Events

Seventy years ago today, the United States detonated the world's first nuclear weapon: On Thursday, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy, will commemorate the 70th anniversary of its greatest scientific accomplishment: the first successful test of an atomic bomb. The anniversary of that explosion, which happened about 210 miles south of here at a site named Trinity, will be marked in a low-key fashion at the lab. There will be a roundtable discussion in an auditorium....

I'm reviewing a book I read about nine years ago, Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It by David Platt. It feels like re-reading Keynes in 2008: really much more familiar than one would want, because no one seems to have learned much. From Chapter 1: As with many areas of computing, user interface design is a highly specialized skill, of which most programmers know nothing. They become programmers because they're good at communicating with a microprocessor... But the user interface, by...

Meanwhile, this: Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Governments do much better at providing many services than private companies do, for the simple reason that private companies have incentives incompatible with the services. Bruce Schneier points out a shining example, nuclear security: We can learn a lot about the potential for safety failures at US nuclear plants from the July 29, 2012, incident in which three religious activists broke into the supposedly impregnable Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Fort Knox of uranium. Once there, they...

New Horizons zips past Pluto in the early hours of the morning U.S. time tomorrow: Last night at 11:23 p.m. EDT (this morning at 4:23 a.m. BST), New Horizons moved within one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) of Pluto, speeding towards the dwarf planet and its five moons at 30,800 mph (49,600 km/h). It will arrive tomorrow at 7:49 a.m. EDT (12:49 pm BST), although owing to the vast distances involved and a one-way communications time of 4.5 hours, we won’t know if it has been successful until the...

For a wildly successful heath care regime: What’s amazing about this is that the good news about Obamacare isn’t really debatable. It’s a simple fact that there has been a stunningly rapid drop in the number of uninsured, coming from multiple independent sources. It’s also a simple fact that outlays on Medicaid and exchange subsidies are coming in well below projections. You can argue that this is all temporary — that premiums will eventually skyrocket even though they haven’t yet, that the predicted...

Yesterday was almost entirely spent going up to the Bristol Renaissance Faire for its opening weekend. We had a lot of fun, ate more food (and more salt) than was probably healthy, and returned from the frozen North with squeaky cheese curds. Of course, all that fun, sun, and driving requires about a day to clear out of my system. The symptoms of this clearing include following random Wiki threads, thinking about doing basic activities for unusually long times before doing them, and arranging my day so...

Crain's Chicago Business has a web comic (of all things) that explains Motorola's decline from the only company making mobile handheld communicators to today's zombie corporation. Spoiler alert: it was Iridium.

The Atlantic's CityLab blog has a host: Train stations in America span all the styles of architecture this nation has to offer. There’s the the gorgeous Italianate train station in Jackson, Michigan. The Amtrak station in Raton, New Mexico, is a beautiful example of Mission Revival. Even the humble lil’ train station in Mineola, Texas, has got some flair. Whatever you might think about Orlando’s train station, it no doubt looks historic. The stations I want to talk about are not those train stations....

Two by Josh Marshall this morning. First, on how Donald Trump has got the Republican National Committee chair near apoplexy: If you're someone of [RNC chair Reince] Priebus' relative stature, approaching someone of Trump's arrogance and buffoonery, who is insulated from all of the pressures usually used to bring politicians to heel, you're not going to say, "Dude, STFU or else." I think you're probably to say something like "Dude, you're killing it. You've really struck a nerve. But a party can only...