Events

In addition to crapping on the norms of office that have kept our Republic functioning for centuries, the Trump Administration has lowered the bar for standard written English in politics: Amid all the chaos in the White House — including West Wing personnel drama, the Stormy Daniels scandal and Mueller’s Russia investigation — some wayward spellings and inaccurate honorifics might seem minor. But the constant small mistakes — which have dogged the Trump White House since the president’s official...

About a year ago, a number of American diplomats and their families in Cuba were injured by what our military speculated might be a sonic weapon. A sonic weapon directs sonic energy at a target to disable, but not necessarily permanently damage, the person. Over a few months, people reported "blaring, grinding noise," hearing loss, speech problems, nausea, disequilibrium...exactly what a sonic weapon could cause. Via Bruce Schneier, a team at the University of Michigan working in association with the...

Crain's reported yesterday on the latest business-school rankings from US News and World Report. University of Chicago tied with Harvard at the top spot and Northwestern landed at #6: The magazine labels its ranking a year in advance, so this is the 2019 list. While it started the rankings in 1990, it has historical data reaching back only to 1994, but it was confident this was the first No. 1 showing for Booth. “The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business tied for No. 1 this year due to its...

Late afternoon on Tuesday, with so much to do before the end of the week, I can only hope actually to read these articles that have passed through my inbox today: New Republic's Josephine Livingstone praises the latest "Tomb Raider" movie for humanizing Lara Croft. James Fallows takes a look at the 15-year history of the Iraq War and shakes his head. Which is a lot gentler a commentary than Iraqi native Sinan Antoon has in the Times under the title "Fifteen years ago, America destroyed my country."...

Climate change, in part, destroyed two of my favorite places in the world last year, but they're recovering slowly. Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the progress of both. First, Sint Maarten: Passengers arriving at Princess Juliana International Airport, on the Dutch side of the island earlier this month, were directed onto the tarmac, past the battered terminal to a white wedding-style tent for immigration. Outside the parking lot, the Pink Iguana, a tugboat turned dockside bar, remained...

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, The Daily Parker will participate in this year's Blogging A-to-Z Challenge. Today's the official Theme Reveal day. My topic will be: Programming Concepts using Microsoft C# .NET. My topics will include: Compilers vs Interpreters Generics Human factors (and errors) LINQ Polymorphism ...and will finish with a real-world practical example on April 30th. I will also keep up my annoying political and Parker posts through April. And, full disclosure, many of the 26 A-to-Z...

Over the past few weeks I've gotten several emails from someone purporting to be "Jess Miller" in New Zealand, mentioning she'd noticed a post I did on the Maldives in 2012. That post reported on the violent coup d'état that overthrew the democratically elected government of the island nation just southwest of the Indian subcontinent. And just a few weeks ago, the military dissolved Parliament and threw the country into more unrest. The U.S. State Department has issued a level-2 caution. Understandably...

The New York Times last week suggested that people who sleep with their dogs sleep just as well as those whose dogs sleep elsewhere: The dogs wore a device called a Fitbark, an activity tracker that attaches to the collar and records whether an animal is at rest and sleeping or active and at play. The people wore an Actiwatch 2, an activity monitor that records people’s movements and whether they are sleeping soundly or not. Both monitors were set to sample movement every minute, while the humans also...

Duke advanced yesterday to the Sweet 16. Cool, but their 87-62 win over Rhode Island wasn't exactly a fair fight. Loyola, though. Loyola advanced on a hail-Mary three-pointer with 3 seconds left on the clock: Loyola did it again with a 63-62 NCAA tournament thriller against No. 3 seed Tennessee to advance to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1985 — the last time the Ramblers were in the tournament. On Saturday night, it was guard Clayton Custer who delivered a game-winning 15-foot jumper with 3.6...

As of just a few moments ago, I passed 1.5 billion seconds old. Yes, this is a thing most people don't really think about, but as someone who works in software, this actually has some significance—and another Y2K problem that will occur just a few months before I get to 2.0 Gigaseconds (Gs) in 2038. The problem is a thing called the Unix epoch. Computers can only count as high as they have bits to count. Unix computers, which include Macs and most of the infrastructure of the Internet, count time in...