cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21829820

https://www.copakeauction.com/featured-lot-taxonomy/cavalry/

I started doing a "one short story a week" challenge, and I ended up writing something I think y'all might appreciate.

Formatting may be lost via x-post, so go to the original if it's unreadable.

100 years ago: Electra Lynne was arrested for violating LA's newly-enacted traffic ordinance that prioritized cars over people.

TL;DW: as fucking always, it's single-family zoning:

I think instead of making it impossible to build more affordable housing in safer places, and incentivizing people to rebuild in fire-prone areas, maybe the government could do the fucking opposite for once and make it easier to build in places that don't burn down once a decade! The state's response to these neighborhoods going up like kindling cannot only be to replace the kindling just as it was, just where it was, as quickly as possible, and at a taxpayer-funded discount. That is not bravery; that is not resilience; that is denial.

Climate change is only going to make these fires more frequent, and we have a glaringly obvious solution to make California safer in the face of them: we could rezone the city to allow more housing in areas that don't border the fire zone. But that is a solution that our cowardly politicians refuse to try, for fear of pissing off the homeowners who don't like apartment buildings!

Source: https://partyon.xyz/@nullagent/113878729653655042 I would have shared this one directly from Mastodon but I couldn't find out how. Seems as if the fediverse actually still is a bunch of fediplanets 😔

NJ Residents/voters/potential primary challengers take note

https://nj.gov/governor/contact/all/

Dutch university researcher Holger Caesar heads out into the afternoon traffic on a bicycle like no other, equipped to collect data he believes may one day save lives.

His blue electric bike, kitted out with an array of laser sensors and scanners, speeds off among thousands of students pedalling home through the campus of the Delft University of Technology.

The campus of TU Delft is a warren of cycle paths -- a perfect encapsulation of life in a country where bicycles outnumber people.

As Caesar cycles through Delft's busy streets, his bicycle sweeps up data on range, direction and elevation of both moving and stationary objects -- including cyclists, pedestrains and cars.

The aim is to build a three-dimensional picture of its surroundings and a better undestanding of the way road users behave.

"We hope these datasets will have lots of applications in future," he said, suggesting they could help cyclists avoid obstacles, build self-stabilising bicycles or teach autonomous vehicles how to avoid hitting two-wheeled travellers.

"For cars it's relatively simple... They go left. They go right. They go straight on. But it's very hard to predict how cyclists are going to behave," Caesar told AFP.

"You could, for instance, use the data to develop an application that alerts car drivers when a cyclist makes an unexpected move."

The "Delft SenseBike" itself would be at home in a science fiction film, equipped as it is with LiDAR sensors at the front and back.

LiDAR -- "Light Detection And Ranging" technology -- is commonly used in autonomous vehicles, which use the laser detection to create a three-dimensional image of their surroundings.

The infrared light rays emitted by the sensors bounce off surfaces and relay back information to "map" the area through which the SenseBike travels, including detecting moving objects like cyclists.

The data is processed using a labelling technique that associates everything visible in the images to a description of what it is -– such as "tree", "cyclist" and "traffic light".

This technique should allow a car driver to recognise a "cyclist" when they see one and avoid a collision.

"The first step will be to make this data publicly available, so that academics and entrepreneurs can benefit from it," said Caesar.

Then artificial intelligence algorithms can be developed to detect, track and predict cyclists' behaviour so drivers can "plan a route around them", he said.

At the moment there is a dearth of data on bikes and cycling in the Netherlands, despite their popularity.

For example, there are few statistics on bicycle accidents in a country that boasts around 37,000 kilometres (23,000 miles) of cycle paths and 22 million bikes.

"It's a difficult question to answer," the Dutch Cyclists' Federation says on its website, noting that "not all accidents are registered".

The Dutch Central Statistics Bureau registered around 270 people as dying in bicycle accidents in 2023.

Almost half the deaths were caused by collisions between cyclists and cars, lorries or buses.

"Cars are becoming safer for their passengers but not for other road users," said the cycling federation's director Esther van Garderen.

Asked whether the Delft University data could one day be used to develop an autonomous "self-riding" bicycle, Caesar laughed and shook his head.

"I think that would kind of take away the fun of cycling," he grinned.

"We probably don't want to do that, but we still think we can make cycling safer."

Well, I guess that's one way to solve the problem 🙄

WTF? Hers a better jdea, ban on steeet parking. Prove you have somewhere to park the car or not be allowed to buy it.

OSAKA — Yumeshima Station opened Sunday morning on a reclaimed island in Konohana Ward, Osaka, the location of the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo.

The first train departed from the underground station at 5:02 a.m.

The Expo will take place on Yumeshima Island from April 13 to Oct. 13, and the station’s ticket gates connect to the venue’s East Gate.

The first train from the station, which is on Osaka Metro Co.’s Chuo Line, was bound for Kintetsu Railway Co.’s Kintetsu Gakken-Nara-Tomigaoka Station in Nara City. The train had a special plate on the front and the rear featuring the words “Yumeshima 2025.”

About 20 people, including Osaka Metro President Hideaki Kawai, attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony and saw the train off.

A 23-year-old male company employee from Sanda, Hyogo Prefecture, said he had been waiting in line at the station since 7:30 p.m. on Saturday to board the first train. “The feeling that the Expo is near has gotten strong,” he said. “I want to go to the venue many times.”

A 10-year-old fourth-grade elementary school boy from Osaka City, who came to Yumeshima Island for the first time, said he also wants to see the venue under construction from the outside.

The new station, located in the center of Yumeshima Island, was constructed by extending the Chuo Line by 3.2 kilometers from Cosmosquare Station in Suminoe Ward, Osaka. The Yumeshima Station will be used mainly by construction workers until the opening of the Expo.>

The ambient air pollution by particulate matter (PM) has strong negative effects on human health. Recent studies have found correlations between pollution and mortality due to Covid-19. We present here an analysis of such correlation for 32 locations in 6 countries of the Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom), for the 2020–2022 period. The data are weekly averaged, and the mortality values were normalized considering the population of the locations. A correlation is qualitatively found for the time-series of PM2.5 pollution and Covid-19 mortality.

The higher mortality values occurred during the pollutions peaks, as presented for the city of Paris (France) and the Lombardy regions (Italia), one of the more polluted locations in Western Europe. An almost linear trend with a factor 5.5 ± 1.0 increase in mortality when the pollution increases to ~45 μg.m−3 is found when considering all data.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/21517409

From @[email protected]'s comment.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/52646883