Events

May 5th has some history, and not just about a relatively minor battle in Mexico that most Mexicans don't even remember. For example, two hundred years ago today, Napoleon died and The Guardian was born. I never knew about that coincidence. TIL. And this morning, Facebook's Oversight Board upheld the social-media company's ban on the XPOTUS, at least for the next six months. Also TIL that my main programming language, C#, commands 7% of the Internet's mind-share, making it the 4th most-popular...

The decennial update of the 30-year US climate normals dropped this afternoon. They show the US has gotten measurably warmer over the 1981-2010 normals: NOAA’s new U.S. Climate Normals give the public, weather forecasters, and businesses a standard way to compare today’s conditions to 30-year averages. Temperature and precipitation averages and statistics are calculated every decade so we can put today’s weather into proper context and make better climate-related decisions. Normals are not merely...

We have gloomy, misty weather today, keeping us mostly inside. Cassie has let me know how bored she is, so in the next few minutes we'll brave the spitting fog and see if anyone else has made it to the dog park. Meanwhile: As today is May the Fourth (be with you), NPR reminded us of the time they produced a radio drama based on "A New Hope." It turns out, the FBI never actually got around to warning Rudy Giuliani that he was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign. The US Trustee, the Department...

Over the weekend, I stooped down to give Cassie some pats while she slept on her bed in my office, and realized I had a cache of turn-of-the-century computer games on a lower shelf. Among them I found SimCity 4, from 2003. It turns out that SimCity 4, like many games from that era, relies on a thing called "SecuROM" which turned out to have sufficient security problems of its own that Microsoft decided not to support it in Windows 10. I didn't know this until I started researching why the game...

The American news and information radio network turns 50 today: It's been a turbulent time, with a deadly pandemic and a chaotic — sometimes violent — political climate. In the midst of all this, NPR is marking a milestone; on May 3, 2021, the network turns 50 years old. On the same day, in 1971, we started holding up our microphone to America. Just outside our doors, on the streets of Washington, DC, one of the biggest antiwar protests in American history was taking place. NPR's story is that of a...

Hello, CDC? I'd like to report some side-effects of my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. To wit: All I wanted to do on Friday was sleep. When I finally slept, my left arm was sore enough to wake me up a couple of times. But hey, I planned to sleep in yesterday anyway, so no biggie. Cassie had other ideas. She poked her nose in my ear at 6:30. I shooed her away. At 6:45, she decided that the squirrel or bird or whateverthefuck outside had to die, and that was the end of my slumber for good. According to...

On my horizontal monitor, I'm watching Apollo After Hours 2021, our chorus's annual benefit. Last year we deployed the 7pm video about now. This year we deployed it yesterday. I've spent the last six years working very hard to spread the gospel of boring software deployments. I'm overjoyed that we had one this year with Apollo After Hours.

The BBC Fact Checker corrects the record on things the President has said since he took office: "An increase in border migration 'happens every year... in the winter months'" The number fluctuates widely - but there is not always a significant increase during the winter months. At a press conference in March, he said: "There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year." Of the seven statements the BBC...

Paul Krugman points out that adequate child care, such as President Biden has championed, goes a long way to helping families make and keep money: It’s ... instructive to compare the United States with other advanced countries, almost all of which have higher taxes and more generous social benefits than we do. Do they pay a price for these policies in the form of reduced employment? Many Americans would, I suspect, be surprised to learn that the truth is that many high-tax, high-benefit countries are...

I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine today. So pfar, I haven't notices any pside epffects. Actually, that's not true. I'm four hours in and I'm starting to feel a heaviness to the injection site that has spread up and down my arm. My immune system has decided it's this guy: