My mother relays to me this tidbit about Elizabeth Warren:
At a town hall in Lebanon, New Hampshire, on Sunday, a voter asked the presidential hopeful if she ever whispers to her golden retriever Bailey’s ear at night, “Who is going to be my Mike Pence? Who is gonna look at me with adoring eyes?”
She said, “I already have a dog.”
If this claim is correct, then the U.S.’s war in and occupation of Iraq will soon have cost us about $2 trillion (including projected future costs of veterans’ care and increased interest on the debt). That works out to about $8700 for every man, woman, and child in the US. Did you get your money’s worth?
Another way to look at this number is that $2 trillion is more than eight times Iraq’s GDP. Those two trillion work out to, in round figures, about $50,000 for every single Iraqi. I remain of the opinion that there would have been a better way to spend that money.
The Faculty Senate here at U.Miami has awarded me the Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award for 2020. There will be an award ceremony on Monday, April 13, 2020, at 5:00 p.m. somewhere on the Coral Gables Campus, details TBA.
The letter notifying me of the award says that,
The Faculty Senate created this award on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Faculty Charter. This prestigious award acknowledges outstanding contributions to scholarship by individual faculty members. …
As a true visionary scholar in the law profession, your striking record of achievement has paved new paths significant in our current legal and social fields.
And there’s a medal, too.
Two long-time Android apps that I used to use a lot bit the dust recently: Hipmunk, the airfare aggregator is just dead. Tapingo, the skip-the-line-order-ahead app for campus dining, has been subsumed into the Borg that is Grubhub. (Weirdly, most people around here pronounced it “tap-ingo” while I perhaps wrongly said “tap-n-go”. Guess that’s totally academic now.)
Coincidence? Or have we reached a new stage in the lifecycle of even established apps?
Apparently, the earthquake between Jamaica and Cuba this afternoon was so strong (7.7!) it shook up parts of Miami. Various tall buildings downtown were evacuated as a safety precaution.
I didn’t feel a thing in my third-floor office in Coral Gables.
Graphical Real-Time Map of Confirmed Cases of Coronavirus: Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Global Cases (by JHU CSSE)
Above as of Jan 27, 2020 9 am EST. The map is real-time in the sense that it’s updated when new info is provided by authorities. It can also be adjusted to show any country or city, and a timeline and scale of contagion.
Recent Bluessky Posts
Jotwell Blenderlaw