Events

Parker and I have walked about 90 minutes today, and we'll probably walk some more half an hour from now. It's 23°C and crystal clear, with a forecast for more of the same all weekend. I may not get anything done until Monday. Pity.

Via Sullivan, a look at a 45-story abandoned tower in Caracas that now houses 2,500 people: Welcome to the world’s tallest slum: poverty-ridden Venezuela’s Tower of David. Squatters took over this very unfinished 45-story skyscraper in the early 1990s, and they’ve been there ever since. The tower was originally intended to be a symbol of Caracas’ bright financial future, complete with a rooftop helipad, but construction stopped because of a banking crisis and the sudden death of the tower’s namesake...

Ezra Klein points to this graph and raises the question: The core issue here is that the unemployment rate only counts people actively looking for work. That means there are two ways to leave the ranks of the unemployed. One way — the good way — is to get a job. The other way is to stop looking for work, either because you’ve retired, or become discouraged, or begun working off the books. The yellow line on the left shows the official unemployment rate since 2008. It’s fallen from over 10 percent to...

...because I didn't have time to read them today: Today's Tales from the Interview on TDWTF July's climate writeup from the Illinois State Climatologist Sam Harris on free will and love Scott Hanselman recommends everyone get a "digital will" Azure SDK 2.1 is out today How to make frequent-flyer programs better Andrew Sullivan on the best opening lines in novels Mental Floss lists things we no longer see in airplanes but leaves out the most important one: hijackers I will now go home and read these...

It's good reconnecting with stuff that has been lost for years. Like the Jewish Samurai, for example. And the quiz proving executives do not have much in common with pre-schoolers. And let's not forget the four Jewish sons. Somewhere in the mists of time I have notes about why I released so many jokes in batches. As I move to a new blog/content platform this fall, I'll post what I find.

Earlier I surmised that automating the process of extracting my old jokes from the ancient braverman.org site would take less time than hand-copying them. Well, duh. It only took two hours to write the script, lint the very few entries that needed it, and push the lot up to The Daily Parker. So, for those of you who have missed all the jokes—there are just under 200 of them, all published from May 1998 to November 2004—start here, then skip to here, and then keep clicking the calendar control. I'll call...

Observer columnist John Naughton explains how the practices Edward Snowden revealed have hurt us: [H]ere are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far. The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided...

It completely passed me by that last week was the 30th anniversary of one of aviation's biggest moments in "it could have been worse," when an Air Canada 767 ran out of fuel over western Ontario: On 23 July 1983, flight 143 was cruising at 41,000 ft., over Red Lake, Ontario. The aircraft's cockpit warning system sounded, indicating a fuel pressure problem on the aircraft's left side. Assuming a fuel pump had failed,[3] the pilots turned it off,[3] since gravity should feed fuel to the aircraft's two...

...braverman.org published six proto-blog entries. This brings the total ancient blog entries restored to 63, leaving around 140 still to be dug out. It takes about 5 minutes per entry to convert right now, so I may automate the process. Since writing some automation will probably take less than 11 hours, I may just do that over the next couple of days.

New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow lays out the awfulness of "stand your ground" laws better than I: Something is wrong here. We are not being made more secure, we are being made more barbaric. These laws are an abomination and an affront to morality and common sense. We can’t allow ourselves to be pawns in the gun industry’s profiteering. We are real people, and people have power. Attorney General Eric Holder told the N.A.A.C.P. last week: “It’s time to question laws that senselessly expand...