The Swiss have built a 57 km tunnel under the Alps, and it opens June 1st:
[T]he new Gotthard Base Tunnel burrows deep beneath the mountains to connect Switzerland’s German- and Italian-speaking regions, ultimately linking the Swiss lowlands with the North Italian plain. It exceeds the length of its longest predecessor, Japan’s Seikan Tunnel, by a little over three kilometers (1.9 miles). Running at up to 8,000 feet below mountain peaks at times, it also runs deeper below ground level than any other tunnel yet built. So great is the amount of rock and rubble created by the excavation—over 28 million tons—that steep artificial hills have been created in the valleys at the tunnel’s mouth.
Now that trains will run on a specially constructed, almost entirely flat track, trains through the tunnel will be able to reach speeds of 150 miles per hour. This will slash the journey time between Zurich and Milan to just two hours and 30 minutes, considerably faster than the current four hours and 40 minutes. While that’s impressive, shorter hops between sub-Alpine cities aren’t really the new tunnels main raison d’etre, and wouldn’t alone necessarily be worth an injection of over $10 billion.
Why is Europe in generally better shape even though their economy is technically in worse shape? This might be an example.
Canadian brothers Tim and Alex Foley discovered that their parents were spies for the Russian SVR when the FBI raided their house on 27 June 2010:
[T]he FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys’ parents.
Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. They were both born in the Soviet Union, had undergone training in the KGB and been dispatched abroad as part of a Soviet programme of deep-cover secret agents, known in Russia as the “illegals”. After a slow-burning career building up an ordinary North American background, the pair were now active agents for the SVR, the foreign spy agency of modern Russia and a successor to the KGB. They, along with eight other agents, had been betrayed by a Russian spy who had defected to the Americans.
The Guardian also addresses the bear in the room: "If Tim and Alex’s story sounds eerily familiar to fans of The Americans, the television drama about a KGB couple living in the US with their two children, that’s because it’s partly based on them."
Some articles:
Today's other tasks include cleaning my house and writing code for about four hours.
The Argentine national football team is messing with us in this hilarious promotion:
TPM explains:
“They’re coming from South America. These are total killers. These are not the nice, sweet, little people that you’d think, okay?" Trump continues. "We have no protection, anybody can come in. It’s very easy and it shouldn’t be that way. We need to build a wall and it has to be built quickly.”
Trump's comments about a border wall play over clips of Argentine soccer players scoring a goal and cutting past a defender.
The promo closes with the caption: "The truth is the best they can do is not let us in."
Heh.
I mean, it's only funny until someone loses an election.
Cranky Flier thinks Brussels Airlines has done a remarkable job keeping its passengers moving after its principal hub closed for repairs last week:
Two days after the bombing, Brussels Airlines started to get things running, but only on its short haul network. It deployed its Avro RJ100 aircraft to Antwerp, a mere half hour north of Brussels Airport, to fly within Europe. That may sound ideal, but the airport has a runway less than 5,000 feet long. The Avro can handle that with ease, but it’s not great for much else.
Meanwhile, Liege, which is about 45 minutes southeast of Brussels Airport, picked up a bunch of flights with the A319/A320 fleet. Liege is the cargo hub of Belgium, but it doesn’t usually do much in the way of passenger flights. The airline is offering free shuttle bus service to both airports from Brussels.
The next day, Friday, Brussels Airlines got at least a piece of its long haul network off the ground. With those flights service a fair bit of connecting traffic, Liege wasn’t the best option. Instead, Brussels moved those flights to operate from Lufthansa’s Frankfurt hub as well as from the Swiss hub in Zurich. (Swiss is owned by Lufthansa as well.)
This was a brilliant move. It allowed Lufthansa Group/United/Air Canada travelers to continue to connect on to these African destinations. And for those who were starting or ending in Brussels, Lufthansa-operated flights were added from Frankfurt and Munich to Liege to help feed people into the new network. Brussels Airlines is flying from Antwerp to Zurich as well.
I'm always encouraged to see a business responding effectively after a major event, especially in aviation.
I've been running around all day and only have a couple of minutes to list some things I've read on my phone while running around. All day.
There were a few other things in there, but these were the ones I paid most attention to.
After the criminal gang known as ISIS held the Mosul Dam in Iraq last year, it did not follow the campsite rule when it fled the Iraqi government's counter-attack. Consequently, engineers say the dam is in danger of imminent collapse:
[P]ressure on the dam’s compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir, bringing it up to its maximum capacity, while the sluice gates normally used to relieve that pressure were jammed shut.
The Iraqi engineers also said the failure to replace machinery or assemble a full workforce more than a year after Islamic State temporarily held the dam means that the chasms in the porous rock under the dam were getting bigger and more dangerous every day.
Nasrat Adamo, the dam’s former chief engineer who spent most of his professional career shoring it up in the face of fundamental flaws in its construction, said that the structure would only survive with round-the-clock work with teams filling in holes in the porous bedrock under the structure, a process known as grouting. But that level of maintenance, dating back to just after the dam’s construction in 1984, evaporated after the Isis occupation.
People are worried that the rise of Donald Trump in the polls here in the U.S. signals a new dumbing-down of our country. But nothing beats the destructive power of religiously-fueled anti-intellectualism of the kind that ISIS and, even better, Boko Haram perpetrate on innocents.
Also, let's not forget who is most responsible for the chaos Iraq has suffered for the last 12 years: us. This is one more legacy of George W. Bush's needless war.
Both United and American want approval for non-stop flights from Chicago to Havana:
Initially, the customer pool for Chicago-to-Havana trips would be limited, given the ongoing trade embargo. The Department of the Treasury only permits travelers to fly to Cuba for a dozen reasons, including family visits, official governmental trips and humanitarian missions.
But carriers are eager to establish a beachhead in the island nation, which might eventually prove a robust destination for leisure and business travelers as well.
“It's been an untapped market for 50 years,” said John Weber, director for the Americas at British consultancy Aviation Analytics. “The interest of carriers is to get in and get established from the very beginning.”
Both airlines proposed a weekly 737-800 flight leaving Saturday morning and returning Saturday night. As soon as I can, I'll be happy to spend a week in Cuba and get full frequent-flyer miles for the trip.
From two years ago, and still relevant (and still NSFW funny):
The Daily WTF (a must-read if you're in a technology job) today described how poor testing caused 2,000 ballots to be thrown out in a 2014 election in Brussels:
It wasn’t enough to sway any one election, but the media had already caught wind of the potential voter fraud. Adrien’s company was hired for an independent code review of Delacroy Europe’s voting program to determine if anything criminal had transpired.
He noticed something strange in the UI selection functions, triggered when the user selects a candidate on the viewscreen.
He found two commented lines, dated June 28, 2013, a year before election day. A developer, looking at Card_Unselect(), realized that by unselecting a candidate, it also unselected everyone in that candidate’s list. They commented out two lines, thinking they had fixed the error. However, the unselection algorithm never decremented the check counter, which kept track of how many candidates had been chosen. If a user checked a candidate on one list, changed their mind, and picked another from a separate list, then both votes would be counted.
It hadn’t been a case of fraud, but some poorly-placed comments.
It also could have been prevented—or at least discovered immediately—through automated unit testing.
"Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence."