Erica Fischer
@enf.bsky.social
She is awake. She is not in acute distress. She is well-developed and well-groomed. She is not ill-appearing. Behavior is cooperative. Thought content normal.
OMG. The drawings of Frederick Law Olmstead (Central Park, National Zoo, Mountain View Cemetery …) are archived on Flickr. www.flickr.com/photos/olmst...
I had forgotten all about this map of East Bay BART station locations that were under consideration in 1958 flickr.com/photos/walki... felt.com/map/East-Bay...
I’m too old and out of shape to be Walking Every Street, but is it a street?
Single-use flashbulbs! Who would believe now that that was the way it was
Rainbow flag kids (and a few grownups) pride-parading past my door
The trouble with having a topo map tattoo is that then you spend months obsessing about whether it is possible to fix and mask the errors in what is already in your skin, and whether they are worth fixing when no one else notices or cares
Are there any accounts of the initial bringup of any of the 8-bit-era personal computers, like what routines in the ROM were written first, that kind of thing?
“Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple And Fast” The fastest known floating-point printer and parsing algorithms - fixed-width printing, shortest-width printing, and parsing, all in 400 lines of Go. research.swtch.com/fp research.swtch.com/fp-proof
research!rsc: Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple And Fast (Floating Point Formatting, Part 3)
research.swtch.com
Starting to process years of AC Transit data into useful dashboards. Weekly/daily OTP stats: kuanbutts.com/actransit_pe... - Much higher dropped service on weekends - Rush hour delays are widespread, consistent - Delays consistent across routes, impacting reliability as a bridge to BART
Inside of you there are two wolves. This is a race condition that has been fixed and will be resolved in the next nightly build.
How I found Sphere's lost disk operating system, how it connects to Motorola's 6800 development system, and how professional self-hosted development on micros took away one of the things that minis uniquely could do. sphere.computer/news/2026-05...
Sphere News: Finding a Lost DOS in the Desert
Recovering FDOS, Sphere's Disk Operating System.
sphere.computer
New: Signetics CRT font family, based on the bitmap letterforms of the Signetics 2513 character generator, as seen on an analog CRT screen. Mixed-case, style variants and TTF variable axis included. www.fogcitytype.com/signetics-crt
Signetics CRT — Fog City Type
Monospace font family designed with the bitmap letterforms of the Signetics 2513 character ROM, as seen on a cathode ray tube screen. Four styles, boldface versions, and variable TTF.
fogcitytype.com
Suddenly wondering how long until product placement becomes a thing in AI image generation
For twenty years I've been asked about this. Here are my answers, for all to see. ggwash.org/view/102941/...
Frequently asked questions about the missing Georgetown Metro station
Following the 20th anniversary of Zachary Schrag’s The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro, and the 50th anniversary of the first Metrorail service, Schrag offers his best answers ...
ggwash.org
One of the stranger mysteries about the Sphere computers has been their BASIC language. Slow, huge... but oddly powerful. Full details only emerged late, so barely in advance of the book's arrival, I present the wild story of Sphere BASIC: sphere.computer/news/2026-03...
Sphere News: The Secret Minicomputer Inside Your Sphere
Unveiling the extraordinary origins of Sphere's BASIC programming language.
sphere.computer
When a Schmidt dies, we take all the USB cables they accumulated in life, chain them through older and older ports, back to a splitter on my great-grandfather’s telephone jack… and so back through the generations, across the sea. Each grave flickers with power from a waterwheel in the old country.
YES! After a few hours searching, I finally dug up a high-quality scan of the first (known) color choropleth. From haab-digital.klassik-stiftung.de/viewer/fulls... Thanks to @datavisfriendly.bsky.social & @infowetrust.com who helped with the search. #cartography #maps #dataviz
Just started doing new data analysis and I know I keep saying this, but: I really, really don't think people appreciate how much this moral panic was a deliberate and extremely expensive invention.
Jessica Kant@jessdkant.bsky.social · 7mo agoIn 2022 I started tracking changes in how news outlets were describing trans people, and set up a bot to record every article pushed to the Google News index based on a handful of search phrases, including “biological sex” in both the US and UK. The amount in 2023 alone was absolutely staggering.