Events

Cassie last got a bath (I think) sometime in April. So, wow, did she need one today. And she was a trooper. Before: After: She actually likes water, so she just let me spray her down, shampoo her up, and spray her down again. Once inside and toweled off, she got the zoomies but good. After two hours she's dry and doesn't smell like a wet dog. And she's so soft again, without the sheen of whatever she rolled in at day camp for the past few weeks.

Last August 6th I took some drone photos and video of the Black Lives Matter mural on Clifton Street in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. Here is 6 August 2020: And here is today: It's had some weathering, but overall, it looks OK. My primary goal of today's flights was to document the CTA RPM Project. Crews have removed the two east-side tracks between Lawrence and Bryn Mawr, and have started removing the embankment as well. As the project goes on, I'll document more of it, and assemble a video. This is...

Via Bruce Schneier, researchers have developed software that can bamboozle facial-recognition software up to 60% of the time: The work suggests that it’s possible to generate such ‘master keys’ for more than 40% of the population using only 9 faces synthesized by the StyleGAN Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), via three leading face recognition systems. The paper is a collaboration between the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and the school of Electrical Engineering, both at Tel Aviv. StyleGAN is...

United States Magistrate Judge Reid Neureiter has ordered that the attorneys who filed a ridiculous case against (I am not kidding) over 10,000 people allegedly involved in a massive conspiracy to steal the 2020 election, must pay the defendants' legal fees under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11: Attorneys Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker filed a “frivolous” case and “did not conduct a reasonable inquiry into whether the factual contentions had evidentiary support,” Magistrate Judge N. Reid...

Yesterday, Boston University clinical journalism instructor and WGBH-Boston reporter Jenifer McKim presented a story on NPR's Morning Edition about Grindr, the gay dating app. NPR's Steve Inskeep introduced the story by saying "the dating app Grindr is a popular site for men seeking other men. It's also used by underage boys, which can put them at risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking." Between that introduction and the body of the story, I got pretty steamed. This morning I sent the following...

Amanda Mull examines why. Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, [historian Susan Strasser, the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market] said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure. If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past...

New York State Attorney General Letitia James released a report yesterday that alleges New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed at least 11 women, including a New York State Police trooper assigned to his protective detail: The report, released by the attorney general, Letitia James, and the announcement from the Albany County prosecutor, Kevin Soares, endangered Mr. Cuomo’s political future while also placing him in legal jeopardy. “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state...

As of June 11th, the Cubs were tied for first place. That turned out to have been the high point of 2021. The nadir arrived over the weekend when the organization perpetrated the "biggest 24-hour roster dump in franchise history," according to the Chicago Tribune: The Cubs entered the Brewers series hitting .186 in June, the fourth-lowest average of any team in any calendar month. After beating the Cubs 13-2 in the opening game of the homestand, again with Sogard pitching in relief, the...

Welcome to stop #49 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery closed in August 2023. Brewery: MyGrain Brewing., 50 E. Jefferson St., JolietTrain line: Heritage Corridor or Rock Island, JolietTime from Chicago: 70 minutes (Zone H)Distance from station: At the station One of the subtle (to American audiences, anyway) bits of satire in Simon Pegg's 2013 movie The World's End is the sameness of the pubs that the characters visit. They have the same faux-handwriting, faux-chalk menu boards; the same layouts...

While I look out my hermetically-sealed office window at some beautiful September weather in Chicago (another argument for working from home), I have a lot of news to digest: The infrastructure bill unveiled in the US Senate this morning would give $66 billion to Amtrak, which desperately needs the money. Josh Marshall argues that social-group identity drives resistance to vaccination. Brooke Harrington elaborates by pointing out that people who are conned usually can't admit to being conned. In...