Events

What can I say? I have nerdy friends. Also the weather forecast for the Faire calls for sunny skies and 26°C—damn close to perfect. Only question is, should I bring my real camera?

Fifty years ago today, the Beatles released Revolver: [I]n their spare time, the Beatles make the greatest rock album ever, Revolver, released on August 5th, 1966 – an album so far ahead of its time, the world is still catching up with it 50 years later. This is where the Beatles jumped into a whole new future – where they truly became the tomorrow that never knows. Revolver is all about the pleasure of being Beatles, from the period when they still thrived on each other's company. Given the acrimony...

Voters in Kansas yesterday called borderline-crazy Tea Partier Tim Huelskamp home from the U.S. House: Frustrated voters in a sprawling Kansas congressional district sent a blunt message on Tuesday that might yet break through the din of this election: At some point the government needs to do something for them. That sentiment was delivered in the harshest possible terms to Representative Tim Huelskamp, a firebrand Tea Party conservative who lost in a primary landslide after spending most of his six...

Yet another reporter stumbles upon the Dunning-Krueger effect (though without naming it) to explain Trump's stumbles upon the body politic. Meanwhile, some Republicans are finally distancing themselves from him, but in a way that makes them look even more craven than they already looked. It's even looking like they know they've made a huge mistake. Maybe. And even though his balloon is on fire, he's already starting to blame "them" for "fixing" the general election. Via Schneier, the NIST no longer...

I thought earlier today that this was unique. James Fallows, who knows more about the presidency than most living journalists, agrees: To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before. Presidents of one party call nominees from the other party “bad choices” or “wrong for America” or “risky bets” or in some other way second-best options to their own preferred candidate. As far as I am aware, none of them has previously declared a major-party nominee categorically unfit. Again we...

President Obama yesterday called Donald Trump "woefully unprepared" and "unfit" to be president: During a press conference at the White House with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Obama posed the question to the Republican Party: "If you are repeatedly having to say what Trump says is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?" "The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have...

Attention flat-earthers: you can't simultaneously believe in GPS and that the earth is a disk covered by the dome of Heaven. Maps of Australia are the latest casualty in the war between evidence and...well, flat-earthers: The Australian Plate is moving about 7 centimeters (2.8 inches) northwards every single year. This motion has accumulated over the decades to produce a significant discrepancy between local coordinates on maps and global coordinates in digital navigation systems used by satellites. At...

This evening's Times: Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health. He stood 188 cm with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10. But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels. The diagnosis resulted in...

This year's Republican National Convention is the first one in modern times after which the nominee polled lower than before it: Gallup has surveyed on this question since 1984, and the 2016 GOP convention was the first time where a candidate ended up in negative territory. The voters who felt less likely to vote Trump after the convention outnumbered those who felt even more motivated for the GOP nominee, 51-36, according to a Gallup poll. The closest a convention came to such unfavorable closing...

With a new job, summer weather, and lots of things going on, July 2016 turned out to be the worst month for the Daily Parker since November 2010. Back then I was finishing my MBA and traveling for work four days a week. This past month I only had 37 entries (the all-time mean is 40), averaging 1.19 per day (cf. mean 1.33). Ah, well. I'll try to be more conscientious this month.