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PUBLISHED FEB. 8, 2022, AT 4:02 PM

The Lasting Legacy Of RedliningWe looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated — just like they were designed to be.

By Ryan Best and Elena Mejía

Get the data on GitHub

HOUSING DIVIDE is a partnership between ABC News and FiveThirtyEight examining racial inequities in housing, access to housing and the historical and present-day causes of those inequities. See more of our coverage on Nightline and ABC News.

In 1939, officials working with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) went to Cleveland, Ohio, as part of the agency’s national effort to grade neighborhoods based on their perceived mortgage-lending risk.

One of the neighborhoods that officials visited — now known mostly as Fairfax — was 55 percent Black, and as such, they gave this area a “D” grade, meaning they thought Fairfax was “hazardous,” or at high risk for defaulting on mortgage loans. In their report, HOLC officials concluded that property prices were trending down due to a “strong colored infiltration” and that there was a “detrimental change of ownership occupancy from white to colored.” Fairfax, like most metropolitan neighborhoods where Black people lived in the early 1900s, was then marked with red ink in the HOLC’s maps — a practice referred to as redlining.

It’s been over 80 years since the lines were drawn in Fairfax and over 50 years since the use of redlining was legally banned, but the impact of redlining is still felt in cities like Cleveland, where redlined neighborhoods are some of the most starkly segregated in the country.

“BEST”“DESIRABLE”“DECLINING”“HAZARDOUS”THE HOME OWNERS’ LOAN CORPORATION’S MAP OF THE CLEVELAND METROPOLITAN DISTRICT AND CUYAHOGA COUNTY, COPYRIGHTED BY COMMERCIAL SURVEY COMPANY, 1937

The racial makeup of Cleveland’s formerly redlined zones, by rating

WHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER“BEST”“DESIRABLE”“DECLINING”“HAZARDOUS”

But it’s not just Cleveland. In its 20 years of existence, the now-defunct HOLC drew hundreds of these maps across the country. In total, we analyzed the demographics of 138 metropolitan areas where HOLC drew maps, using data provided by the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project and by the 2020 census. And we found that nearly all formerly redlined zones in the country are still disproportionately Black, Latino or Asian compared with their surrounding metropolitan area, while two-thirds of greenlined zones — neighborhoods that HOLC deemed “best” for mortgage lending — are still overwhelmingly white.

“The redlining maps are like the Rosetta stone of American cities,” said LaDale Winling, a professor of history at Virginia Tech and one of the researchers behind the Mapping Inequality project. Winling told us that these maps were used to codify and institutionalize practices that had already been ongoing at a more scattershot level within the real estate industry.

You can see the effects of that institutionalized segregation clearly in this national map of formerly greenlined and redlined zones:

Most formerly redlined zones are people of color; most greenlined zones are white

Estimated 2020 share of non-Hispanic white residents living within greenlined (“best”) and redlined (“hazardous”) boundaries drawn by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation between 1935-40, by metropolitan area

“HAZARDOUS”“BEST”

Includes only micro- and metropolitan areas with both A- (“best”) and D-rated (“hazardous”) zones in their redlining map — 138 of a total 143 metropolitan areas in the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project. Circle sizes are based on total population in the surrounding area of that metro’s redlining map and positions are approximate, meaning they do not represent exact locations.

But despite formerly redlined zones sharing a purpose — to disproportionately deny loans to low-income Americans and, in particular, Black and minority Americans — the legacy of redlining differs from city to city and region to region.

Formerly redlined zones in the Northeast and Midwest are among the most segregated areas in the country. In those regions, a higher proportion of Black Americans live in redlined zones compared with those zones’ surrounding areas — and a higher proportion than can be found in other regions of the country. Meanwhile, in the South, formerly redlined zones aren’t as segregated. But less residential segregation doesn’t mean that the South is a more equitable region for Black and minority Americans, especially given its history of slavery and the Jim Crow era. Additionally, even though redlining was a housing policy that heavily targeted Black Americans, redlining has also affected immigrants and other minorities, in particular Latino Americans — something visible today in places like California. But at the same time, huge demographic shifts, suburbanization, urban renewal and gentrification have also changed the landscape of many of these cities. In some cities, formerly redlined zones are now whiter and more developed than they were in the 1940s. In other cities, there are more Black people than white people living in formerly greenlined areas, or areas that government officials once rated as “best.”

There is no one legacy when it comes to redlining. And its legacy is particularly devastating because, as we were told by Stephen Menendian, assistant director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, “Housing really is at the core of every expression of racial inequality in America.”

Jump to explore your cityThe myth of the northern “Promised Land”

The legacy of redlining is particularly pronounced in the Northeast and Midwest,1 where cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Chicago are home to some of the most segregated formerly redlined zones in the country. This segregation is especially entrenched in redlined cities with large Black populations. Of the 19 such cities in these regions, 16 were still segregated, with over two-thirds as many Black people living in formerly redlined areas as in the surrounding area. White people, meanwhile, made up less than a third of the population of formerly redlined areas and were vastly overrepresented in formerly greenlined areas.2

One reason northern cities remain so segregated is because of what historians call the Great Migration and Second Great Migration. From the 1910s through the 1970s, millions of Black Americans fled the oppressive Jim Crow South in search of jobs in industrialized cities and a better life in the Northeast and Midwest. But Black Americans didn’t find refuge from systemic racism in these regions, especially when it came to housing policy.

In fact, scholars have found that the increase in Black Americans in these regions led to growing efforts like redlining in northern metro areas to keep Black Americans and other immigrants in specific areas and prevent them from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods. Consequently, Black families had little opportunity to build generational wealth.

Take Pittsburgh. It saw a massive uptick in its population in the early 1900s, but Black Americans moving in were limited to pre-war segregated areas like the Hill District, which in 1937 was officially redlined by HOLC officials because of what they described as an “infiltration” and “concentration of negro and undesirables.”

Today, the Hill District, like all neighborhoods encompassing formerly redlined zones in the Steel City, is still overwhelmingly segregated. Pittsburgh’s formerly redlined zones have, on average, close to three times as many Black people living in them as compared to their surrounding areas — making Pittsburgh the second most segregated redlined city in the country,3 just behind Cleveland.

Pittsburgh, PAWHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

PITTSBURGH’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

WHITE53.1%BLACK34.8%

PITTSBURGH’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE74.9%BLACK12.9%

One reason why an area like the Hill District is still so segregated is that redlining created a lack of investment in parts of Pittsburgh that persists today. Last year, a team of researchers released a report that looked at bank lending data and public investment documents in Pittsburgh from 2007 to 2019, finding that just 7 percent of home mortgage loans went to predominantly minority neighborhoods in that time period, despite the residents of these neighborhoods comprising almost 21 percent of the city’s population. And out of $11.8 billion in loans to borrowers, less than 4 percent went to Black people.

“[Redlining] biased where investment was made,” Bruce Mitchell, a senior analyst at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition told us, with “hazardous” areas like Hill District suffering from years of neglect. Mitchell said it’s this lack of investment in formerly redlined areas that is one of redlining’s most devastating consequences.

Like Pittsburgh, Chicago saw a huge surge in its Black population as part of the Great Migration. Many Black people moved to Chicago’s South Side, north of Washington Park — the area where many of Chicago’s redlines were ultimately drawn.

At the time government appraisers drew those lines, housing near parks, lakes and swimming pools was typically inhabited by white people, but in one zone surrounding Washington Park appraisers noted that it had been “almost completely monopolized by the colored race.” Appraisers concluded that Black Americans couldn’t be “closed in” and Washington Park was already “doomed,” so they drew a redline around the area in their map.

Today, there are over 90 percent more Black Chicagoans in redlined zones than in the surrounding area.

Chicago, ILWHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

CHICAGO’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

BLACK31.8%LATINO31.6%WHITE26.8%

CHICAGO’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE48.7%LATINO23.8%WHITE48.7%How an anti-Black past in the South shapes its present

In the South, most formerly redlined areas are also still starkly segregated — 28 of the 31 cities we analyzed.4 And while they aren’t as segregated as formerly redlined zones in the North, the formerly greenlined zones in the South are more segregated than in the North. On average, the South has almost twice as many white people living in greenlined zones compared with those zones’ surrounding areas — a much higher share than is seen in the North.

That’s important for understanding the legacy of redlining in the South because slavery and Jim Crow laws have played a much bigger role in the South’s unique form of segregation. Winling, who was one of the researchers behind the Mapping Inequality project, told us that Black Americans in the North began to move into greenlined areas after white populations started to flee because city neighborhoods were rapidly diversifying. But in some southern cities, he said, this didn’t happen to the same extent.

Take a city like Atlanta. Its neighborhood of Buckhead held the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s. Currently, Buckhead is the city’s whitest and wealthiest neighborhood, and it’s also where most of the “best” areas were drawn during in the late 1930s. And as can be seen on the map below, those “best” areas are 80 percent white.

Atlanta, GAWHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

ATLANTA’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

WHITE80.2%BLACK5.9%

ATLANTA’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE36.9%BLACK45.7%

Buckhead also remains very segregated from the rest of Atlanta. In fact, neighborhood residents are now backing an effort in the city’s legislature to create their own city and secede from Atlanta, a majority Black city. If this were to happen, it would be financially devastating for Atlanta since the city would lose an estimated 38 percent of its tax revenue.

According to Andre Perry, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro and author of “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities,” it is these white enclaves in the South “where power is often exercised the most.”

Part of the way these areas amassed power was through the South’s long history of violent racism toward Black Americans, especially those moving to predominantly white neighborhoods. Consider Birmingham, Alabama, a city where bombings against Black residents were so rampant in the mid-1900s — there were more than 50 house bombings and burnings from the late 1940s until the mid-1960s — that Birmingham became known as “Bombingham.”

This ongoing violence, in addition to redlining, meant that much of Birmingham’s white population was confined to its greenlined zones. This pattern is still visible today, with the share of white people living in the city’s formerly greenlined zones being over twice as high as the share living in the surrounding area. In fact, per an ABC News analysis of mortgage-lending data, people of color are still less likely to have their loans approved in majority-white neighborhoods.

Birmingham, ALWHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

BIRMINGHAM’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

WHITE11.1%BLACK79.5%

BIRMINGHAM’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE43.5%BLACK46.4%

But parts of the South’s racial makeup are changing, albeit slowly. Since the 1990s, more and more Black Americans have moved to the South — a movement demographers are terming “The New Great Migration.” This has changed cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, which have also seen an influx of Asian Americans and other minorities, but according to Taylor, the Princeton professor, the South’s fixation on white exclusivity in places like Buckhead is still a big problem.

“People are returning to places that are just as segregated, just as excluded,” Taylor said.

“Anti-Black racism hurt everyone”

The harm redlining has caused Black Americans is extensive, but redlining has also affected other minorities in the U.S. — particularly the country’s growing Latino population. In some cities, government officials directly targeted Latinos with their redlining maps while in others, the continued lack of investment in formerly redlined areas has caused disproportionate harm to Latino communities.

Of 50 cities across the country with large Latino populations,5 we found that 72 percent have segregated Latino communities living in formerly redlined areas.

“That’s why I always say, anti-Black racism hurt everyone,” Perry said. “There’s lots of places where … anti-Black racism and hate against brown people and other groups really limited the amount of housing options for people of color, and the only places that they can generally go are formerly redlined or Black neighborhoods.”

Take San Diego. Its formerly redlined zones are the most segregated in the West, with 76 percent more Latinos living in these neighborhoods compared to the surrounding areas. Latinos were targeted by HOLC appraisers, too, as they wrote in their 1935 report that the area southeast of Fairmont Park had “many Mexicans with a definite trend of infiltration.”

San Diego, CAWHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

SAN DIEGO’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

WHITE14.3%LATINO58.2%

SAN DIEGO’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE40.9%LATINO33.1%

In other parts of California, appraisers used even harsher, more racist language. In 1939, San Gabriel, a city in Los Angeles County, was 90 percent Mexican American, and appraisers described them as “peon Mexicans” and as a “distinctly subversive racial influence.”

Up until 1930, the U.S. census classified Mexicans as white, but in the 1930 census, the government classified them as their own race. According to Jerry González, a historian at the University of Texas at San Antonio, this allowed the U.S. government to more easily target Mexican Americans as a racial threat.

This targeting was especially clear in redlining practices of the time. González told us that officials would specifically identify Mexicans living in places like Los Angeles, and then include language in their reports like, “do not sell this home to persons not fully of the Caucasian race.” González said that language gave housing officials the flexibility to more easily discriminate.

Los Angeles, CAWHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

LOS ANGELES’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

WHITE14.8%LATINO63.9%

LOS ANGELES’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE25.2%LATINO47.6%

It’s not just Latinos that HOLC officials targeted either. Appraisers described other areas derisively as a “melting pot … long been thoroughly blighted,” also classifying Asian Americans as “subversive racial elements” in California. Today, San Gabriel’s Asian and Latino communities are still segregated from the city’s white population.

Beyond the red lines

Of course, segregation in many cities doesn’t fit neatly inside formerly redlined zones. This doesn’t mean, however, that these cities avoided or overcame a racist housing system. On the contrary, housing segregation manifests in ways that go far beyond HOLC’s color lines on these maps.

“The refusal of federal agencies to issue mortgages to those neighborhoods in the 1930s and 40s — that’s one of many policies that were followed,” Richard Rothstein, author of “The Color of Law,” said. “But it doesn’t entirely determine today’s landscape, and there are many, many other policies that get ignored that are equally important.”

For instance, even though it is one of the most segregated cities in the country, Detroit’s segregation doesn’t match up with its formerly redlined zones. This is in large part because as Black southerners moved into Detroit during the Great Migration, white Detroiters responded by leaving the city in droves, mostly moving out to federally subsidized and racially homogenous suburbs — a migration that historians call “white flight.” White Detroiters went through great lengths to keep their wealthy suburbs exclusively white, too, with measures as extreme as building a half-mile-long concrete wall to physically separate themselves from Black families.

Detroit, MIWHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

DETROIT’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

WHITE33.1%BLACK43.4%

DETROIT’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE57.0%BLACK27.1%

According to Joe Darden, a professor of geography, environment and spatial sciences at Michigan State University, the Detroit metro area continues to experience white flight, too. As Black Detroiters move into predominantly white suburbs, many white Detroiters move away — further perpetuating residential segregation.

“The future of Black suburbanization is going to be looking at those places that used to be predominantly white, and turning them more and more to be predominantly Black,” Darden said. “As Blacks move in, whites, even to this day, still have a tendency to move further and further out.”

Meanwhile, Philadelphia is seeing the opposite happen: More white people are moving into its formerly redlined zones. And as this occurs, property values increase and lower-income people, many of whom are Black, can no longer afford to stay.

This gentrification has fundamentally shifted where Philadelphia’s varying demographics reside so that its present-day segregation doesn’t really match up against its formerly redlined zones. In 2019, a study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that seven cities account for almost half of all the gentrification in the U.S., and by their metrics, Philadelphia was one of the cities where gentrification was most rampant.

Philadelphia, PAWHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

PHILADELPHIA’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

WHITE37.3%BLACK35.9%

PHILADELPHIA’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE50.1%BLACK26.2%

In recent years, it’s become popular among some Democrats to tout proposals that will remedy segregation caused by redlining. But Taylor told us that these measures often fail to account for how the maps have changed over time. For instance, in Philadelphia, young white people have been able to move into historically Black neighborhoods and buy homes by using programs associated with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was intended to remedy the damage of redlining. In fact, per an ABC News analysis, it’s now easier for white people than people of color to buy homes in historically nonwhite neighborhoods. In 2019, 65 percent of the 347,000 white homebuyers who applied for mortgages in mostly nonwhite neighborhoods in the country’s largest metro areas were approved, compared with 56 percent of 715,000 nonwhite homebuyers who received a loan in those same neighborhoods.

What’s more, Taylor said, simply encouraging homeownership in neighborhoods like East Germantown, where the housing stock is old and dilapidated, could saddle Black Americans with debt. Without being able to fund repairs or escape long, predatory mortgages, these programs could exacerbate the housing crisis and push more Black people out of their neighborhoods.

“There’s no money to be made in affordable housing, and so all the building that is happening now are million-dollar condos, because that’s where the money is,” Taylor said.

Some 40 years after the first redlining map was drawn, redlining was banned under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But in many ways, HOLC and the Federal Housing Administration had already written the textbook for racist real estate practices.

“[The Fair Housing Act of 1968] doesn’t roll back or undo or make amends for 50 years of housing discrimination that had gone on up to that point,” said Winling, the Virginia Tech historian involved in the Mapping Inequality project. “It’s going to take probably another 80 or 90 years of vigorous enforcement and vigorous remediation to undo that legacy.”

The legacy of redlining extends far beyond housing segregation, too. Its impact can be seen today in minority neighborhoods’ access to health care, poorer educational opportunties, and increased risk of climate change, as many of these areas are more prone to flooding and extreme heat. Without a serious confrontation of its lasting generational damage, the racial segregation caused by redlining isn’t going anywhere either.

“I look at it as: Redlining happened. It was an important part of American history,” Perry said. “And we must reckon with the behaviors and the outcomes in ways that never discount what redlining did. And again, it has different stories for different cities, but redlining is a part of that story. It just is.”

SEARCH CITIES WITH HOLC MAPS​​WHITEBLACKLATINOASIANOTHER

CLEVELAND’S“Best”“Desirable”“Declining”“Hazardous”ZONES:

WHITE22.8%BLACK59.5%

CLEVELAND’S SURROUNDING AREA:

WHITE63.9%BLACK22.0%ABOUT THIS ANALYSIS

Redlining maps used in this project were originally drawn by the now-defunct Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) from 1935-40 and downloaded from the Mapping Inequality project. Individual HOLC zones that fall within the same metropolitan area were grouped according to census micro- or metropolitan area definitions.6 A small number of HOLC zones fractionally overlapped in source map shapefiles; these overlaps were carved out of the geographically larger zone.7

Population and race/ethnicity data comes from the 2020 U.S. decennial census. Population counts were aggregated from census blocks, which are the smallest geographic census units and offer the most precision when matching census data to other geographic shapes. HOLC zones were matched to census data by first determining which census blocks geographically intersected with each zone. Data from all matching blocks was then weighted by the proportion of the block’s total area that intersects with that HOLC zone and summed to estimate the 2020 demographic makeup of each HOLC zone.

The surrounding area for each metropolitan area’s HOLC map was computed by adding a 10 percent buffer radius to the combined zones in that metropolitan area.8 Surrounding area population totals were then computed by summing census-block population data, weighted by the proportion of each block’s total area contained within the surrounding area’s border.

For each metropolitan area’s HOLC map, a location quotient (LQ) — a small-area measure of segregation that specifically compares one racial/ethnic group’s proportion in a granular geography to its proportion in a larger surrounding geography — was calculated for combined A-, B-, C- and D-rated zones for each racial/ethnic group. An LQ above 1 for a given racial group indicates overrepresentation in that HOLC zone compared with the broader surrounding area, and values below 1 indicate underrepresentation. A metropolitan area’s HOLC zones were defined as segregated for a minority racial/ethnic group if: (1) its LQ in D-rated zones was greater than 1 (suggesting this group was overrepresented in redlined areas); (2) its LQ in D-rated zones was greater than its LQ in A-rated zones (suggesting this group was more represented in redlined areas than in greenlined areas); and (3) its LQ in A-rated zones was smaller than the white population’s LQ in A-rated zones (suggesting this group was not more represented in greenlined areas than the white population).

Population density dots were generated for each racial/ethnic group within a census block, with each dot representing one person. Dots were placed randomly within a census block and do not represent exact locations but rather the total population of a given race/ethnicity in that block. White, Black and Asian data excludes those who indicated Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. Hispanic/Latino data includes all who indicated Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, regardless of race. Other race data includes all population counts that did not fall under white, Black, Asian or Latino. The Albers Equal-Area Conic projection, which guarantees areas on one map are equivalent to areas on another map, was used for all maps and spatial calculations.

This data-driven infographic shows the status of Webb on its journey to L2 orbit. The page constantly updates as Webb travels, deploys, and cools to operating temperature. If you have any issues with the page, hold the CTRL or CMD key and hit the F5 key which will reload the page and should clear any issues. (cntl/cmd shift R works too).

The MOST RECENTLY COMPLETED deployment step for Webb is displayed along a line that also indicates the major deployment phases. Note that the timing, duration and/or order of deployment phases and steps may change. This page shows the default/nominal timing and order. The phases mark the start and end of major groups of deployment steps. The most recently completed deployment step is shown as a spacecraft icon on the line and is detailed below with a larger image and links. Deployment phases are shown on the line in a light blue overlay on screens large enough to display this info, otherwise hidden.

Explore ALL Deployment Steps

You can EXPLORE past and upcoming deployments on the way to L2. The Deployment Explorer opens to the MOST RECENTLY COMPLETED deployment step, all deployment steps to the "left" (on the top thumbnail nav) are COMPLETED, all deployment steps to the "right" (on the top thumbnail nav) are FUTURE.

The graduated horizontal line tracks the progress of Webb on its journey to L2 orbit. It can be displayed in time view or as a percentage of the total distance travelled to reach L2 orbit. The display defaults to a TIME line. The units are days. We refer to deployment events in terms of launch + elapsed-time so this view is useful for tracking deployments and time progress. Webb enters its L2 orbit at approximately 29.5days on the timeline. In "distance" view, it shows the percentage of the total distance to Webb entering its L2 orbit. Note on smaller screens the labels are progressively simplified and/or removed.

Your last chosen view mode is stored in a temporary "session" (non-persistent) cookie. This cookie will last at most until you close your browser and then be deleted. NASA Privacy Policy.

The speed and distance numbers displayed track Webb's distance travelled from Earth to entry into its L2 orbit. The numbers are derived from precalculated flight dynamics data that models Webb's flight up to its entry into L2 orbit. The distance numbers displayed are the approximate distance travelled as opposed to altitude. All the speed and distance data is with respect to an Earth-centered coordinate system.

With much higher speeds early in the trip, Webb covers a large percentage of the distance to L2 orbit early in its trip. This can be seen by toggling the "time" vs "distance %" views on the "progress line". Webb's speed is at its peak while connected to the push of the launch vehicle. It begins to slow rapidly after separation as it coasts up hill climbing the gravity ridge from Earth to its orbit around L2. Note on the TIME view that Webb reaches the altitude of the moon in ~2.5 days (which is ~8% of the total trip time but ~25% of its trip distance). See the sections below on Distance to L2 and Arrival at L2 for more information on the distance travelled to L2.

Passing The Moon

As noted above, this page displays the "distance travelled" by Webb as opposed to its altitude from Earth. Webb launched on the sun-facing side of the Earth and travels on a slightly curved path so Webb's "distance travelled" is greater than its altitude. Webb passing the Moon's altitude is a good example of the difference, when Webb reached the altitude (a) of the Moon at a time of launch + ~2.5 days, Webb had already travelled a distance (d) greater than the moon's altitude.

Temperatures

This page displays 2 "hot side" and 2 "cold side" temperatures on each side of the sunshield to illustrate the incredible engineering and effectiveness of the sunshield. A set of bellwether instrument temperature observations are included that give a good indication of the temperature trends that drive commisioning activities.

Temperatures are updated once per day. In general, temperatures change slowly so this frequency is sufficient to give a snapshot of overall trends. Temperatures are rounded to the nearest whole number and displayed in the users choice of Farenheit or Celsius along with Kelvin in parentheses.

L2 is approximately 1 million miles from Earth (932056 miles/1.5M km to be exact). But Webb never actually arrives at L2, it is travelling to enter an orbit around L2. Webb's L2 orbit is very large in size and it enters its orbit before it reaches the linear distance between Earth and L2. Webb's orbit around L2 is known as a halo orbit which, rather than a single path, is an orbit that periodically varies through a series of paths around L2.

By design, the launch vehicle and Webb's trajectory put Webb on a path to an L2 orbit with only small inputs needed to refine it. As it separates from the upper stage of the launch vehicle, Webb is climbing the gravity ridge from Earth up into a halo orbit around L2. Once Webb is in its halo orbit it will be riding up and down and over and along the shallow saddle contour at L2. Read more about L2 in this blog entry.

To get the exact orbit needed, Webb's trajectory is fine tuned by a number of "burns" along the way. You can learn more about these Mid Course Correction (MCC) burns on the Deployment Explorer page. The final burn, MCC2, inserts Webb into the desired L2 halo orbit. The MCC2 burn is now planned for L+30 days. At the end of that burn we can say Webb is "In L2 Orbit" and so has "arrived at L2".

Therefore, this page, for purposes of calculations uses a distance to L2 orbit entry number ( and timing ) that is a sufficient distance and time after the MCC2 burn to say "Webb is in L2 Orbit". Once in L2 orbit, this page will no longer track distance, but will track temperatures. The spacecraft will continue to cool to operating temperatures and numerous tests and calibrations occur to ready it for operations and its first images over the months that follow.

By default the page loads and displays distances in miles, temperatures in Fahrenheit, ie English units (also known as Imperial or USCS system units). If you wish to have the page load and display in kilometers and temperatures in Celsius, ie metric system units use the urls below to select your preferred units. We do not use persistent cookies; so these urls 'store' your units preference. Once chosen, bookmark the urls with your preferred units and use it instead of the default website link. NOTE: the page units toggle button English<>Metric now reloads the page with these urls.

KILOMETERS/metric units | MILES/English units

As the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) explained:

This sea pig (Scotoplanes sp.) was spotted at 1,290 meters (4,230 feet) beneath the sea surface with a juvenile king crab (Neolithodes diomedeae) clinging to its body. Researchers speculate that this may help young crabs evade predators.

— Read the rest

This game from Tom Watson is great fun: you’re presented with a succession of people, places, and things with associated dates that you have to correctly place in chronological order, like so:

All the data is pulled from Wikipedia and it gets harder as you go along because the gaps in time between dates already on the timeline get shorter. Did the discovery of radium happen before or after Queen Victoria’s death? Was Jane Austen born before or after the American Revolution? I know everyone is all about Wordle right now, but this game is much more my speed (and I can’t stop playing). (via waxy)

Update: For fans of this, there are at least two board games that are similar: Chronology and Timeline.

You may have also noted that the data is a little…wrong in places. The dangers of building a game based on a non-structured dataset. Think of it as an unintentional “hard mode”. (thx @bobclewell & peter)

Tags: games   Tom Watson   Wikipedia

Ronnie Spector, best known for leading groundbreaking ’60s pop group the Ronettes, has died. She was 78. Spector’s family confirmed the news in a post on the singer’s website, writing, “Our beloved earth angel, Ronnie, peacefully left this world today after a brief battle with cancer. Ronnie lived her life with a twinkle in her eye, a spunky attitude, a wicked sense of humor and a smile on her face. She was filled with love and gratitude.”

Not to be outdone by the bizarre and inappropriate kids' toys that were made to accompany David Lynch's Dune, Walmart is selling an exclusive box set of Denis Villeneuve's Dune that comes in a "limited edition pain box." ＰＵＴ ＹＯＵＲ ＨＡＮＤ ＩＮ ＴＨＥ ＢＯＸ．

Repeating the phrase "limited edition pain box" over and over in my head until it sounds normal pic.twitter.com/4RDBa4H1VJ

— Read the rest

For the last few years, I’ve been a fan of Tom Whitwell’s annual list of 52 things he learned during the past year — here’s his list for 2021. This year, I kept track of my own list, presented here in no particular order:

1. “In Fargo, Carl says ‘30 minutes, Jerry, we wrap this thing up’ when there are exactly 30 minutes of the movie remaining.”
2. There’s a Boeing 727 cargo plane that’s used exclusively for horse transportation nicknamed Air Horse One.
3. In March 2020, the Covid-19 testing capacity for all of NYC was 120 tests per day.
4. “The last time ships got stuck in the Suez Canal [in 1967], they were there for eight years and developed a separate society with its own Olympic Games.”
5. The pronunciation of the last name of the man who lent his name to Mount Everest (over his objections) is different than the pronunciation of the mountain.
6. While recording the audiobook version of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White needed 17 takes to read Charlotte’s death scene because he kept crying.
7. America’s anti-democratic Senate, in one number. “Once Warnock and Ossoff take their seats, the Democratic half of the Senate will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.”
8. The first rap video shown on MTV was Rapture by Blondie.
9. As of 2019, only 54% of Americans accept the theory of evolution.
10. When CBD is taken orally (as in a pill, food, or beverage), as little as 5% of it enters your bloodstream. “If you’re at the coffee shop and like ‘oh, yeah, give me a CBD,’ you’re just wasting $3.”
11. The size of FedEx boxes is proprietary. “The size of an official FedEx box, not just its design, is proprietary; it is a volume of space which is a property exclusive to FedEx.”
12. In golf, finishing four strokes under par on a single hole is called a condor.
13. A commemorative press plate is given to authors and photographers who have made the front page of the NY Times for the first time.
14. A button installed at the behest of the previous President summoned a Diet Coke to the Oval Office when pressed.
15. The number of people born in Antarctica (11) is fewer than the number of people who have walked on the Moon (12).
16. The market for table saws is $200-400 million but they cause almost $4 billion in damage annually. Power tools companies aren’t liable for the damage, which is borne by individual users, workers comp, and the health system.
17. Disney animators occasionally “recycle” scenes from older films, keeping the motion and choreography while redrawing the characters.
18. In the past 45 years, the top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90%.
19. People age at different speeds. “People varied widely in biological aging: The slowest ager gained only 0.4 ‘biological years’ for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.”
20. The Six Flags amusement parks were named after the flags of the six countries that represented Texas throughout its history, including the Confederacy. The last Confederate flags flying outside Six Flags’ locations were removed only in 2017.
21. Humans have evolved to out-drink other mammals. “Many species have enzymes that break alcohol down and allow the body to excrete it, avoiding death by poisoning. But about 10 million years ago, a genetic mutation left our ancestors with a souped-up enzyme that increased alcohol metabolism 40-fold.”
22. “It takes about 200 hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a good friend.”
23. There are only 25 blimps in the whole world.
24. In 2016, a fourth division Spanish football club renamed itself Flat Earth FC.
25. “What exactly is meant by the term ‘Holocaust’? It means that the global Jewish population in 2019 (~15 million) is still lower than it was in 1939 (16.6 million). So many Jews were murdered that we still haven’t recovered demographically after 80 years.”
26. Cannabis delivery isn’t legal in Maine, so this enterprising online shop employs “psychics” to “find a wide selection of your lost weed and drop it off at your home”.
27. How algorithms radicalize the users of social media platforms. “Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it.”
28. Andre Agassi learned to break Boris Becker’s fierce serve by noting the position of Becker’s tongue right before he served.
29. In emergencies, mammals can breathe through their anus.
30. There are chess positions that humans players can understand easily that the most powerful chess engines can’t.
31. As of May 2021, “Republicans and white people have actually become less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were before the death of George Floyd.”
32. Build-A-Bear over-purchased yellow fabric to make Minions plushies, so the company released a number of yellow stuffed animals made of the surplus “minion skin”.
33. Scientists didn’t discover that the cause of the 1918 influenza pandemic was a virus until 1933. “At the time most microbiologists believed that influenza was caused by a bacteria.”
34. Skinny bike tires are not faster than wider tires. “The increased vibrations of the narrower tires caused energy losses that canceled out the gains from the reduced flex.”
35. The first RV was made out of a fallen redwood tree and was called “Travel Log”.
36. “In the last four years, Costa Rica has generated 98.53% of its electricity from renewable sources.”
37. Disney Imagineers use smaller bricks at the top of buildings to make them seem bigger and taller than they are.
38. “Dogs tend to poop aligned north-south.”
39. There are three different types of fun. “Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect.”
40. Babylonians were using Pythagorean calculations for the dimensions of right triangles 1000 years before Pythagoras was born.
41. Galileo didn’t invent the telescope and wasn’t even the first to use it for astronomical purposes.
42. By counting excess deaths from Jan 2020 to Sept 2021, the Economist estimates that more than 15 million people have died of Covid-19 worldwide, more than 3 times the official death toll of ~4.6 million.
43. Michael K. Williams choreographed the dancing in the music video for Crystal Waters’ 100% Pure Love.
44. Gas stations don’t make much money selling gasoline. The goods inside gas station stores “only account for ~30% of the average gas station’s revenue, yet bring in 70% of the profit”.
45. Solastalgia “is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault” (e.g. by climate change).
46. The Beishan Broadcasting Wall in Kinmen, Taiwan was a massive three-story speaker system built in 1967 to broadcast anti-Communist messages to China.
47. Before he became a famous actor, Timothée Chalamet had a small YouTube channel where he showed off his custom-painted Xbox 360 controllers.
48. “China is planning at least 150 new [nuclear] reactors in the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35.”
49. Earlier this fall, a bar-tailed godwit set the world record for the longest continual flight by a land bird: about 8100 miles and “flapping its wings for 239 hours without rest”.
50. “About one in five health-care workers [in the US] has left medicine since the pandemic started.”
51. The Chevy Suburban has been in production under that same name since 1935, “making it the longest continuously used automobile nameplate in production”.
52. The ubiquitous Chinese food takeout container was originally invented for carrying oysters.

Tags: lists

People use machines to find people they lost.

As the nation continues to mourn the loss of Betty White, it’s almost impossible to not take a moment to laugh with her during one of her many famous cameo appearances. White became the olde... More »

Covid Standard Time is a clever if gloomy idea, implemented well. Someone do a speaking clock phone line, every loop ending with a dry, unsuppressible cough!

Norway has slow television, a genre of calming broadcasts depicting railways, boat rides, knitting, and wood-chopping. The internet has ASMR. The Midwest has Joe Pera Talks With You. More »

After Hours is a one-crazy-night movie about how work sucks. We don’t need to know much about Paul Hackett, the data-entry drudge played by Griffin Dunne, beyond the fact that he is bored with his job and the life it has afforded him. Dining alone at a café after leaving his nondescript ... More »

Joseph Ducreux was a French painter active in the latter part of the 18th century — he was a portraitist in the court of Louis XVI and continued his career after the French Revolution. But Ducreux is increasingly remembered for his series of self-portraits that were surprisingly informal for the age in which they were painted. To contemporary eyes, they almost seem to have been painted for use in memes, a purpose for which they certainly have been used.

Tags: art   Joseph Ducreux

"I graduated college with a degree in design and I redesigned some popular logos I think we can all agree are ugly," says Emily Zugay on her TikTok account. She proceeds to redesign iconic logos into Microsoft-Paint-style abominations. Zugay is clearly doing this as a joke, and her three videos have gotten nearly 12 million views— each. — Read the rest

Cecily Strong has a particular talent for playing “Weekend Update” characters bristling with thinly veiled rage (recall “Claire from HR”More »

Sometimes called "the greatest movie that was never made," Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune was the cult director's mid-1970s effort to adapt Frank Herbert's novel for the big screen, starring Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, and Gloria Swanson, with music by Pink Floyd and Magma. — Read the rest

As part of an online course on fashion and design, MoMA visited the Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard to learn how they go about making one of their bespoke suits.

Behind a drawn curtain, a master cutter takes an initial series of 27 measurements: 20 for the jacket, 7 for the trousers. From these measurements, the cutter fashions a pattern in heavy brown paper. At the cutter’s table, the cloth is cut in using heavy shears, and the many pieces of fabric are rolled for each garment into tiny packages, which await the tailors.

See also $399 Suit Vs $7900 Suit. And you can check out the rest of the MoMA’s online course Fashion as Design in this YouTube playlist.

Tags: design   fashion   how to   MoMA   video

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before James Austin Johnson’s Trump got some airtime on Saturday Night Live; the impression, which went viral last year, is what the comedian is mos... More »

We thank our sponsor for making this content possible; it is not written by the editorial staff nor does it necessarily reflect its views.

We love Pongo. He is one of the most important members of our family, and his love and devotion never waver. — Read the rest

Most people have had dreams where they have the magical ability to hover, glide down the sidewalk, and soar into the upper atmosphere. This ad for Burberry does a great job of depicting dream flying. I wonder if such a capability could be possible in the far future? — Read the rest

Leave it to Archie McPhee to bring the world Hot Dog Candy Canes:

WIENER WIENER HOT DOG DINNER

Hot Dog Candy Canes will remind you of school lunches and backyard BBQs. Instead of cookies this year, maybe Santa would prefer a wiener?

— Read the rest

Using samples of chopped-down wood left behind by Viking explorers at their settlement in Newfoundland and known chemical markers of powerful solar storms in 993 AD, a group of scientists has determined the exact timing of the first-known visit of Europeans to North America: 1021 AD. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 471 years before Columbus.

A team of scientists looked at wood found at the L’Anse aux Meadows Viking site. In three cases the trees had been physically cut down, and moreover, they were clearly cut with metal tools — Vikings had metal implements at the time, but indigenous people did not. The wood was all from different trees (one was fir, and another juniper, for example). The key parts here are that the wood was all from trees that had been alive for many decades, and all had their waney edge intact as well.

The scientists extracted 127 samples from the wood, and 83 rings were examined. They used two methods to secure dates. The first was to compare the amount of carbon-14 in each ring with known atmospheric amounts from the time. This gives a rough date for the waney edge of the wood. They also then looked for an anomalous spike in carbon-14 in an inner ring, knowing this would have come from the 993 A.D. event, and then simply counted the rings outward from there to get the date of the waney edge.

In all three samples the waney edge was dated to the same year: 1021 A.D. This would be incredibly unlikely to occur at random.

Outstanding science. It’s incredible how much of a time machine these analysis tools are. There’s so much we don’t know about people who lived 1000 years ago, but it’s astounding that we know anything at all, particularly precise dates like this.

Update: From this Ars Technica piece, some more information on the precision of the dating:

Based on the development stages of certain cells in the waney layer, Dee, Kuitems, and their colleagues say that one of the trees was cut down in the spring, while another was cut down in the summer or fall. The third tree’s final season couldn’t be identified because the cells had been damaged by a conservation treatment, but the results suggest that the Norse cut down these trees within a few months of each other in 1021.

That lends additional support to the other evidence that the Norse only stayed in Newfoundland for a few years.

“One would imagine the dates would have been different if the occupation period of the site was very long,” Dee told Ars. “However, the fact all three of our samples produced the same date does not, of course, mean the site was only occupied for one year. It may indeed have been occupied longer. But I think it is true to say our results support a short occupation.”

Tags: archaeology   science   Vikings

The Library of Congress recently scanned and posted 30,000 maps drafted and published in the 19th century by The Sanborn Map Company. That being rather a lot of get though, Ben Welsh made a Twitter bot that posts one every few hours. — Read the rest

“I think I need a standing ovation/ Over 10 years in the game, I’m impatient.” So says Little Simz halfway through her new album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Indeed, with a decade under her belt, Simz has made music that is consistently surprising and rewarding — she deserves applause. On her fourth full-length, Simz has made her most accomplished album to date. Introvert is heady and dense and restless — a masterwork, one might say, the definitive document of the musician also known as Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo.

When Penelope Lowenstein received invitations to see Nora Cheng and Gigi Reece, her two best friends and Horsegirl bandmates, graduate from their respective high schools, she was faced with a dilemma: Both events were scheduled for the same day. One of the upsides to the pandemic, however, is that virtual options are increasingly available, so she did what any good friend would and figured out a way to celebrate them simultaneously. While Reece’s high school graduation unfolded on her phone, Lowenstein hopped in the car to catch Cheng’s ceremony in person. That’s when their song “Ballroom Dance Scene” came on the radio.

Auctioneers at Binoche et Giquello hope that it's a good year for vintage furnishings—and that someone out there has at least $1.2m Euros and a lot of space to stash a full-size Triceratops skeleton. The 66m-year-old fossil's skull alone is 2.62m (8' 7") long and 2m (6' 7") wide. — Read the rest

Back in July, Courtney Barnett began a four-month rollout for Things Take Time, Take Time — her first album in more than three years — with the release of its lead single and opening track, “Rae Street.” We were big fans. Today she’s back with another new song, which is also great.

I recently came across this 2002 Playbill interview with songwriter Jim Steinman, who passed away earlier this year. The conversation was mostly about his then-upcoming Broadway flop, Dance of the Vampires, which oddly included the Steinway-penned Bonnie Tyler hit, "Total Eclipse of the Heart." — Read the rest

Dictionary.com's word of the day is "Jeopardy" a "noun meaning 'peril or danger.' Here it is in a sentence: 'My job is in jeopardy because of my past comments.'"

"Jeopardy" is a noun meaning "peril or danger." Here it is in a sentence:

"My job is in jeopardy because of my past comments."

— Read the rest

Update, September 2nd, 12:03PM ET: The “actor” Brett Goldstein has addressed the conspiracy theory that Roy Kent is a CGI creation head-on by publishing a statement on Instagram. In it, Goldstein notes (quite accurately) that “there’s a fucking load of mad shit happening on the internet today, as usual” before reassuring viewers that he is “a completely real normal human man” who does “normal human basic things like rendering and buffering and transferring data.” Glad to have that sorted out. (The original story follows below.)

I’ll confess this upfront: I’ve yet to watch an episode of Ted Lasso. But I absolutely buy the...

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