Kingmakers

Thursday morning. Happy birthday to Jony Ive, John Steinbeck, Alan Guth, and the Labor Party.

Don’t stop with just booze or chocolate. The Pope wants you give up trolling for lent.

The Arizona Republic is no longer endorsing candidates. Why? Basically it boils down to the fact that no one really cares about newspaper endorsements anymore. (As opposed to the Globe which had a teaser campaign for their presidential endorsement. Really? Mark your calendar?)

Google is investing $10 billion in a number of states, including Massachusetts, to expand data centers and office space.

Clearview, the facial recognition company profiled by the Times several weeks ago as a threat to privacy has been hacked. Buzzfeed reports that its client list of law enforcement customers was stolen in a data breach.

And here’s a bit of practical advice for avoiding the coronavirus, or any virus for that matter: keep your distance from people with symptoms. 6 feet or greater is good. And if you’re wondering if you need a mask, watch this video from the WHO.

$tarter homes

It’s a post-Superbowl Monday morning. AM traffic is always light on this day.

In addition to the game there were the commercials. Some decent ones this year. I kind of liked the bizarre Pringles ad.

Families are struggling to find affordable housing around Boston. According to a study to be released today, too many existing units are being occupied by empty-nesters or groups of roommates. The challenge seems to be incentivizing those folks to move to more appropriate sized homes, freeing up the multi-bedrooms for families.

Another day, another weird academic paper.

Google Maps is usually pretty good at knowing when traffic backs up. Then it uses that knowledge to route you around the bottlenecks when you ask it for directions. Google knows about traffic because our cell phones tell Google where we are and how fast we’re going. It assumes we’re in a car. So a guy put a hundred cellphones in a red wagon and pulled it slowly along a city street to try to trick Google into thinking there was a traffic jam. It worked. Pretty clever way to open a road up. But not reassuring that Google Maps was hacked this easily.

And as the coronavirus spreads around the world, so does misinformation about it.