Events

I'm having a series of productive days lately, which has taken me away from wasting a bunch of time. So for example, I haven't yet today read these items: A group of Redditors has put a short squeeze on two hedge funds to the tune of billions of dollars, and there was much rending of clothes that kind of, sort of, made the Redditors' point for them. Journalist Yudhijit Bhattacharjee investigates a source of thieving phone scams in India. From November 2019, National Geographic explains how a phenomenon...

As the State of Illinois starts abandoning the Helmut Jahn-designed Thompson Center in Chicago's Loop, the Governor's Office announced the state has purchased PepsiCo's old building at 555 W Monroe St: The 18-year-old structure has 430,000 square feet of office space and has green certification for energy efficiency. More than 1,000—and potentially 1,400—of the 3,500 state workers now based in downtown Chicago eventually will relocate to the new facility, starting in April, according to Ayse...

It's every other Tuesday today, so I'm just waiting for the last continuous-integration (CI) build to finish before deploying the latest software to our production environment. So far, so boring, just the way I like it. Meanwhile, in the real world: In a symbolic but meaningless vote, all but 5 Republican members of the US Senate voted to let the XPOTUS off the hook for inciting an insurrection against, well, them, as this way they believe they get to keep his followers at no cost to themselves. If this...

Dear future reader, observe how the combination of physical isolation; near-universal access to the entire world through the Internet; apps that make collaboration simple (like TikTok); and really bored young people has allowed entirely new art forms to flourish. This, as just one example, needs preservation so future generations can see what we got up to in early 2021: I don't know whether videos like this will continue once people can make live music for live audiences again. I will predict, however...

Today is the last day of Sprint 28 at my day job, and I've just closed my third one-point story of the day. When we estimate the difficulty of a story (i.e., a single unit of code that can be deployed when complete), we estimate by points on a Fibonacci scale: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. A 2-point story is about twice as hard as a 1-point story; a 5 point story is about 5 times harder than a 1-point story; etc. If we estimate 8 or more points on my current team, we re-examine the story in order to break it...

Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the ten GOP representatives who voted for the Article of Impeachment against the XPOTUS two weeks ago, finds himself on the outs with his party: Kinzinger's future prospects depend largely on Trump's continuing role in Republican politics. If the party remains in thrall to the former president at every level, Kinzinger's perceived betrayal makes political survival, let alone advancement, uncertain. What does Kinzinger want to do in 2022? "I don't know," he says. "Do I have...

Via Julia Ioffe, the Guardian highlights a kitchen gadget that literally no one needs: The Egg Master (£29.99, DecentGadget, Amazon) is a vertical grill encased in silicone housing. Ingredients poured into the plastic tube are heated by an embedded, wraparound element. When ready, food spontaneously rises from the device. This week’s gadget describes itself as “a new way to prepare eggs”, which is accurate in the way that chopping off your legs could be described as a new way to lose weight. Let’s start...

The City of Chicago has moved into Covid-19 response Tier 1, meaning bars and restaurants can sort-of open: In a Saturday morning announcement, as expected, the Illinois Department of Public Health said its latest data indicates both the city and suburban Cook—Regions 10 and 11 in the state’s COVID-19 matrix—have reached the metrics needed to allow reopening at 25 percent of  normal capacity, to a maximum of 25 people per room. Whether restaurants and bars actually open this time no one can predict. But...

In just four years, the XPOTUS lied over 30,000 times: “We also built the greatest economy in the history of the world…Powered by these policies, we built the greatest economy in the history of the world.” FACT CHECK: This is Trump’s favorite false claim, so there should be no surprise he said it twice in his farewell address. (In this database, we only count a falsehood once per venue.) By just about any key measure in the modern era, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton presided...

Even though things have quieted down in the last few days (gosh, why?), the news are still newing: President Biden has signed a pack of executive orders, including a national mask mandate and others designed to get his Covid-19 plan running. James Fallows, himself a former presidential speechwriter, explains "why Biden's inaugural address succeeded." Of course, and who could have predicted?, the Republican Party have twisted their panties into (fake) knots over President Biden's call for unity. The...