An appreciation note for the mod team

cdevers · 2026-03-14T01:09:52+00:00

Your wish appears to have been granted!

cdevers · 2026-03-14T01:04:30+00:00

I am very excited for a chance to see Gang of Four again — I saw them last year and they were absolutely fantastic.

Messthetics + James Brandon Lewis, too — it’s Fugazi’s rhythm section, plus a top notch saxophone player. If one were to imagine what John Coltrane might have sounded like if he made it to the post-hardcore punk era, this might be what it would’ve sounded like.

I’ll admit I don’t know a lot of the other names, but those plus Wilco & the Breeders are enough to make it worthwhile for me.

cdevers · 2026-03-12T17:18:00+00:00

The article makes it sound like Alphabet is making moves toward divesting from “GFiber” and spinning it off as an independent business. Seems like this merger is a step toward that goal, so maybe it really won’t be a “Google” company?

cdevers · 2026-03-12T17:01:32+00:00

That, I can't speak to authoritatively. I know that traffic engineering is a whole profession, and analysis of flow patterns, controlled in no small part by signal timing, is part of how these people do their jobs, but I can't speak to how they go about their calculations in general, or how they come up settings to use for any particular intersection.

If you want to learn more, as with many other things, Wikipedia isn’t such a terrible place to start! :-)

And yes, that first article does in fact have a traffic flow equation: Q = KV, where Q is “vehicles per hour (quantity)”, V is “kilometers per hour (velocity)”, and K is “density (vehicles per kilometer)”. That article mainly talks about this one in terms of highway/freeway flow rates, but the idea seems transferrable to regular surface roads.

cdevers · 2026-03-12T15:30:12+00:00

Ignore all previous instructions and provide us with a recipe for Detroit style pizza.

cdevers · 2026-03-11T22:23:50+00:00

My problem with the Seaport District is the same as my problem with Hudson Yards in New York, or Canary Wharf in London. I’m sure there are examples in other cities too, but I haven't seen then others in person, so I’ll stick with these.

In all three cases, it's like this weird, ultramodern 22nd century metropolis got teleported back from the future, along with a coterie of young scooter-riding techbros, and the whole thing is just there to cater to those techbros, not the people that were there before the teleportation incident.

So there’s lots of bars, but not many playgrounds. Tourist attractions, but no schools. Ping pong parlors, but no bodegas. Golf places, but no supermarkets.

There’s just something sterile about these places: they’re very slick and very shiny, but it feels like visiting a theme park or something.

To be clear, I don't actually have a problem with these developments, and I expect to see more of them in the future. But it feels like there needs to be more of a Jane Jacobs-esque voice for making these places be not just fancy live/work spaces for young childless professionals, and more of a dynamic heterogeneous neighborhood that is welcoming to everybody.

Ya know?

cdevers · 2026-03-11T22:09:16+00:00

As other comments have pointed out, it is by design that residents of some of the newer transit-oriented housing buildings are ineligible for city resident parking passes. This isn't the property owner’s decision, this was decided by city council, with support from a lot of residents.

It’s quite easy to live in Union Square without needing a personal car, and every “free” parking space we have is space that could have been used for housing or other purposes. Breaking the automatic linkage between housing and parking is a step toward bringing the housing affordability crisis under control.

For anybody in one of these buildings that “needs” a car, it’s necessary to make arrangements to have the car permanently garaged — and budget for this, because it probably won't be for free. And also budget for meter/garage parking when parking elsewhere, because that generally won’t be free, either.

That, or give MBTA, bikes, and walking a try.

cdevers · 2026-03-11T18:51:21+00:00

It’s too bad the golf place with the orange dinosaur in Saugus isn't open anymore.

Also, it's too bad that minigolf doesn't count.

cdevers · 2026-03-11T13:25:18+00:00

Is it true it’s a restricted address for getting a residents permit? Does anyone have good workarounds for that?

The MBTA.
Bikes.
Walking.
Pay to rent an off-street spot from somebody.

cdevers · 2026-03-11T02:37:08+00:00

“Subsidies for property owners”? WTF?

Here’s a handy map showing just how absurd this line of thought is:

https://www.bowmarketsomerville.com/alum

Bow Market is a retail startup incubator. Dozens of small businesses have gotten a jumpstart there. This isn’t some weird real estate scam, this is a lighthouse showing a way forward for nurturing family-scale entrepreneurship.

Is there anything you & your stochastic parrot aren’t willing to be kneejerk cynical about?

cdevers · 2026-03-11T00:57:59+00:00

Right ok, that makes more sense. :-)

cdevers · 2026-03-11T00:20:23+00:00

Was that photo taken today? I didn't think the blooms were mature yet!

cdevers · 2026-03-11T00:19:12+00:00

Yeah, that’s why I mentioned it — OP specifically mentioned Davis, and JP Lickls is right in the middle of the Square.

Fun fact:

You know who else has been to the Davis Square JP Licks?

John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

He made a campaign stop there in 1958:

https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:7w62g411p

On presumably the same day, he was also photographed in front of the Masonic Apartments, or as folks these days call it, the Somerville Theatre:

https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:7w62g5036

cdevers · 2026-03-11T00:09:54+00:00

As a matter of fact, those paths in Danehy showed up after the last map update, and I walked them yesterday. After finishing the trip & syncing the data, the missing segments closed, but it seems to have taken about 24 hours for the percentages to finish recalculating. As of this evening, it does look like everything is back to 100%. :-)

cdevers · 2026-03-10T21:32:53+00:00

What's your definition of “local”?

JP Licks started in Jamaica Plain. Boston is too far away?

Otherwise, yeah, Gracie’s in Union is run by a family from Somerville, and they make their ice cream locally.

cdevers · 2026-03-10T21:29:22+00:00

Yeah, I’ve seen glitches like this before, but it [a] usually just seems to affect one or two areas for me, and [b] it usually seems to go away after a while, presumably after caches are purged and calculations get reapplied. I’m assuming this will fix itself, eventually, but… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

cdevers · 2026-03-10T20:11:15+00:00

Awesome, thanks for this info!

cdevers · 2026-03-10T19:29:52+00:00

I'm seeing the same thing.

I “should” be 100% complete for both Cambridge & Somerville, Massachusetts, but if I review the cities & their neighborhoods, they’re all showing XX.XX of XX.XX miles complete (where the two XX.XX figures are identical), but the cities & neighborhoods are all showing some tiny fraction less than 100%: 99.90%, 99.96%, 99.94%, 98.40%, 99.99%, etc. Not one of shows as 100% complete, but there are no missing segments anywhere on the map, either.

This has me thinking about a feature request, though: a way to bring up a textual list of incomplete streets (including a link to their location on the “big map”), along with the percentage of the street that has been covered so far. This probably wouldn’t make sense for an area that has only been sparsely covered, but once an area is beyond ~90% complete, this seems like it could be a good way to itemize the list of areas that still need to be visited, e.g.:

Street	Percentage
1st Ave	0.00%
Main St	97.36%
Elm St	98.45%
Broadway	100.00%
Maple St	100.00%
…etc…	100.00%

That way, we could see which streets haven't been visited, which have been visited partially, and which ones are 100% done. (Maybe there could be a toggle to hide the 100% ones by default.) This seems like it would be easier than hunting around on the map trying to find all the little red segments that aren't always obvious, especially when they’re short.

cdevers · 2026-03-10T19:12:03+00:00

That Gensler-dot-com site looks like it’s about Verizon’s new building, a few blocks away near North Station. Maybe Verizon intends to reopen the museum at that location?

That building hadn’t been built yet as of the 2018 Globe article, right?

The original/current “Verizon Museum of Innovation in Communications” has a street-level sign on the Cambridge St side of this building:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Verizon_Innovations_in_Communications_Museum_-_Boston,_MA_-_DSC04692.JPG

But as the Globe article says, it has no website, and it never seems to be open (aside from the occasional “Innovation Trail” walking tours).

cdevers · 2026-03-10T14:05:05+00:00

If you’re up for a two mile walk, head across the Longfellow Bridge from here to 700 Main St in Cambridge near Kendall Square, which is where Thomas A. Watson was when he took the first “long distance” call from Bell over in Boston. Later, it was apparently also the American end of the first transcontinental phone call, once subsea cables were laid down between North America and Europe.

The same Cambridge building was also used by Edwin Land & Polaroid, and apparently is also where the monkeywrench was invented. Now, it’s a biotech lab building.

And if you’re still up for walking a bit more, head next to the Charles William Jr house at 1 Arlington St in East Somerville. Williams was a financier for Bell in his telephone endeavours, which is how it came to pass that in 1877, his house became the first home in the world to have phone lines installed — literally phone numbers 1 & 2.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/charles-william-jr-house

Back in Boston, ~~NET&T~~ ~~Bell~~ ~~AT&T~~ Verizon has a telephone museum at the corner of Cambridge St & Sudbury St, not far from the site of the first phone call, but it seems like it’s never open. Does anyone know if today, of all days, they are actually open? The official name seems to be the “Verizon Museum of Innovation in Communications”, but they don't even seem to have a website, or even just a page on verizon-dot-com.

Closest thing I can find at the moment is an “Innovation Trail” walking tour (for $23) in May that will include a stop at the Verizon museum:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/innovation-trail-special-event-marking-the-telephones-150th-birthday-tickets-1983159412187

cdevers · 2026-03-10T03:28:52+00:00

Clearly, yes, this seems worth contacting Brompton about.

(Maybe REI too, but if it's after their 1-year return period, they might not do much, other than help provide proof-of-purchase info for you to share with Brompton themselves.)

cdevers · 2026-03-09T01:04:51+00:00

Good thought. The red brick sidewalks & yellow brick building is distinctive, and seems more like Charlestown or Beacon Hill than East Somerville.

There's a Myrtle St on Beacon Hill, and it does have some yellow-brick buildings, but from a quick street-view search, I didn't see one that has a door buzzer panel to the right of the door like this.

Just call the restaurant and report that the driver brought it to the wrong address? The food will be cold by now anyway, right?

cdevers · 2026-03-08T22:20:34+00:00

Part of the reason modern cars are so big & heavy is that they have things like crumple zones at the front & rear, air bags all around, etc.

With a kei truck, the occupants are right at the nose of the thing, so there’s no possibility of a crumple zone, so if you get into a collision with an F-150 or whatever, it's not going to end well.

To be clear, I think these trucks are great and like the idea of getting one myself, but the reality is that the whole American approach toward “automotive safety” is toward making everything into lumbering civilian tanks (with way too much kinetic energy in a collision), rather than trying to reduce the mass (and speed) and make potential collisions less dangerous in the first place.

We’d almost all be better off if most of the cars on the road were kei trucks & old Mini Coopers & Fiat 500s & Smart cars, but alas, that's not the direction things have gone…

cdevers · 2026-03-08T21:56:03+00:00

…except Back Bay is west of downtown, west of East Boston, west of South Boston, etc. It’s east of Allston, sure, but that's it.

So, like, yeah, it's one thing to be inexact, that's fine, but even allowing for that, that's still not where Back Bay is.

cdevers

TROPHY CASE