(via Tonight: Help save the waterfront | Seattle Bike Blog)

Hey, it looks like the present-day Embarcadero in San Francisco. Can we get palm trees too?

curiositycounts:

This Chart Is a Lonely Hunter: The Narrative Eros of the Infographic – an excellent, thorough meditation on the history, future, and cultural footprint of infographics.

2012, the year useless infographics died.

j-p-g:

Toden Arakawa Tram Line | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Daily coffee. (Taken with instagram)

All my plants have died except this one. I am the worst plant-keeper. The tiny cactus is thriving! (Taken with instagram)

The greatest country.

longreads:

An inside look at the operational challenges facing United and Continental as they merge—from the union negotiations to the choice of in-flight coffee:

On July 1 the new United introduced its new coffee. Fliers on the ‘legacy United’ fleet, accustomed to Starbucks, let out a collective yowl of protest. Pineau-Boddison had expected some resistance—Starbucks, after all, is a popular brand—but this was something else. Flight attendants reported a barrage of complaints. Pineau-Boddison received angry e-mails from customers, as did Smisek. The coffee, fliers complained, was watery.

The beverage committee launched an inquiry. The coffee itself, they discovered, was only part of the problem. Airplane coffee is made from small, premeasured ‘pillow packs’ that sit in a brew basket drawer at the top of the galley coffee machine. When the drawer is closed, boiling water flows through the pillow into the pot below. The old United brew baskets, the committee discovered, sit a quarter of an inch lower than Continental’s, leaving a space for water to leak around the pillow pack.

“Making the World’s Largest Airline Fly.” — Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Ask the Pilot.” Patrick Smith, Salon, May 15, 2009

(via longreads)

These Mammals Pack a Toxic Punch - NYTimes.com

Those hairs, when observed under a scanning electron microscope, look very different from ordinary fur, Dr. Vollrath said. Each outer shaft is stiff and full of holes — like a dead cactus, he said — and inside are a series of long, fluffy microfibers. The researchers showed that the applied toxin seeps through the outer holes of the hairs and is wicked up and stored by the fibers, lending the rat twinned flank strips of doom.