Observations from an MLA program: people in the architectural professions have no sense of viewing distance or the scale of paper. School pin-ups instill bad habits, and looking at PDFs on-screen makes the problem worse.

I should probably have said "light rail cars." (What's light rail? It's an interurban that was built after 1972.)

Purple Line streetcars will begin test runs on tracks from College Park Metro to the east, later in November, extending into the UMD campus in January. view.email.umd.edu?qs=3fa1b3ab6...

Craft is dead.

NYC will be getting a mayor who understands traffic safety—that the design of streets and what vehicles people drive both matter.

So this is new: I'm now blocking people who offer outrageously stupid comments. Happy to talk about disagreements, but I do not have time for foolishness.

DDOT's seeking feedback about the Columbia Heights bus priority street redesign, with a public meeting at Mt. Pleasant Library, 5:30–7:30 pm tonight (11/4), open house drop-in style. content.govdelivery.com/accounts/DCW...

We once had hydrofoils.

Looking up Wills Creek toward the Narrows, Cumberland, Md. We're on the former Western Maryland line.

Little Seneca Lake on Sunday. We have no naturally-occurring lakes in Maryland or Virginia, so I appreciate these freshwater environments with rushes along the fringes of a still body of water.

Thinking about David Lynch's _Image of the City_, which would be confusing and full of cowboys.

TIL that the Oxbow, in Northampton, Mass., no longer exists as painted by Thomas Cole — just a few years after Cole finished his painting, the Connecticut River cut through the meander's neck, leaving an oxbow lake.

The Potomac River at Great Cacapon, W.Va.

I had problems with search results on the USGS National Map last week. Looks as if the nation's data infrastructure is starting to crumble because of the shutdown. www.reddit.com/r/gis/commen...

Mt. Pleasant. I like to think that the squirrel has been waiting politely.

Putting aside, just for a moment, the problem of the demolition: Does Trump's White House ballroom make sense on its own terms? Absolutely not: A 1,000-person ballroom is far too large for white-glove dining. One expert called it a "cattle call" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Medic 21 just rollled by, playing the Ghostbusteds theme over the ambulance PA.

The Baltimore Brew was always reactionary, but now it's doing straight-up hit pieces on the housing bills. www.baltimorebrew.com/2025/10/31/a...

The US Park Police, DC's most lawless and incompetent law enforcement agency, is on a hiring spree, aiming to more-than-double the officers it has in the city. wapo.st/4ofLO4K

It's striking, how much almost everyone's mental model of flooding says that floods happen when heavy rain falls right where the flooding occurs, and along rivers. That doesn't allow room for coastal flooding, like yesterday's (it's only by chance that we had rain in the morning!).

The US Coast Guard Instagram account's another loss. A year ago, the account was distinctive, characterized by its attention to the service's 11 wide-ranging missions, incl. environmental protection and aids to navigation. Now it's all drug busts and skeezy "be on the lookout for narco boats" posts.

Flood walls were raised at Washington Harbour, yesterday. www.reddit.com/r/washington...

NEW: #2030Census advocates led by The Census Project urge Congress to strike a House funding bill provision that would take away the Census Bureau’s ability to “inquire” more than twice to get a survey response, a change that they say would "adversely affect the quality and availability" of data

It’s that time of year: If you are running for office in DC, and your materials say you seek a seat on the ”City Council,” *I will not vote for you*.

"Interim park is a temporary condition." Toronto waterfront, 2023.

I was at the Getty Villa last week and it was a reminder that the wealthy in this country, evil as they might have been, once believed in human progress — which they thought they represented, naturally — and feared retribution. They now fear nothing and are ambivalent about the human being.

This got to me. Haunting and beautifully written. news.mongabay.com/2025/10/in-m...

Note the little hose attached to the excavator — this crew is thinking about dust control. www.reddit.com/r/Structural...

DDOT's concept development presentation is out, for the Mt. Pleasant–Columbia Heights bus priority project. The agency's proposing a roundabout at the lunatic intersection of Harvard, Argonne, and "Little Harvard"!

"When you need to move fast" — "As quiet as a whisper." Böcker, which makes the ladder/lift trucks used in the Louvre robbery, decided to embrace their machine's new notoriety and run with an ad campaign. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge? It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

Interesting: using crytographic techniques to make visible the chain of edits to a photo, and to identify the type of sensor that made the original.

This, although strictly, the issue is word spacing.

"Goal" and "objective" in English are almost entirely overlapping in meaning—I get the more concrete terms like "milestone," and I have to admire the military jargon of "end state" and "key tasks."

Symbolism here is on point.

The Baltimore City Council voted to remove minimum parking rules — although there is one more vote remaining.

High water in Church Creek, Annapolis. Over the weekend, tides were of moderate height, but the heavy winds were pushing 1–2 ft. more water up the Bay.

A big willow oak and the Ontario.

a key reason why Signal and Bluesky have done pretty well is because they're actually really easy to use: I desperately wish more people in the open source and responsible technology world would look at those examples and go "huh, maybe we should do that too"

A good reminder that "The Cloud" is a physical thing--mostly located in the DC are.

On the plus side, the AWS outage is making for some teachable moments about data centers and how even something as ephemeral as the Internet has physical form.

Thinking about ruin value.

Man @ggwash.org’s coverage of DC ‘s bus shelters is great—it really highlights how arcane agreements and underfunding shape a very basic piece of infrastructure.

I had hoped that the Post might return to its Watergate-era roots in terms of principles, not circulation figures.

CulturalDC is shutting down, between "post"-pandemic upheaval and the administration's war on culture. Their announcement is a celebration of their work—they even commissioned a poster—and they are winding down by donating funds to Howard, Hamiltonian, and a slew of others. www.culturaldc.org

Showing up to No Kings with a sign reading “monarchy is an affront to human dignity but, when incorporated into a liberal democratic system, may nevertheless be a useful safety valve for nationalist and/or authoritarian impulses” and then getting clobbered by a Buttigieg-supporting grandmother

Four pages, and they're also really bad.

Look at literally ANYTHING these days, you'll see this phenomenon I wrote about in that 2016 article. It's since gotten a word for it, "enshittification". Everything sucks now, and it didn't used to. What happened? We're managing things towards our measurements, and not leading people to our goals.

US Park Police helicopter circling by the White House and then at Walter Reed, now returned to base, and busy HMX–1 helicopter traffic to and from the northwest. Don't get too excited, it's probably nothing.

So much about this is disgraceful, but it is good that DCAG worked to secure all the justice they could.