Good Morning, RVA: A little better

Slight relief to the sweltering heat today, and maybe some more rain.

July 10, 2014; 7:01 AM • by Ross Catrow

Good morning, RVA! It’s 73 °F, and yesterday’s rain and accompanying “fronts” have brought a slight relief to the area. No, it won’t be any less humid, but it will only hit the mid-80s today. The chance of rain persists throughout the day, so…good luck in whichever way you’d like that to go.

Water cooler

Atop the Martin Agency sits…a laser bridge! Way less cool than Asgard’s Bifröst, it’s still pretty neat. The laser wirelessly connects two Martin Agency networks in two different buildings.

Sen. Mark Warner has asked the FTC to look into Facebook’s super creepy emotion manipulation experiment. He’s asked the agency to “explore the potential ramifications of the experiment, and to consider questions about what, if any, oversight would be appropriate for behavioral studies conducted by social media platforms.”

More than 60 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza after three days of Israeli air strikes. The strikes come in response to over 350 rockets fired into Israel since Tuesday. Further cementing just how surreal life must be in that part of the world, this quote: “The [Israeli] military says it warns the occupants of houses marked for destruction that airstrikes are coming by phoning residents then firing a flare or a missile without an explosive warhead onto the roof to warn that an attack is imminent.”

While looking for a good article on the violence in Israel, I found this very seriously written “Turn Down for What: a guide” on Vox.

Sports!

• Squirrels lost to Akron, 2-5, and have one more attempt to even the series tonight at 7:05 PM. Tickets are available online.
• Nats overwhelmed the Orioles, 6-2, and the series finishes up tonight at 7:05 PM.

World Cup

Yesterday, Argentina advanced to the World Cup finals, beating Netherlands in a penalty shootout. Penalty kicks are both exciting and kind of a totally different sport than the rest of a soccer match. It reminds me of how the end of a basketball game is basically an entirely different thing that’s based on shooting while standing around.

The third place game, between Brazil and Netherlands, is this Saturday at 4:00 PM on ESPN, and the finals, between Argentina and Germany, are this Sunday at 3:00 PM on ABC.

This morning’s longread

Programming is just like drugs, except the dealer pays you

The closest description of something like coder’s high from a noncoder I ever heard was from a chess player. He described how, in his most lucid moments of concentration, he could suddenly see the entire game laid out before him in his mind, all the possibilities for strategies and many of their upsides and downsides. It was beyond just a mental picture or movie, since it had more information than could be represented in any linear way. It was as though the linear, serial nature of his consciousness had broken down and he finally had access to the vast parallelized processes of the brain all at once.

Photo by: Mallory_Shriver

This morning’s Instagram

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July 10, 2014 7:01 AM 0