Events

Engineer Jeff Speck is dismayed that his home town, Lowell, Mass., is planning to replace an unattractive and un-walkable street with an equally-un-walkable design: Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across an article earlier this month about the city’s plans for its southern gateway, the Lord Overpass. This site is particularly important to Lowell, being an area of major redevelopment as well as the key link from the train station (at right in the image below) to downtown (beyond the canal to the...

Comedian and writer John Hodgman endorsed Hillary Clinton on his blog this week, making the argument I've been making to my friends for years: No one can succeed 100% of the time in our system. But I think she can foster policies that will capitalize on the initial gains made by President Obama, whom I supported and still do, and surely, if slowly, move our nation closer to the ideals that I embrace.  Will it be fast? No. But there is a lot to do to shift the the nation’s policies back after the slow...

Donald Trump's speech is fundamentally different than other national politicians': Word choice isn’t the only way Trump differs from his presidential candidate contemporaries. Jennifer Sclafani, an associate professor at Georgetown University who studies the construction of political identity through language, said Trump is an enigma — the “anti-politician” when it comes to talking. According to Sclafani, Trump doesn’t often [use discourse markers]. Usually, she said, he starts his answers with “I.” But...

One more photo from Oregon. The coffee shop I stopped in Saturday morning, Looney Bean, has a fenced yard by the Deschutes River, and allows dogs. Like this one, who eventually let me throw her the ball:

The Treasury has dropped its plan to change the $10 note, and instead, has decided to put Harriet Tubman on the $20: The move [Treasury Secretary Jack] Lew is announcing Wednesday is intended as a way to thread the needle between women's groups who have been advocating for gender diversity on U.S. currency and fans of Hamilton, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, the playwright and star of the hit Broadway musical about the nation's first Treasury secretary. Miranda lobbied Lew to keep Hamilton on the $10...

I'm just going to re-publish Bruce Schneier's post from this morning: GCHQ detected a potential pre-publication leak of a Harry Potter book, and alerted the publisher. Is this what British national intelligence is supposed to be doing? What, exactly, is the British equivalent of the NSA looking at?

Programmer Sean Hickey demonstrates the evolution of a software engineer.

Despite spending more time in my hotel room than intended, I did get around downtown Bend some, and I did drive to and from Portland Airport through the Mt. Hood National Forest. So I did manage a couple of photos. First, the coffee shop I would go to every day if I lived in Bend: Second, Mount Hood itself, viewed across the fields around Madras, Ore.: More when I sync up my phone.

Scroll down and you'll see that I did not achieve my goal of 25,000 steps on Saturday because (most likely) I ate contaminated kefta kebab on Friday night. My Fitbit did provide some interesting data, however, that underscores how disappointing the trip turned out to be. Sleep: I average 7 hours a night, generally. Friday night, more because I had absolutely no responsibilities than anything else, I slept in, getting 9:34 total. But then the sleep chart goes almost full-circle as the Fitbit recorded all...

It's great that I spent 21 of 44 hours in Bend asleep. Yeah, that's just special. It's a beautiful day both in Oregon and in Chicago today, which is why I'm even happier to be inside the PDX terminal. Still, the extra-special-fun symptoms I've experienced over the last two days seem to have subsided. I may attempt to eat solid food in a few minutes, which I haven't done since 9am yesterday. Can I get a do-over, please?