climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Terrifying news: the Ontario government wants to make it easy for landlords to evict tenants at will.
It’s stuff like this that makes the future terrible to contemplate. The system is already horrendously abused by landlords. Housing stress has been one of the worst parts of my life ever since I moved here. Policy choices like these understandably make people afraid about whether they will be able to have a future at all.
Photo by Jess
I had a great Saturday. It was cool enough not to be oppressive, and I was able to ride down the Don past the Brickworks to the new Biidaasige (bee-daw-sih-geh) Park. The park is very impressive. They have turned the engineered, industrial, concrete landscape around the mouth of the Don River into a real human space again, and an alluring one. There is a large outdoor adventure playground with ziplines, charmingly rendered animal play sculptures, and two-story high treehouses shaped like a raccoon and an owl, the latter of which has a tiny amphitheater in front. Within a large landscape of springy concrete, kids can use human-powered pumps to move water into a simulated watershed with controllable floodgates and sand areas to play in. There are curving paths along the new rivercourse, which is lined thickly with native plants. There are also boat launches and fishing spots.
The park grand opening was happening just a short ride from the Neon Riders BBQ, so I was able to see some friends there and bring one back for another ride through Biidaasige Park. After that, another friend from the Riders had a charmingly creative and playful music gig in Bickford Park, which was further enriched for me by a pair of very friendly dogs who were part of the small audience.
A river mouth should be a geographical anchor and natural point of interest. As someone who has walked extensively all over Toronto, the way the Don came to an end failed to satisfy those expectations. With Corktown Common, Biidaasige Park, and the other park areas still in progress, the city is doing a great job at making the river mouth part of the human landscape again. I have thought for years that Toronto’s greatest planning blunder was cutting off the city from the lake with the Gardiner Expressway. Personally, I would be fine with getting rid of the whole thing through the mechanism of less driving downtown, but while we are waiting it’s great that at least the river is being reclaimed.
The ziplines all had long lines of small children on Saturday, so I will need to return when things are less crowded. I expect Biidaasige Park to become a popular break spot for Neon Rides.
P.S. At an arts and crafts station, I was taught to make ‘seed bombs’ out of dirt, pottery clay, and heirloom open-pollinated seeds of Common Evening Primrose (Oenothera lamarckiana) from the Ecoseedbank in Montreal. The flowers are native to the region and good for pollinators, and the initiative reminds me of charming videos of dogs who help re-seed the forest after fires in Chile.
I’m excited about Toronto’s launch of Biidaasige Park tomorrow. How often does a city get a big new area of green space, and in as geographically and ecologically important a place as a river mouth?
Muscle exertion, and drawing by moving, on foot and by mechanical bicycle:
I had never taken a bicycle to the Toronto Island before, so yesterday I went with my friend Lance to ride the different tracks:
He also very kindly made us bannock, coffee, and bacon on his portable twig stove, and even brought along hammocks and lent me one after:
Soon, some friends are planning to ride up the Humber from Old Mill station toward the West Humber trail and Claireville conservation area.
Here’s a bit of a neat animation which I put together showing three heat wave after-work rides this week.
The green, blue, and red tracks show my Dutch bike rides on Monday, Tuesday, and today.
The white tracks show every other Dutch (3,437km), Bike Share Toronto mechanical (2,522km), and loaner bike tracks (85km):
The streets I sought out are little visited because they tend to be inconvenient and not to serve as an effective way to get between places beyond. That does make them blessed with light traffic, and the large properties have some of Toronto’s most ancient and impressive urban trees.
It’s remarkable that even someone trying to explore can ride past the same streets over and over, within the densest part of their ride network.
This also marks over 6,040 km of mechanical bike exercise rides in Toronto.
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I had been playing around with using Google’s Gemino 2.5 Pro LLM to make Python scripts for working with GPS files: for instance, adding data on the speed I was traveling at every point along recorded tracks.
The process is a bit awkward. The LLM doesn’t know exactly what system you are implementing the code in, which can lead to a lot of back and forth when commands and the code content aren’t completely right.
The other day, however, I noticed the ‘Build’ tab on the left side menu of Google’s AI Studio web interface. It provides a pretty amazing way to make an app from nothing, without writing any code. As a basic starting point, I asked for an app that can go through a GPX file with hundreds of hikes or bike rides, pull out the titles of all the tracks, and list them along with the dates they were recorded. This could all be done with command-line tools or self-written Python, but it was pretty amazing to watch for a couple of minutes while the LLM coded up a complete web app which produced the output that I wanted.
Much of this has been in service of a longstanding goal of adding new kinds of detail to my hike and biking maps, such as slowing the slope or speed at each point using different colours. I stepped up my experiment and asked directly for a web app that would ingest a large GPX and output a map colour coded by speed.
Here are the results for my Dutch bike rides:
And the mechanical Bike Share Toronto bikes:
I would prefer something that looks more like the output from QGIS, but it’s pretty amazing that it’s possible. It also had a remarkable amount of difficulty with the seemingly simple task of adding a button to zoom the extent of the map to show all the tracks, without too much blank space outside.
Perhaps the most surprising part was when at one point I submitted a prompt that the map interface was jittery and awkward. Without any further instructions it made a bunch of automatic code tweaks and suddenly the map worked much better.
It is really far, far from perfect or reliable. It is still very much in the dog-playing-a-violin stage, where it is impressive that it can be done at all, even if not skillfully.