So, I graphed the pageviews between 1 October 2021 and 30 January 2022 for 6 of the top 10 most streamed Christmas songs on Spotify. The dotted vertical line is American Thanksgiving. The graphs followed the general trends that would be expected, with a spike in late December, but there was a surprising amount of variation.

Most songs had a slow, gradual increase from November to the peak at Christmas. Two of them, Baby, It’s Cold Outside and All I Want for Christmas Is You, have a significant spike in early November. Oddly, Baby, It’s Cold Outside’s views stay high, compared to its peers, through November and December. I think this has something to do with the explosion of cultural commentary about the song over the past few years. Compare that to All I Want for Christmas Is You which has a dramatic spike on 1 November, falls, and then surges after American Thanksgiving.

Feliz Navidad has the least popular of the 6 songs through November, but it has the highest peak at Christmas. Post-Christmas, 5 of the 6 songs have a dramatic slide to the rest of the year norm. The outlier is Last Christmas which has a slight New Year’s bump.

It is important to ensure that the trends you see for one year are reflected in previous years. I should have done some sort of smoothed average, but that requires real data science to account for the differences in view volume between years. Below is the simpler option, the curve for All I Want for Christmas Is You for the 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022 Christmas seasons. The dotted line is American Thanksgiving for each year.

The curves look similar enough to say that this year was not an outlier. Based on the data, no matter how early retail would like to start the Christmas season, interest in Christmas music is minimal until the first of November. Even then, the vast majority of interest is between the start of secular advent on 1 December and Christmas Day. American Thanksgiving coincides with an increase in consumer interest in some years but not others. Because of that, it is hard to see it as the start of the Christmas season.

Housekeeping

I have started a job here in Copenhagen and therefore have less time to write and work with data. I am going to be switching to a monthly posting schedule and turning paid subscriptions off. Thank you to everyone who has supported my work over the past year! The 70 posts I released since I moved to Copenhagen have been viewed more than 15 thousand times.

Two days before Thanksgiving, my wife and I returned to Denmark from our honeymoon in Hawaii. I am a national parks buff just like President Jed Bartlet, so we had to visit Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park as well as the National Historic Site and the two National Historical Parks. I am trying to get all of the stamps to complete my national parks passport. It will probably take me my whole life, but the program has convinced me to go to smaller and more out-of-the-way sites run by the National Park Service.

Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park is completely otherworldly. Chain of Craters Drive — the lighter-weight road in the national park on the map, above — passes through lava flows that were as recent as 2008. The stark black volcanic rock with almost no vegetation was unlike anything that I had ever seen. In the hour's drive, you drop 1232 meters (4000 ft) as you head to the ocean. At several points, you can look mountain covered in black streaks from past eruptions and then turn around and see where the lava met the water. At the end of the road is a trail to a natural arch.

Traversing across the island to the lesser-known NPS sites forced us to see views we would not have seen otherwise if we had just stayed at our resort near Kailua-Kona and gone to the national park. At the Puʻukoholā Heiau National Historic Site, the ranger mentioned that you could see Maui from the high road (HI-250) on a clear day. So, we drove up Kohala in our rental car. We saw Maui, but the best part of the drive was on the other side of the mountain. The view of the valley below was absolutely spectacular.

If you get the chance, go. The views were worth the 6-hour flight from the mainland. When you are there, leave Kona or Hilo and head for the lesser traveled parts of the island.

I also wrote two Good Articles (Leander Schnerr and Marriage License) and co-closed a contentious discussion on Wikipedia. Halloween has come and gone, and we have entered the cultural start of winter here in Denmark. The sun now sets before 4 PM, and the winter drizzle has returned. I now feel refreshed and set for another year of writing.

Mastodon

Twitter in a meltdown

On October 27th, Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. Since his purchase, things have not gone great for him. Journalists and celebrities have blue checkmarks to verify that they own the account. The bar to get it was inconsistent and vague. A journalist at a major media outlet or a candidate for office would get the check no matter how few followers they have. Meanwhile, people with hundreds of thousands of followers would routinely get denied for not being important enough. There is social status to having the checkmark, but there is also a basket of features and perks for high follower accounts. Musk decided, announced, and had Twitter ship the code to give this to everyone who pays $8/month for Twitter Blue. It didn’t last long. He has been forced to backtrack on this until after the election.

Musk’s free speech crusade has also hit a snag. After tweeting “the bird is free”, extolling his new position on free speech, and firing the trust and safety team, the backtracking has begun. After a string of people changing their display name, avatar, and bio to match Musk’s and then tweeting out rude things, content moderation has returned. As I wrote about in April, Musk’s stance on free speech hit reality like a brick wall.

All of this chaos has encouraged people to find other options for their microblogging. One place where many people have turned to is Mastodon.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is open-source software that allows people to do almost everything on Twitter: post short text posts, follow accounts, and interact with other people’s content. What makes Mastodon unique is that it is a federated system. If you have an account on one server, you can interact with people on other servers. If you are extremely nerdy, you can host a server just for you.

Usernames on Mastodon have two parts to make sense of the federated system: a username and a server address. For example, I am @fish@wikis.world. Fish is my username and my server can be found at https://wikis.world. It is pretty much the same as an email address but with an extra @ at the beginning.

Mastodon has no algorithm and a purposely limited search. You can not search for a phrase across every server. Instead, all feeds are chronological. To get found, content creators need to make posts out of 2009 with several hashtags.

Server choice

The downside of this model is that you are fully reliant on your server admin. They can read everything that you have ever sent or received, even if it is private. Your IP address and therefore your location is also accessible. If they decide to delete the AWS instance your server runs on you are out of luck.

This is why I chose a small invite-only server run by two Wikimedia community members over the other options. Kunal and Taavi have had access to private data on the Wikimedia servers at some point over the past decade and have not abused their access. They have a track record of working to keep the Wikimedia servers live. They have a plan to keep the server up and running. I trust them to do moderation right. I hope they know how to keep the server running if it gets hugged to death.

I understand that I am extremely lucky to know people who are running a server, but my general thought process is one that you should follow. Econtwitter.net looks great, but people should ask @paulgp@econtwitter.net how he intends to keep the lights on in the future. This is true of every other new server that has appeared over the past month.

Future of Mastodon

I think we are going to see some servers implement ads in the next year. In the past, servers were run on donations and goodwill. It is a bit like email in the 1990s. With the mainstreaming of Mastodon, the costs of running a large server increase due to the spike in bandwidth. Users have shown that they prefer free access over paid, so ads will have to start appearing.

Servers are going to also cope with the crush of mainstream trust and safety issues. No longer are the majority of your users FOSS nerds and techno-utopians. This will require paid moderators and staff. DCMA takedown notices need to be acted on. Illegal material needs to be reported to the proper authorities. Even Wikipedia can not do all of this with volunteers alone.

My best guess is that in the long term, Mastodon is going to turn into something much more like email. Email is open by spec but in practice a closed system. Google and Microsoft pretty much control who can and can’t have their emails delivered. Similarly, I imagine that most Mastodon users are going to shuffle into a number of large servers with paid moderation that mostly federate with each other. The openness to new servers that we see now, will be replaced with a more closed system after it is abused by scammers and trolls. Utopian systems are too tempting for bad actors to keep open forever.

For something slightly off the well-trodden path, I suggest Stevns Klint. The cliffs are a UNESCO site, so you aren’t heading to an unknown location, but it requires a car or the willingness to take a train to the end of the line and then bike 15 to 40 km round trip on rural roads to see everything. But, it was worth the journey. The vistas are beautiful, and the area oozes with Cold War history. It is a perfect place to build your American hipster dad (or mom) credit and stake your claim to a time period other than World War II or the American Civil War to obsess over.

Trip

My brother and I spent most of a day just visiting a 7 km stretch between the Stevns Lighthouse just south of Tommerstrup and Rødvig. Unlike other roads with attractions along them, the roads that run alongside Stevns Klint are narrow, run along farm fields, and are a distance from the water. If you start in the north, it is very possible to miss that you are at a UNESCO site.

Lighthouse

The first place we went to was the Stevns Lighthouse. It is still in operation, and you can climb it in the summer to see Sweden and Copenhagen. A few exhibits in one of the lighthouse’s outbuildings explain the area's geology. To the south, the ruins of a SAM battery are open for exploration. All of those were cool, but they did not compare to this nondescript white building.

This unassuming building is where an important part of the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. The Danish soldier watching the Øresund on October 24, 1962 witnessed the Krasnograd turn around and head back to the Warsaw Pact with its load of military equipment.1 This was seen as a sign by NATO that Nikita Khrushchev was not planning on going to war to place missiles in Cuba. John F. Kennedy’s blockade worked.

Højerup

A small church was built on the side of the cliff in Højerup in the 13th Century. In 1910, a new church was built a short distance away due to worries about subsidence as the limestone and chalk beneath it crumbled away. Eighteen years later, the back sections of the church, including the altar, fell into the sea.

The remains of the church were reinforced with cement creating a small overlook in the rear of the church. From it, you get your first glimpse at the white cliffs. A few meters to the south, there are steep steps if you would like to walk down to the water and view the church and cliffs from below.

Stevnsfort

During the Cold War, one of the likely areas to receive intense fighting if war broke out between the Warsaw Pact and NATO was the Øresund. For much of the conflict, the largest naval fleets of the USSR and her allies were in the Baltic Sea. The key goal initial phase of most battle plans was getting them out to the North Sea. NATO knew this and made plans to mine and secure the sound.

Stevnsfort was a key part of those plans. It featured a sprawling above-ground array of surface-to-air missiles and large guns. Underground there was a sprawling bunker carved into the rock. When the Danish military left the fort in 2000, the complex was preserved as a museum. They offer self-guided tours above ground and guided tours of the bunker.

Rødvig

At the south end of Stevns Klint lies the town of Rødvig. It is the only town along the cliffs and the site of the closest train station. The overlook beside the town’s harbor provides a beautiful last look at the cliffs.

There is probably more to say about Rødvig, but my brother and I had to leave quickly once we got there. It was later than we expected, and we had a dinner reservation in Copenhagen.

Most tickets were written around and north of the White House. This makes sense because that area is where most offices are in DC and where most of the economic activity h…

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This is clearly not optimal public policy. Over the past two weeks, I have tried to lay out a case that there are areas of Washington, DC that have a large number of bike crashes that result in a fatality or several injuries, and these hot spots can not be explained solely through bike traffic. To make biking safer and percent these sorts of crashes, DC has various options.

Simplified cycling infrastructure

One of the best things that Washington, DC could do to make cycling safer would be to ditch at-grade cycling infrastructure and replace it with a uniform system of raised cycle tracks. This would dramatically reduce confusion by both cyclists and motorists, which leads to cyclists being put in danger.

Right now, Washington DC has nine different kinds of bike infrastructure. To make this more confusing, cyclists are placed in various spots around a driver, depending on which type of bike lane is installed. This Virginia driver probably had no idea they were driving into a bike lane.

In DC, most bike infrastructure is at-grade with the road, providing little to no protection for cyclists. When cyclists get protection, it is often in the form of flex posts and, sometimes, low concrete barriers. The safety provided by flex posts alone, such as in this picture on DDOT’s website, is primarily psychological because they do nothing to stop a car. Further, Washington, DC uses white flex posts for various other uses. To a driver, they don’t scream protected bike lane.

I currently live in Denmark. Danes have four kinds of bike lanes depending on the speed limit of the road. The most common is a bike lane protected by a curb. Mikael Colville-Andersen claims these are found on streets with speed limits between 30 and 40 mph, but I have experienced them on roads with speed limits as low as 25 mph. One of them can be found on Dag Hammarskjölds Allé in front of the US Embassy, which has a speed limit between 40 and 50 kph (25 to 30 mph).

These kinds of bike lanes are easy to understand because of the design rules used. Bikes move with the flow of traffic. Bike lanes are always in the most protected position next to the sidewalk unless there is a crossover due to turns. On-street parking spots for cars never require crossing over a bike lane. Bike lanes do not look like a place for vehicles to occupy. If the conditions call for a two-way bike lane, it is separated from the road by a large berm. Our confused Virginia driver should never be put in the position to drive down the bike lane.

If you think Dutch-style two-way cycle tracks are superior to Danish-style one-way, the solution is the same:

• Reduce complexity by adopting a minimal number of possible installation options.

• Standardize everything you can, from turning at stoplights to connecting feeder to the side of the road with a bike lane, so there is an element of predictability.

• Get cyclists off the road level and onto the sidewalk level or an intermediate one for added protection.

• Burn every flex post.

Cycling would be much safer with these changes.

Bike lane enforcement

If the sun is up, a bike lane in DC is being used for its intended purpose. That is, of course, being the pick-up and drop-off zone for taxis, rideshare, delivery, and other drivers. No matter how much paint DDOT puts on the road or flex posts they put up, it continues to happen.

One of the most dangerous things a cyclist has to do is swerving around these cars and trucks. Due to the curb, you have a limited number of options. You risk getting doored by going between the vehicle and the curb. If you go between the car and traffic, you risk getting hit by a passing vehicle.

Instead of higher fines, DC needs to tow cars that use bike lanes as their personal parking spot. If the impound lot is filled with taxis, UPS trucks, and the cars of uber eats drivers every weekend, so be it. The current system of ticketing drivers, especially by mail, does not work. When cars can have $6584 in outstanding fines, adding another $150 to the pile is not an effective deterrent.

Further, if blocking a bike lane leads to the death of a cyclist, the driver who parked the car should be held liable for their death. They were the ones, through negligence, that forced a cyclist into traffic from their lane. Too often, cities shrug when this happens.

Ticket collection

One of the major issues leading to unsafe streets is the lack of ticket reciprocity for automated tickets between Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia. This creates a situation where cars with out-of-state plates can rack up thousands of dollars of tickets without any consequences. Things aren’t much better with DC-tagged cars. Safe Sidewalks DC routinely finds cars with DC plates with similar outrageous amounts of unpaid tickets. DC will boot vehicles with unpaid tickets if DPW comes across them, but it will take years to get through the backlog.

This has created a situation where speed limits are optional if a Metropolitan Police Department officer is not present to write a ticket. It doesn’t matter if DC reduces the speed limit if there is no enforcement. One of the ways to do this is to work out a cross-state agreement to give the speed limits in DC some teeth. Within the district, cars with more than $1000 of tickets should be towed, not just booted. Slower speeds save lives.

Parting gift

I had too many good pictures of cars blocking bike lanes to use all of them in this post, but this one from Vienna Terrell perfectly shows the struggle of biking in DC. You know for a fact that the driver of this truck either works for the US Secret Service or is closely connected to them. They would never let a rando block a lane around the White House. While I tried to be hopeful, it is easy to be cynical.

Cycling density

Last week’s post on cycling in Washington, DC was my most read post ever. Thank you to all who read, shared, critiqued, or subscribed because of it. The response from yinz was humbling. One of the common criticisms of my analysis on Twitter and Reddit was that all I was doing was showing where people bike and not where the highest risk is, à la XKCD 1137. At first blush, that is a reasonable thing to say. However, I do not think the data agrees.

Strava is an excellent resource for cyclists to connect and share rides. Their data science folks are extremely permissive as to how they share the data they collect. One of the products they release is a heatmap where people bike, run, ski, and swim. The map is great because it allows cyclists to choose routes more effectively, but it also has privacy risks.

It is the best product I can think of to gauge where people bike in DC the most. I plotted the locations of crashes that resulted in death or serious injury over Strava’s heat map. The resulting map can be seen below.

Many people cycle through the high-risk areas I identified last week. However, they are not the areas brightest on Strava’s map. Michigan Ave NE and NW is a high cycling traffic street but only has a single serious crash. Similarly, The National Mall and surrounding streets have many recorded rides but a low proportion of crashes that result in death or serious injury. There is something different about the area between G St NW and Columbia Rd NW. Those roads have many crashes, yet they are not overwhelmingly busy with cyclists.

Bruce Faulconer

Ted Gioia dropped a substack piece last week that put Wikipedia’s deletions into the conversation. In it, Gioia repeats several common misconceptions about deletion on Wikipedia that I addressed back in May, including: “you earn an article” and “Wikipedia should make up for the media not covering a topic.” Even more problematic, Gioia’s article skips over a crucial part of why the deletion discussion started.

The article on Bruce Falconer was started on 17 January 2006 by Marekso. Even back in 2006, there were worries that Falconer may not meet the inclusion requirements for Wikipedia. Over the past 16 years, the article grew and would have sat undisturbed like many long-standing articles that might be deleted if created today.

However, on 8 July, an account claiming to be Falconer edited his biography. That account was blocked, and a new account claiming to be Falconer went back to editing the article in a promotional manner. This conflict of interest editing caught the eye of Wikipedians, and the article was nominated for deletion a few days later. From 8 July to 16 July, Falconer recruited or used nine accounts to edit his biography or sway the outcome of the deletion discussion. On 19 July, the deletion discussion was closed as a redirect. If Falconer had never edited his biography, none of this would have happened.

A few days later, Dr. Blofeld rewrote the article on Falconer. I think the sourcing is a bit thin and that Dr. Blofeld used a bunch of passing mentions of Falconer to write it. Like most people on the cusp of notability, Falconer will not receive comprehensive media coverage until his obituary is released. This is one of the most frustrating things about writing Wikipedia articles.

In general, I find Gioia’s article to be a tad histrionic. In particular, his repeated use of the word “troll” to describe Wikipedia editors who even considered removing Falconer’s article. Wikipedia is not a venue for promoting people. Further, the subjects of articles have no control over how they are covered. If you would like either of those things, use your website.

Upcoming Wikipedia main page content

This month, I will have two of my article featured on the main page of Wikipedia

• 9 August — Saint Vincent Beer

• 19 August — mewithoutYou discography

Memories are good, but they are hard to extrapolate from. Having a near miss last month in a neighborhood may be a sign of the attitude people have to cyclists, but it also may just be a coincidence. Luckily, we have data to draw conclusions from. The Metropolitan Police Department and the DDOT Traffic Safety Division maintains a dataset of all crashes within their jurisdiction.1 It was last updated in December of 2021, and there are plenty of caveats, but it is a good jumping-off point.

Vehicle-bike collisions

First, I was interested to see the frequency and density of crashes2 involving at least one bicycle3 and automobile. To keep things reasonable, I decided to look at the last decade reported by DC, from 2011 to 2021. About 4,600 collisions of the type I am interested in were reported in the time frame. Since they are included in the database, they must be severe enough that MPD or DDOT was informed. I have no idea what proportion of crashes go unreported.

Looking at the dots, you can see a general picture of where collisions happen. However, the stacking of dots by ArcMap sometimes leads to poor conclusions. To figure out what areas of the city have the highest density of automobile-on-bike collisions, I ran the points through QGIS’s kernel density tool.4 The darker the red, the more crashes.

There are two main areas of high collisions: in Georgetown (ANC District 2E) along M St NW and a large zone up the center of the city from ANC District 1A to 2C. M St NW makes sense to me; it was never fun to bike. The Columbia Heights-U Street-Logan Circle area blew me away. One of my assumptions was that tourists were often getting into minor crashes. The zone goes far enough north that the burden has to be carried by Washingtonians. After living on the Maryland side of the DC line in Friendship Heights, I would have thought it would be worse off. Navy Yard is also much better than I expected based on my workout rides.

Serious crashes

The dataset reports the injury severity of any cyclists involved. In the eyes of the Metropolitan Police Department and the DDOT Traffic Safety Division, 394 cyclists suffered significant injuries from a collision, while 13 died.5 I do not know how serious injuries need to be for them to qualify as major, so take this with a grain of salt. I was going to show only the fatal crashes, but I thought it was too rare of an event to extrapolate conclusions from.

The density of serious crashes follows the general contours of all crashes. However, this data shows a few definite “hot spots.” Where ANC Districts 2B, 2F, and 2C meet has the highest density of severe collisions of anywhere in the district. Additionally, where ANC Districts 2G and 6E meet has a high number of serious crashes as well as 1A.

I have no solutions, and I understand that this does not identify unsafe individual roads. Still, I hope this helps cyclists in DC better utilize their energy to advocate for improved bike infrastructure.

It’s the windows

The reason for the lack of uptake of AC in Europe has been discussed repeatedly as the heatwave has progressed. However, I do not find any of the popular arguments on Twitter to be satisfying. The German state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, explained it in terms of moral superiority: “[Germans] say it is a waste of power, money, and can make you sick.” Far-right commentator Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry chalked it up to Europe being poorer than the United States. The New York Times and Washington Post claimed that it was climate-related. The climate argument makes a lot of sense to me. Yesterday, the heat broke, and I wore long sleeves. The rest of the arguments do not, and I think something else is at play: Northern Europe’s architecture makes retrofitting AC difficult.

When I lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I lived in a house from the 1800s. Due to its age, there was steam heat from an oil boiler and no central AC. To make due, I had window AC units in two rooms. This is the story of pre-AC buildings all over the United States; window units are a ubiquitous way to add AC to older buildings.

The problem is that window units are impossible to install in most homes in Denmark due to the type of windows found in most homes. America primarily uses sash windows that create a place for a window AC unit to sit and hold it in place. In Denmark, most houses use casement windows that swing out. My experience so far is that casement windows are exceptionally good at catching the breeze. My house is built to catch the wind on one of the lower floors to push hot air out of the skylight. The downside of this strategy is that there is nowhere to put a window unit.

If you want AC, you must settle for a portable unit like ours. The problem with portable units is that they are louder, take up more space, and are less efficient than window units. The exhaust hose is warm and radiates heat back into the room. If you can not cut a hole in one of the windows, you are left using a thin nylon sheet that you attach to the window with velcro to try to create an opening for the hot air. As you may imagine, this system is only so effective at separating the cool room from the hot outdoors.

Why we have AC

With all those problems, why did we spring for an AC unit? For me, the AC unit is a dehumidifier that sometimes puts out cold air. On a typical day, we water our plants with 3 to 5 gallons of water from the AC unit that drains into the blue bucket.

The reduction in humidity makes a big difference. As every dad in America will tell you, the humidity, not the heat, will get you. Evaporative cooling, such as sweating, works less and less efficiently as the humidity increases. That creates the uncomfortable feeling of sticking to your sheets at night. We also noticed that the price difference between a dehumidifier and a portable AC unit was negligible. So far this year, there have been about five days where it felt like we needed AC. The rest of the time, it is a fan and dehumidifier.

The other reason that we decided to get an AC unit is insects. For as much as Danish homes are built to cool naturally with the wind, screens to keep bugs out are not standard. I have a strong feeling this has to do with malaria’s disappearance in Denmark by 1900, but it could also be the long summer days mean there is, traditionally, very little reason to be awake while it is dark. As the earth warms and living patterns have changed, those assumptions are no longer valid. There is a high risk of West Nile being introduced to Denmark and a lower risk of other non-malaria mosquito-transmitted illnesses. Trying to stay in touch with friends and family in the US means late phone and video calls. This spring and early summer, we discovered that leaving our windows open results in mosquito bites and a regular stream of moths getting lost in our house. Our AC unit allows us to close our windows at night to keep out insects but stay cool.

Line of Actual Control

Abortion is a Spatial Issue

Highlights from today’s post: The spatial constraints of abortion access in the US Midwest Cartography from an actual cartographer Before we get into today’s post, do you need to convert geo coordinates into useful location information? This week's edition is sponsored by…

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4 years ago · RC

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization changed everything. A close to 50-year-long status quo for abortion was overturned, and it threw reproductive rights into chaos. The South, by and large, has had full bans or bans after 6 weeks come into effect due to existing trigger laws. Those restrictions have been stayed by the courts in Louisiana, Georgia, and Kentucky. North Carolina and Florida may be the only states south of Virginia and east of New Mexico with abortion after 7 weeks in the next month or two.

The Midwest, on the other hand, is much more varied. Three states have either banned abortion or restricted it to the first 6 weeks: Ohio (6 weeks), South Dakota (ban), and Missouri (ban). Wisconsin has no providers due to an 1800s law. Bans or 6 weeks restrictions have been blocked by the courts in Michigan (ban), Iowa (6 weeks), and North Dakota (6 weeks).

With voters in Kansas going to the polls next month to decide the fate of abortion in their state, Line of Actual Control approached me to map access to abortion in the Midwest. After some back and forth, I made a map series for them. They look good, and I think they show the state of abortion access particularly well.

Access

The GIF below shows access to abortion at up to 6, 11, 15, and 20 weeks as of 14 July 2022. The locations of providers and time frame that they offer abortions were scraped from Abortion Finder and other sources. They were then used to create 1 and 2-hour driving areas to show where there is and is not access to in-person abortion services. While telehealth exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person access continues to be important because medical abortions can only happen within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.

At 6 weeks, women in large most of Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota are more than 2 hours from an in-person abortion.1 Other areas with coverage gaps include along the Ohio River in Ohio and Illinois as well as rural parts of Minnesota.

Abortions become less accessible the later in a pregnancy a woman is. At about 20 weeks, a woman desiring an abortion has to go to one of ten cities. These cities are oftentimes very far from home and require a large commitment of time and money to end a pregnancy.

Future

Forecasting the future is difficult. However, it seems that all of the states in the Midwest except for Illinois and Minnesota are poised to heavily restrict abortion.2 There is a chance that the courts will rule that Michigan’s pre-Roe law banning abortion is enforceable, but signatures have already been collected to add a right to an abortion to the state constitution. I think it is more possible than not that the ballot initiative will pass. That would lead to the Midwest looking something like this.

This is a world with large stretches of the Midwest without access to abortion. Women will need to travel long distances to seek out care. I think many places that will preserve access to abortion are major airline hubs: Chicago, Minneapolis-St Paul, Denver, and Detroit. That probably means that flights to one of these hubs would be a crucial way to access abortion care. The gray dots in the map below are the airports in states that may ban abortion with a 2-hour, or less, year-round flight to one of those hubs.

Yes, being able to drop $500 to fly to get an abortion with little to no notice is a very privileged position. But, something that strikes me looking at this map is the large areas where women would need to travel a large distance by car to get to one of these airports. Western Kansas, for example, is more than three hours by car to Denver and roughly 2 hours to the nearest airport. Central South Dakota is another area of extremely limited access.

While this may come to fruition, the story of abortion access in the Midwest is yet to be written. Now more than ever, state and local elections are important. The lawmakers who are elected this cycle will have the opportunity to shape access to healthcare for years to come. If you live in Kansas, vote on the constitutional amendment next month. Most states elect their state legislature in November. Do not sit this one out!

Behind the Curtain

As a geographer, when I say “Yeah, I can do that” when discussing a big project, it is a sign of storms to come. This map series was one of those cases. In March of 2021, I made a map exploring how long it takes to travel from the White House to locations within the core of the DC Metropolitan Area. I naïvely thought that this would be a straightforward scale-up of that work. Unfortunately, that was nowhere near the case.

A small number of counties in a compact area have a limited number of road segments. I used everything in the OpenStreetMap database for that work, so I tried that on this project. Bad move. I quickly crashed QGIS on my computer due to a lack of resources and moved to AWS. At my peak, I was using close to 200 GB of memory and overloading what the network analysis tools in QGIS could do. Thank you Jeff Bezos for creating a server company that fronts as a digital retailer!

So, I had a scale down. I tried removing the service, unknown, and undefined roads. That was still too big. In the end, I had to remove all of the residential streets and pair back to just the green lines shown on the map below.

In other ways, I was able to apply lessons learned from last year’s work. To combat the over-estimation of distance traveled, I set 1 hour to be 45 minutes within the algorithm. The assumptions that it makes — no stop signs/lights, no traffic, and always traveling exactly at the speed limit — were unrealistic. Based on my experience, 45 minutes of algorithm time produced distances comparable to 1 hour.

Copenhagen has gone all out for the Grand Départ. It feels like every third building in the city center has yellow banners up vying for a share of the cheap global advertising from being featured on the broadcast. In some places, there are small yellow, polka dotted, green, and white flags above the street. Trees along the streets are covered in yellow fabric. From what I have seen, tomorrow will be magical.

Email filtering has been a long-term bee in the bonnet of elected officials. At one of the “Big Tech” hearings, congressmen and women asked Google about this issue. Emails going to spam is a big deal for political campaigns because emails are one of the significant ways they connect with supporters and turn them into donors. In spam, they are not read, and that process can not happen.

Bias?

McCarthy points to a pre-pub article by Hassan Iqbal et al. to prove that Google is biased. The authors looked at how political emails were filtered during the 2020 election to support that this is due to political bias and not people hating campaign emails. They then used ten covariates to try to control for cone characteristics. Here are the first two findings from the discussion section.

That sounds like bad news bears for Google. However, in the discussion section, the authors go on to temper these findings. They suggest that users may tag more republican campaign emails as spam compared to ones from democrats. One of the authors has pointed out that the problem goes away when you train gmail’s spam algorithm to your usage.

I think the authors are missing something: Trump’s emails look like spam, and republicans have been copying his tactics. Compare these two emails that were sent today:

One thing you can’t get away from when looking at emails from Donald Trump is how much they remind you of the viagra spam you received in 2005 to your AOL email. The capitalizations, high-pressure sales tactics, and font changes bring me back to my childhood. On the other hand, the DNC email, which is trying to do the same things as the Trump one, looks much less like spam of days gone by. Does it surprise you that an AI trained on old spam emails would think one of these emails is spam?

Problem bill

This bill is a solution in search of a problem. While Gmail and Outlook are the titans of corporate email, consumers and companies have various other options. If someone is willing to pay, the potential service providers increase exponentially. I would never recommend it, but anyone can set up an email server. All you need is a domain name and a computer. Unlike social media, switching costs are near zero. I have many email addresses that forward their contents to another email address without doing any filtering.

This bill, if enacted, will make spam worse for internet users. There are a few vectors that I can see this happening on. The main one is through spammers watching domain registration expiration dates. For all practical purposes, companies and individuals rent domain names. If someone does not renew the lease, it goes back to the open market. It would behoove spammers to take advantage of this and scoop up domains that could be on Google’s list of campaigns to see if there is a lag in the system.

Once you start getting campaign emails, it is almost impossible to stop. Worse, campaigns routinely share email lists. Sure, I may have donated to someone the last cycle, but that does not mean I want to contribute to a candidate in another state this cycle. I take issue with politicians claiming that I opted into this system. If regulations were truly consumer-first, we would ban the trading and selling of email lists, restrict how many emails begging for money a campaign can send per day, and make it much easier to unsubscribe. Instead, the worry is that I am not getting enough useless emails from political campaigns.

The space between Russia’s satellite state of Belarus and Kaliningrad is known as the Suwałki Gap. It is where NATO planners have long expected intense fighting if it ever had to go to war with Russia. The “blockade” has ignited worries about potential future warfare here. I don’t have a take, I just thought that it was worthwhile to show where this is because you have probably never heard of it before this week.

A guide to the Arbitration Committee

I worked this weekend on an essay for Wikipedia as a guide of sorts for parties in Arbitration Committee cases. It is extreme insider baseball, but one of the things that I have seen over the past decade is people digging themselves into holes due to what they think the Arbitration Committee works. In fact, committee members are often looking for the exact opposite thing.

Missing middle housing

About a month ago, my friend, Luca Gattoni-Celli, released an article in GGWash about building more missing middle housing in Arlington, VA. Last week, he and the rest of the Northern Virginia YIMBYs appeared at the Arlington County Board meeting in favor of a proposed policy to do just that. If you are interested in building a wider variety of homes in Arlington, join NoVA YIMBYs!

Greater Bethesda

Maryland Should Build a Cross-Bay Bus Rapid Transit System

With Governor Hogan announcing funding for the Tier 2 study of a new Chesapeake Bridge span, debates about moving people efficiently seem to be missing. The State of Maryland should consider building out a cross-bay Bus Rapid Transit system to help get cars off the road and make burgeoning cities on the Eastern Shore wealthier. The system should have 2 …

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Ron

In his article, Ron makes a sound case for cross-bay and intra-shore transit. I think he is correct in his identification that bus rapid transit (BRT), not rail, is the best option for the shore. As nice as rail is, it has too many hangups that would prevent it from actually getting built. The WMATA Silver Line extension is still not open after four years of delays.

An improved alignment proposal

The only thing that I disagree with Ron on is the map that he proposed. To me, a good BRT alignment for the Eastern Shore needs to do three things:

1. Complement, not replace, existing transit

2. Connect urbanites to the Maryland and Delaware beaches

3. Increase intra-shore connectivity

Ron’s alignment is a good starting point, but it over-emphasizes 2 as a way of solving the Bay Bridge dilemma and it is much too lower-shore focused. Instead, I would propose this map as a more balanced way of providing transit options to the shore.

I would have four bus rapid transit lines. Orange from New Carrollton, MD to Lewes, DE extending WMATA’s Orange Line and MTA’s Purple Line to the beaches and has a direct transfer to MARC’s Penn Line as well as Amtrak. Green from Perryville, MD to Salisbury, MD extending MARC’s Penn Line to the beaches. Purple from Newark, DE to Ocean City, MD extending SEPTA’s Wilmington/Newark Line to the beaches. Finally, silver from Newark, DE to Salisbury, MD connecting the Maryland’s Eastern Shore together.

This would give residents of Washington, DC; Baltimore, MD; and Philadelphia, PA access to the beach without owning or renting a car. You would just need to take your regional rail or transit network to the end of the line and then transfer to a bus. Residents of Sailsbury and the beaches would have access to all three metro areas without having to change busses.

There are two major downsides to my map. First, half of my proposal is in Delaware. WMATA is a trash fire partly due to the cross-border nature of its transit system. There is good reason for policymakers in Maryland and Delaware to be skeptical of another transit system like it. Second, MARC connects to Baltimore, but I would not call it part of Baltimore’s public transit system. The green line may have to be extended into Baltimore City or Baltimore County to make it work. With these in mind, I think this is a more workable version of a great idea.

At this point, your alarm bells should be going off. The three data points could easily be cherry-picked to prove a point. Luckily, Tabarrok linked to the State Department’s wait time estimates for embassies and consulates. After a small amount of manual scraping, I was able to pull together the wait times for each country in Africa.

With that data, I made a map. Some embassies such as Juba, South Sudan and Maseru, Lesotho report that they are not currently doing visa interviews. The US does not have a consular presence in Somalia and Libya. In both cases, those countries are in gray.

Looking at the data, there is a wide range of wait times for interviews. The longest is in Accra, Ghana at 983 days; the shortest is 3 days in Bujumbura, Burundi. The median wait time is 95 days. A long time, but nowhere near the several years that Tabarrok pointed to.

There seems to be a loose association between the population of a country and the wait time for a visitor visa, but quite a few countries dramatically fall outside of the trend. Nairobi’s quoted nearly 2-year wait time is an outlier compared to the rest of Africa and it bucks the population-based trend.

I watch a lot of TikToks because it is all dopamine. The moment you no longer want to see videos of YIMBYs, it switches to fashion. The algorithm is deft at giving you what you want when you want it. Using the app is probably not the best for someone’s neural chemistry, but your mileage may vary. The video below, by bmacs001, sparked some interesting thoughts after it appeared on my for you. It is only 45 seconds, but it is worth a watch. I reuploaded it to YouTube because the TikTok embeds are not great.

Jake Orlowitz founded the Wikipedia Library in 2011 with the central idea of giving Wikipedians access to sources that only large institutional libraries have access to. At the time, Wikipedia had an informal resource exchange network where people with access to sources would email PDFs to users who needed them. By mid-2012, three companies — JSTOR, High Beam, and Credo — donated a fixed number of accounts. Today, The Wikipedia Library gives access to 99 sources through a mixture of donations and reduced-price purchases.

It is easy to think of the donations of sources as altruistic, but it leads to things in a publisher’s best interest. It is well known that open access papers get cited more often than paywalled ones due to ease of access. Through this effect, Wikipedia articles are more often built on accessible sources rather than the best sources. The way this changes future uses of a source is muddy. A 2013 paper found that the likelihood of citing a source did not increase after its inclusion, but they only looked at a limited number of fields.

A 2016 paper proposed that Wikipedia citations can be used as a measure of impact factor. In 2021, another group of researchers suggested something similar after looking at the use of psychology journals on Wikipedia. Your journal offerings slip in rankings compared to your rivals may decrease future sales when libraries make their yearly round difficult decisions of which very expensive databases to subscribe to.

It only takes 500 edits over 6 months to get access to the Wikipedia Library and then 10 edits each month to maintain access. I use my JSTOR and Newspapers.com subscriptions regularly for projects both on and off Wikipedia. So much useful information is hidden behind paywalls, and it can be yours for a small amount of your time.

Like most currencies, the krone is released in various denominations of coins and bills. The coins range in value from half a krone to 20 kroner and the bills range from 50 kroner to 1000 kroner. The six coins are pictured below in order from smallest to largest.

Since the introduction of the Euro in 1999, the krone has been narrowly pegged to it. Currently, one Euro is about 7.46 kroner. As the Euro has weakened over the past year compared to the dollar, so has the krone. This is the current rough value of each of the coins and bills.

• 0.5 DKK ≈ $0.07

• 1 DKK ≈ $0.15

• 2 DKK ≈ $0.30

• 5 DKK ≈ $0.75

• 10 DKK ≈ $1.50

• 20 DKK ≈ $3.00

• 50 DKK ≈ $7.00

• 100 DKK ≈ $14.00

• 200 DKK ≈ $29.00

• 500 DKK ≈ $72.00

• 1000 DKK ≈ $143.00

In my time here, I have found that credit/debit cards and MobilePay are more common than using cash. Danes love digital payment methods, but I have never experienced cash being turned away. Unless you have long-term immigration status here, you won’t have access to MobilePay; I can’t get access to it and I am here for three years. But, your card should work here and will be accepted almost everywhere. Smaller stores may be cash or MobilePay only, so it is worth carrying some cash on you.

Hopeium or Hopium is the reliance on hope in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary past the point of delusion. The term originated in a 2010 ZeroHedge post but gained popularity during the 2020 presidential election. It warps your ability to perceive what is going on by substituting reality for what someone wants to see.

Left on left criticism isn’t sinking Democrats: reality is

The Neoliberal Project posted a relatively benign tweet criticizing the While House’s messaging around the deficit on Sunday. It would have passed without notice if Jeff Bezos did not quote tweet it adding on his thoughts about inflation. Suddenly all hell broke loose. The overly on Twitter amateur commentariat found issue with the project publically criticizing the administration. Apparently, all left-of-center groups need to be rubber stamp bodies for the party or risk upsetting the apple cart during the midterms.

The problem is that this is completely asinine. No amount of intra-left criticism is what is sinking Democrats; all indicators suggest that a Red Wave is coming. The President’s political party tends to not do well in the midterms. The United States has been experiencing the highest year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index since the 1890s. Real wages are shrinking. Gas prices sit at about $4.60 per gallon. Joe Biden’s approval rating sits around where Trump’s was four years ago. Republicans are ahead by 2.5 points on a generic ballot.

Big tent or social change

Another way that hopium rears its head is through the use of the “but January 6th”, “but Trump,” or “but theocracy” fallacy. These attempt to position the GOP as the party of anti-democratic theocrats and the democrats as the only thing holding them back. There is an element of truth to this, but it doesn’t matter.

Democrats had a choice on 9 November 2016, 7 January 2021, and 4 May 2022 to become a big tent coalition in opposition to the GOP. This party would span from Bernie to Romney, rebuilding the Roosevelt coalition of the 1930s. Instead, Democrats choose to continue to go to the left of the median American on social issues. Liz Cheney, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins still have Rs next to their names. Democrats continue with their plan to try to force Manchin and Sinema to vote for a progressive wishlist instead of building a bill that they will vote for. Democrats need to live with that choice.

Reject Hopeium, Embrace Reality

Trump’s continued existence, the insurrection, and the demise of Roe v. Wade will not be deus ex machina events that will save the party from a reversion to the mean or the economic fundamentals. To deny that things look dire for Democrats is malpractice. Wanting your “side” to win does not will it into existence. Democratic political hobbyists refusing to see this are more delusional today than they were in 2016 when they thought HRC would waltz past Trump. Reject Hopeium, Embrace Reality.

Notability is about what someone has done.

Wikipedia uses the term “notability” when it should use the phrase “inclusion criteria,” which spawns many problems. Notability wounds the subject's ego of deleted biographies because it feels like we are dismissing that person’s accomplishments. It also gives the public the wrong idea of what the Wikipedia Community cares about the curricula vitæ of potential biography subjects.

Instead, Wikipedia makes inclusion decisions involve determining if there is significant coverage in independent and reliable secondary sources about a subject. We call this the General Notability Guideline (GNG). In addition to the GNG, there are subject-specific notability guidelines (SNG) that the community uses as a shortcut to determining if those secondary sources exist. After a fruitless comprehensive search for sources, articles that meet an SNG may be deleted if the subject does not meet the GNG.

For example, I wrote the biography of a former president of my alma mater, Daniel Z. Gibson. The citations are below:

Of the eight citations, there are three obituaries: Washington Post, Morning News, and Baltimore Sun. These would count for notability because they were published by reliable sources unconnected from the subject and are entirely about Gibson. The 1950 Washington Post article about Gibson becoming president would also count in a potential deletion discussion. However, the 1951 Washington Post article would not matter because the coverage of Gibson is only passing in nature. The coverage in Dumschott is much more of a toss-up. The book is reliable, but Gibson’s former employer, Washington College, released it.

This analysis is done at all deletion discussions, no matter the article's topic. Albums, biographies, works of art, companies, organizations, etc., all need to meet this burden. Without enough coverage, an article may be deleted if independent and reliable secondary sources can not be found.

Wikipedia is the Compendium of All Knowledge.

The public believes that Wikipedia is the compendium of all human knowledge, and we delete nothing. While some people would like that to happen, theTexfiles guy being the most vocal and toxic about it, it is not the goal of Wikipedia. We constantly delete articles.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. That means we are a tertiary source. To write a tertiary source, we need secondary sources about a topic to cite. As a community, we have decided that those sources need to be reliable. That means no blogs or other self-published sources. If that can not be done for a topic, we consider it to be not notable (covered above) and is deleted.

Below is a simplified flow chart of how deletion works on Wikipedia. An article can enter at CSD, PROD, or AfD and follow the arrows. Deletion is not a random event on Wikipedia. Instead, it is governed by a system that works slowly and deliberatively.

If any article meets one of the speedy deletion criteria, it can be deleted at any time by an administrator. Suppose an article is not covered under one of those strict criteria. In that case, the tag can either be removed (and the article is kept) or converted into a candidate for proposed deletion. At any time over the next seven days, anyone can object to that article being deleted. If someone disagrees with that objection, they can start a discussion at Articles for Deletion. That discussion lasts for at least seven days and ends when the Wikipedia community comes to a consensus to delete or keep the article.

You want a biography.

I need to get this one out of the way. I once had dinner with a friend from college’s parents, who are important people in the world of DC think tanks. When my friend told them that I am a Wikipedia administrator, the first question I received was how they could get a biography on Wikipedia. The sad truth is, you don’t want a Wikipedia biography while you are alive.

You have no control over your Wikipedia biography. You can kindly suggest things on the talk page, but the editors working on your bio are not bound to listen to you. If you try to edit it directly without disclosing your conflict of interest, your edits will probably get reversed, and your account may be blocked from editing. Conflict of interest editing sticks out to Wikipedia editors.

Wikipedia works on a model of verifiability, not truth. This is a headache for the subjects of biographies. Even if the New York Times got something wrong, and you know they got it wrong, removing that information without another source contradicting or debunking it is nearly impossible. Due to a process called citogenesis, incorrect facts on Wikipedia have a terrible habit of being “sticky” as future journalists, under time pressure, repeat information they find on Wikipedia without talking to you.

Additionally, biographies of non-celebrities have a terrible habit of being a “wall of shame” of a person’s failures. Due to how news works, failures and other negative events receive more coverage than successes. Biography subjects who find themselves in scandal or legal trouble, find that information about it is quickly added to their bio. Due to the model of verifiability, that information will be impossible to remove. The events happened, and there was probably more press coverage about it than all of the successes so far in that person’s life.

By deleting a person’s biography, the Wikipedia Community gives the subject the extraordinary gift of having the top-ranked Google result for their name to be a webpage that they have control over. Newspapers and journalists have shame and may retract stories; Wikipedia is a collective and feels nothing.

Wikipedia exists to provide free advertising.

Due to the lack of control you have over your biography, Wikipedia is dreadful advertising for you or your products. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view. Further, we are an encyclopedia and not the default link on the internet. If you want to advertise yourself, write a blog post or Tweet.

The job of Wikipedia is to fix systemic bias in the media.

Wikipedia is based on secondary sources. The best thing that the public can do to fix systemic bias problems on Wikipedia is to pressure journalists and groups they are part of to write more about a more comprehensive array of living people. I used Daniel Z. Gibson as an example of notability above. The sad thing is he received enough coverage for a Wikipedia biography on the day after his death. This is true of most people. Obituaries are a vital source of information about people and are oftentimes the only article where someone’s life is covered.

No notability until death does not need to be the case. If fields do a better job at covering the lives of the people who work in them, we can write a better selection of biographies on Wikipedia.