My bias is generally pro-vulnerable users of infrastructure, so I came into this article in the NYT expecting to have my existing views reinforced. Even so, I learned a lot from the piece.

The article shows how deaths to pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists are increasing in the US, even as they decrease in other countries. Fatalities didn’t even go down during the early days of the pandemic, when far fewer people were driving.

Some of the main drivers of this cross-country discrepancy is because our roads are designed to enable cars to drive fast, and the limited power states have over their transportation budgets and ability to set basic stuff like speed limits, which are often hampered by federal laws. .

From the article:

In 2021, nearly 43,000 people died on American roads, the government estimates. And the recent rise in fatalities has been particularly pronounced among those the government classifies as most vulnerable — cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians.

Much of the familiar explanation for America’s road safety record lies with a transportation system primarily designed to move cars quickly, not to move people safely.

“Motor vehicles are first, highways are first, and everything else is an afterthought,” said Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Read the article for more.

band camp:

or apple music:

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or Wikipedia:

[Madi] Diaz grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where she was home-schooled by her Peruvian mother, Nancy, a proponent of early childhood development and the visual arts, and her Danish father, Eric, a woodworker and musician. Diaz began piano lessons at age five from her father.

OK – this one requires an explanation.

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You see, at one point I squished a bug on a page of the notebook I carry around with me.

I wanted to make it into some sort of drawing, but I didn't know what to draw.

Then I read this story by T.C. Boyle in McSweeney's that had this great line: You're as likable as a sealed jar on a high shelf.

The rest is history.

Thank you.

Bye.

See also: other drawings

Drawn @ Grimm on Metropolitan

See also: other drawings  

i used to use this app called Writeroom to write without distractions.

it takes over your whole screen and is just a cursor and text. no  messing with the font, changing the spacing, or anything liek that.

just you and your text. like a typewriter

it hasn't been updated in awhile and i don't write as much as i used to. But I still use it when i want to write something semi-long and want to minimize distractions. It works.

this recent New Yorker article takes a fresh look at the current landscape of distraction-free writing apps and hardware, and it's just great.

here's an excerpt:

But focus mode on an everything device is a meditation room in a casino. What good is it to separate writing from editing, formatting, and cluttered interfaces if you can’t separate it from the Internet? Even a disconnected computer offers plenty of opportunities for distraction: old photographs, downloaded music, or, most treacherous of all, one’s own research. And so, just as savvy entrepreneurs have resuscitated the “dumb” phone as a premium single-tasking communication device, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would revive the stand-alone word processor.

Released in 2016, the Freewrite Smart Typewriter is a hefty little lunchbox of a machine with a noisy mechanical keyboard and an e-ink display the size of an index card. The user can type and backspace but not much else, and, with the default settings, only ten lines of text are visible at a time.