Events

Stuff to read (or watch): Yesterday, Labour shadow foreign secretary Hilary Bent made the case to the House of Commons for bombing Syria. Republican leaders still don't believe (or pretend not to believe) that climate change is happening... ...even while glacier data shows conclusively that it is. Waukegan, Ill., may open a Ray Bradbury museum in the library building he frequented as a child. Chi-Raq is probably a really good film. Back to the mines.

This is cool. Explains CityLab: Entomological unease aside, this poster of the planet’s 140 metros should make a fantastic holiday gift for the city-obsessed nerd. Made by Neil Freeman, an artist and urban planner who runs the site Fake Is the New Real, the roughly29 by 23-inch, black-and-white sheet stacks train systems with the largest ones at top… ...and the most basic at bottom. Take a look at the artist's designs and find your metro.

That's not exactly the question Richard Posner and Eric Segall raise, but it's not that far off: Justice Scalia ... predicted in his dissent [in Lawrence v. Texas] that the court would eventually rule that the Constitution protects the right to same-sex marriage. This June, Justice Scalia’s prediction came true in Obergefell v. Hodges. He has vented even more than his usual anger over this decision. It has become apparent that his colleagues’ gay rights decisions have driven him to an extreme position...

Via the scientist responsible for Deeply Trivial, secondarily via Real Clear Science, comes a research paper so succinct it didn't require any actual words: Note the reviewer's comments at the bottom. As Deeply Trivial IM'd me just now, "Who knew scientists had a sense of humor?"

After upgrading to the Azure SDK 2.8.1 yesterday, I'm unable to debug this application locally without an uncomfortable contortion. The application is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVC website set up to run using IIS Express. It uses some Azure components, in particular the evil msshrtmi.dll that has caused so many versioning headaches in the past. The symptoms are these: when starting to debug the application in Visual Studio 2015, the application compiles but immediately causes a system toast message to appear...

This photo from my commute this morning shows why Chicagoans typically keep an extra pair of shoes at the office:

I just upgraded my system to the Azure SDK 2.8.1, released earlier today, and also merged the latest code from the BlogEngine.NET master repo into my custom codebase. Do you see where I'm heading? Once I "solved" the version issue with msshrtmi.dll (a perennial bête noir [not to be confused with this bête noir]), then published the changes, and promptly killed the blog for an hour. It looks better now, but I'm still having trouble debugging it locally. Tomorrow, after I finish fixing a bug for work...

First, the New Republic's Jeet Heer reminds us that Donald Trump is a bullshitter, not a liar, and is that much more dangerous for it: The triumph of bullshit has consequences far beyond the political realm, making society as a whole more credulous and willing to accept all sorts of irrational beliefs. A newly published article in the academic journal Judgment and Decision Makinglinks “bullshit receptivity” to other forms of impaired thinking: “Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower...

There were some unexpected numbers over the Thanksgiving weekend: Trip down: 562 km, 4 hours 57 minutes; trip back: 561 km, 5 hours 53 minutes. We call that effect "Chicago Sunday-evening traffic." Gasoline price: $2.16/gal for 93 octane (which my car requires)—the lowest price I've paid for gas since buying the car, less than half what I paid last Thanksgiving, and in real terms, the lowest price I've ever paid for gas. (In 1989 I once paid $1.11 per gallon, which is $2.17 adjusted for inflation—but...

I mentioned yesterday that we stopped at Scratch Beer in Ava, Ill., on the recommendation of a local. It's pretty remote, but worth the trip. They make one barrel of each beer, and when that barrel is empty, it's gone forever. So, yes, we'll have to go back, even though the 561-kilometer trip home took almost 6 hours. At least Scratch is dog-friendly (outside). So maybe the next road trip down there will be when it's warmer.