This is cool. Explains CityLab:
Entomological unease aside, this poster of the planet’s 140 metros should make a fantastic holiday gift for the city-obsessed nerd. Made by Neil Freeman, an artist and urban planner who runs the site Fake Is the New Real, the roughly29 by 23-inch, black-and-white sheet stacks train systems with the largest ones at top…
...and the most basic at bottom.
Take a look at the artist's designs and find your metro.
First, the New Republic's Jeet Heer reminds us that Donald Trump is a bullshitter, not a liar, and is that much more dangerous for it:
The triumph of bullshit has consequences far beyond the political realm, making society as a whole more credulous and willing to accept all sorts of irrational beliefs. A newly published article in the academic journal Judgment and Decision Making
links “bullshit receptivity” to other forms of impaired thinking: “Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.”
It’s no accident that Trump himself is receptive to bullshit ideas promulgated by the likes of anti-vaxxers. A President Trump, based on his own bullshit receptivity and his own bullshit contagiousness, would lead a country that is far more conspiratorial, far more confused, and far less able to grapple with problems in a rational way. Trump’s America would truly be a nation swimming in bullshit.
Next, a heartwarming story of how LifeLock allowed a man to set up an account to stalk his ex-wife, and then did nothing when she complained:
Not only did the company not respond to her queries about the situation, she tells the Republic that LifeLock actively tried to block her access to the account — in order to protect the privacy of her ex-husband.
While she was able to block her ex from having access to the service, he was still able to close the account because he was the one who had paid for it. Rather than help her by providing the requested documents or keeping the account open, LifeLock advised that she open an entirely new account.
Finally, from Cranky Flier, the account of the last airplane to roll off an assembly line in California, ending a 102-year-old industry there:
As aircraft manufacturing dried up around the state, Long Beach became the last holdout. When Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, the entire Douglas commercial line was terminated in short order except for the MD-95. That became the Boeing 717 and made it all the way to May 23, 2006. On that day, the last two were rolled across Lakewood Blvd on the east side of the airport and delivered to AirTran and Midwest. Commercial aircraft production in the state died that day.
But on the west side of the field, the military C-17 soldiered on. The C-17 is a beast of an airplane. It’s a massive military transport that is essential for the US military. The problem is that the military has all the C-17s it needs. Production peaked at 16 a year in 2009, but that has been ramping down every year since. The aircraft was marketed to foreign countries and orders did roll in — enough to keep the production going for longer than expected — but the end has finally arrived.
The last airplane to be delivered took off from Long Beach around midday on Sunday.
There's a video of the plane taking off, too. (C-17s are pretty damned impressive.)
Parker and I are home, unpacked, and well-rested. Part of the well-rested bit resulted from three days of rain. When you go to a cabin in the woods and plan on lots of hiking, and no hiking happens, there is disappointment.
There is also a serendipitous find: Scratch Beer in Ana, Illinois. They make beers from locally-found ingredients: Pignut Ale, from local pignut hickory nuts. Pumpkin seed ale, which "DOES NOT TASTE LIKE PUMPKIN SPICE OR PUMPKIN PIE." I'll have photos tomorrow.
Right now: unpacking, laundry, deleting hundreds of emails, and sampling Grand River Spirits whiskey.
I'm traveling this weekend for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, so posting will be sparse. We don't have WiFi but we do have topography:
This video shows the point-of-view of an engineer on the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad in 1945. From Linden Street in Wilmette on up to Waukegan, none of these tracks exists anymore; it's now the North Shore Trail, which I've ridden and walked on for most of my life.
Check it out:
I might follow this map. Explanation:
Community beer and brewery review site RateBeer puts out a list every year of the top 100 breweries in the world, “according to reviews taken last year and weighted by performance within and outside of style, balanced by indicators of depth.” From this year's list, 72 of the breweries are based in the United States.
Randal Olson found a pretty good solution using genetic algorithms and the Google Maps API. He computed an optimal road trip to visit a historical landmark in each state.
Forget that though. I want beer. Tasty beer. I applied Olson's solution to breweries to get the order in which to visit them in the least miles possible.
The trip to see just the 70 breweries on Yau's list takes 197 hours over 19,789 km. He thinks he can do it in 8 days. Or he can stop at any of the 1,414 other breweries in between and extend the trip to a month.
On the other hand, given the same amount of time off, I might rather do a oneworld explorer fare.
Lottery, anyone?
American's A'Advantage program will change in January to accrue miles based on how much a ticket costs. The formula is pretty simple: members will get X dollars per flight mile based on their elite status, though elite status qualification will still be based on segments or miles actually flown (though not on a third "points" option currently in force).
Everyone who watches these things knew this was coming. And it won't make that much difference to most people. For example, my mileage run this weekend netted me 10,490 base miles and 5,245 elite-qualifying miles (EQMs). Under the new formula, it would still net me 5,245 EQMs but only 3,640 base miles, because of the fare. So fie on them. Even the last business trip I took would earn fewer base miles: 7,384 under the current regime, but only 2,208 under the new plan. (Again, though, EQMs would not have changed.)
This new structure clearly benefits the airline, and business travelers. Those times in the past when I took full-fare flights, or even business class, would really have done well under the new plan. Last November I had to go to Oslo for three days. (It wasn't that glamorous.) Current plan: 21,406 base miles, 9,354 EQMs; new plan: a whopping 63,976 base miles, because it was a last-minute business-class fare.
Basically, the airline is trying not to bleed through its frequent-flyer program. And we knew this was coming. And as long as they keep EQMs the same, I'm OK with it.
As I mentioned Thursday, I'm on a mileage run. But because I'm an aviation geek, not only am I trying to hold onto elite status for 2016, but also I'm trying out American Airlines' newest airplanes. Yesterday's flight from JFK to LAX got me on the A321 Transcontinental (along with, no kidding, both Laura Linney and Natalie Dormer). Today's gets me from LAX to DFW on this gorgeous thing:
They're seamless, you know. If you look at the fuselage of any other passenger airplane, you see rivets, welds, all kinds of imperfections in the surface. Dreamliners have flawless composite skins whose only perturbations are the windows.
I've flown on one other 787, on British Airways from London to Toronto in March 2014. And this is not the first 787 American put into service; that one is N800AN; mine today is N809AA, put into service on 28 August 2015. It's a mere puppy. And I'm really excited to fly on it in about an hour.
...not everywabone would look like these guys, getting in a few waves just past 9 in the morning today:
These are just some quick edits on my Surface. When I get home I'll spend some more time with the few hundred photos I've taken today and yesterday.
Two from last night, near the Hermosa Beach Pier:
