The Josh Fruhlinger Experience

From the New York Times, on how triple-decker houses in New England have been hit with unusually high foreclosure rates:

Boston, home to roughly 15,000 three-deckers, is taking a different approach. It has not demolished any abandoned three-deckers because city officials want to preserve as many affordable housing units as possible, said Evelyn Friedman, chief and director of the Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development.

Modern zoning laws, Ms. Friedman said, would never allow three units on such small lots.

“If we have four three-deckers on 12,000 square feet and could only get two on that amount of land now,” Ms. Friedman said, “we are losing six units. So it’s very important to us to sustain them.”

Or you could, you know, change the zoning laws, you know?

Zut alors! I am in space!

So the European Space Agency (yeah, they have one!) is holding tryouts for astronauts! They’ll pick the first Euro-spacepersons since 1992(!). When this was announced, apparently reporters were badgering the ESA spokesdrone with questions like “From which of the countries that fund your agency will the space-men come?” and “Will some of the space-men be ladies?”, because she kept repeating over and over again that “excellence” was the only criteria for selection.

Here’s the thing, though: there will be four space-persons picked, out of 8,400 applicants. That’s like 0.04 percent. I’m pretty sure that there will be more than four totally excellent people in the pool; it’s not like you’ll be able to stick them all into some kind of excellence-quantifying machine and rank them by EQ (excellent quotient). So, you know what? I think that, once you’ve got the pool winnowed down to the, say, two or three dozen excellentest folks who come out of this process, it’s totally legitimate to start making decisions based on, say, making sure the governments who pay your bills are not pissed off, or on not continuing to exclude women from macho jobs.