Even setting aside everything else (!), the writing here is only marginally literate.

USACE has awarded a contract for restoring/rebuilding James Island, an all-but-vanished island in the Chesapeake Bay, using dredge spoil. www.nab.usace.army.mil/Media/News-R...

WaPo reports that DC Water proposed repairs to the failed Potomac Interceptor in 2018, but that NPS delayed permits. I think the piece is a hit job on necessary environmental review: another read is that DC Water failed to maintain the sewer, then repeatedly messed up its permit applications.

Always a fan of a good collection of streetscape photos.

Looks as if it's time for some new aerial imagery of DC.

Common names of native plants are just wild. There’ll be something like Ugly Rat-House Bush and it’s a modest plant with yellow-white flowers in late spring, and then there’ll be Devil’s Rotting Duvet Cover that hosts 5,000 Lepidoptera species, but it got its name because it flops over sometimes.

Working with LIDAR data, points classified as bare earth, and noticed that the data shows the fallen trees, the logs on the ground, down toward the stream. Not a bare-earth return!

Dial-a-cat?

Found this 1969 #Earth Day poster. The message remains very relevant. Our #environmental problems are serious and our societies remain unsustainable. But it also inadvertently shows that we've made A LOT of progress too. Consider the smoke trails. They are not an exaggeration.

It's good to see professional orgs standing up. Eight architecture and preservation groups sued to block the president's unlawful alterations to the Kennedy Center. www.archpaper.com/2026/03/aia-...

"If you can dial in your feeds’ algorithms just right, maybe you can bear a type of witness so complete it feels like participation, or maybe even control." There's a long history of dashboards offering a semblance of control, but ubiquitous speculation makes "monitoring" an existential operation.

This, although it's also worth nothing that the youngest college students really would've started learning about world events partway through the Trump presidency.

It's on-brand.

I'd say the Wire draws more from classic cinema. It's hard to notice, but the show is quite visually stylized, esp. in lighting and framing, and it capitalizes on wide shots and locations. (I think it's refined but bland; certain moves, like the slow dolly-back boom-up become crutches.)

A couple of observations about design: the poster is a spatial medium, not only in the poster-space that it contains but in how the viewer moves closer in and farther away. Books and websites, meanwhile, are more time-based than most designers recognize—for the web, it's the scroll.

Technology is not a march of ever-expanding affordances. More polish and more money has made websites, interactive maps, and locative media less accessible, not easier. Being in at the start meant that big business hadn't yet foreclosed all the possibilities.

I'm skeptical of "digital natives"—I've observed that younger than Gen X/older Millennials, students are so, so much worse at making tech do anything beyond the expected—but I can imagine a heightened sensitivity to images because of exposure. Likely *caring* more rather than seeing/not seeing.

US Park Police continues to be the worst law enforcement agency in the DC area—officers are still making traffic stops so that ICE/federal agents can arrest immigrants. cnsmaryland.org/2026/03/11/p...

This is a novel variation on the "law enforcement officers posing behind guns and drugs on the table" photos.

“Whose work it surfaces.“

83 deg F in College Park.

NEWS: @mayorbowser.dc.gov has very unexpectedly released a report @ddotdc.bsky.social finished five years ago on what implementing congestion pricing in D.C. would look like. She had refused to make it public since it was done, but now calls congestion pricing "the wrong policy at the wrong time."

There are frogs calling in a little wetland in College Park.

The Bodleian Map Room Blog looks at a specific kind of map of imaginary places, “designed to be a guide to cartographers by showing how to portray certain features, or for the map reader to… More

This is extraordinary: a Sea King from Marine Helicopter Squadron One, flying up to Camp David and now landing at the Naval Observatory, with its transponder on. (Just passed overhead.)

Since the Fisk map is circulating again, I want to highlight a very good and probably underappreciated* paper by Aslan and Autin on how soils develop in this setting, through the interaction of pedogenic processes, sedimentation, and hydrology. doi.org/10.1130/0016... *like so many good soils papers

The CFA encourages "evergreen plantings to screen the southeast and southwest corners of the addition." I note that there are species of Mid-Atlantic native pines that grow quickly and will reach heights of 40–80 ft.

Northwest Branch at Hyattsville in the fog.

The National Capital Planning Commission has received over 32,000 comments about its current controversial case, the Epstein Ballroom, overwhelming opposed. Has to be a record, though AFAICT the article does not confirm this. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/u...

Just subscribed!

(Some) residents are performatively angry after Takoma Park's mayor bars applause during a public meeting. Reminds me of how in my neighborhood, older, reactionary folks are angry that they can't see the names/faces of other attendees in online meetings, bc they can't bully them. wapo.st/4aQtzPr

On the plus side, it looks as if the Army’s new counter-drone laser can in fact shoot down drones and not just party balloons. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Bike racks are an unusual object; I’d posit that they’ve reached their highest form in the staple/U and cannot be improved on.

Had to skip a lunch-and-learn w a bike rack vendor because most of their products suck and should not exist, and I just couldn’t be in that room. The average cyclist knows better than the average planner, architect, LA, or engineer.

It is freshwater Friday, so a good time to flag our recent open access article with @floodplainmead.bsky.social on using a historic landscape approach to identify former meadow habitats with origins in the early medieval period: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Was trying to find eyedrops this morning. Sprawling university campuses, where the only retail is contracted-out fast food, are lacking in services. Quality is terrible. Whole categories are missing. There’s a drugstore at the edge of campus but that’s a mile away.

I note that my institution's thesis specifications doc does not actually state a page size. Wondering if I can get away with running the doc, which will be a PDF read only on screen, in a horizontal format so it isn't stupidly difficult to use.

“Another train coming”

At College Park, the Purple Line signals are live and the railroad crossing lights appear to be under test.

Record snowfall in Providence. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/u...

It’s interesting watching Hickey Run try to reestablish itself through Langdon Park after a snowfall. (In my dream, someday, there is a stream running through this park again. @jburchdc.bsky.social @imagineterrain.bsky.social

The storm has passed here in DC, and the clouds are brightening. I do appreciate the light that snow reflects into indoor spaces—soft, cool, and bouncing off of ceilings and the upper parts of walls that are normally left in shadow.

This opening is giving M.R. James vibes. (Come for the ghosts; stick around for the linguistics.)

One NOAA tide gage is forecast to see major coastal flooding from the coming Nor'easter, during the 1 a.m. Monday high tide cycle: Lewes, DE. This would be the 8th-highest water level since records began in 1919, ~1.3' below the record set in the 1/23/16 Nor'easter, and ~0.7' below Hurricane Sandy.

Water is extremely high in Lower Beaverdam Creek (and a turbid brown) and in the Anacostia.

Someone, one of my classmates convinced a teacher to show us _Reservoir Dogs_, back when the film was newly out on VHS. We got to see about 10 minutes of the film.

Would appreciate a website/app that simultaneously provides temps in Fahrenheit and Celsius, and mapping software with dual scales, simply as a way to learn other systems.

Perfectly normal things happening at Dupont Circle Citizens Association meetings. www.reddit.com/r/washington...

Made my way up to where the Potomac Interceptor sewage pipe broke late last month just north of Cabin John, Md. The C&O Canal between locks 12 and 10 is being used to divert sewage around the broken portion; it’s essentially an open-air sewer at this point.