u/polyploid_coded

I visited the Obama Presidential Center and hadn't seen this text before - it's the speech prepared if the Supreme Court ruled against the ACA / Obamacare in June 2015 (King v. Burwell). This is one of multiple cases where parts of the ACA were on the line.

Obama has written "Didn't need this, brother!" afterward. Here was the speech that he delivered instead: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/25/remarks-president-supreme-courts-ruling-affordable-care-act

I visited the new museum today and wanted to share museum nerd observations.

Photo 1: Videos in the museum have a box with an ASL interpreter (this video had music so the interpreter embraces that energy). Below you can see a tactile panel about Bo, the Obamas' dog. There is a dots texture over the dog, and the speech bubbles have Braille writing. There are additional controls next to or across from videos around the museum, but I didn't see them in use.

Photo 2: This was a video about tech evolving during the Obama campaign and presidency. Instead of having a real Blackberry behind glass, they had these solid blocks, I guess so kids can touch an old school phone.

Photo 3: In an exhibit on the ACA / Obamacare, this raised signature, and a representation of how many pages were in the bill. Visitors weren't paying much attention to this, but I imagine if you are a kid going through, one fact that might register might be that it was a 900 page bill.

Other notes: Dolores Huerta's major role in the civil rights section, Equal Earth projection on world maps

I've seen the map of Madison, Wisconsin a bunch of times, so when I first saw Bemidji, Minnesota on a real estate map, I thought that I was in the mirror universe. There are only a few roads, businesses and a train track on the isthmus, but it can still count.
It's on the shores of Lake Irving and Lake Bemidji, on the Mississippi River and only 50 miles from its source.

This outcropping of bedrock cut off a block of 12th Street, Long Island City for decades. After years of cars parking on it, the area was redeveloped as a pedestrian plaza in 2019. There's still a way to go to match the renderings of greenery and traffic calming, but it's a pleasant use of this block made possible by an accident of geography.

This street in the Long Island City neighborhood, NYC (Google Maps link with more photos) has been blocked by this large rock since time immemorial. For years this block was used for parking, then in 2019 it got converted into a pedestrian plaza.

Around 2012 a blogger identified it as a "glacial erratic" like other large boulders in the city, so it got added to Google Maps as "Ancient Glacier Rock" and on Wikipedia is described as such. But I saw a comment on Facebook that was confident this is an outcropping of bedrock?

I'm doing a video on this park's development (first proposed in 2006) and I'd like to ID this rock correctly! Maybe a reach goal would be for the park to get an informative sign if its origins are interesting enough.