Bruce Dawson

Claim: "Water vapor is a greenhouse gas!"
Reality: Yes, and there's more of it in a warmer atmosphere

-"CO2 is plant food!"
-pretty hard to eat when you're on fire

-"Climate has changed before!"
-We know, we told you that

-"Scientists don't know everything!"
- doesn't mean we know *nothing*

YouTube video by Shifter This bike theft trick almost got me. I had gotten complacent

New video about to drop: I nearly had my bike stolen, and it was a wake-up call for keeping my bike secure in ways that don't frighten my away from riding
youtu.be/dRjG6eYX-0g?...

Me with some of the City of Vancouver staff responsible for the Granville Connector project.

Me with City of Vancouver Director of Transportation Paul Storer, Paul Krugeger, VP of HUB Cycling Victoria Gray and HUB Cycling President Jeff Leigh

Me cycling on the new Granville Connector protected bike lane.

Poster listing the benefits of the project including a wide, accessible walking path and a protected cycling lane

It was so exciting to be at the opening of Vancouver’s Granville Connector yesterday. Public space reallocated to safe, comfortable walking and cycling routes. Thank you to all the advocates that spent years pressuring politicians to make this a reality and the staff who made it happen.

Opinion | What Hulk Hogan Left Behind

The NYT has a heavy house style that prevents me from using more, shall we say, colorful, language to describe Hulk Hogan but I think I still got my central point across here www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/o...

I think my tap limit is $250 and the amount they needed to lock down was greater than that. Occasionally I'll see gas pumps that don't yet support tap, but those are becoming rarer.

It seems like swipe+pin could allow an arbitrarily high amount, but I've never seen that done.

Avis very definitely needed a physical card, inserted into a machine, that was not a prepaid credit card. So it is a good thing I found the two "missing" cards

The complete lack of information makes it quite confusing. I have no idea what I could have done. I guess the lock was triggered by my trying a password recovery so soon after account creation? But why a perma-ban? Very strange. What up Apple?

Actually, the cards weren't even missing! I think the person who found my wallet took them out to get my name, and then put them back into a different place. I discovered them a few days later, just in time to rent a car (which needed a physical card)

This morning they made it permanent. No explanation. Is Apple usually this capricious? There was zero explanation for what my alleged offence was.

"Your Apple Account Request
Dear Bruce,

We have reviewed your request, and access to your account (***.***) has been denied.

Sincerely,

Apple"

This account is locked. This account is locked and cannot be used.

I created an Apple account to listen to one of their podcasts. The next day I tried using it on a different device, including doing a password reset, and it was locked.

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

Task Manager screen shot showing WPA's working set trimmed from 4.5 GB to 0.5 GB

WTF Microsoft? I stepped away from my laptop for an hour, I have 17.7 GB of available memory, and you've trimmed WPA's working set from 4.5 GB to 0.5 GB. It is going to be unusably slow and I don't understand why you do this. Memory priority is five, but that doesn't matter anymore. Sigh...

The original copy of WPA was unusably slow. Multi-second delays on basically every UI operation. I didn't bother profiling WPA to find out the details but it seems pretty clear that the problem is that a lot of data was paged out. After all, I only have 14.6 GB available. Sigh...

Task Manager screen shot. The second copy of wpa.exe wants to use 6.3 GB of RAM but Windows has trimmed it to less than 1.0 GB

Ugh. I'm trying to extract a couple more items from the trace but Windows has trimmed the WPA working set from 6.3 GB to less than 1.0 GB (second copy in this screen shot). So I have to reload the trace to make it usably fast to explore. Performance issues while investigating a performance issue

chrome://gpu says Display type : ANGLE_D3D11. I've had this laptop since 2017, for what that's worth.

This happens days after Chrome startup but I think it was shortly after resuming from standby

The flurry of updater.exe processes is, therefore, probably unrelated, but apparently still of interest.

I chatted offline with a Chrome dev and looked more at the trace. The GPU process was hung for the first 49.6 s of the trace so that is probably the problem. It looks like the bug is likely in the Intel graphics driver which could explain why other things were affected.

For the middle part of the hang other processes were hung, including Signal (also Chrome based...) and Explorer (so I couldn't launch UIforETW for a while).

Trace available on request if anybody at Google wants to look at it. These occasional live hangs seem to be an ongoing problem

For the duration of the hang - a couple of minutes - I couldn't switch tabs, with mouse or keyboard. When the hang resolved the queued up input was processed - new tab opening, etc.

WPA screenshot showing seventeen copies of Chrome's 140.0.7272.0 updater running, from two different locations

The only relevant oddness I noticed was that there were 17 copies of Chrome's updater.exe running, from two locations. It looks like the canary version - I still have many Chrome's installed. Could this cause stable Chrome to hang? For that long?

Chrome 138.0.7204.101 on Windows just hung for me. I grabbed an ETW trace for the last half of the hang. It was a live hang with the browser process still running, just not responding to input. These are tough to diagnose and I don't work there anymore so I'm not going to try to figure it out.

I have confirmed that rolling back the driver solves the problems, and I reported the issue through back channels

Drive update history showing that NVIDIA display driver 32.0.15.7322 was installed today

Thanks NVIDIA. My laptop hasn't hung in months but I've now lost track of how many times it's hung today. Screen power-saver, plugging or unplugging monitor, tilting my head too much while looking at it, etc.

I know Microsoft wants me to upgrade to Windows 11, but I can't, so they want me to buy a new laptop.
Given this it seems suspicious that an NVIDIA update that landed today causes my laptop to hang when the screen power-saver flips on, thus making my perfectly good laptop much less useful.
Sigh...

Man Afraid to Ride Subway Named Head of NASA Trump has tapped Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as NASA administrator.

A lesson on how to write a headline.

I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes Homelessness in America has reached crisis levels, and I am determined to do everything in my power to fix the problem as long as it doesn’t involv...

“I WILL DO ANYTHING TO END HOMELESSNESS EXCEPT BUILD MORE HOMES”

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-w...

USAID cuts may cause 14 million more deaths in next five years, study says The analysis, published in the Lancet, estimates the agency’s programs saved 91 million lives worldwide over two decades, playing a vital role in global health.

Funding cuts to USAID by the Trump administration could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths globally over the next five years, according to a new study.

"I started crying, because it's been so hard to forgive myself"

Jan 6 defendant Pam Hemphill tells CBS News's "The Takeout" that she received a letter of gratitude from Mike Pence, for rejecting her pardon

(Hemphill spoke with my colleague Major Garrett)

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Let’s Ban Right-on-Red in BC A red light means stop, right? That’s what we teach our kids from a young age. It’s a universal signal. Except for the one case when it doesn’t. In BC, drivers are allowed to turn right even w…

Another interesting but not surprising finding: "The majority of close calls involved right-turning vehicles, followed by left-turning vehicles, then through-vehicles."

We know that right turns on red are one of the biggest dangers to cyclist and pedestrians.

visionzerovancouver.ca/2024/05/31/l...

GPS trace of a run around Athens including a circuit of the Acropolis

Mid-morning run around the Acropolis, during a heat wave. The highlight was when three young kids (6-10 years) ran with me for a few blocks. We high-fived and then I ran off. The lack of a common language mattered not at all