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Alexandra Petri attempts to be the government

What happens when you send a humorist to do investigative reporting? You get a story about how absolutely insane it is when the government won’t do his job. Alexandra Petri set out to perform tasks usually allocated to a government agency employee.

What became a five-month quest to assume government responsibilities took me from the overgrown fields of Antietam to the cramped basket of a hot-air balloon about 1,400 feet over Ohio; from a biology lab at Johns Hopkins University, where I beheaded flies, to a farmstead in Maryland, where I inspected the fly-bothered udder of a cow named Melissa.

And the potential duties kept piling up as I learned about each round of cuts. Since I started typing this paragraph, Donald Trump has fired many of the people who surveil infectious diseases; before I finish typing this paragraph, he may have hired them back. I hope so! I would do almost anything for a good story, but perhaps I should draw the line at “monitor Ebola.”

Amanda MullJohn F. Kennedy famously implored us: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I asked! And the answer is: lots of things. If you don’t mind doing them wrong.

PJH Studios artwork, Portrait of a sun

PJH Studios

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  • Alexandra Petri attempts to be the government

    What happens when you send a humorist to do investigative reporting? You get a story about how absolutely insane it is when the government won’t do his job. Alexandra Petri set out to perform tasks usually allocated to a government agency employee. What became a five-month quest to assume government responsibilities took me from the…

  • The Moylan Arrow

    That little arrow on your dashboard that points either left or right, tells you which side of your gas tank is on. It’s such a simple design, and it even has a name, The Moylan Arrow, named after the engineer, Jim Moylan. “I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger…

  • Backing up Spotify

    Anna’s Archive backed up Spotify. The whole article is interesting about the process and the analysis that they did on the data set. They walked in the home process and including charts class, they even offer a truly random song selection.

  • Dragonsweeper

    Here’s a fun Minesweeper clone that combines dungeon-crawling elements with a Minesweeper-like grid, called Dragonsweeper. The numbers indicate the hit points of the monsters in those squares. You need to collect gold in order to level up and earn more hearts to take on larger monsters.

  • Open Source Industrial Construction Equipment

    An interesting idea: 3D printed, open-source industrial construction equipment that could create a village or small town if necessary, called the Global Village Construction Set.

  • AI recreates Minesweeper

    Minesweeper is complex enough in its rule set that it needs a little bit of thought in order to program, whoever, it’s not so complex that it needs extra libraries and all sorts of fancy programming tricks. Researchers gave four different AI code assistant instructions to recreate the game, and each delivered different results.

  • A neat JavaScript calendar generator

    If you have ever done any web development at all and tried to make a calendar, you’ll know that it is one of the more difficult things to get right. It’s more than just generating boxes and numbers. There’s other sorts of logic that need to be taken into account. Here is a neat JavaScript…

  • The Cassandras predicted our current political reality

    Back in 2015, 2016, there was a minority group of people who saw what Trump really was, Modern-day Cassandras who had a vision but were not listened to. I still remember how the arguments with family members were that this was not going to go well. While they may not concede that I was right,…

  • Rolling back the Constitution

    It’s no surprise that, with recent Supreme Court rulings using questionable logic and some dramatic mental gymnastics, the entire goal is to roll the country back to an older era. What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal…

  • SNL’s alternate Home Alone ending

    Ariana Grande and the SNL cast provide an alternate Home Alone ending.