Events

I've had some strange online conversations recently. Just today, one of my friends posted quote from comedian Michael Che: You can’t have whatever you want, all right? I know the Forefathers said you had a right to own a gun, but they also said you could own people! One of my friend's other Facebook friends commented: "Check your facts. 'Slave' and 'slavery' were never used in the Constitution." Well, that is literally true but irrelevant to Che's point. The 3/5 compromise and the return of fugitives...

It turned out, whatever the UK Border Force agent reported on Sunday, by Monday HM Customs and Immigration had decided I'm not a risk. Registered Traveller status granted.

I'm in the Ancestral Homeland on a my last-ditch effort to maintain American Airlines Platinum status for 2016. If that sounds bizarre and pointless to you, then you have some empathy for the UK Border Force agent who interviewed me for fifteen minutes this morning. Usually my UK entry interviews are about ninety seconds. I'm here four times a year, I always go home, and...well, that's basically all they've ever been concerned about. Until today, for the 23 years I've been visiting the UK, I have never...

Saturday nights are not busy at O'Hare, which lets me get better photos of the holiday decorations:

Today I'm at Le Cordon Bleu learning sauces. Full report later. 

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...