Events

During the first half of 2015, I took four trips, slightly fewer than the 22 I took in the second half of 2014. As of today I have four scheduled in the next three months—still not a huge number by historical standards. This coming weekend I'm restarting the 30-Park Geas. Then from mid-August to mid-September I've got trips planned to downstate Illinois, London, and San Francisco, the last one to attend the Dreamforce conference. It's still murder on my EQM numbers. It will hurt in 2016 if I can't...

At the new Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, we have Xfinity Internet provided by Comcast. In the last couple of weeks, citing competition from just about everyone, Comcast upgraded Internet speeds in many of their markets, including Chicago: Comcast announced Monday that it is raising the speed of its Blast Internet service to 75 Mbps, at no additional charge. The 50 percent increase will benefit about half of the company's high-speed Internet customers in Chicago, effective immediately. For...

The Atlantic's CityLab blog looks at the historic buildings and shares a 1965 video about its construction: The city has granted Marina City preliminary landmark status. Final approval could take a few weeks.

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...