Events

Urbanist channel Not Just Bikes gushes at the integration and efficiency of the world's busiest train station, Tokyo's Shinjuku: I passed through it every day during my visit to Tokyo in 2011, and yes, it is a marvel.

Cassie and I took two long walks yesterday. We drove up to the Skokie Lagoons before lunchtime and took a 7.25 km stroll along the north loop. The weather cooperated: I wanted to go up there in part because a 100-year-old forest had a higher probability of cicadas than anywhere near my house. We were not disappointed. Cassie and I both had passengers at various points in the walk: And wow, were they loud. I forgot how loud they got during the 2007 outbreak. Even at the points on the walk closest to the...

John Cleese did a political advert in 1987 for the SDP/Liberal Alliance, a moderate coalition of small UK parties that, as one would expect, got annihilated in the election that year, and ultimately became the Liberal Democratic Party. The LDP went on to get the shit kicked out of them in every election until the Tories found them useful for a hot second in 2010, whereupon they got kicked to the curb as soon as the Tories had an outright majority, before everyone forgot about them in 2015. Anyway, his...

I just beat a hasty retreat from where Cassie and I had spent our warm summer afternoon; see if you can spot why: In Chicago, if the temperature is above -18°C and you feel cold, you're just not dressed correctly. At 3pm I was dressed correctly; at 3:30pm I was not. At least we beat the rain: Looks like it'll pass in a couple of hours, so we'll get one more decent walk in this evening. Tomorrow my plan is to drag her butt to the North Branch Trail so we can see (and hear) some cicadas. Still none in my...

Seventy-five years ago today, George Orwell published 1984, a horrifying novel that gets closer to reality every day. Also on 8 June 1949, the FBI released a report naming acting stars and filmmakers "communists," kicking off a horrifying chapter in American history that gets closer to coming back every day. And yesterday, NASA astronaut Bill Anders died in a plane crash. You may not know who Anders was, but you've seen the photo he took on Christmas Eve 1968: By NASA/Bill Anders (Link) Public Domain...

I started my day with overlapping meetings, a visit from the housekeeping service, more meetings, a visit from an electrician, and just now discovered that a "new" bug report actually relates a bug we introduced on June 20th last year, but only now got reported. Oh, also: it's 25°C and sunny. At least it's Friday. And I guess I can read some of these tomorrow morning: Tara Palmeri examines the Beltway reactions to the convicted-felon XPOTUS's 34-count felony conviction. (But Josh Marshall says of this...

But only for a moment. I've spent most of today trying to fix things, or at least trying to figure out what problems need fixing. One of the problems has generated a comment thread on a vendor website, now at 44 comments, and I think after all that work I found the problem in an interaction between my code and Microsoft Azure Functions. If I'm right, the confirmation will come around 3pm. Naturally, I haven't had time to read any of these: Jamie Boule points out that the myth of the convicted-felon...

Via Bruce Schneier's recent essay on complexity, I found a blog post on the work of Ronald Coase, which really resonated: Ronald Coase observed that an organisation could be considered as a collection of contracts, and asked why, in that case, did organisations even exist. His answer was that contractual relationships have transactions costs. When these transactions costs outweighed the expense of organisation, organisation would predominate. Also, there were limits to transaction; it might be actually...

My home office has an unobstructed eastern view, and it sits in a loft above my bedroom. That means my bedroom gets indirect eastern light. The blinds in my office don't block all that light, however, so for three months of the year my bedroom gets awfully bright before 6am. Today, for whatever reason, I didn't sleep through it. Fortunately the sun rises before 6am only from late April to mid August, so I will get to sleep later eventually. And I do like that the sun sets after 7:30pm from early April...

Every other Tuesday we release software, so that's what I just did. It was so boring we even pushed the bits yesterday evening. In theory we always have a code-freeze the night before a release, but in fact we sometimes have just one more thing to do before we commit this last bit of code... And yet, the world outside keeps becoming less boring: Paul Krugman thinks President Biden should toot his own horn a bit more. Michelle Goldberg reminds us all that the XPOTUS meant "lock her up" literally: "A...