John Davies, Alexander J. Kent, James Risen, The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World.

John Davies writes the excellent blog Soviet Maps, and spent a lot of time checking why and how the guys behind the red curtain managed to draw such accurate (well not always) maps. Check his Resources and Links section and try to find time to sleep…
You will find a summary of Davies’ work in his excellent article Soviet Military Mapping of the Cold War Era. The book itself was long awaited. It was initially scheduled to be published in 2015 by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, which backed out over copyright concern, according to Nick Ballon in his article in WIRED Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers (also a must-read).

“Cartographic culture is to Russia as wine culture is to France,”

says Kent Lee, the CEO of EastView Geospatial, a Minnesota company that claims to have the largest collection of Soviet military maps outside of Russia and publisher of Russian Military Mapping.

Remember Scotty, the guy from strangeparts who chases iPhone spare parts in a Chinese alleymarket in order build a (not legit, but look-alike) iPhone 6S?
Well he spent some time (17 weeks?) to hack a jack port in a iPhone 7S. It’s a one-off, not suited for replication or even small-scale production but he left his design out for free (yes, both as-in-free-beer and not-as-in-free-beer kind of free!) for a smarter guy/gal to pick it up and use it!

Run Fusion 360 in Linux using Paperspace like Josh Hertz, or VMWare like Peter Lehnér

Vox : Road signs suck. What if we got rid of them all?
Shared space designs, explained with 99% Invisible. Check them out here: 99percentinvisible.org

Clue: you need to share. with all. including disabled.

(via Kottke)

Le Monde: comment des chercheurs ont utilisé les données du Décodex pour analyser la présidentielle

…a “high” migration scenario projects [a] record flow of refugees into Europe between 2014 and 2016. (…) In this scenario, Muslims could make up 14% of Europe’s population by 2050 – nearly triple the current share, but still considerably smaller than the populations of both Christians and people with no religion in Europe.
(…)
The refugee flows of the last few years, (…) are extremely high compared with the historical average in recent decades, and already have begun to decline as the European Union and many of its member states have made policy changes aimed at limiting refugee flow.
Predicting future migration levels is impossible. (…) if regular migration continues at recent levels, and some asylum seekers also continue to arrive and receive refugee status – but not as many as during the historically exceptional surge of refugees from 2014 to 2016 – then the share of Muslims in Europe’s population as of 2050 would be expected to be somewhere between 11.2% and 14%.

While Europe’s Muslim population is expected to grow in all three scenarios (…) Europe’s non-Muslims, on the other hand, are projected to decline in total.

Between mid-2010 and mid-2016, the number of Muslims in Europe grew considerably through natural increase alone:

Three scenarios illustrate what the Muslim population could look like in Europe in 2050 (Methodology). Résumé en langue française ici, texte intégral en anglais là.

Il conduit (en toute légalité) 500 km pour obtenir un document lui permettant d’avoir son permis (après avoir d’abord été s’inscrire dans un auto-école dans un département voisin pour tenter d’éviter ce tracas)!

• Nice-Paris : requiem pour un train de nuit
• Paris-Briancon : il y aura des trains de nuit pendant les vacances de Noël
• La mobilisation s’organise contre la suppression du train de nuit pour Paris
• La suppression du Paris-Nice enterine la quasi disparition des trains de nuit

• Afin de protester contre la suppression de cette ligne, en service depuis la fin du XIXe siècle, deux collectifs d’usagers, « Oui au train de nuit » et « Rendez moi mon train de nuit », ont prévu, non sans humour, un rassemblement sur place… en pyjama.

  reportage video sur francetvinfo.fr

• Le Monde (paywall): clap de fin pour le train de nuit

352 heures, 22 voyages, 232 000 images et 1500 dollars (de frais de parking).

Julian Tryba

Pixelsites, via Google

…des forces de l’ordre complètement dépassées, spectateurs qui se contentent de rappels à la loi et qui ont surtout pour consigne de ne pas déclencher de poursuite pour éviter un drame éventuel…

Personne ne se demande vraiment d’où viennent ces motos et ces quads bardés de stickers. Surtout pas les autorités, plus zélées lorsqu’il s’agit de mettre à l’amende un deux roues et son conducteur bien solvable qui aurait emprunté une voie de bus sur 20 mètres.

Moto Verte

Via Google (!)