Events

In the end, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron probably didn't need to go hat-in-hand to Ed Miliband, but the dead-enders in his own party forced him to. Regardless, marriage equality has passed the House of Commons tonight 375-70, will probably pass the House of Lords easily: But the prime minister, who attempted to reach out to his party by emailing a "personal note" to all members saying that he would never work with anyone who "sneered" at them, suffered the humiliation of having to plead...

Apparently Chicago has one: Typically, a team of four to six researchers fans out, whacking through the brush looking for holes surrounded by fresh digging or other signs, such as tracks, fur or scat. Sometimes they find two or more in a day, but often they strike out. At a promising site near Hoffman Estates, a team recently dug for an hour. Forest preserve biologist Chuck Rizzo wormed his way in and explored it with his burrow cam — an infrared camera with its cable stiffened by a noodle, one of those...

If you're a geography nerd, whatever you do, don't try playing Geoguessr. It will take hours of your life away. The idea: it puts you down at a random spot on Google Street View, and you have to figure out where you are. Here's one of my attempts, before I realized I needed to do some work today. I blame Randall Munroe.

A little grisly accident via The Atlantic: Now you know the last thing a whole bunch of salmon ever saw.

I have 21 hours of budget to finish a substantial project at work, and then another project to finish by the end of May. Posting may be iffy the next couple of days. Coming up, the final figures on how much moving to Azure saved me.

It's 26°C and sunny in Chicago right now, so I'm going for yet another walk. Regular posting to resume later today or tomorrow.

The BBC has a list of 10 euphamisms that bring back memories of political scandals past: 2. "Discussing Uganda" In 1973, the satirical magazine Private Eye reported that journalist Mary Kenny had been disturbed in the arms of a former cabinet minister of President Obote of Uganda during a party. Variations of "Ugandan discussions" or "discussing Uganda" - the term is believed to have been coined by the poet James Fenton - were subsequently used by the Eye to describe any illicit encounter, and the...

It's sobering that babies born the day I graduated college can take their first legal drinks today.

Via Sullivan, American Public Media's Kai Ryssdal yesterday committed an act of journalism against the former defense secretary: I don’t know if y’all had a chance to listen to Donald Rumsfeld being torn a new one on Marketplace yesterday, but it was glorious to hear. Rummy was no doubt expecting softball questions about his new book Rumsfeld’s Rules and instead was grilled about how the wisdom in his book is in stark contrast to his work with Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve never felt a man squirm through...

Via Sullivan, Max Fischer at WaPo found an interesting proxy for racial tolerance: Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country...