A tale of two periodicals
This morning I pointed to William Langewische's essay the New York Times Magazine published this morning about the 737-MAX airplane crashes last year. Lagnewische has flown airplanes professionally and...
View ArticleThis bird has flown
A new paper in Science today reports that North America has lost 27% of its bird population since 1970, with the biggest declines in grasslands and forests. The authors of the report, ornithologists...
View ArticleFalse equivalence again, because of course
James Fallows calls out the press for, once again, treating two different scandals as the same:Under normal circumstances, the press’s strong preference is for procedural balance. The program’s...
View ArticleWhy does Greta Thunberg bother you?
The arrival in New York this week of climate activist Greta Thunberg has thrown the Right into their version of pearl-clutching hyperventilation. Unfortunately for civil discourse, their version...
View ArticleOvercooked
The UK has started a £100 m repatriation scheme to get stranded Thomas Cook customers home:The government has said it will run a "shadow airline" for two weeks to repatriate the 155,000 UK tourists...
View ArticleAnd in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Abbey Road, the Beatles' final album.1 The New York Post, not a newspaper I quote often, has a track-by-track retrospective:“Something”Frank Sinatra...
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The Fifth Risk
"You'll never guess where I am," he said archly.As I mentioned yesterday, I'm here to see the last team on my list play a home game. More on that tomorrow, as I probably won't blog about it after the...
View ArticleLunchtime links
I'm surprised I ate anything today, after this past weekend. I'm less surprised I haven't yet consumed all of these:Harvard Law professor John Coates argues that "a sitting president threatening civil...
View ArticleWelcome to the Fourth Quarter
October began today for some of the world, but here in Chicago the 29°C weather (at Midway and downtwon; it's 23°C at O'Hare) would be more appropriate for July. October should start tomorrow for us,...
View ArticlePile-up on the Link Highway
I was busy today, and apparently so was everyone else:Umair Haque deplores the "age of the idiot" in which we now live.The Washington Post reports that President Trump has spoken with Russian president...
View ArticleTrump isn't Nixon; he's Johnson
I wanted to call special attention to an article in Mother Jones I linked to earlier this evening. In it, Tim Murphy shows that the historical precedent for President Trump's impeachment isn't Richard...
View ArticleMonty Python at 50
How did I miss this? Monty Python's Flying Circus turned 50 on Friday:The Pythons included a prolific diarist – Palin has published three hefty volumes already – but, dismayingly, the months around the...
View ArticleThe sources of pollution
The Guardian has ranked the 20-largest polluters worldwide based on their addition to atmospheric greenhouse gases since 1965. You will not be surprised:New data from world-renowned researchers reveals...
View ArticleWhat's happening today?
Not too much:The Guardian asks, what happens if cities act to mitigate climate change but nations don't? Meanwhile, the New York Times shows where in the U.S. emissions are coming from.Josh Chafetz...
View ArticleFalse equivalence and journalistic malfeasance
It has become a lot more likely in the last two weeks that my party will nominate Elizabeth Warren for President. (Note: I am a financial contributor to the Warren campaign.) One way you can tell is...
View ArticleWorld record set at today's Chicago Marathon
Kenyan runner Brigid Kosgei ran the course in 2:14:04, setting a new world record fastest marathon for a woman:Paula Radcliffe held the previous record (2:15:25), set at the 2003 London Marathon.“I’m...
View ArticleLost technologies
The Guardian gave a group of London teenagers five technologies from the distant past to see if they could use them:1 Phone home… with a rotary dial telephoneThey recognise the old phone from movies...
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Back to childhood for a moment
The Chicago Architecture Foundation is sponsoring its annual Chicago Open House this weekend, so I visited a place I'd wondered about for years. I give you the Garfield-Clarendon Model Railroad:They're...
View ArticleThe sack of Kurdistan
Could President Trump be not only a very stable genius, but a strategic one as well, for pulling American troops out of Syria ? I mean, given the obvious consequences of our pull-out (i.e., Russia and...
View ArticleThings to think about while running a 31-minute calculation
While my work computer chews through slightly more than a million calculations in a unit test (which I don't run in CI, in case you (a) were wondering and (b) know what that means), I have a moment to...
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