Busy weekend; lunchtime reading

This past weekend included the Chicago Gay Pride Parade and helping a friend prepare for hosing a brunch beforehand. Blogging fell a bit on the priority list.

Meanwhile, here are some of the things I'm reading today:

• From last week, the Times discusses whether Earth's 23.4° axis tilt was actually a necessary precursor to life.
• New Republic's Josephine Huetlin asks, "Why do populists get away with corruption?"
• One of Chicago's last remaining over-the-tollway oases is slated for demolition.
• Josh Marshall points out why President Trump treating international diplomatic negotiations like flea-market haggling is a huge, long-term problem for the US.
• Writing for JetBrains' blog, developer Dino Esposito looks at how special string handling can be a code smell.
• The owner of the Lexington, Va., restaurant that kicked out Press Secretary Sarah Sanders talked to the Washington Post.

Back to debugging service bus queues...

Apropos the tilt of the Earth's axis, as the NY Times article mentions briefly at the end, we should be thankful that our planet has a large companion satellite. The Moon stabilises the tilt angle of the Earth, preventing it from varying by more than a couple of degrees. This was illustrated dramatically in a research paper in "Astronomy & Astrophysics" by the French astronomer Jacques Laskar back in 1993. He ran a numerical simulation in which he "removed" the stabilising effect of the Moon. The Earth's tilt angle then underwent large (> 15 degrees) oscillations on timescales of a few hundred thousand years.