'They call it stormy Monday,
But Tuesday's just as bad.
Lord and Wednesday's worse,
and Thursday's oh so sad.'
Friday, Saturday and Sunday are gnarly on the freeways, too. #transportation #transit
And here's the full story (nearly undiscoverable on KQED's site) of the 1903 journey that may count as the United States' first cross-country road trip: www.kqed.org/liveblog/bay...
After audio of two pilots communicating in cat speak was shared widely online, the FAA said that it was investigating the interaction, and that pilots were banned from “nonessential communication” below a certain altitude.
"There is no widely available public tool comparable to the Wayback Machine, and if it continues to lose access to major news sources, its preservation efforts could erode to the point where early digital records of history become much harder to access, or are even lost altogether. "
Join me for a live virtual office hour on Tue Mar 10 at 3pm PT to discuss potential for a genuinely extreme, and potentially even historic, March heatwave in American Southwest (including CA) later this month. I'll talk dynamics, impacts & implications.
Alexander Butterfield, who disclosed the existence of Nixon’s secret White House taping system, blowing the cover on the Watergate conspiracy and sealing the fate of the only American president to resign from office, dies at 99. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/u...
Curious about the history of the San Francisco Bay Area's now defunct electric streetcar system?
Check out this deep dive by @danbrekke.bsky.social, where I try to dispel the conspiracy theory about their demise:
www.kqed.org/news/12073762
In the Transbay Tube, no one can hear you scream (the Chronicle revisits a 2010 investigation on why @bart.gov is so damned loud). #transit
www.sfchronicle.com/projects/202...
"Christy Wegener, the executive director of the Livermore Amador Valley Transit Authority, said that at the current rate, with about 7,000 to 8,000 accounts upgraded per day, it would take over three years to fully transition all accounts to next-generation Clipper."
“Judge Cannon's decision to permanently block the release of this extraordinarily significant report is impossible to square with the First Amendment and the common law"
@bart.gov Train Dispatch Audio
BART Lost all Radio Communication with
Trains in the Transbay Tube
Service Stopped between Embarcadero & West Oakland
February 22, 2026, 4:01 PM @danbrekke.bsky.social
youtu.be/EDzBiPZth9E
"To be treated worse here, at home, than people who had attacked our unit in a war zone, it’s been hard to understand."
Yeah, they're loud, but maybe...respect? 🙌🏼 "We should celebrate them for being successful... Like, they think about how to live with us, we need to think about how to live with them." www.kqed.org/news/1207243... via @kqednews.kqed.org @danbrekke.bsky.social
Police sergeant reported working average of 100 hours a week in 2024, with total compensation north of $800,000 once regular salary and benefits were added in. One question the story doesn’t address: Who in the city administration is responsible for signing off on such an outlandish level of OT?
"Before last week's fatal shooting in Minneapolis, ICE shootings involved moving vehicles at least 19 times & were connected to at least 10 deaths and six injuries. Task forces including ICE agents have shot at least three other US citizens."
'The secrecy has concealed ICE’s transformation into a parallel FBI, a DEA and an independent police force whose mission has crept well past the deportations that media tend to focus on.' #ICE #immigration
“...Most field officers see a clear need for de-escalation. There is genuine fear that indeed ICE’s heavy handedness and the rhetoric from Washington is more creating a condition where the officers’ lives are in danger....” Via @kenklippenstein.bsky.social
Two people have been killed in solo scooter crashes in #Berkeley over the last few weeks.
From NOAA's Climate Prediction Center: 'Major pattern change for the West Coast' after rainy period. #wx #cawx
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has something to say about what the franchise calls itself. #OaklandA's
Here's an excellent explanation of the Postal Service's change in postmark practices and how it will affect the public. 1/2
Impressive: Winds on Christmas morning were violent enough to rip out part of the multi-ton shutter on one of Lick Observatory's telescope domes. Repairs will take months.
(Rainiest October, to be clear...)
This is more than record-book trivial in that long-term station observations like those at Berkeley provide data for understanding climate change. A meteorologist friend has told me this problem goes well beyond Berkeley and that the overall state of consistent record-keeping is a mess.
The current break in the record is the longest, more than four years. Lots of rainfall history is being missed, including October 2021, likely the rainiest in the station's history, and the series of wet Decembers we've had going back to 2021.
I've been told by folks at Cal that part of the problem is outdated equipment it's expensive to replace The campus record goes back to 1886 and is considered continuous since 1893. This isn't the first lapse in record-keeping. One occurred from 1902 thru 1904, another from 1991 thru 1993.
By the way, when it comes time to compute Berkeley's 2001-2030 "normal" rainfall in a few years, much of the record for this decade will be missing. That's because reliable data collection at our official station location on the UC Berkeley campus faltered during 2020 and ceased entirely in 2022.
My total for Dec. 17-Dec. 27 was 6.14 in. That's close to a quarter of Berkeley's "normal" annual rainfall (computed for 1991-2020) of 26.12 in and compares to December's "normal" rainfall of 5.32 in.
