Events

Links, the posting of which does not constitute endorsement: Christian delusions are driving the GOP insane Engagement rings are barbaric Create an air gap to keep your stuff secure Azerbaijan releases election results before polls open Government shutdown causing needless lab animal deaths Back to the mines. Sarah Jarosz tonight.

If you wondered how often people actually ride Divvy bikes, everyone's Divvy online trip summary page has the answer. They put the trip ID right on the page. My first Divvy trip, on September 18th, was #522105; this morning's was #732089. Assuming they use an ID field that auto-increments by 1 for each ride, that means Divvy users rode about 210,000 times in the past 22 days, or about 9,500 times a day (on average). That rate gives them nearly 3.5 million rides over the next 12 months. Compare that with...

I've got about an hour to prepare for a Meet-Up I'm presenting. While I'm doing that, you read these: Sarah Lawrence College professor Nicholaus Mills compares Ted Cruz to Huey Long; Zack Beauchamp at ThinkProgress says racism caused the shutdown (but more broadly than you think); Mimi Cowan has put up a history of the Chicago fire, which started 140 years ago yesterday; and David Auerbach at Slate explains why the ACA website sucks, but not as badly as you think, and probably not for much longer. OK...

I have a new post up on the 10th Magnitude developers' blog.

A Gallup poll released today shows the largest drop in economic confidence since 2008: Americans' confidence in the economy has deteriorated more in the past week during the partial government shutdown than in any week since Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 15, 2008, which triggered a global economic crisis. Gallup's Economic Confidence Index tumbled 12 points to -34 last week, the second-largest weekly decline since Gallup began tracking economic confidence daily in January 2008. Fiscal brinksmanship...

I've held off posting this one from my walk through Hampstead Heath last month because it needed a little Photoshopping. Today at lunch one of my colleagues let me use her laptop for five minutes. Voilà: I'll have to round up some of the HDR sequences I've shot over the past couple of years...this is fun.