A memorial walk for Brian Fairbrother, September 2011. Friends used orange paint to mark the turn Brian apparently missed.

Mike Wang was biking home to his family one evening in July 2011 when a man driving an SUV made a quick left turn and killed him on Dexter Ave. It’s impossible to fill a hole in the world the size of Mike Wang, but through all the tears and pain and anger that followed, something truly powerful shifted in hearts across Seattle.

One month later, Brian Fairbrother was biking on a South Lake Union sidewalk marked as a city trail when he apparently missed the turn onto the Fairview Ave N bridge and crashed down a staircase. I have never seen anything as beautiful as the memorial his community of friends held for him, the response of creative people struggling to understand why Brian had to die.

But when young Robert Townsend was killed while biking deliveries in the U District just one month later, Seattle’s grief and pain and anger finally boiled over. It was too much. People shouldn’t die just for trying to get around our city. Whatever our society thinks we’re getting in return for all these deaths isn’t worth the horrible cost.

Not only can we end traffic violence, we realized, we have to.

That’s why the day after initial returns show the Move Seattle levy passing with a solid margin, I’m sitting at my keyboard trying to type this story through a stream of tears. The path from July 2011 to passing a measure that will invest at least $400 million into an unprecedented effort to end traffic violence — the amazing bloom of genuinely grassroots Seattle Neighborhood Greenways groups in all corners of our city, the Road Safety Summit that crafted our city’s first plan to end deaths and serious injuries, the remake of the Bike Master Plan that lays out the path to crafting safe streets for people of all ages and abilities — was paved by the lives of people who did not need to die.

Two people call for care on the roads at the 2011 Safe Streets Social

An average of 16 people die every year on Seattle streets. Compared to other big US cities, that horrible total actually makes Seattle one of the safest.

No city in our nation has ever made a financial commitment to safe streets like this. Seattle is forging into uncharted territory. Over the next nine years, we have the responsibility to lead, to prove to cities around the state and the country that the public health menace of traffic deaths and injuries is preventable.

There will be a lot of time to celebrate this win, to thank all the people who worked so hard to get us to this point. There will be a lot of time to look forward, to guide and watchdog these investments. To keep the city honest and make sure politicians don’t cave when vital road safety changes face pushback from people afraid of change.

A memorial bike ride for Sher Kung took over 2nd Ave September, 2014

But today, I find myself looking backwards to moments like filling 2nd Ave with a sea of people biking in memory of a young mother and attorney named Sher Kung who had already made a huge impact on the world in her work to help overturn Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. We’ll never know what other important legal wins she would have won because someone in a truck turned into her as she biked to work last year.

Memorial walk for the Schulte family, March 2014

Or marching down NE 75th Street in the rain with a huge crowd of people unable to comprehend the devastating scale of loss and pain felt by a family that, in one horrifying moment, two grandparents are killed and a new mother and child are critically injured by a man driving drunk.

A memorial walk for Caleb Shoop, September 2014.

Or shaking Ben Shoop’s hand and listening to him trying to stay strong in the wake of his son Caleb’s death in a Kenmore crosswalk. He’s not asking much, but he just can’t accept that nobody seems to be able to tell him how they are going to stop this from happening to anyone else.

Or witnessing the beautiful struggle of Brandon Blake, a powerfully inspiring man trying to come to terms with his life as a survivor of a traumatic brain injury.

Or the sound forever playing in my head as memorial riders biking past Mike Wang’s wife, daughter and father followed his family’s wishes by calling out, “Wang!” It was a timid cry from dozens of voices choking back tears together.

Ghost bike for Mike Wang, July 2011.

According to a report by our news partners at Phinneywood.com, Ballard author and Jeopardy champ Tom Nissley recently purchased local independent book store Santoro’s Books (7405 Greenwood Ave N).

Previous owner Carol Santoro put the store up for sale three months ago in the hope of selling it before the expiration of her lease at the end of May.

Nissley and his wife, Laura Silverstein are set to take over in early May and will change the store name to Phinney Books. Final preparations will then be made and the store will officially open in early June.

“I couldn’t have hoped for a better buyer or a better outcome for the bookstore,” Santoro said in a press release. “After nine years owning Santoro’s Books and 29 years in the bookselling business, it’s time for me to make a change. I feel completely confident that Tom will take the bookstore in an interesting new direction. He’s extremely knowledgeable and well-connected in the bookselling world – it’s a perfect fit.”

My Ballard featured Nissley’s stint as an eight-day Jeopardy champion back in 2010 and his performance as runner-up in the Tournament of Champions in 2011. He is making an apparent on the show this  week as part of the “Battle of the Decades.”

Since his time on Jeopardy, he quit his job at Amazon and is now a full-time writer. His latest book, released in November last year, is titled “A Reader’s Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year.”

“We’re living in a digital age, but it’s become clear in the past couple of years that many readers still want to read physical books and want to buy them at local, independent bookstores, which are thriving in Seattle,” Nissley said in the press release.

Slack off from your job today, and spend some quality time giggling.

On passwords and security — This World of Ours

In general, I think that security researchers have a problem with public relations. Security people are like smarmy teenagers who listen to goth music: they are full of morbid and detailed monologues about the pervasive catastrophes that surround us, but they are much less interested in the practical topic of what people should do before we’re inevitably killed by ravens or a shortage of black mascara. It’s like, websites are amazing BUT DON’T CLICK ON THAT LINK, and your phone can run all of these amazing apps BUT MANY OF YOUR APPS ARE EVIL, and if you order a Russian bride on Craigslist YOU MAY GET A CONFUSED FILIPINO MAN WHO DOES NOT LIKE BEING SHIPPED IN A BOX. It’s not clear what else there is to do with computers besides click on things, run applications, and fill spiritual voids using destitute mail-ordered foreigners. If the security people are correct, then the only provably safe activity is to stare at a horseshoe whose integrity has been verified by a quorum of Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman.

On the true horror of system programming — The Night Watch

The main thing that I ponder is who will be in my gang, because the likelihood of post-apocalyptic survival is directly related to the size and quality of your rag-tag group of associates. […] The most important person in my gang will be a systems programmer. A person who can debug a device driver or a distributed system is a person who can be trusted in a Hobbesian nightmare of breathtaking scope; a systems programmer has seen the terrors of the world and understood the intrinsic horror of existence. […]

A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.

On consensus protocols — The Saddest Moment

Whenever I go to a conference and I discover that there will be a presentation about Byzantine fault tolerance, I always feel an immediate, unshakable sense of sadness, kind of like when you realize that bad things can happen to good people, or that Keanu Reeves will almost certainly make more money than you over arbitrary time scales. Watching a presentation on Byzantine fault tolerance is similar to watch- ing a foreign film from a depressing nation that used to be controlled by the Soviets—the only difference is that computers and networks are constantly failing instead of young Kapruskin being unable to reunite with the girl he fell in love with while he was working in a coal mine beneath an orphanage that was atop a prison that was inside the abstract concept of World War II.

Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery

Mobile computing researchers are a special kind of menace. They don’t smuggle rockets to Hezbollah, or clone baby seals and then make them work in sweatshops for pennies a day. That’s not the problem with mobile computing people. The problem with mobile computing people is that they have no shame. They write research papers with titles like “Crowdsourced Geolocation-based Energy Profiling for Mobile Devices,” as if the most urgent deficiency of smartphones is an insufficient composition of buzzwords. The real problem with mobile devices is that they are composed of Satan. They crash all of the time, ignore our basic commands, and spend most of their time sullen, quiet, and confused, draining their batteries and converting the energy into waste heat and thwarted dreams.

On the rise and fall of hardware design— The Slow Winter

Unfortunately for John, the branches made a pact with Satan and quantum mechanics during a midnight screening of “Weekend at Bernie’s II.” In exchange for their last remaining bits of entropy, the branches cast evil spells on future genera- tions of processors. Those evil spells had names like “scaling- induced voltage leaks” and “increasing levels of waste heat” and “Pauly Shore, who is only loosely connected to computer architecture, but who will continue to produce a new movie every three years until he sublimates into an empty bag of Cheetos and a pair of those running shoes that have individual toes and that make you look like you received a foot transplant from a Hobbit, Sasquatch, or an infertile Hobbit/Sasquatch hybrid.” Once again, I digress. The point is that the branches, those vanquished foes from long ago, would have the last laugh.

“I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.” — Albert Einstein

“I want to be a human being, nothing more and nothing less. … I don’t suppose we can ever stop hating each other, but why encourage that by keeping the old labels with their ready-made history of millennial hate?” — Isaac Asimov

“Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.” — Bertrand Russell

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” — George Bernard Shaw

Dear non-English-as-a-first-language-speaking phishing attackers, let me point out all the ways that I know that this is not actually from PayPal:¹

Dear Costumer, [A costumer is someone who makes clothing for actors. You meant "customer".]

We need more information from you [missing period]

We need your help resoving [resolving] an issue with your account. To give us to work together on this, [this phrase doesn't make any sense] we've temporarily limited what you can do with your account untill [until] the issue is resolved.

We need a little bit [of]information about you to help confirm you [your]identity [missing period]

Note: Please note that in 50% of cases you will receive this e-mail in the spam box, [comma splice]it is because of the increased security emailing services you use. [No, it's because you're criminals.]

UPDATE: This is deliberate! How astonishingly devious. See this transcript of On The Media and this Microsoft Research paper.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

During the filming of Planet of the Apes in 1967, Charlton Heston noted “an instinctive segregation on the set. Not only would the apes eat together, but the chimpanzees ate with the chimpanzees, the gorillas ate with the gorillas, the orangutans ate with the orangutans, and the humans would eat off by themselves. It was quite spooky.”

James Franciscus noticed the same thing filming Beneath the Planet of the Apes in 1969. “During lunch I looked up and realized, ‘My God, here is the universe,’ because at one table were all the orangutans eating, at another table were the apes, and at another table were the humans. The orangutan characters would not eat or mix with the ape characters, and the humans wouldn’t sit down and eat with any one of them.

“I remember saying, ‘Look around — do you realize what’s happening here? This is a little isolated microcosm of probably what’s bugging the whole world. Call it prejudice or whatever you want to call it. Whatever’s different is to be shunned or it’s frightening or so forth.’ Nobody was intermingling, even though they were all humans underneath the masks. The masks were enough to bring out our own little genetic natures of fear and prejudice. It was startling.”

(From Joe Russo and Larry Landsman, Planet of the Apes Revisited, 2001.)