If only I had a flight coming up this week

...I might have time to read all of these:

• President Trump's new rule, announced by acting USCIS chief Ken Cuccinelli, could radically change who gets to become an American.
• This week is the 10th anniversary of Kanye West's unpardonable dick move against Taylor Swift.
• The UK banned a Philadelphia cream cheese advert because it portrayed a gender stereotype.
• David Dudley argues that the bad mayor in Stephen Spielberg's 1975 movie Jaws explains "all I really needed to know about cities."
• Blogger Charles Phipps provides 50 bits of evidence that we're now living in a Cyberpunk future.
• Ross Douthat argues that sometimes—albeit rarely—you need to take conspiracy theories seriously.
• Peter Brannen points out that, at some point our entire history will be a few millimeters of rock under an ocean, so debating the "anthropocene" is kind of silly.
• Apparently, Ayn Rand has a recruiting problem.
• Fox and Friends doesn't really understand how tariffs work, even though the network they work for seems to get it.
• Rob Sylvan has some great tips for using Adobe Lightroom.

And now, back to work.

Apropos the article about the "anthropocene", to an astronomer like myself, even 100-million-year geological ages are little more than a brief moment on the timescales on which the universe operates. The Sun, after all, has a 10 billion year lifespan, and 100 million years is just 1 per cent of that. And if you want to consider truly mind-boggling spans of time, read the 1997 paper "A Dying Universe" by Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin. Among the events they consider in the distant future, based on current physics and astronomy, are the end of new star formation and the dying of the longest-lived stars, around 100 trillion (10 to the power 14) years from now; the end of normal matter as protons decay at around 10 to the power 38 years; and the evaporation, via Hawking radiation, of the super-massive black holes at the centres of galaxies at around 10 to the power 83 years.

Well, then. Let's party like it's 199999999999999!