The traffic data is not as good as it appears. It is completely closed, only given to police and goverment agencies. No API, no numerical values for speed (only 5 ‘color codes’ that are relative to location, so are almost useles) and numerical data is not given even to academics. I spent almost a whole month trying to get actual useful data for academic purposes, but Google really went out in their path to make it impossible.

It has the potential to be an excellent tool: crowsourced real-time data, access to historical data and it is incredibly fine-grained, improving over goverment data (at least in my city) by a 10 or 100x factor. But no, it had to be yet another Google’s tool for spying on people, not giving it away and sell it to police.

Cumming

You reminded me that one time we almost got killer/severely injured in a protest by a stun grenade.

This happened almost same time I saw some news of Israel killing protestors with tear gas grenades, as it fell into their head and skull, inducing lethal damage.

Anyway, I was with a friend and a bunch of people. Everything was peaceful and then, bam, out of nowhere it went to shit. We were used to it, but that time the tear gas was so bad that the neutralizer we brought was doing nothing. We were covered with a wall (bad idea, but we were panicking badly), and I wasn’t able to breath, so I wanted us to run away from there. I told him to let’s just run certain way, and I was so full of adrenaline and ready to run, but he stopped me. 1 second later, a stun grenade fell from the sky just 1 m away of us, in the direction I wanted us to run; no doubt it would have hit me in the head.

After that I just took his hand and we ran away, not able to see nor breath. Me holding his hand was a huge saver for both of us, as we could, more or less, guide each other. We ran some 20-30 m and just fell to the ground, but in a somewhat safe place. We crawled some 10 m more and just rest there. It took us some solid 15 minutes to catch our breath. Never said a word to my family.

Fun times.

Rozo, if you ever read this: queso.