This floored me. The Lebanese health minister reported earlier that 8 people died and 2,750 suffered injuries when thousands of pagers exploded this morning in Lebanon and Syria:
Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abia, said the blasts killed eight people, including a girl. “About 2,750 people were injured ... more than 200 of them critically,” with injuries mostly reported to the face, hands and stomach, he told a press conference.
Hezbollah said in a statement that two of its fighters and a 10-year-old girl were among the dead.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was one of those injured in the explosions, according to Iran’s Mehr news agency.
Some of the top Hezbollah leaders and their advisers were also injured, the Saudi-owned Al-Hadath news channel reported, quoting unnamed sources.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.
Yossi Melman, a co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and other books on Israeli intelligence, said: “This absolutely has all the hallmarks of a Mossad operation. Somebody has planted minor explosives or malware from inside the pagers. I understand they were recently supplied as well.”
Melman said he understood that “a lot of people in Hezbollah carried these pagers, not just top echelon commanders”. They were used by the Lebanese group because they feared their mobile phones were being monitored by Israeli intelligence to surveil their communications and to pinpoint missile attacks.
That (a) someone managed to supply thousands of Hezbollah terrorists with booby-trapped pagers and (b) no one in Hezbollah conducted security checks on the pagers before handing them out blows my mind. Regardless of who perpetrated this attack, (a) I am very sorry the little girl died but (b) for the Hezbollah fighters and leaders injured in the attack, I will shed not one tear. It's simultaneously one of the most effective intelligence operations and one of the worst counter-espionage failures in decades. Wow.
Other than having absolutely no real value except to scammers and thieves, cryptocurrency has no real value. But a lot of money gets laundered through crypto these days, so people will spend gobs of real currency building data centers to generate more cryptocurrency. These data centers efficiently dump nearly all the externalities of crypto mining onto their neighbors, except for the externalities crypto already dumps on just about everybody else. Oh, don't let me forget that simulated artificial intelligence also needs big data centers:
Across the country, from Indiana to Oregon, companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are building data centers on sites that can stretch over 1,000 acres, ringed with guard towers and razor wire fences.
People who live near one Northern Virginia center have complained that the mechanical whir of the fleet of industrial fans needed to cool the sensitive computer equipment inside can sound like a leaf blower that never turns off. Cooling the heavy equipment also diverts great volumes of water even in places where it’s scarce. And some of the costs of powering the centers are shouldered by utility customers, in the form of hundreds of dollars a year added to household energy bills.
Local leaders who run interference on behalf of tech giants often play up the benefits, particularly the jobs and advanced technical training opportunities they tout. Recently, a small but growing number of officials have begun to question these deals. In Georgia, where electricity demand and energy grid strain from more than 50 data centers pushed residential utility bills up almost $200 a year on average per household, state senators passed a bill earlier this year that would pause tax incentives for data center development for the next two years.
One thing Cooper doesn't suggest: increasing penalties on public officials who benefit personally from their offices. But that would undermine American-style democracy, wouldn't it?
I've just released a new version of Weather Now, which brings back a feature the app hasn't had since about 2002. Building on the release two weeks ago that added user profiles (as long as you have a Microsoft account), today's release allows users to set their home location and home weather station.
Pages like the Nearby Weather page will show distances from your home location in the list of stations. And other pages will use your home weather station (Current Weather) or home location (Sunrise Times) as the default starting point. You can still specify different locations for everything. And, of course, you don't have to have a user profile set up to use those features.
To choose your home location, search for a place and then go to the Place Info page. (The link to Place Info is usually on the bottom of a page.) On Place Info, click on "Make this your home place." Similarly, to set your home weather station, go to any weather page and click "Make this your home weather station."
Next up: users will be able to select the stations that appear on the home page when they log in.
Super cool!
I went out to Suburbistan to have dinner with an old family friend, and he surprised me with an unusual and very cool heirloom that his own father, Bill, left him:
That's an HO-scale model that Bill built out from kits probably back in the 1970s. Must have taken him weeks, with the detailing and the weathering. I thought putting it in front of a 1970 edition Britannica fit pretty well.
But since I went out to Suburbistan, Cassie had to wait bloody hours for dinner. She didn't seem to mind getting a little couch time afterward:
Today I'm working from home so she doesn't see any need to follow me around. And she's about to get a 30-minute walk, which should help with any residual feelings of neglect that may linger from yesterday.
In September, all eyes in baseball turn to the teams likely to win spots in the post-season championship games. You'll see in the standings that some teams have a "magic number:" the combination of their wins and other-team losses that will move them into the playoffs. Today, for instance, the New York Yankees are in first place in the American League. Because of math™, any combination of 14 Yankees wins or Baltimore Orioles losses will mean the Yankees finish first in their division.
Chicago's American League team, the White Sox, have a different number to ensure every baseball fan will remember them forever. They have lost 114 games so far this year. So, with 15 games left to play this season, the White Sox have to lose only 7 games to break the all-time record for most losses by a major league team in a full season:
The 1962 New York Mets lost 120 games, setting the record for the most defeats in a single season in modern baseball history. The 2024 Chicago White Sox are on pace to supplant the Mets as the worst team ever. As the season winds down, we’ll track their efforts to avoid infamy.
The White Sox have gone an entire month without a home win.
The White Sox now sit at 33-114. Since their inception as a charter member of the American League in 1901, only five teams have recorded more losses in a season: the 2018 Baltimore Orioles (115), the 1935 Boston Braves (115), the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics (117), the 2003 Detroit Tigers (119) and the 1962 New York Mets (120).
Note to football (soccer) fans: we don't have relegation in baseball. We're stuck with them.
But hey, they could still win 10 of those 15 games and defy history! They already did it earlier this season when they failed to lose 23 games in a row to tie the worst-streak-ever record set by Philadelphia in 1961. Will they fall short (long?) of losing 121 games this year? We'll know in just over two weeks.
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently ruled in Hachette v Internet Archive that the Internet Archive's Open Library violated copyright law. Molly White today published the best response I have seen so far:
My beliefs are simple, and hardly radical: Libraries are critical infrastructure. Access to information is a human right. When you buy a book you should truly own it. When a library buys a book, they should be able to lend it. Readers should be able to read without any third parties spying over their shoulders, or preventing them from accessing the materials they have legally obtained.
Hachette and the other plaintiff publishers have argued that, by lending out one-to-one digital copies of books they have legally purchased, the Internet Archive’s Open Library is infringing upon the publishers’ copyright and damaging their sales. And, without any evidence of actual harm to the publishers, the Second Circuit went right along with it. They also went a step further, again without evidence, to suggest that libraries are inherently detrimental to society.
[B]y fighting [Controlled Digital Lending], publishers are seeking to overstep the established boundaries of intellectual property law to exert continued control over an item that has already been purchased from them. And they are seeking to diminish the critical rights of readers to read the books they want without being subjected to censorship and surveillance. This is part and parcel with other attempts by digital publishers — of books, but also of films, video games, and other media — to turn media purchases into rentals, so as to extract endless money and private data from their customers.
In other words: even though libraries have been around far longer than the Copyright Act itself, libraries are now a threat to authors. The true meaning is clear: publishers’ abilities to extract exorbitant rents and exert control over readers outweigh the incredible benefits of increased public access to books.
US law protects rentiers better than most of our peer countries' laws do. Yet another reason to get the plutocratic Republicans out of Congress.
The intersection of my vacation next week and my group's usual work-from-home schedule means I won't come back to my office for two weeks. Other than saving a few bucks on Metra this month, I'm also getting just a bit more time with Cassie before I leave her for a week.
I've also just finished an invasive refactoring of our product's unit tests, so while those are running I either stare out my window or read all these things:
- Yes, Virginia (and Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina), you are much better off than you were four years ago.
- The Illinois Attorney General has filed an environmental suit against Trump Tower for refusing to fix its water-intake system.
- A New York City cop who fought against "courtesy cards" won a $175,000 settlement from the city.
- A developer plans to raze a 175-year-old house in Glencoe, Ill., designed by William Boyington, because we can't have nice things anymore.
- Speaking of not having nice things, after £175m spent and 12 years of construction, the Old Street roundabout in Islington, London, looks...about the same as before.
Finally, the New York Times ran a story in its Travel section Tuesday claiming Marseille has some of the best pizza in Europe. I will research this assertion and report back on the 24th.
I just finished a 75-minute open-level French test as part of a QA study that Duolingo invited me to participate in. What an eye-opener. And quelle épuisement!
The test started well enough but got a lot harder as it went on, for two principal reasons. First, the order of sections went precisely in the order of my abilities: reading, writing, listening, speaking. Turns out I read French a lot better than I write it, write it better than I understand it, and speak it like a reject from a Pink Panther film. Some poor evaluator will have to listen to me going on for nearly three minutes about how hard the job of cat-herder is. What's worse, I only just now learned the word berger. "Herder des chats" is, apparently, not a thing, but berger de chats potentially is. I hope whoever scores that response at least has a sense of humor.
The second reason it got harder is that "open level" bit I mentioned. Each section got progressively more difficult, such that by the end of the listening part I could barely pick out the topic let alone individual words. Senegalese fishermen, you may be surprised to learn, are harder to understand than recorded announcements at train stations.
Still, I'm glad I did it. I don't know if they'll share the results with me, because they only want the data to calibrate their language-learning product. I hope they do, particularly before I pop out of the Chunnel just over two weeks from now.
I'm dog-sitting again, so a nervous beagle wandered up to my office during the test to see why I hadn't fed her yet. I suppose they both could use an around-the-block and some kibble. I will try to speak French to them, if only for my own practice.
Oh, and if you haven't been able to get to Weather Now this afternoon, that's because I shut it down for a bit while I root out a connection-exhaustion problem. I believe there are too many bots hitting it the last few days, but it still shouldn't crash when they do. Until I can fix the problem, or get rid of the bots, I'm only going to have it up a little bit at a time. (Its data collection continues unaffected, however.)
I spent 56 minutes trying to get ADT to change a single setting at my house, and it turned out, they changed the wrong setting. I will try again Friday, when I have time.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:
Finally, Slow Horses season 4 came out today, so at some point this evening I'll visit Slough House and get a dose of Jackson Lamb's sarcasm.
Before I bugger off to get at least a couple of daylight hours in this sunny, 22°C afternoon, here are the most interesting stories that popped up today:
Finally, the Chicago White Sox have surpassed their team record for losses, going 31-108 through yesterday. If they lose 13 of the remaining 22 games—which would actually represent an improvement over their performance so far—they will surpass the 1962 New York Mets' record 120 losses in a season. For reasons passing understanding, they're still charging for tickets, with box seats going for $69 and some tickets as high as $309. They have lots of seats left, though, so maybe I'll just take the El down there this weekend to see the Athletics beat them?