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After the fires, the rain. Southern California has been drenched in torrential showers for several days and the deluge has hit areas recently scarred by huge wildfires.
LA’s National Weather Service office reports rainfall of over six inches in just three days for areas in Ventura and LA county, with ten other regions receiving over 4 inches.
The resulting mud bath has been described by one sheriff in Santa Barbara County as similar to “a World War I battlefield”, with “a carpet of mud and debris everywhere.”
At least 15 people have died amid evacuation orders while many homes have been completely washed away. Cars have been plucked out of gloopy swamps and roads have been closed. Read more…
More about California, Storm, Wildfire, Rainfall, and Southern California
SpaceX is launching Zuma, a mystery spacecraft operated by the U.S. government for purposes unknown, thanks to it being very classified. The launch was supposed to take place last year, with a November date for the flight, but it was scrubbed, reset and then scrubbed again with no firm timeline for a follow up attempt. Zuma is now set to take off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral tentatively… 
In this week’s episode of Technotopia I spoke to author and historian Leslie Berlin, writer of Troublemakers: Silicon Valleys’ Coming Of Age. Berlin is the Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University and one of the few people who can see the entire rise of SV tech culture from a researcher’s perspective.
The room is a raw warehouse space that is partitioned off with curtains, hiding the bulk of it from view. I’m at the back of a group of girls who is nervously dropping its phones into a plastic box for safekeeping, to be returned on exit. The reason for the curtains, and the no phone policy, is that we are about to be some of the first people outside of the Disney Imagineering group to… /https%3A%2F%2Fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fcard%2Fimage%2F671233%2Ffbff29b6-9740-4a65-8558-dd7a3a113038.jpg)