Heads-down research and development today

I usually spend the first day or two of a sprint researching and testing out approaches before I start the real coding effort. Since one of my stories this sprint requires me to refactor a fairly important feature—an effort I think will take me all of next week—I decided to read up on something today and have wound up in a rabbit hole.

Naturally, that means a few interesting stories have piled up:

• The Presidential Greatness Project released its annual list of, well, presidents, putting Lincoln at the top (95.03 points), Buchanan next-to-last (16.71), and the XPOTUS dead last (10.92).
• The Justice Dept has finally filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation Entertainment, owner of Ticketmaster, for running one of the most pernicious monopolies of the 21st century. (I refuse to go to Live Nation events or use Ticketmaster anymore, because who wants to pay a 35% fee to a third party just to buy a ticket?)
• Molly White worries about a Dutch court's rationale for convicting Alexey Pertsev of writing the code for a service used to launder money, pointing out that privacy is a human right, and not all anonymization is criminal.
• Pilot James Fallows explains the Singapore Airlines severe-turbulence encounter and repeats the warning I gave earlier in the week.

Finally, Lagunitas Brewing will move its brewing operations back to Petaluma, Calif., (which is a million times better than Megaluma!) and close its Chicago taproom this summer, so I suppose the Brews & Choos Project should get its ass over there pronto.