This is unbelievable. Every single person aboard this Japan Airlines jet survived the crash shown in this video. (The plane it crashed into was not so lucky. Five out of six coast guard crew members were killed.)
Commercial construction dropped in November at an annualized rate of -2.9%. This is the first time it's declined in the past year and a half—and this is despite the continuing tailwinds of the Infrastructure Act and the CHIPS Act. Perhaps the emptying of downtown office buildings is finally taking its toll?
The latest from the Ivy League: Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision... Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting ...continue reading "Harvard president will resign today"
The Wall Street Journal says things are looking up: Last year’s widespread skepticism proved to be misplaced.... Now, with the S&P 500 within 0.6% of a record high, the crowd is much more optimistic. I know it's traditional to report stock market indexes in nominal terms, but that doesn't make it right. It's just a ...continue reading "Here’s how the stock market is really doing"
I've forgotten to follow up on this recently, so here is K-12 public education employment through November: November employment was the highest in the past decade with the exception (barely) of 2019—even though school enrollment has dropped about 6%. There's no apparent teacher shortage. This comes with the usual caveats. It includes all ed employees, ...continue reading "Chart of the day: K-12 public school employment in the US"
December 2023 was the warmest December on record for the Contiguous U.S. by a wide margin using Prism Climate Group data. It was 0.67°F (0.37°C) warmer than December 2021. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/nhRL9j0O4G — Brian Brettschneider (@Climatologist49) January 1, 2024
These are mostly years in which a surprising number of important things happened. For the most part, wars are excluded. Go ahead and argue with my choices in comments. 1687: Isaac Newton invents physics. 1776: American Revolution, Wealth of Nations, first commercial Watt steam engine, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1789: French Revolution, ...continue reading "Top 10 years of the past few centuries"
Ha ha, the headline is just clickbait. Most of these aren't really extinction level events, they're just really bad. And the odds of any of them happening in 2024 are minuscule. But still possible! Miyake event. This mysterious burst of cosmic rays has occurred several times in the past 10,000 years. It wouldn't actually kill ...continue reading "Top 10 extinction level natural disasters for 2024"
Here are a few miscellaneous predictions for the new year: Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination. Joe Biden will be reelected president. Waymo will solve its highway problems and finally have a true driverless car that can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any conditions. It will still be a couple more years ...continue reading "Top 10 predictions for 2024"
Unlike the photos, I had no problem finding ten interesting charts. In fact, I found 20. So at the risk of taking a good thing too far, here are the top 20 most interesting charts of 2023. By the way: by "interesting," I mostly mean "something you might find surprising." 1. The cost of college ...continue reading "Top 20 charts of 2023"
This was a bit of a weak year for photos, largely because I haven't gone out a lot since the CAR-T treatment in April. Not only did I not have a hard time paring my choices down to ten, I actually had to work a bit to find a full ten I really liked. In ...continue reading "Top ten photos of 2023"
Harvard has been in the news a lot lately, and among other things critics say that wokeism has gotten so out of hand that it's all but impossible to be hired there unless you're a person of color. That got me curious, and luckily Harvard has a convenient page listing all the new full-time, tenure-track ...continue reading "How woke is Harvard?"
I'm not a big NBA fan, so I've followed the hype over French superstar-to-be Victor Wembanyama only distantly. But I think I'm really starting to like the guy. “With your first experience in Vegas — what did you think?” “On earth, it’s probably the closest thing to a dystopia.” - Victor Wembanyama 😂 pic.twitter.com/PoJRveKG3w — ...continue reading "NBA star speaks the truth only Stephen King has spoken before"
Marc Thiessen has a list today of the ten worst things Joe Biden did this year. Here's the first: 10. He made the child-care crisis worse. As my Post colleague Alyssa Rosenberg and I pointed out in September, child-care costs have been rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation. We proposed expanding the State ...continue reading "Joe Biden has crushed the working class by raising the price of au pairs"
Someone on Twitter recently re-upped a Fast Company piece from a few months ago about our old friend, right turn on red—known to all traffic cognoscenti as RTOR: It's time to ban 'right-on-red' Cognitive overload is inevitable if drivers are expected to simultaneously watch traffic to their left and keep an eye out for anyone ...continue reading "Right-on-red works fine. There’s no need to ban it."
When we last saw Charlie he was wearing a stylish black cone to keep him from picking at a sore spot on his back leg. That proved unworkable: it didn't keep him from getting to his leg and he was able to get it off anyway. So it was back to the ordinary plastic cone ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 29 December 2023"
Interesting data: Wish we had seen more takes about this trend. pic.twitter.com/zvQVVi75q9 — Conor Sen (@conorsen) December 28, 2023 What surprises me about this is not that passport holding has risen so much but that it was so low as recently as 30 years ago: There were only 7 million passport holders in 1989. That ...continue reading "Why does everyone have a passport these days?"
Now we're talking: Maine and Colorado say Trump can't run for president while Michigan and California say he can. No matter how you come down on this question, it really does seem like it needs a definitive national answer. Supreme Court, here we come.
I accidentally found myself last night on the home page of the State Department's list of (non-natural) overseas deaths, which Congress has required it to compile since 2003. I learned a few things: Americans like to go to sunny places and then drown themselves. Man, do a lot of Americans die in Mexico. An awful ...continue reading "Raw data: How Americans die overseas"
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