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Until 1984, the Santa Fe Railroad moved freight cars across the San Francisco Bay by barge. Railroad cars were decoupled from trains and loaded onto special "carfloat" barges, which were pulled across the bay by a small fleet of tug boats, to be re-attached to trains at the other end. The service ended when a fire destroyed the Point Richmond pier (the East Bay terminal for the operation), and that was that.
A handful of rail carfloat operations continue in the US, most notably in NY Harbor.
Captured with a small mirrorless camera and 50mm lens on a lightweight tripod.
I normally prefer lower contrast, but the ruined industrial subject worked reasonably well with a high contrast, backlit approach here. The sun was just above and directly in front of the frame,
Ruins of Carfloat Slip, Port Richmond, CA, 2011.
All the pixels, but no fishing or diving permitted, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/5484488587
RE: https://techpolicy.social/@joebeone/116035301351973749
Sad news. Dave Farber was one of a small handful of Internet pioneers who understood early on the inseparable link between technology and policy.
Dave recruited me to U. Penn. He has been an influence on almost everything I’ve worked on in my career.
@cvvhrn The stitched raw file is about 100GB. Definitely not something you want to edit on a phone.
I have mixed feelings about these cold war relics. On the one hand, they're artifacts of what was perhaps humanity's most dangerous folly to date, locking the world in a deadly game where the stakes only went up with each round. This doesn't seem like something to commemorate or celebrate.
On the other hand, these objects, many now destroyed or decayed, serve as visible evidence of just how close to oblivion we are willing to go. And looked at from the right angle, they have stories to tell.
It's unclear if the SAGE system would have actually been effective in tracking incoming bombers, which presumably would have employed radar jammers and other countermeasures. Fortunately, we never found out.
The huge rotating antenna (not shown) was removed shortly after the site's decommissioning in 1980, but the building, a prominent local landmark visible from downtown San Jose, has been preserved.
From 1958 through 1980, this incongruous four level (82 foot) monolith was the centerpiece of the "Almaden Air Force Station", a long-range radar site that was part of NORAD's SAGE early warning system. The blast-hardened concrete building served as the platform for an FPS-24 radar system, a massive 120 foot wide reflector that emitted a 5 megawatt VHF pulse, continuously rotating at 5 RPM.
Notoriously, the powerful radar signal disrupted TV and radio reception throughout the San Jose area.
This is a stitched imaged made from two shifted side-by-side captures with the Rodenstock 70mm/5.6 HR-Digaron-W lens and a Phase One IQ4-150 digital back (@ ISO 50) on a Cambo WRS 1250 camera, shifted left/right +/- 15mm, producing a 230MP final image.
AN/FPS-24 Radar Tower, Mt. Umunhum, Los Gatos, CA, 2024.
All the pixels, but without messing up your TV reception, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53796724938/
@spacehobo Yeah, and there are a few mailing lists I'm on that he appears to have also subscribed to.
Which basically reminds me that you can find really sleazy people, and the sleazy people who tolerate them, just about everywhere.
I checked today and I'm not listed in the Epstein files. This is unsurprising (I've never met him), but it's also a bit of a relief, since he seems to have had a surprising level of interest in a bunch of communities I'm part of (DEFCON, academia, infosec, etc).
Talking about election security would be a lot more productive if more people understood two things:
- The existence of a vulnerability is concerning, but does not by itself prove that an election was hacked or compromised.
- Losing an election, even one that you expected to win, is frustrating, but does not by itself prove that an election was hacked or compromised.
@usenixassociation @SteveBellovin Hey, good folks of @usenixassociation, you really should take Steve more seriously than that.
@me I kayaked out there a while back, but I don't think there's any dry ground at all left.
@me You haven't been able to for about 20 years, even at low tide.
Side note: A mile or two behind this shop is the (now inaccessible) abandoned ghost town of Drawbridge, CA, which has been slowly sinking into the bay. But that's another story for another day.
Captured with a small mirrorless camera and 18mm lens, on a small tripod. I had no shifting lens, so this was shot head on with a wider lens and then cropped.
Harsh midday sun is normally not ideal for architectural photos, but the hard light nicely brought out the clapboard siding of this (since demolished) rather dilapidated old former antique shop.