bigpicture

Prevailing winds bring relatively clean air to most any city east of the Mississippi River especially in the winter time. Without nearby mountains, temperature inversions are pretty rare.

In late summer, air quality drops quite a bit as the wind drops off.

I'm salaried, but it sure bought me a lot of goodwill.

A few years ago I had to update some FORTRAN code written in the 1980s that did bond valuations and some other financial stuff. It hadn't been touched since it was written and was now running out of space because the number of bonds keeps increasing year after year.

I'd never done anything with FORTRAN before, so I spent a couple days reading about it and looking into how it works, fearful that I'd muck everything up trying to fix it.

I open the code and find that it was the most elegantly written software you could wish for, with fantastic comments and structure. I changed two numbers and was done, buying us another 30 years or so of rock-solid service.

The longer I work in this industry, the more I am coming to believe that waterfall is nothing more than a strawman set up to make development process X look like the Holy Grail.

Has anyone seen it in real life - in the pure form?

I once worked at a place that "did waterfall", but a diagram of the process would have shown arrows in all directions (would we call these things salmon runs or something?) and if you needed to go backwards only that specific piece did so while everything else continued as normal. Unit testing, integration testing, system testing, etc was all present on day 1.

> It's truly a shame that so much money is poured into such utterly wasteful possessions

When the yachts are idle, which is the majority of the time, they are typically plugged into shore power and are thus just consuming electricity from the grid. The electrical systems of these things are typically far more efficient than your home because they must generate their own electricity when at sea.

As for the wasting of money, you'll note that most of the cost of building a yacht is labor because they are mostly one-off builds and can't take advantage of automation. The article mentions that they cost 10% of the purchase price per month in upkeep. The vast majority of those costs are labor.

These things are among the most efficient devices for transferring wealth from the rich to the middle class. I wouldn't discourage their use at all.

This was a nice little review so I went to my local library website to reserve and found that they have two copies of this book published in 1967 from the Harvard University Press. The review's affiliate link to Amazon shows that this particular book is new and perhaps significant:

> “The Greek text of Characters is rather messy, with lots of sentences in dispute (or simply unintelligible) due to copyists’ errors in the transmission process. Only a few years ago, a new edition of the Greek text by James Diggle sorted out many of these problems. This new English version by Pamela Mensch takes advantage of that cleaned-up Greek text.”

> The crazy thing about this article is that it presents Chicago's solution (make the combined sewer bigger)

Except that Chicago's publicly stated position is that the Deep Tunnel system is not the solution. This is not a new thing, either. It's been that way for more than 2 decades.

For more than 10 years, they've had a stormwater management building ordinance and (with few exceptions) any project (new construction or renovation) that changes the amount of stormwater exiting a piece of property is subject to it. It limits the flow rate of stormwater leaving, the volume of stormwater leaving, and the amount of sediment that can leave a piece of property. It is entirely math-based, with published formulas and coefficients and makes determining compliance straightforward, objective and fast.

They've received international recognition for their incremental approach to stormwater management, which recognizes that the vast majority of property in the city is private property built long ago. As for public property, whenever the city rebuilds an alleyway, it is done with permeable pavement and is disconnected from the sewer. Whenever the city rebuilds a road, it is disconnected from the sewer to the extent that surrounding private property allows. Last year an entire block of a road near me was rebuilt and the side that was adjacent to a railroad embankment was built with swales every 50 feet or so to manage stormwater. It was actually visually attractive as well.

The S&P 500 publishes changes to the index in advance of the changes taking place, so all of the affected stocks have prices that reflect the change at the time of the change.

Most tracking indexes, especially the ones Vanguard uses, do not do that and thus do not allow the markets to front-run them. If you adopt the strategy of "do what Vanguard does" and you do it immediately after Vanguard says they did something, you are already too late to get the prices that Vanguard got and can kiss at least .05% goodbye just based on that. I would expect to under-perform by at least .25%, if not more.

Not being familiar with the term XNU, I did a little clicking around and hopefully I understand a bit better:

This file is evidence that Apple has been running iOS/MacOS on the Raspberry Pi 3?

The next thing I want Apple to do: If an app will request location services, it must: 1. Have a specific publicly available URL that contains all "location data" terms, conditions, and privacy information. 2. Monitor that URL and reset the permission dialog if the URL ever changes. 3. Immediately disable location services for that app if the URL disappears.

> I understand that Apple does everything in its power to make the life of developers miserable

All XCode projects are automatically code signed on every build. If you have a developer membership with Apple, it uses a certificate issued by Apple. If not, it's just a locally-generated certificate.

If you use make or call Clang directly, obviously there is no signing process, but there is a command-line tool that you can use and integrate into your non-Xcode build process just fine.

In my area, it is very common for parents of boys that will be "young" when starting kindergarten to hold them back a year. They call it redshirting (a reference to US college athletics).

Our local school district prohibits the practice, but really can only enforce it at the kindergarten level. So many parents continue to enroll their boys in private preschool for two additional years and then enroll them in first grade when the school district can't say no. It is very rare for girls because of the assumption that emotional and behavioral development is far ahead of boys at that age.