Events

Brilliant:

I got an odd bit of mail today, in an official USPS envelope with a handwritten address. It was a check. A check I wrote. To the State Department. Apparently, my passport renewal check got swept up in a pile of bills and other envelopes I dropped into the local mailbox. I didn't even realize I'd mailed the check without an envelope. And I remember thinking, as I reprinted the check a couple days later, "crap, another one fell behind my desk. I'll get it later." Thank you, anonymous Chicago postal...

Via one of my classmates, and the NPR Planet Money blog, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority has started testing demand pricing for parking spaces: The system will use electronic sensors to measure real-time demand for parking spaces, and adjust prices accordingly. When there are lots of empty spaces, it will be cheap to park. When spaces are hard to find, rates will be higher. The range in prices will be huge: from 25 cents an hour to a maximum of $6 an hour, according to the San...

Via Sullivan and the New Yorker, a scary-cool animation of the 2,051 nuclear weapons tests (plus the two the U.S. dropped on Japan) between 1945 and 1998:

I play online Scrabble™ every day, so I've seen my fill of bad Scrabble racks. When you have four Es in your rack towards the end of the game, it almost doesn't matter what else you have. Sometimes, though, you have four Es, a blank, a Z, and an N...and this happens, for 54 points: Of course, there was the game where my racks looked like this for most of the game: I'm actually batting .500 with this opponent after close to 100 games. So we're pretty evenly matched, which I think is best, as it's obvious...

Usually G#, but today C# or possibly even Db.[1,2] I've had a raspy voice and a strange ability to hit bass notes the last few days, and the weather is why: The heat and plentiful rain of recent weeks has led to a bumper crop of mold spores--and never more so than on Friday. Loyola Gottlieb Hospital's mold count, produced by Dr. Joseph Leija and his staff, surged to a five-year high--and nearly to "alert" levels Friday. The count was 49,789 spores per cubic meter--alerts are issued when the mold counts...

Krugman makes a succinct point about why the current recession isn't like 1981: The 1981-2 recession was a very different kind of event from the 2007-9 recession: basically, it was a recession deliberately created by the Fed to bring down inflation. The Fed raised interest rates sky-high, causing a plunge in home construction, which was the main driver of the slump. When Paul Volcker believed that we had suffered enough, he cut rates, housing sprang back — and it was housing that mainly drove the...

Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen's blog often sails right over my head, but I read it anyway. He's fairly senior at Microsoft, and he's written a good bit of the Windows operating systems. Plural. So I learn from him. This story, however, should have wider publication than just us industry geeks: During the development of the product he was working on, the programmers needed an image for a comparatively rarely-used piece of the user interface. Since programmers aren't graphic designers, they inserted a...

Still, when you see something like this, it hurts: When it finally ended, the Brewers wound up with an 18-1 win, sending the Cubs to their sixth straight defeat and leaving them a season-worst 14 games under .500 at 46-60. The Cubs tied a franchise record with 26 hits allowed. The loss dropped them into fifth place in the National League Central, a half-game behind the Astros. Acting manager Alan Trammell said before the game that "being professional" is one of the things the Cubs are looking for from...

Via Sullivan, UK Prime Minister David Cameron presents the Conservative view of gay marriage: I know there is one other subject that the gay community is particularly interested in: marriage. As someone who believes in commitment, in marriage and in civil partnerships, my view is that if religious organisations want to have civil partnerships registered at their places of worship that should be able to happen. Last week the Equalities Minister held listening events with faith groups and representatives...