Events

Maxis died in 2015 and made Electronic Arts king of SimCity. When I recently found a copy of SimCity 4, one of the only computer games I've ever played long enough to get good at, I thought I might waste an hour or two on a rainy Sunday playing it. Unfortunately, the CD requires a copy-protection feature in Windows Vista that Windows 7 dropped because researchers discovered a massive security flaw in it. The CD, therefore, will only work on Windows Vista or Windows XP, neither of which I have run...

Spring has gone on spring break this week, so while I find the weather pleasant and enjoyable, it still feels like mid-March. That makes it more palatable to remain indoors for lunch and catch up on these stories: Josh Marshall reminds us why, given today's anemic jobs report, listening to Larry Summers never ends well. David Brooks asks, "Could today’s version of America have been able to win World War II?" Tl;dr: Nope. George Conway III outlines Rudy Giuliani's legal troubles. Ted Koppel takes a look...

University of Edinburgh literature professor David Farrier adapts his book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils for the BBC: If cities have a geological character, it begs the question of what they will leave behind in the stratigraphy of the 21st Century. Fossils are a kind of planetary memory of the shapes the world once wore. Just as the landscapes of the deep past are not forgotten, how will the rock record of the deep future remember Shanghai, New York and other great cities? The main components...

Travel in the US just got slightly easier now that the Department of Homeland Security has extended the deadline to get REAL ID cards to May 2023. Illinois just started making them a year ago, but you have to go to a Secretary of State office in person to get one. Due to Covid-19, the lines at those facilities often stretch to the next facility a few kilometers away. Reading that made me happier than reading most of the following: The Washington Post has two op-eds today that interested me for reasons...

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...