2026-07-13
post/822070769783914496
mwew:
london in bleak mode
Bastion House, or 140 London Wall, due to be demolished sooner rather than later. I’d be more mournful if the road’s 1960s masterplan had survived more than the 25 years it managed, but I still like this last remnant of the original designs.
2026-06-20
post/819990251855560704
Select’s Images pullout from July 1993.
Subjects and photographer credits can be found in both the front page and the alt text.
2026-06-19
post/819899942310182912
Naval Officer Housing, Janet Delaney, from the project Treasure Island (although, pedantically, this is on the adjoining Yerba Buena Island).
post/819899802589495296
2026-06-17
post/819710908553166848
Select’s Images pullout from November 1994.
Subjects and photographer credits can be found in both the front page and the alt text.
2026-06-16
post/819604132305469440
Select’s Images pullout from June 1993.
Subjects and photographer credits can be found in both the front page and the alt text.
2026-06-12
post/819260650640605184
A collection of frames from Woldgate Woods, Winter, 2010, by David Hockney.
I saw this and some of the related works at the Hockney retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco over a decade ago, and I still think of them fondly. These videos combine moving image and the multiple viewpoints of his photographic joiners, and combined with the presentation - those are nine 55" screens, so the combined image is over two metres tall and three and a half wide - they were unsurprisingly captivating.
nyc + 25 + sagittarius
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David Hockney, Skater (New York), 1982 for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics
(bremser gönderdi)
2026-06-05
post/818623786558586880
A couple of months ago, I wondered: what was the first plane I flew internationally in?
It’s an easier question to answer for me than for some; I didn’t take that flight until I was 26. On the other hand, it’s long enough ago that it predates pretty much all of the flight tracking websites - and anyway, they typically charge for anything much older than a week. It also predates my use of Gmail, and I never did get around to importing my archive.
However, the US government - the DOT and more specifically the Bureau of Transportation Statistics - make available data on both international and domestic flight segments since 1990. It’s pipe delimited, which is a bit weird, but nothing some database utilities couldn’t handle, and so I rapidly had my candidate: Air India, which flew daily from Heathrow to New York (courtesy of what was called the “fifth freedom” - although it was between two countries that regulated air traffic heavily, it originated in India (either Delhi or Mumbai, apparently)). So, an Air India 747-400. Probably.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. All of a sudden I had a database waiting to be explored. What planes flew LHR to JFK in 2001? What US destinations could you reach from Heathrow, or where could you fly from San Francisco? When exactly did Pan Am vanish, or TWA? And when did 747s stop ruling the skies?
Exposing the database - along with some support tables to demystify the carrier acronyms and non-standard government-assigned aircraft type IDs - was pretty easy thanks to Datasette, Simon Willison’s project to make exploring data a bit more approachable. To answer just one of the questions above - 747s were common on LHR-JFK, but there were also plenty of 767s, a smattering of DC-10s and even Lockheed L-1011 tri-jets, and of course, Concorde.
For the others, I ended up with a bunch of saved queries. These let me pick from the top US airports (sorted by passenger, seats, departures, or freight); view the destinations from each, over time; view details of a flight pair (like San Francisco to Heathrow); and then look in more detail at just that one route for a year.
If you’re interested in exploring this stuff yourself, I’ve thrown up a quick repo on GitHub. It’ll install datasette, datasette-plot, and contains instructions on downloading the data to populate the SQLite database (since I didn’t want to upload 497MB). Good luck, and enjoy.
post/818623759684648960
N Train, 1995, by Kazuo Sumida, from his series A Story of the NYC Subway.










































