Events

Yeah, one of those days: Has the NRA fatally over-reached? Niel deGrasse Tyson examines whether Superman can really fly. How visionary is Eric Schmidt, really? (Could it be instead survivorship bias?) Can we stop worshiping Reagan, please? What happens when a rural town dies? I'll get to these eventually...

I didn't do anything of value of the weekend except continuing to read Before the Deluge. It's making me wonder what would have to happen in the U.S. to have such a stunning collapse of civilization. So the book not only makes me pause every few paragraphs to really absorb what I'm reading, but also I keep going off to Wikipedia to get maps and context. It's taken me years to figure out that I breathe mentally. Inhaling means reading and watching movies; exhaling means writing and coding. (No idea how...

While looking up a map of the Tottenham Court Road area of London just now, I saw...something: Do you see it, just north of the British Museum in the northern corner of Russell Square? Look closely, or click for a full-size capture: Looks like an A320, doesn't it? Can't tell whose. I just hope that it's as high up as I think it is.

Yesterday California rolled out is ACA Exchange, and it looks like a rousing success: An estimated 5.3 million Californians will be eligible for coverage through Covered California, the state agency running the insurance marketplace. The lowest-income people will be referred to public safety net programs, while some 2.6 million middle-income residents will qualify for federal subsidies to help pay their premiums. Covered California provided examples of what a 40-year-old would pay depending on income...

National Public Radio has created an interactive map that uses Google Maps and new satellite images Google obtained yesterday to show 10-meter images of the Oklahoma tornado's destruction: This may be the best, most timely use of geographic information in a news presentation I've ever seen. The images are stunning. I can only imagine what life must be like in Moore right now—and with the NPR app, it's a lot easier to understand.

Stockholm, apparently: Hundreds of young people have torched cars and attacked police in three nights of riots in immigrant suburbs of Sweden's capital, shocking a country that has dodged the worst of the financial crisis but failed to defuse youth unemployment and resentment of asylum seekers. The riots were less severe than those of the past two summers in Britain and France, but provided a similar reminder that, even in places less ravaged by the financial crisis than Greece or Spain, state...

If you've ever played SimCity, you have probably encountered the Arcology, a massive self-contained building that houses thousands of people. They're almost here: BSC is going to stuff 30,000 people into these self-contained skyscraper communities—a resident of Sky City will use up 1/100th of the land used by a typical Chinese citizen. And it really is a city in and of itself—4,450 apartments, nearly 100,000 square feet of indoor vertical farms, 250 hotel rooms, 92 elevators, 30 foot courtyards for...

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.