the Internet of Things water bottle: the Hidrate Spark 2.0. It’s one of several available, actually, but this by far the best.
A beautiful witty app keeps track of how much water you drink from this good-looking bottle, plots it on a graph over time, and shows how you’re doing against friends who also own the bottle. It also shows how much you should be drinking, based on your height and weight, your activity level, the current humidity and altitude, and so on.
Unlike other Bluetooth bottles, this one doesn’t have to be charged every night. It uses a six-month coin battery.
And here’s the best part: If you haven’t been keeping up with your hydration, the bottle reminds you by glowing.
It’s $54 and, alas, sold out everywhere—sorry about that. But keep the Hidrate Spark in mind for the new year, when your resolutions should include “drink more water.”
At least if you care about your skin, sleep, weight, productivity, and resistance to disease.
David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. Here’s how to get his columns by email.
Across the Metro Vancouver region, if you add in amortized 25 year average annual transportation cost estimates, the percentage of homes with a cost of over $1 million rises significantly from 43 per cent to 92 per cent.
Numerous Nexus 6P owners have been complaining about battery issues with their handset post updating to Android 7.0 Nougat. While the blame was initially put on the Nougat update, the issue persisted for many Nexus 6P owners even after they flashed back to Marshmallow.
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Images courtesy of the Art Handlers Calendar team
Snow at Tsukijima, 1930. Images courtesy of The Ronin Gallery 
Sudden Shower at Imai Bridge
Zojo Temple in Snow at Shiba, 1925
Snow at Mukojima, 1931
Shuzenji in Rain, 1933
Rain at Maekawa, 1932
Kaminohashi at Fukagawa, 1920
Images via
