tingilinde

when was the emoticon invented?

Many have suggested a 1881 piece in Puck.

Perhaps it was a bit earlier :)

 

women couldn't be creative in the magic kingdom

A rejection letter from Disney

Of course times have changed ... at least one hopes.

 

 

 

mobile two way radio a hundred years ago

One wonders if talking while driving was a problem.

 

imagine

 

If the US had competent leadership not zero, but several studies suggest that we'd be in the 100 or so new cases a day - nationwide - and be more or less back to normal with testing picking up the inevitable hot spots.  Instead it's going to get much worse.

 

 

 

trump tower in nyc

WeWork for organized crime

 

a series of indignities

excellent   a tip of the hat to Dewayne

A Continuing Series of Small Indignities from Michael Pfaendtner on Vimeo.

the confederates who fled

looking for land and slaves -- in Brazil

 

on re-opening schools

Kids need to schools, but America's failure to deal with Covid-19 forces difficult choices. Some of what has been learned. 

 

epidemiologist larry brilliant on how we're doing so far

Not well it turns out...  at least the US.

 

 

a rule of thumb

 

Don't take deadly pandemic advice from people who don’t care if children are gunned down in schoolrooms.

 

 

coherence

The current period is more significant than the little ice age. 

snip

...

What makes those older eras different from modern warming is coherence—that climate change is happening today just about everywhere at the same time. “That coherence cannot be explained by the natural variability of the climate system,” Steiger said. And it does not characterize any previous era.

“This study is another nail in the coffin of the idea of that there was a globally warm or cold period that fit tidily into a specific couple of centuries,” said Yarrow Axford, a climate scientist at Northwestern University, in an email. She was not involved in writing the new paper. The idea that the Little Ice Age or eras like it were uniform global events was “already dying within the scientific community,” she said, yet that idea remains “perennially popular with nonexperts who want to sow doubt about the significance of the dramatic and truly global warming that has occurred in the past century.”

...

 

carl reiner's final performance

Three days before he died...

a tip of the hat to Xeni

 

campus for sale

starting bids at three million - we're likely to see more of this

 

slothbot

trying to move beyond gerrymandering

Greg points out an interesting technique from Harvard and BU.  It needs testing and, of course, adoption - but we need something.

snip

...

However, as appealing as an apolitical computer program solving gerrymandering sounds, it turns out it’s not that simple. It’s practically impossible to remove the political elements from district mapping, even if technology is involved. However, researchers from Harvard and Boston University have developed a deceptively simple method that keeps the districting process in human hands and gives both parties a hand in shaping the districts, while using sophisticated mapping algorithms to ensure their approach is as fair as possible. Now if only state legislatures will choose to use it.

...