Events

The cashing-out consolidation of craft breweries continues with today's surprise announcement that Japan's Sapporo Holdings will acquire San Francisco's Anchor Brewing: According to Keith Greggor, Anchor’s president and CEO, the move was a year in the making and the result of speaking with “many, many” larger breweries all over the world to find the right fit. Anchor Brewing Co. is considered the leading pioneer of the craft beer movement, and is credited with reviving and modernizing some of today's...

Via Bruce Schneier, last week the hacker convention DefCon hosted an event at which every single electronic voting machine tested got pwned within minutes: Also, organizers revealed that many of these machines arrived with their voter records intact, sold on by county voting authorities who hadn't wiped them first. While many people at the Voter Hacking Village zeroed in on the weak mechanical lock covering access to the machine's USB port, Synack worked on two open USB ports right on the back. No lock...

My office to my house is just over 7 km, so I try to walk home when I can. This week, I have walked home every day, which is not hurting my step count. I have no idea how much I'll be able to walk next week, so this will help.

A year ago today I posted that the previous month, July 2016, was my worst blogging month in 5 years. Well, July 2017 was my best blogging month in 3½ years. The last month I posted 47 posts was January 2014 before I slowed down to the point where this past February I only posted 20 times for a rate of 0.74/day, a number not seen since November 2010. I have some hypotheses why this happened, and why posting has rebounded. For now, though, I'll just say I've had three consecutive months of beating both...

President Clinton's chief of staff John Podesta has simple advice for President Trump's new chief of staff, John Kelly: Don’t take the job. Kelly, who has rendered extraordinary service and sacrifice to the nation, just signed up for what may truly be an impossible mission: bringing discipline, order and strategic focus to the chaos that is the Trump White House. To have any chance of succeeding, he will have to accomplish three extraordinary tasks, all at odds with President Trump’s instincts. First...

Via Eclipse2017.org, Xavier Jubier has created an interactive map showing all the data for the eclipse that takes place three weeks from today. I'll be staying here the night before, and I'm planning to watch from here the day of.

Crossrail, the UK's £14.8bn rail line connecting London's far western suburbs with its eastern ones, either represents the end of an era or the beginning of one, according to today's New York Times: Before Britain voted last summer to leave the European Union, Crossrail was conceived for a London open to the world and speeding into the future. Now, with Brexit, the nightmare scenario is that this massive project, to provide more trains moving more people more quickly through a growing city, ends up...

Scottish authorities are making it difficult for Donald Trump to expand his money-losing golf course outside Aberdeen: Two Scottish government agencies—the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage, a conservation agency—say they will object to the Trump Organization’s plans to build a second 18-hole golf course at Aberdeen, known as the Trump International Golf Links. If they succeed in killing this expansion, it will be a major setback for Trump and raise doubts about the...

There is one musical play, out of all of them, that I loathe more than any other. My hatred of this play far exceeds my antipathy towards Mitch McConnell, such that I would gladly prefer an evening reading his floor speeches than to listen to one single song from this abomination. Rogers and Hammerstein, you should be ashamed. Way back in May 2011, Melinda Taub wrote a gem for McSweeney's that suggest she agrees: Dear friends, family, and Austrian nobility, Captain Von Trapp and I are very sorry to...

Yesterday around 7pm, as I dropped a friend off at O'Hare, I was lucky enough to see the last United 747 take off from Chicago: Chicago-based United still has 14 747s in operation that typically only fly from San Francisco to a handful of cities in Asia and Europe. But United will have one of its 747s fly from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to San Francisco on Friday, the airline said. Tickets for the flight — UA2704, departing Chicago at 6:30 p.m. — went on sale Tuesday, said United spokeswoman...