This week: Live music on the ferry, a “boujee” club for all ages, a hand-drawn map of Berkeley, wild radish, and a donkey reality show. Plus, Public Domain Day at the Internet Archive, the local legacy behind an ‘80s hit, and the Asian Art Museum explores rave culture.

Music on the water

Friday ferry rides picked up a new rhythm this month as SF Bay Ferry began hosting live performances on select routes through the month of January. The “Tides and Tunes” series brings local musicians, bands, and DJs onto the fleet’s larger vessels with room to host small performances.

The performances come at no extra cost beyond the regular ferry fare. The series runs at select times on Fridays, with artist Lolah returning for another set on January 23. — KPIX

The legacy of a hit

“Rumors” by Timex Social Club started as a song written by East Bay teens and went on to become one of 1986’s biggest hits, selling more than a million copies. The track still shows up in DJ sets and party playlists, even as most people know little about the group behind it.

In his book, How Do Rumors Get Started, founding member Marcus Thompson details how the band formed in Oakland, recorded the song on basic equipment, and quickly found national success. It also follows what came after, including industry disputes, broken agreements, and the breakup of the group in the years following the song’s rise. — SFGate

Cultural artifacts made public

Each January, a new batch of music, books, and films enters the public domain, and the Internet Archive marks the moment by opening the doors to creative reuse. This year includes works from 1930 like “Georgia on My Mind,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” The Maltese Falcon, and early Nancy Drew stories.

The Archive frames the public domain as a way to keep culture accessible, especially as copyright battles have narrowed access to its digital library. The celebration includes a daylong online event and an evening gathering at the Internet Archive (300 Funston Avenue, SF), centered on remixed films made from newly public works on January 21. — Mission Local

Paths on paper

Tattoo artist and illustrator Danielle Hopkins has drawn a hand-rendered map of the Berkeley Hills that traces stairways, rock parks, and winding streets with the elaborate detail of someone who walks them often. After she shared an early version on Nextdoor, neighbors began showing up at her door to buy copies.

She’s sold about 30 so far and given others away, including to neighbors who became friends through the process. The map grew out of her move from San Jose to Berkeley and her attachment to the hills, especially the Tamalpais Path, which she calls a brutal climb with a view worth the effort. — Berkeleyside

Pulse and light

At the Asian Art Museum, Rave into the Future: Art in Motion looks at dance culture through the work of West Asian artists shaped by diaspora, memory, and movement. The exhibition brings together multimedia installations, sculpture, and sound to explore how music and dance create spaces of connection, privacy, and release.

Highlights include Sahar Khoury’s commission with a working DJ deck, Yasmine Nasser Diaz’s bedroom-as-dance-floor installation, and Joe Namy’s copper-tiled floor that records every step taken on it. The show, which is curated by Naz Cuguoglu and features work by 10 artists based in the U.S. and Europe, remains on view at the Asian Art Museum through January 26. — The Chronicle

Candy-colored commons

In Walnut Creek, Ruby Lou’s is opening as a place where birthday parties, cocktail hour, and casual play all blur together. Built by longtime mixologist and set designer Megan Abraham Benshalom and named for her daughter, the space leans into bright color, built-in board games, claw machines, and furniture that looks pulled from a candy shop daydream.

The menu mirrors that split personality, with Wagyu hot dogs, short-rib nachos on housemade chips, and a full cocktail program alongside an ice cream bar and “yolo” sundaes for kids. It’s designed for families in the afternoon and adults after dark, without forcing either group to leave the room. Ruby Lou’s is open now for private events and plans to open to the public very soon. — Bay Area News Group

Salt on the buds

Out in the Baylands, invasive wild radish began flowering in late December, its pale purple and white petals standing out against the marsh. Unlike wild mustard, which blooms yellow, the radish can be identified by its four-petaled flowers and its edible parts from top to bottom.

The leaves, buds, and seed pods can all be eaten, carrying a mild, peppery bite, and sometimes a trace of salt from the coastal air. There’s even a small radish root at certain times of year, though most foragers prize the greens and buds. It grows alongside plants like sea asparagus in the San Francisco Baylands, where winter still yields plenty of plantlife. — The Bay Forager

From pasture to prime time

A Northern California donkey rescue has found a national audience through a reality series on ABC. Donkey King follows the day-to-day work at Oscar’s Place, a Mendocino County sanctuary that takes in donkeys from auctions, surrenders, and unsafe conditions, and either rehomes them or gives them a permanent home on the ranch.

The nonprofit has rescued more than 400 animals, and each episode centers on the care and recovery of one donkey, with staff balancing medical needs, transport, and trust-building. The show airs Saturday mornings on ABC, with episodes available to stream for free afterward at donkeyking.com. — The Press Democrat

Top image: Performance by TCS; activation of 'For Your Eyes Only' by Yasmine Nasser Diaz; Photo by Tracy Nguyen/Asian Art Museum

Previously: Field Notes: Fairy Rings, Waterfalls, SF Library Map, and New East Bay All-Ages Music Venue

A map, which was scribed in Mexico on October 30, 1770, and is considered among historians to be the first map showing the San Francisco Bay, will be auctioned off to the highest bidder on October 25.

San Francisco was officially founded on June 29, 1776, when colonists (surprise!) from Spain (surprise, again!) established the "Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate and Mission San Francisco de Asís," both named for Francis of Assisi. Before then, various marine vessels had passed through the San Francisco Bay on explorations; SF was first discovered by Captain Juan Gaspar de Portola on November 4, 1769, on an overland exploration expedition that saw him and his crew climb to the top of Sweeney Ridge —  looking over the SF Bay.

Less than a year later, the first-ever map showing the San Francisco Bay would be drawn into existence. That map will go on auction in late October.

The original manuscript depicting San Francisco was signed and created by Miguel de Costansó, a Catalan cartographer and engineer for the Portola Expedition. (This expedition, per the National Park Service, was the first exploration of what is now California by a European nation; it's also regarded as the beginning of Spain’s colonization of the Golden State.)

The map was scribed in Mexico on October 30, 1770, and is widely the first map to depict the San Francisco Bay.

“The map was created in conjunction with Costansó’s written report of the expedition, published in 1771 as Diario Historico de los viages de mar, y tierra hechos al norte de la California, the first book on California and itself a rarity,” Bonhams, a privately owned international auction house and auctioning party behind the map, said in a statement published by KTLA.

Bonhams — which is one of the world's oldest and largest auctioneers of fine art and antiques — has noted that there are three versions of this map. It was the second example to first depict the SF Bay Area; the third was printed in 1771 using the second manuscript.

How much is the map expected to fetch at auction, you ask? Somewhere between $600K and $800K, though bidding will begin at $500K.

You can view the auction page for what Bonhams is calling "the most important 18th century map of California," here.

Photo: Courtesy of Bonhams

A mapping startup called Mapzen has been working on an experimental map-visualization project called TransitFlow that provides us an animated look at 24 hours worth of transit-vehicle movement around San Francisco. Curbed points us to the project, which is headed (coincidentally) by an intern named Will Geary who's currently a grad student at Columbia University, and the effect of seeing all these buses and trains in motion is pretty soothing and hypnotic — and it's fun seeing the yellow BART trains shoot in from the Tranbay Tube and then seemingly disappear in the morass of other Market Street traffic.

Except for those late-night "OWL" buses, things go pretty quiet between 2 and 4 a.m., as you'd expect, but then watch as things ramp up and streets fill again with a reported 700 transit vehicles in the course of 24 hours — all sped up to fit in this two-minute video.

Here you can see the same treatment done to Mexico City and Chicago.

Traveling outside the city, the flow of mass transit becomes a whole lot easier to take in because of the dearth of options, as you can see in the animation below of the Bay Area and Sacramento. And, especially in those overnight hours, nothing is moving except those buses in SF.

As Geary says in a blog post, the map visualizations help us see what transit frequency looks like for the region — reinforcing the idea that people won't use transit as much when they know it's never coming at a certain hour. "Static transit maps provide geographic context but do not give any information about frequency," he says. "Timetables provide information about frequency but can be overwhelming, unintuitive and lacking geographic context. Perhaps we can use spatial-temporal visualization to combine the spatial information of a static transit map with the temporal information of a timetable, and make it easer to think and talk about transit frequency!"

Below, the even more comforting, much less chaotic visualization of the full Bay Area, set to Debussy's Clair de Lune.

Previously: Map Du Jour: SF Transit Stops, By Hashtag

For several years someone has been putting together an "unofficial" map of Burning Man and all the art and theme camps, the newest of which you can see below, using Google Maps. But once a year for a couple of years at least, the temporary town known as Black Rock City appears on the real Google Maps in the middle of the Black Rock Desert of Pershing County, Nevada, complete with all the street names and intersections that non-Burners are confused by when they see phrases like "We're at 7:30 and Genuflect" or "Meet me at 9:30 and Dance."

This didn't used to be much of a useful thing back when there was zero cell signal out on the playa, but all that has changed, and now we call get to see the festival unfold basically in real time on social media, from the comfort of our own dust-free homes, with plumbing.

Wired published a piece over the weekend discussing "What the Controlled Chaos of Burning Man Reveals About Cities," and how the semi-circle grid has not changed much since early Burner Rod Garrett designed it and implemented it in 1997. As Garrett later explained in a blog post about the design, "We were attempting to recreate some of the intimacy of our original camping circle, but on a much larger civic scale."

For bookmarking, here's the direct link to the map.

Stay tuned for photos of this year's art installations!

Related: The Seven Best Places To Stop En Route To Burning Man

Where do people go when they leave the Bay Area? Die-hards might answer "who cares" — The farthest from San Francisco or Berkeley or Oakland that they'd deign to move would be to a plot in Colma.

Still, most San Franciscans should only be so lucky as to hold onto our current situations here, and LinkedIn is the latest to probe the question of where SF workers head to when they pack their bags and go. With data from their users, the Linkedin study , remarked on here by the Chronicle, determined that smaller creative and tech hubs like Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, and Austin, Texas, were (in that order) the most common refuge for Bay Area expats.

This info is particularly interesting since it's not just a list of where current San Franciscans say they'd like to move, the kind of information that prompts studies saying a full third of Bay Area reisdents were about to get up and leave (update: they probably didn't). Instead, the LinkedIn numbers show people who weren't just bluffing or dreaming and really decamped.

Still, for every one person who leaves the area, there are probably several others rushing to take their place. In that vein, San Francisco sees the most migrants from NYC, Boston, and Chicago, according to Linkedin's numbers.

Last, in terms of "gross migrations," or the most overall gains and losses with one place, San Francisco and Los Angeles shared the most swaps.

via Linkedin

Related: Are Tech Workers Starting To Flee SF For Jobs In Cheaper Towns?

In the constantly simmering debate over how dense San Francisco ought to be and at what exact density it loses its soul or whatever, a recent visual might help us compare our population density to other cities across the world in a novel way. The takeaway from the chart below is the usual — we're denser than Houston, but not as dense as Mumbai — but the images might present a clearer way for the eye to recognize that fact.

San Francisco's overall population density of 18,440 people per square mile really varies a great deal by neighborhood — I'm looking at you, Western 'hoods — and that's even more the case in sprawling US cities like Los Angeles. But the visualization from Austin-based storage unit listing site SpareFoot is just based on city limits, so it loses neighborhood nuance.

Oh well. Instead, it simply takes population density as defined by whole cities, and imagines how much the square milage of San Francisco would need to stretch or shrink to accommodate the same total city populace of 864,816 people at the density of a different city. If SF were packed in like Mumbai, for instance, you'd only need some of the room we've actually got. But if San Franciscans arranged themselves according to the population density of Anchorage, Alaska, we'd need to spread out drastically.

This is an interesting experiment, for sure, but there's one dimension that's notably absent. You can spread most cities outward, expand their limits, but not ours: We're bound by the ocean on three sides. There's just one direction SF can grow, if it's growth we want, and that's up. How about, for the next visualization, a representation of how much we would have to stretch our buildings skyward up or shrink them down to match the population density of other cities?

[H/T] SFGate

Related: Another Study Contends SF Housing Would Be Way Cheaper If There Was Less Regulation

A new map of the city's main transit lines, pointed out by Curbed, attempts to rename many of the stops using actual geotagged Instagram data indicating the most popular thing or destination at each location. For instance: the most popular hashtag for Civic Center? #sfpride

Not surprising is that #sushirrito and #lataqueriasf get their own BART stops named for them, and the Castro Muni station is simply #gay.

A little more surprising is that a lot of people actually go to #olivegarden at the Stonestown Mall, and SF State students can't come up with anything better to post to Insta about than #library.

The project is called #tagsandthecity, and the team has also done hashtag maps of New York, London, Paris, and Berlin. And yes, these can be ordered as pillows.

Below, the larger Bay Area map (click to enlarge).

[h/t: Curbed SF]

Starting in 2013, Google invited us to step right up and "watch the sprouting of Dubai’s artificial Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, and the impressive urban expansion of Las Vegas, Nevada." That innovation, Google Earth Timelapse, provided the ability to see the earth like an actual god from above and over the span of years.

Now Chris Herwig, the program manager of Google Earth Engine, writes on the company's blog that Google has updated their Timelapse with "four additional years of imagery, petabytes of new data, and a sharper view of the Earth from 1984 to 2016." It's the largest update yet, and it just makes the technology more exciting going forward — if we assume the Earth doesn't blow up anytime soon, which maybe we shouldn't, the more years of satellite imagery added to the mosaic, the more interesting it will be.

"Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 32 years," Google Earth Engine explains. "It is made from 33 cloud-free annual mosaics, one for each year from 1984 to 2016, which are made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab's Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time."

You can create your own Timelapse Tour, as below, with an online "Tour Editor."

To create lapses like these, Google relied on 5 million satellite images from the past three decades taken by 5 different satellites. "The majority of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program that has observed the Earth since the 1970s," Google writes. "For 2015 and 2016, we combined Landsat 8 imagery with imagery from Sentinel-2A, part of the European Commission and European Space Agency's Copernicus Earth observation program."

Pretty cool. Can you see your house from up here?

Related: Google To Open Youth Education Center In Oakland

It's that time of year again! 2003's Prop C mandated that the beautiful City of San Francisco issue an annual report on the state of our dear sweet streets and sidewalks, and here that is, once again: The Street and Sidewalk Maintenance Standards Annual Report.

To produce the report, issued last week for Fiscal Year 2015-2016, inspectors from contractor JBR Partners walked 183 selected routes in town — about half of them commercial, half of them residential — at the midpoint in the week between street cleanings. Compared to FY 2014-15, these inspectors found less litter and grime on streets, with about twice as many routes free from "excessive" litter.

That's the good news, here's the bad: The big three hazards on streets — feces, needles, and condoms, or FNC as they're known in the biz — were spotted more often than last year along residential routes, though inspectors found conditions to be roughly the same on commercial routes.

For another metric, the City’s SF311 customer service center fielded an increase in reports about feces and the like on streets, suggesting a palpable uptick in "FNC" sightings. In fact, 311 calls grew by 25 percent in FY 2015-16 to reach an average of 34,480 requests per month.

Going by 311 calls, reports of needles saw a 41 percent increase across the city, moving the proverbial needle quite a bit. Last year saw 2,527 reports of needles, and this year there were 3,551. The SF Public Works "Hot Spot" team, which actually performs needle cleanups, also noticed a big uptick here, counting internally 16,000 needles picked up in FY2015 and then 23,300 in FY2016 — an increase of 40 percent.

Human waste reports were up 39 percent, with District 6 bearing the brunt of that.

via the Office of the Controller

311 requests regarding broken glass were also up, tied to car break-ins, by 24 percent this year. That includes an astronomical jump after April and May media coverage brought attention to the issue of broken glass and car break-ins, possibly skewing the numbers.

via the Office of the Controller

Graffiti was also up according to the report. So who's responsible for cleaning up this mess? Mostly the answer is Public Works. Per the report, "among the twenty-two street and sidewalk standards evaluated, the Public Works department is generally responsible for the maintenance of the streets and Public Works assets located on the sidewalks." To keep up and help "operationalize" findings, the report recommends that the number of street and sidewalk evaluations each year be increased.

But trash, needles, and shit on city streets don't just spontaneously generate: A large factor in all of this is that San Francisco's population is up 8 percent since 2010, with 60,000 more residents as of January 2016. "This continued growth of people living and working in San Francisco places additional demand on the City’s service systems," the report explains. More people means more trash, and maybe it also means more people to complain about crap on the street. However, the report notes that the increase in 311 reports far outmatched the increase in new 311 users. Aw, crap.

Previously: Report Cites Fewer Needles On Sidwalks, But Complaints About Them Rise Anyway

An apparently new outfit called VanDeGraph just produced this YouTube explainer for everyone who doesn't understand the difference between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, or what defines the Bay Area. The video features some rapid-fire narration the briefly summarizes the companies that first made Silicon Valley a center of technology innovation starting in the 1950's, and maps out the locations of all the major players today, some of which exist outside the Santa Clara Valley proper, like Facebook and Twitter, which are in San Mateo and San Francisco Counties, respectively, thus creating the popular confusion about what defines the Valley.

The narrator, however, also appears to not be from around here — he pronounces "Marin" like "Mare-in," and he makes the unfortunate joke about Oakland that it's "a good place to live if you're poor and only make $100,000 a year."

I'll just let the commenter gallery run with that one.

Related: Tourists Flocking To Silicon Valley On 21st Century Tech Pilgrimages
As Ping Pong Sales Go Down, So Goes Silicon Valley? Maybe

Maps of San Francisco can be very grounding. While so many aspects of this city may change — buildings rising and falling, people coming and going — the basic geography/cartography of our peninsula tends to stay consistent. Street names occasionally change — looking at you Cesar Chavez/Army — but maps, especially pretty ones, seem to celebrate the mostly solid foundation of our city.

That's the case with a set of typographic maps from the cartographers at Axis who have graciously included San Francisco among their map offerings of inferior metropoles like Boston, Chicago, London, New York City, Seattle and Washington DC. More towns are coming soon like Minneapolis and Madison, where Axis is based.

As the Axis Maps team writes, the project doesn't represent their typical work. "The typographic maps began as a fun side-project," they say, "something to work on between hours spent creating user interface mock-ups in Photoshop or writing HTML and Javascript code."

The series, where the largest highways are 12 pt font and the smallest roads and alleys are 6 pt (condensed), was a particular departure because "nothing was automated." Instead, they write, "Everything was laid out manually in Adobe Illustrator, from entering names over an OpenStreetMap image, to nudging text along curved paths to depict flowing water, to selectively erasing text to create a woven street pattern. Each city intentionally differs in style, but the end result is similar: From a distance it can appear as an accurate reference map, and as you get closer you notice the thousands of words it comprises."

via Axis Maps

Sadly, the Axis San Francisco typographical map is sold out at the moment, so you might have to settle for your second choice city. And, a question: did they leave out LA because it would be too hard?

Related: A Look At The 'Best-Case Scenario' For 2050 Bay Area Transit

Bay Area denizens love making "dream" maps of public transit. The reality, of course, is that the construction of new lines, tracks, and whatever else is required to add new public transit to the city takes decades of planning and loads of money and time. Keeping that in mind, one individual decided to map out what all the current planning and proposed construction might actually look like — in a "best-case scenario," that is — by 2050.

In a Medium post titled "Bay Area 2050: the BART Metro Map," Adam Susaneck depicts current BART and Muni lines, and layers proposed and in-progress lines on top. "The BART Metro Map consolidates the Bay Area’s existing transit —  currently spread over two dozen different transit agencies  —  and aggregates proposed, planned, and under-construction projects," he explains. "The map envisions a 'best-case scenario,' in which every proposal currently under consideration around the Bay has been funded and constructed (wishful thinking, of course). As we trudge down Geary on the 38, jam ourselves into rush hour BART, or as CalTrain experiences yet another delay, this map imagines an integrated, reliable, and truly regional transit future."

Susaneck goes into detail about all the assumptions made in his Medium post, noting that his motivation in creating the map was to "help people understand what is being considered and what our transit future could look like with more funding and more commitment from local governments." One such example? The above maps shows the second Transbay Tube that's been batted around stretching from 3rd and King to a stop in Alameda.

The Chronicle picked it up, and curmudgeonly notes that "the map is highly optimistic and ignores the bureaucratic red tape and funding issues that will almost certainly block or delay many of these projects."

Which, yeah, but we can dream, can't we?

Related: Map: The BART System, If It Were in Super Mario Land

Remember when the Nema building on Market published that neighborhood map that didn't include the Castro but in its place was "Eureka Valley/Dolores Heights." Well, it's long been common custom for SF realtors to list properties as being in Eureka Valley that are really, technically, in the Castro, which is the name adopted for the neighborhood by the gay community and far more commonly used post-1970. But as Curbed explores in an intriguing new piece, it gets a bit more complicated than that — and it may just be a quirk of history and the way the city's real estate district maps were drawn years ago.

Curbed speaks with several realtors who explain that the "Castro" designation is a neighborhood within a larger subdistrict called Eureka Valley, which itself is in MLS District 5, and it encompasses everything up to 22nd Street and over to Upper Market, as well as Corona Heights, most of Duboce Triangle, and Dolores Heights where Zuckerberg's new manse stands on 21st.

Realtor Danielle Lazier explains, "The Board of Realtors has not always been the most diverse; however, it's equally plausible that the Castro was not yet in common usage as the neighborhood's name when the map was drawn."

But the realtors get a little weird when they try to describe how "Castro" connotes an "affinity group," i.e. LGBT people and specifically gay men, and how "Eureka Valley" sounds sexier and/or "more mature" for many buyers.

Do other cities have this problem? Realtors in Seattle or New York don't try to pretend like Capitol Hill and Chelsea aren't there — even if Chelsea is barely gay anymore.

Further, the SF realtors try to say that The Castro proper is really just four square blocks, essentially Castro Street between Market and 19th, and a couple blocks of 18th — most of which is lined with rental property — and the single-family homes and duplexes and triplexes up on the hills with views are all "Eureka Valley."

But if someone says they're going to Noe and 17th, that's the Castro right? And Sanchez and 18th? Yes, that's also the Castro. And 19th and Hartford? Castro. Some would even argue that Church Street is still the Castro.

A straight couple with kids moving from Seattle or Boston would probably rather tell their friends that they bought a house in Eureka Valley, though. And then go complaining to the neighborhood association when they have to walk by window displays of dildos.

Previously: Realtor Responds To 'The Quad,' San Francisco's Newest Fake Neighborhood
Retail Survey Says: Castro Getting Less Gay, But Remains Very Gay
Is The Castro Really Turning Straight?