Good Morning, RVA: Return of the sun

Warmer temperatures and sunnier skies might help you forget about what’s going on in the world?

December 10, 2014; 6:53 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: Lord is Good

Good morning, RVA! It’s 42 °F, and today looks about six or seven times better than yesterday’s Gloomy Gus situation. Highs might even crack 50 °F, and we’ll see the sun again. I miss you, sun.

Water cooler

Here’s (almost) everything you need to know about the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, aka the CIA Torture Report. The awful and embarrassing tl;dr is this sentence, pulled from the report: “CIA officers regularly called into question whether the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, assessing that the use of techniques failed to elicit detainee cooperation or produce accurate intelligence.” If you wish, you can read all 528 pages of the report.

Congress has decided to block Washington D.C.’s decision to legalize marijuana, despite the democratically demonstrated desire of 69% of voters. I honestly thought that those fat cats up in Washington had better things to do with their time–like preening and not passing bills.

I love this annonymous RTD editorial about our region’s total lack of cooperation. Why are we spending tax payer money to move companies from city to county–or vice versa–creating no real gains for anyone, the mysteriously annonymous author asks. Check out this sick burn: “Taxpayers might be interested to know which area genius was offering to squander the public’s money on a zero-sum scheme that would have produced a net regional jobs gain of zilch.”

Today’s your day to buy an island that was once used as a “pleasure garden, housing shuffleboard courts and a barroom.” With any luck, someone will buy Vauxhall Island and take down the awful billboard that obscures the first skyline drivers see on I-95 since Jacksonville.

Ugh, embarrassing small-town politics.

Sports!

• Caps zapped the Lightning, 5-3. That makes three in a row for the Capitals.

This morning’s longread

Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society

An adorable, playable, and easily understandable demonstration of how small individual biases (like racial biases) can lead to large collective biases (like very segregated neighborhoods). It’ll take you five minutes to work through the post, and is 100% recommended.

Our cute, adorable segregation simulator is based off the work of Nobel Prize-winning game theorist, Thomas Schelling. Specifically, his mathematical model of racial segregation found in Dynamic Models of Segregation. We built on top of his model, by showing how adding a small cultural demand for diversity can help desegregate a neighborhood. In other words, we gave his model a happy ending.

This morning’s Instagram

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December 10, 2014 6:53 AM 0