Downtown Scott Brown

Darn archaeologists screw up UN Climate scaremonger narrative. Real scientific facts keep getting in the way of the nightmare fairy tale. 20,000 years ago, Britain was connected to mainland Europe. Time Team Special 26 (2007) - Britain's Drowned World youtube.com/watch?v=4P9wQj…

@flatbush711 Same here

I grew up in a small town like that as boy. I'd assemble lawn mowers, bikes etc. at the Western Auto store. My pay was 30.06 ammo👴

@PWSullivan @JimPethokoukis Rustin peace Chicago legend

Sam Sianis of the Billy Goat, Chicago's most famous salonkeeper, dies at 91. chicagotribune.com/2026/05/15/sam…

@profstonge 🤔

If hot coffee's a $2.9 million lawsuit, one wonders the number when an illegal with a fake license kills a family of 4 🤔

At Sox games, Girls just wanna have fun. #ChicagoHistory ⚾️

Mostly peaceful ...😵‍💫

When a hog decides to charge, you’ve only got one shot to get it right.

I’m sorry 😂😱I can’t stop laughing 😂 this clips make my day every time i watch it😂😂😂😂😱😂😂😂😂😂

Man Finds Robot Dog Is Bad at Protecting His Chickens, But Might Be Good at Sending Data to China | Tom Hawking, Gizmodo It’s not every day you see a video that starts with chickens and ends with a genuine national security concern, but then, these are strange times. The story starts with YouTuber, musician, and increasingly influential amateur cybersecurity researcher Benn Jordan’s attempt to get a robot dog from Chinese firm Unitree—also responsible for the questionable Gundam and the kung-fu deathbots—to guard his chicken coop. The robot proves an abject failure at doing this, and at anything else remotely useful. What it does turn out to be good at, according to Jordan, is sending data back to China. While the robot’s general uselessness is amusing, the really interesting part of the video comes once Jordan starts to look into the robot’s information security features—or, more specifically, the alleged lack thereof. This section of the video starts strong with the revelation that Jordan was able to obtain root access to the dog—yes, that’s a phrase I just typed—by adding Curl commands to the end of his wifi password. This allows full access to the dog, which, as Jordan says, involves “not only controlling their movement, but also recording, downloading, and livestreaming audio and video information from the robot’s surroundings without an authenticated connection through the app.” (At this point, it’s probably worth noting that police departments across the country are merrily spending tax revenue on these robots like it’s Monopoly money.) There are also other fun little pieces of information, like the dog’s weird built-in ChatGPT implementation, through which Jordan was able to convince it to “disable its safety functions and give up API info”; the fact that the dog’s radio control frequency is easily replicable; and most of all, the fact that while the robot’s firmware doesn’t take your security seriously in the slightest, it takes the security of the data it’s sending home—and the location to which it’s sending that data—very seriously indeed. The last part of the video catalogs Jordan’s attempts to figure out exactly what information the robot is collecting and where it’s being sent. The ins and outs of it are really worth watching for yourself, but the tl;dr is that, as Jordan puts it, “some, if not all, Unitree robots are intentionally and secretly sending heavily encrypted information to Chinese servers and going to great lengths to prevent anyone from finding out about it.” On a completely unrelated note, hey, did we mention that the US military has been buying these robodogs? As Jordan says, “If we were living in a time when the Federal Government would take this type of thing seriously, this would be something I would report privately.” But, of course, we are living in the most stupid of all possible worlds, so instead, we’re watching this on YouTube. It’s hard to think of a more quintessentially 2026 story than this saga, and there’s probably a word in German for its very specific mixture of absurdity, stupidity, hilarity, and terror. In the absence of such a word, however, I’ll leave you with this screenshot—wherein, just to be clear, it’s the robot dog saying “Hey little lamb over there, you’re off course [and] going [in] the wrong direction”, not Jordan himself. The key figure, though, is the real dog, gazing upon its robotic counterpart—and, indeed, the entire scene—with a mixture of bewilderment and genuine concern. We are all this tiny dog, pondering the foolishness of mankind. Or maybe we’re just the robot dog, narrating its own divergence from the path of sanity. What a piece of work is man, indeed. gizmodo.com/man-finds-robo…

@PekalaLaw @GardinerIsland 😬

Update: NY is discussing allowing govt teachers to retire at age 55 and immediately collect pension$$$. Heck,Teachers Unions are thisclose to saying teachers should be able to retire at 50 after 25 years and immediately collect pension$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. @GardinerIsland

🧐

Strong letter to follow

Buy high, sell low. Who says Chicagoans aren't innovators?

Seems notable that the single largest lever in Mayor Mamdani’s proposal to close New York City’s budget deficit is not a new tax on the rich or new state funding. It is simply lowering the city’s contributions to its pension funds (saving $2.3 billion). And that move was made possible due to higher-than-expected investment returns over the last several years. Capitalism was the mayor’s saving grace.

@chigrl 😆

Powell be like, here are the keys to the office Kev, enjoy!

Iran’s coast is dying in black sludge.🚨 Thousands of dead crabs, toxic oil choking the sea, massive smoke plume visible for miles. The Islamic Regime doesn’t give a damn about human lives. Doesn’t care about the environment. Doesn’t care about anything except staying in power. For them, the end justifies the means even if it means destroying Iran itself. Criminal negligence. Pure evil. #KingRezaPahlavi‌ForIran

🚨 Environmental disaster unfolding along Iran’s Persian Gulf coastline after an estimated 80,000 barrels of oil spilled into the sea near Kharg Island. This video shows thick oil sludge and contamination coating parts of the coastline as dark slicks spread through Gulf waters, creating a severe environmental hazard and devastating marine life and coastal ecosystems. Satellite imagery over recent days revealed massive oil slicks stretching across dozens of square kilometers near Iran’s main oil export hub, raising fears of long-term ecological damage across the region. The Islamic Republic bears full responsibility for the environmental destruction, years of negligence, unsafe infrastructure, and the broader instability surrounding Iran’s oil and maritime operations.

#OTD Happy Birthday, McDonald's! On May 15, 1940, brothers Dick & Mac McDonald opened the very first McDonald's restaurant in San Bernadino, CA.

Mostly peaceful... Fanatical zealots.

A pregnant coyote in downtown Chicago bypassed every patch of green space in the city and built her den inside a concrete parking garage near Soldier Field to birth and raise her pups. Wildlife biologists with the Cook County Coyote Project found her there by following the GPS collar data, and when the coordinates pointed to the upper levels of a parking structure adjacent to an NFL stadium surrounded by six-lane roads and millions of people, the researchers assumed the collar was malfunctioning. It was not. The Cook County Coyote Project started in the early 2000s as one of the most ambitious urban predator studies ever conducted in North America. Researchers began trapping and GPS-collaring coyotes across the Chicago metropolitan area expecting to document a marginal population of stressed, underfed animals surviving on the fringes of the suburbs, picking through garbage in forest preserves and golf course edges. What they found instead was a fully established urban predator population operating deep inside the city grid with a success rate that stunned the research team. The coyotes were not clinging to the margins. They were navigating the core. Collar data showed animals routinely crossing multi-lane highways, threading through commercial districts, and traveling established routes through the densest parts of the metro area on schedules that were precisely calibrated to avoid peak human activity. They moved at night. They used railroad corridors, drainage channels, and highway medians as transit lines. They knew which intersections to avoid and which to cross. The roadkill rate for collared coyotes in the study was remarkably low, which meant the animals had learned the traffic patterns well enough to move through them without getting hit. The pregnant female whose collar led researchers to Soldier Field represented the extreme end of that behavioral adaptation. A coyote preparing to whelp needs a secure, enclosed, defensible space where vulnerable newborn pups can be hidden from predators and weather for the first weeks of life. In a natural landscape, that means a dug-out den in a hillside or an appropriated burrow under a rock ledge. In downtown Chicago, there are no hillsides and no rock ledges. There is concrete, steel, asphalt, and structure. She chose structure. She navigated the ramps of the parking garage, found a concealed space in the upper levels where human foot traffic was minimal, and established a functional den inside the building. Every night she left the garage, hunted urban rodents and scavenged through the surrounding neighborhood to maintain the caloric intake required to nurse a litter, and returned before dawn. The operation ran cleanly enough that nobody working in or around the garage knew she was there until the research team showed up with tracking equipment. The broader finding from the Cook County project was that Chicago's coyote population was not a handful of desperate stragglers. It was a thriving, reproducing community numbering in the hundreds, embedded across the entire metro area, occupying territories that overlapped with some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the Midwest. The animals had modified every aspect of their natural behavioral profile to fit the urban environment. They shifted to almost entirely nocturnal activity. They adjusted their diet from rabbits and ground squirrels to rats, mice, Canada geese, and anthropogenic food waste. They learned infrastructure the way a rural coyote learns game trails, memorizing routes through the built environment that minimized exposure and maximized efficiency. The parking garage den was the detail that made the study famous, because it crystallized the whole finding into a single image.