in my quest to try every way of getting to Chicago, today I’m taking the university’s own daily shuttle UI Ride (cutaway). Never took it bc it leaves at 7 am. incredible. a table, WiFi, luggage closet, fridge, bathroom. $25 each way. really nice driver. never going any other way now.

i met mayor pete and he knew all about bus stop consolidation. then he talked to prof hajj all about recycled asphalt. later on i found a video of a conversation with him about recycled asphalt. not a bullshitter about recycled asphalt. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV5K...

My robins are me in the drive through at Culver’s

I think it was more the maga online movement. trump got booed in Alabama about covid vaccines. when I was a kid in Alabama, nobody talked much about vaccines. being anti vax or Tylenol etc would’ve been a sort of hippie thing. southerners just didn’t talk about health much.

The most surprising watch sold on r/WatchExchange: a constellation that Omega made expressly for Kim Il-Sung www.reddit.com/r/Watchexcha...

Streetsblog publishing the heavy hitters (Dr. Susan Handy) usa.streetsblog.org/2026/05/13/o...

while other countries' 10-year yields went up this year, China's keeps declining (even after the oil shock). A sign that China has tight money (hence the rise in the RMB value), and the market expects that to continue.

U know the jones act hates to see them coming www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

i wrote an academic post: as LLMs get better at writing papers, the knowledge in human brains could atrophy because people learn and are tested by writing. A field could publish more and better papers, even as humans know less and less about it. open.substack.com/pub/critical...

becoming negatively polarized into being a data center supporter. as an IL public employee, i am predisposed to anything that pays taxes. we need money!

my yard assistant

cool paper from my colleage Sandy Dall'erba onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

it will also not lower final prices by the amount of the tax. a cut will raise demand for oil and hence profits of oil sellers, who already have a windfall. strictly better to just temporarily mail every car owner the tax revenues. That wouldn’t stimulate demand except insofar as any income does.

found this meme that i made 10 years ago. i dont think i had a photoshop license so this is probably MS paint or something.

this house near mine is interesting bc they started putting an ADU in the garage but then stopped for some reason. www.zillow.com/homedetails/...

VW shooting for US hybrids by 2029. seems like a long time to catch up! www.caranddriver.com/news/a709100...

Jarrett Walker (@humantransit.bsky.social): “If you want transit to be useful, … you need to watch the practicalities.” But the practicalities of transit are not always what they seem – or what engineering programs teach, or what innovators envision. ...

I agree with @lewislehe.bsky.social and his idea to marginally improve peer review and make papers better to read.

the Adrian chiles mode of being is spreading

'alarmingly.' the proliferation of a previously-rare type: someone with credentials but absolutely no knowledge, in a way that's uncanny, like a large talking baby. someone who doesn't know world war ii came after the civil war, what a muffler or a county is, the square root of 16, etc.

to any students of CEE 310: yall can have an extension on HW8 due to the cyberattack. I cannot communicate with u through canvas.

People r laughing but due to his fragile skin and aspirin usage, trump can probably squirt blood like horned lizards. maybe republican men r considering that. Before fighting, I would certainly consult with someone who actually has pinned a elected official like @timgill924.bsky.social

🚌 Route 66 (Chicago) — Eastbound 5 buses within 550 ft near Grand & Union Buses: #1409, #8166, #8552, #1119, #8733 📊 5th Route 66 bunch reported today

excited to see the new remarkable. www.howtogeek.com/remarkable-p...

new 48 acre reservoir near decatur. IL has 84k manmade ponds. we're getting wetter spring/winter but dryer summers, so i expect IL will build many more ponds. i bet one day we'll float solar in them to stop evaporation/make money. maybe rurals will protest that less. www.rd.usda.gov/newsroom/new...

sailing the slop sea, you sometimes come across some really good writing. reminds me of something that would go in one of the "readers" in AP English.

this company www.busgenius.com adapted the bus bunching game i made like 10 years ago to have an anti-bus bunching algorithm. they provide operations services for shuttle systems. www.busgenius.com/bus-bunching

Alabama's Lt. Governor made this map to let R's dominate. interesting that the shapes are visually simple but geographically unnatural. black belt split across 4 (5?) districts. birmingham/montgomery cut in half. the long north/south districts are weird: demopolis and florence in one district.

What will be scarce? about human labor and AI. I think the more interesting point is in the footnote. Land, floorspace and energy will still be scarce. aleximas.substack.com/p/what-will-...

it’s cool there are now bug sprays that are just essential oils like geraniol. but it makes you wonder what we were doing all those years spraying poison

while some intercity terminals have died, Philly renovated theirs. whyy.org/articles/phi...

i expect intercity bus will also jump. www.npr.org/2026/05/01/n...

A post about a change to the peer review process that could make our papers shorter and more enjoyable. open.substack.com/pub/critical...

parallel with bev adoption for cars, East Asian countries are subsidizing hydrogen buses a lot. I wouldnt be surprised in 2019 but in 2026 I’m not sure I could say exactly why. I think the hope is to get similar learning-by-doing that worked for Bev’s. www.gasworld.com/story/hyunda...

I don’t see why I have to pay dividend taxes since I paid off my margin loans. It’s like I’m renting my stocks to the government. why do I pay vehicle registration fees since I paid off my car loan? It’s like I’m renting my car from the government

a mental challenge for environmentalism is that solar farms are sometimes better for the environment than food farms. idyllic farm tropes are deeply rooted. you can also grow crops and graze under solar panels which looks dystopian to some people. www.usatoday.com/story/money/...

state capacity problems: CU has a horde of wicked geese. our public solution was a humane "charity harvest," but Friends of Geese complained. So now vigilantes violate the Migratory Bird Treaty. the only solution left i see is mass planting of switch grass/release of foxes+snapping turtles.

Amtrak optimistically expected 75,000 passengers along the Mardi Gras Express line in the first year. We are 7 months in and they are about to reach 100,000. Build. More. Passenger. Rail. www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA5w...

MARTA got tap to pay. going to ride the new bus redesign this weekend. really rooting for atlanta here. They have potential insofar as theres much low hanging fruit

Timex now does these Timex x things. They always look so good and are affordable. timex.com/products/tod...

someone i know is selling their 3k sq ft house with solar and geothermal for 400k. we have a lot of good deals down here. www.redfin.com/IL/Champaign...

holding a professional workshop in chicago on LLMs for document processing. there's so much free stock footage online now. cee.illinois.edu/academics/gr...

an important thing to note about pricing waymos: i think Waymo would be exempt from chicagos taxes on ridehail bc a TNP connects passengers to drivers. They need to fix this. codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/chicag...

other hybrid news: China is exporting a ton of hybrids, which are growing much faster than their BEV exports. Wouldn’t have expected that in 2024. www.caixinglobal.com/2026-04-09/c...

nissan‘s turnaround depends on a “series hybrid“ (gas engine acts only as generator). It will drive like an ev and be quiet. i think series hybrids could be a big deal in American cars. carbuzz.com/how-nissan-n...

California: compared to Q1 2025, EV and PHEV registrations in CA plunged, while hybrids increased. overall sales are down, especially tesla, though toyota sold about 33k more vehicles. people want those toyotas. www.cncda.org/wp-content/u...

EVs at 21% of European sales electrek.co/2026/04/20/e...

future historians will find it natural that "robot" is a slavic word. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/w...

sort of inflammatory but some good food for thought here. having been involved with a lot of LLM-for-academia stuff, i think this take is missing something big. Academics Need to Wake Up on AI, Part III open.substack.com/pub/alexande...