Darren Brown was drawn to Florida by Brightline to be a part of something exciting, a new, fast train, privately owned, luxury on wheels. He was incredibly proud to be, as he called it, a “badass bullet train conductor.” Until the deaths started happening. 🧵

“There’d been a communication breakdown. The second Brightline train ‘suddenly approached’ at maximum speed, an official record of the incident recounted. Everyone ran for their lives. The train ran over Conrad a second time.” — @brittanywallman.bsky.social www.miamiherald.com/news/local/a...

Latest from Killer Train: FECR is suing Brightline for “clandestinely” negotiating with county governments to add more trains to its rails in violation of a contract agreement between the two companies. Story by @joshceb.bsky.social + @aaronleibowitz.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/miam...

The move could derail a long-awaited commuter train service in South Florida.

After an investigation by the Miami Herald and WLRN, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he would work “to drive down the number of deaths.”

New Miami Herald/WLRN investigation: Brightline trains kill someone every 13 days of service, on average. 182 people have died, and 99 people have been injured. In at least 101 cases, the train crashed into vehicles, but no one was hurt.

SCOOP from me: the mass exodus of employees from NOAA is decimating a tiny office that literally keeps our measurements of latitude and longitude accurate — and, former employees tell me, endangers the science of how the US understands global measurements:

so excited to be in snowy minneapolis for #NICAR25! say hi if you’re around, i’d love to connect

"Short of sitting by the tracks and scrutinizing hazardous material placards, they have no way of knowing what's on every railcar passing through." NEW data story w/ the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at UMD: www.npr.org/2025/02/03/g...

regretting all decisions that led me to understand every single word of this piece

it’s wild that just a couple weeks worth of abysmal music habits/taste during college finals took over all other data for the year on my spotify wrapped

who is going to write the explainer on how the tiktok fyp has been taken over by livestreams peddling QVC channel-esque teleshopping slop content!! who is watching this stuff? (I personally see more of this now than any other labeled advertising! and the app has felt unusable for weeks now)

To all a happy 🎇🎇🎇 International Shapefile Day 🎇🎇🎇🎇 May your colleagues never send you just the .shp when you ask for their data. (thanks to Gabriel Zanlorenssi for reminding me)

in anticipation of my new computer arriving, I've endured almost nightly dreams where I'm stuck in a groundhog day-type eternity debugging a flood of nonsensical python environment errors

finally my favorite time of the year — got offline and accomplished some of my own recipe testing this week need to add some cookie week recipes to the rotation asap!

my password manager, of all things (!!!), got bought out a few years ago and this perfectly sums up my feelings about finding another (still haven’t) (and more broadly how the constant need to replace tech with other ~better~ tech feels like such a waste of time & energy)

My cartoon for this week’s Guardian books…

hello! here’s a random map i made a long time ago 📊 trying to find other folks working on interesting *data science-y* /computational social sci projects and writers on internet culture and tech/AI & society beats say hi if that sounds like you :)

microdosing this app until it stops feeling like every post in my feed was written in 2012 internet