Events

President Obama this afternoon: Today, the Senate has taken an historic step toward ending a policy that undermines our national security while violating the very ideals that our brave men and women in uniform risk their lives to defend. By ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” no longer will our nation be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans forced to leave the military, despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay. And no longer will many thousands more be asked to...

Jon Stewart railed against the Republican minority this week for stopping a vote on a compensation bill for 9/11 first responders: The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c Worst Responders www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full EpisodesPolitical Humor & Satire BlogThe Daily Show on Facebook Update: Fox News's Shep Smith got the message:

Forty one Republican senators just now voted not to let the Senate vote on the DREAM act, which would have (among other things) let immigrants become citizens by serving in the armed forces. Think about that: a majority of the Senate and a majority of the House, and not for nothing but a majority of Americans, seem to believe that smart, dedicated people coming here to earn college degrees or fight and die in our wars deserve to become Americans, but the GOP doesn't. On the other hand, as I wrote the...

Also from Sullivan: It's called the Books Ngram Viewer, and it allows you to track the plot of words and phrases through time. The service draws on the absolutely massive Google Books corpus. Google estimates they've scanned and OCR'd 10 percent of all the books ever published, so this isn't a perfect dataset. But man is it fun to play with.

(Hat tip: The Daily WTF.)

The New York Times has released an application mapping key Census indicators by census tract. Seriously, you could spend hours playing with this thing.

Chicago Public Radio analyzes losing Bump to Silicon Valley as a demonstration of the lack of VC and incubator support here: David Lieb and his friend Jake Mintz hatched [Bump] at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business when they discovered in that flurry of the first few weeks of school that they really, really hated manually typing all their new friends’ contact information into their phones. So, along with their friend Andy Huibers, they figured out a way to “bump” two phones together to...

Sullivan calls it out: Does Assange want to be forced back to Sweden, where he is freer from possible US intervention? Or is this all a massive, unplanned clusterfuck? I guess if you live in a country where the government stakes out an interest in whether a condom breaks or not in consensual sex, you may never find out. In other news, the Senate just passed the tax compromise by a wide margin. Among other things, like some rejiggering that should add about $6 to my take-home pay, it reinstates the...

I almost forgot: the Inner Drive demonstration site, Weather Now, got a significant upgrade this weekend, to version 3.6. I added two new features that are part of long-term plan of improvements. They don't sound like much, but they're pretty important bits that other features will depend on. First, the lists of weather stations that appear on the home page are now generated dynamically from a database table. This means that I can change them, remove them, add them, or schedule them without having to...

About five hours ago I finished everything required to earn my MBA. I still have one (option) follow-up lecture for one class, so I can't mark the whole thing "resolved and closed" in FogBugz yet. Thus the precise language: I'm done with all the requirements. No more Saturday-morning CENTRA sessions. No more papers and exams lurking under the bed. No more residency calendar on my fridge (first attached there 18 months ago). I feel like Robert Redford's character at the end of The Candidate: "What do we...