Events

A couple I know asked me to take some photos of their 10-month-old daughter recently. Et voilà:

Yesterday the Cardinals spanked the Boys in Blue 6-1, and I got to see the whole thing. Here's Edwin Jackson: I'll give him one thing, boy: he threw 117 pitches, the 113th at 160 km/h. Impressive. Also, I got to sit in a different section than usual, because my cousin and I got our signals crossed on which games to sell. Apparently we broke even—including the extra fee for the better (section 430) seats.

After fending off the Brewers for 8 weeks, the Cubs finally slipped into last place last night by losing to the Cardinals 0-4: I'm going to today's game. I am not optimistic.

It seems that Google is doing away with its 20% R&D policy: When Google went public in 2004, the founders’ letter from co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin cited 20% time as instrumental to the company’s ability to innovate, leading to “many of our most significant advances,” including AdSense, which now accounts for about 25% of the company’s $50+ billion in annual revenue. Google engineers also used 20% time to incubate Gmail, Google Transit, Google Talk, and Google News, among other projects....

The judge in the American Airlines bankruptcy just expressed doubts the airline will survive: A judge asked AMR Corp for guidance on whether he should approve its plan to exit bankruptcy, in light of an antitrust challenge to its planned merger with US Airways Group Inc. The request suggested Judge Sean Lane would hold off on approving AMR's plan at a hearing in U.S. bankruptcy court in New York on Thursday. Lane said he had "lingering doubts" as to whether it was appropriate to confirm the plan. He...

The friend who posted this roundup said simply, "Nerdgasm:" Writing Systems of the World By Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa) (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons Take a look.

After dropping 12 of their last 15 games, the Cubs are now tied with the Brewers for 4th (last) place. There are 42 games left in the season; the Cubs have to win 10 of them to avoid a 100-loss season. It's not going well. At least they can't lose today—but they can drop into 5th place if Milwaukee beats the Reds tonight. This, by the way, is unlikely, since the Reds are doing just fine, and are tied for the National League Wild Card with St. Louis. I'm going to the Cubs-Cards game Sunday to watch the...

...but the Department of Justice suing to block the American-US Airways merger was sure stupid. Cranky Flyer gives them a Crazy Jackass award: It really does appear that DOJ has gone off the rails. The best way to sum up the argument is that airlines should all be punished for trying to be successful enterprises. The complaint is filled with talk about how capacity has shrunk and fares have risen. They think this merger will result in more of the same. But what they’ve failed to recognize is that the...

As expected, the Justice Department and several states' attorneys general have challenged the American-USAirways merger: The Justice Department says the deal would result in the creation of the world’s largest airline and that a combination of the two companies would reduce competition for commercial air travel in local markets and would result in passengers paying higher airfares and receiving less service. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the transaction between US Airways and American...

Paul Krugman points out this simple fiscal truth, along with polling data that makes my head hurt: A little while back I expressed a desire to see a poll of voters asking whether they knew about the plunging federal budget deficit. Just as a reminder, here’s what the CBO numbers for the recent past and projections for the near future look like: Well, Hal Varian of Google got in touch with me, and said,”We can do that!” So he put together a Google Consumer Survey; it’s still ongoing — results here — but...