Events

Today's weather was finally spring-like, meaning twenty degrees warmer away from the lake than near it. But Parker still got over an hour of walkies, I've gotten (so far) about 18,000 steps, and all the windows in my house are open for the first time in about a month. Also, I made a decent showing yesterday at a trivia tournament (tied for first place, but lost the tiebreaker), and today at a Euchre tournament (upper half of the pack, 7-2-1 overall record). That is all. Time to feed the dog, and maybe...

The New York Times notes the 400th anniversary of the playwright's death: Poet, playwright, actor and theatrical-company shareholder, William Shakespeare (sometimes spelled Shakspeare, or Shagspere, or Shaxpere, or Shaxberd, or any number of blessed ways) died today, April 23, 1616, at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was, more or less, 52. His passing was confirmed by his daughter Judith. Over the course of three decades, Mr. Shakespeare rose from working-class obscurity in Warwickshire to become —...

Paul Krugman leverages the Treasury's announcement that Alexander Hamilton is staying on the $10 note to remind us that Hamilton would have supported stepped-up U.S. government borrowing to fund infrastructure: I have read Hamilton’s pathbreaking economic policy manifestoes, in particular his 1790 “First Report on the Public Credit,” a document that remains amazingly relevant today. In that report, Hamilton proposed that the federal government assume and honor all of the debts individual states had run...

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.