Events

While trying to debug an ancient application that has been the undoing of just about everyone on my team, I've put these articles aside for later: Using the example of an automated process that sends out emails that your inbox subsequently deletes without any intervention on your part, Raymond Chen discusses Le Chatelier's Principle. Demonstrating that a stopped clock is correct twice a day, it turns out the Trump tax cuts have given a (temporary) boost to craft distilling. Whisky Advocate name-checks...

Just an historical note: as of today, I've been working with Microsoft .NET for 17 years. The first time I picked it up was 10 September 2001, which, if you think about it, is a very easy date to remember.

Researchers at the City University of New York have discovered that Yelp data can show rising incomes with remarkable precision: First, in testing a popular theory about signs of the gentry’s arrival, they pulled out all the Starbucks listings on Yelp across the United States dating back to 2007. Combining that information with Federal Housing Finance Agency data by zip code, they found that the arrival of every new Starbucks into a given area was associated with a 0.5 percent rise in local housing...

Atlantic editor Adam Serwer draws a straight line between the ways the Redemption court of the 1870s paved the way for the Gilded Age and Jim Crow, and how the Roberts court now (and especially with Brett Kavanaugh on it) is returning to those halcyon days: The decision in Cruikshank set a pattern that would hold for decades. Despite being dominated by appointees from the party of abolition, the Court gave its constitutional blessing to the destruction of America’s short-lived attempt at racial equality...

Sometimes, on Saturday afternoon, you just have to binge-watch Netflix while going through old boxes. I haven't told Parker that there will soon be more boxes. And then more boxes. And then nothing but boxes. He'll find that out on his own in good time. For now, I'll just let him believe that I'm rearranging things because that's what humans do sometimes. But he's eyeing the boxes warily. I think he suspects that his life is about to get disrupted. To the extent that he can suspect anything, or...

The Economist's Gulliver blog this morning asked exactly the same question I did when I woke up: how likely is it to get ill from flying on an airplane? Not very: Planes are widely regarded as flying disease-incubators. If one passenger is sick with a contagious disease and coughing those germs into the air, it makes sense for fellow-flyers to feel that the germs will simply be inhaled by everyone else on the flight, since there is nowhere else for the things to go. In reality, though, the situation is...

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an anonymous op-ed from a "senior White House official" that described a "resistance" inside the White House against President Trump's insanity. Greg Sargent calls bullshit: If anything, the sum total of the revelations offered, while valuable in some respects, reveals the sharp limits on which Trumpian impulses these greatly alarmed patriots discern to be seriously damaging to the country. In so doing, it actually reveals just how deeply insufficient these constraining...

This coffee shop, on Bermondsey Street: And this airplane: Actually, the A380 was pretty cool inside, though I may have erred getting an upper-deck seat. Next trip to London, I'll go for a lower-deck seat if I can. (Or even business class...hmmm...)

Getting off the airplane yesterday, I discovered that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is hanging them up: After nearly three decades of intense public life, from Chicago to the White House to Congress and back again, it was time for this “empty nester”—the term Emanuel kept dropping, to move on. Likely with a huge push from his wife. The prospect of the upcoming election, which Emanuel insisted he “without a doubt” would have won, wasn't the deciding factor. In the interview, Emanuel also said he’s “probably...

I'm sitting in Heathrow Terminal 5 watching planes take off and hoping space opens up in the pay-as-you-go lounge. Wow, do I miss having airline status. Obviously posting will be light today. Tomorrow I hope to get my annual Parker Day photo, just a few days late.