Tomorrow I find out if I'm going to spend 9 weeks in jury duty on a high-profile case, away from work and everything else that happens in the daylight hours. I'm torn up about it; I really don't want everything I work on to shrivel up while I'm gone. If I get picked I'll probably end up working evenings; September is going to be very hard. And yet, I still really hope I get picked.

It's going to be hard to sleep tonight. Time for some whiskey.

Mine's a picture I took from one of my favorite places in San Francisco:

If you're looking for some very different stuff, you should give The Bad Plus a listen. I'm wearing out the grooves on my copy of Never Stop, but I think my favorite album of theirs is These Are The Vistas. They have a way with teetering on the edge of cacaphony and coming back from the precipice that makes my brain happy.

An Ars writer went to town on this story yesterday: http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/07/magic-carbon-layer-not-a-sign-of-extraterrestrial-life/

As a kid growing up in the Windows 95 era, my answer would have to be The Incredible Machine. I actually think that that game, along with LEGO, really birthed my interest in engineering and problem-solving. The concept is simple: given access to a limited set of ingredients (some realistic, like a helium balloon -- some less so, like an antigravity generator) create a Rube Goldberg machine to accomplish a relatively simple goal, like moving a basketball into a net. As a kid I would spend hours constructing huge monstrosities like this:

The first two were for DOS/Windows 3.1 but I still remember getting TIM3 and playing it on our brand-new beige-with-cow-logo Windows 95 PC. It might be time to dust off dosbox and fire it up again.

I think Facebook is probably immune from the big-bang-death of Digg et al, but I do think it's in decline. More and more, my social group is leaving Facebook and falling back on a combination of email, instant messaging and Instagram to keep in touch. Everyone still has a Facebook account, but my news feed has come to be dominated by a small subset of my friends who still actively post; I myself barely ever sign on any more.

Just read the blog post you linked from Heinrichs, then immediately bought his book. And Jonah never lied, he just "borrowed" a bunch, so I'll take a look. Thanks so much!

A bit off topic, but whatever:

I'd love to read more about methods of persuasion; I've done debate, but as you touch on, debate is a great way to have both sides become more entrenched in their beliefs. Any suggestions for reading material that expands on what you're talking about here?

I'm a little confused by this:

The Human Rights Campaign — an advocacy group for gays, lesbians and transgendered people — said there is “a clear legal consensus” that the U.S. government should cover the cost of sex-change operations for federal prisoners if the treatment is medically necessary.

Did the Human Rights Campaign say that in relation to Manning's case? What makes her gender reassignment surgery medically necessary?