Monday: Wait, it's only Monday? :(

It was rainy today.

It hasn't been rainy in a while.

They also fixed the AC in my office today.  It is now unpleasantly chilly, which is basically where I like it to be.  Getting warm is easy, especially here.  Getting cool is not.

Today's also September 11th, and I spent some time looking through my blog to see if I'd done a "this is where I was" thing.  It turns out I like to fly on this day (a lot) because it tends to be cheaper and less busy, but all I could find was this story about yesterday.

It was my first year of grad school, and I had a class that morning, I think at 9am.  When I arrived at my office, the first plane had already hit, and I mentioned that buildings had been hit by planes before, including the Empire State Building.  In any case, class wasn't cancelled, and so we sat through a super fun radiative transfer class while down the hall people watched the news on TV.

By the time class was over, it was pretty clear what was happening, and that work wasn't going to happen, so everybody went home to watch the news there.  I remember driving home, and driving past the mall and Best Buy, with pretty much every business closed.  Someone had parked a big rental truck in the mall parking lot, but had made sure to open the rear door all the way so no one thought it was a bomb.

My thought at the time, which was shared by the professor teaching the radiative transfer class, was that a real existential threat would have the industrial capability to wage a proper war.  Using terrorism and indirect methods shows that they have to go for flashy things that aren't as effective as say "a division of tanks" or "actual bombers".  It's unfortunate that so many people are too stupid to realize this fact, which is why it can be used as a tool against gun control among other things.

• Brought to mind because Krugman has basically the same though.
• Interesting gender bias tool, and I need to find more things to try it on.  Putting yesterday's Secret Wars thing through it suggests I need to stop breaking things into "Team Good Guys/Team Bad Guys".  For that story, it should probably be "Team Jen and Monica Plus Their Bossy Friends/Team Doom is Insufferable."  
• The housing crash was apparently driven by speculation.  Thanks, rich people who aren't rich enough to feel fulfilled.
• Food timeline.