Good morning.

→ ‘I got married at 23. What are the rest of you waiting for?‘ by Julie Shaw, for Slate

I’m a married millennial. I walked down the aisle at 23. My husband, David, was 25. We hadn’t arrived. I had a job; he, a job offer and a year left in law school. But we couldn’t buy a house or even replace the car when it died a few months into our marriage. We lived in a small basement apartment, furnished with secondhand Ikea. We did not have Internet (checking email required a trip to the local coffee shop) or reliable heat.

Marriage wasn’t something we did after we’d grown up—it was how we have grown up and grown together. We’ve endured the hardships of typical millennials: job searches, job losses, family deaths, family conflict, financial fears, and career concerns. The stability, companionship, and intimacy of marriage enabled us to overcome our challenges and develop as individuals and a couple. We learned how to be strong for one another, to comfort, to counsel, and to share our joys and not just our problems.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that this is one of those “subjective” positions. To each his or her own, I guess. That said, I married my wife at 22—she turned 21 three days before we tied the knot—and my experience has been very similar to that of Mrs. Shaw. For the first year or so we barely scraped by as I made about $800 a month, and we fought over stupid things like whether or not to keep the Kuerig coffee maker we got as a wedding gift. But damn it’s been fun to make it up as we go. I wouldn’t trade my wife for anything, or anybody.

→ ‘Linguistics Identifies Anonymous Users,’ via disinformation

Up to 80 percent of certain anonymous underground forum users can be identified using linguistics, researchers say.The techniques compare user posts to track them across forums and could even unveil authors of thesis papers or blogs who had taken to underground networks. “If our dataset contains 100 users we can at least identify 80 of them,” researcher Sadia Afroz told an audience at the 29C3 Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.”Function words are very specific to the writer. Even if you are writing a thesis, you’ll probably use the same function words in chat messages.”Even if your text is not clean, your writing style can give you away.” The analysis techniques could also reveal botnet owners, malware tool authors and provide insight into the size and scope of underground markets, making the research appealing to law enforcement.

This is great news. I’m coming for you, ‘glitterkitty42′.

→ ‘City makes gun ownership mandatory,’ via WXIA-TV

The Nelson City Council voted 5-0 Monday night to require every household to have a gun and ammunition, unless the residents of the household opt out. 

City council members in Nelson voted on the Family Protection Ordinance at their meeting Monday evening.

A gun ownership mandate? To quote conservative columnist David Frum on Twitter this morning, ‘”Good thing it’s not health insurance. That [would] be tyranny.”

Good Morning’ is a list of the three most interesting articles I read over coffee this morning. Topics generally include design, technology, politics and faith—oh, and sometimes goats. Feel free to subscribe via RSS, if you’d like.

Good morning!

→ ‘Buzzkill? How Climate Change Could Eventually End Coffee‘, via US News

Coffee is one of the world’s most traded commodities. Each year, more than $15 billion worth of coffee is exported from 52 countries—many of which are still developing and rely on the crop to buoy their economies. The industry employs some 26 million people worldwide.

But in recent years, keeping the world’s coffee drinkers supplied has become increasingly difficult: The spread of a deadly fungus that has been linked to global warming and rising global temperatures in the tropical countries where coffee grows has researchers scrambling to create new varieties of coffee plants that can keep pace with these new threats without reducing quality.

While coffee researchers can do little to prevent climate change, they’re hard at work to keep up as Earth braces for temperature increases of several degrees over the next several decades.

“Coffee is the canary in the coal mine for climate change,” says Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you can’t think about the long term risk for planetary impacts, think about the short term risk for your coffee. Know that a day without coffee is potentially around the corner.”

I’m sorry to say that this is no April Fools joke.

→ ‘E-bleeder: Is Nook on its deathbed?‘, via The Verge

The ending has yet to be written for Barnes & Noble’s Nook story, which began with the surprise debut of the original Nook e-reader back in late 2009. But recent plot twists don’t appear to bode well for the subsidiary known as “Nook Media,” which contains the company’s e-reader, tablet, and digital content businesses, and which two other companies — Microsoft and publisher Pearson — have bought into.

Over the past few weeks, Barnes & Noble has announced fire sale after fire sale for Nook products: Buy a Nook HD+ tablet and get a Nook Simple Touch free! Download the Nook app for Windows 8 and get free bestselling digital book and magazine titles! The latest deal, which was just announced last week, targets teachers as part of Barnes & Noble’s annual “Educator Appreciation Days,” offering a variety of discounts — including $20 off the Nook HD and HD+ — between April 13 and 21.

This is just an idea—one I may elaborate more on later in a lengthier post—but why don’t print books come with digital downloads the way that most CDs and DVDs do these days? Often, I want to own the book in both formats, but I’m not willing to spend the extra cash to buy a book twice, and it seems to me that this would be a fairly simple solution. I buy the book in print (which generally costs more than the price of the e-book, so there’s technically ”profit” on the distribution of the digital version), I get a download code inside the printed version, and I download it for my iPad/Nook/Kindle/whatever.

Since they own the supply chains to support both digital and print distribution, this seems like something Barnes & Noble could do pretty well. Either way, somebody should do it—Amazon at least. Does anybody want to nominate me for CEO?

And: ”OH MY GOD, WE’RE HAVING A FIRE!!! SALE.”

→ ‘Armed Correlations: The Facts of Gun Ownership and Violence‘, by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker

What makes a correlation causal? Well, it should be robust, showing up all over the place, across many states and nations; it should exclude some other correlation that might be causing the same thing; and, ideally, there ought to be some kind of proposed mechanism that would explain why one element affects the other. There’s a strong correlation between vaccines and less childhood disease, for instance, and a simple biological mechanism of induced immunity to explain it. The correlation between gun possession and gun violence—or, alternately, between gun control and stopping gun violence—is one of the most robust that you can find. And the mechanism that connects weak gun laws to gun murders and massacres is self-evident: with guns around, ordinary arguments escalate into ones where someone gets killed, and crazy kids who dream of getting even with the world can easily find a gun—or, like Adam Lanza, many guns—to do it with.

I mean, c’mon: it’s hard to argue that an increase in gun ownership doesn’t directly result in an increase in gun violence. The same way it’s hard to argue that an increase in smartphone ownership doesn’t mean an decrease in conversation around the dinner table. iPhones and firearms are devices. With a purpose. Only, unfortunately, the purpose of a firearm isn’t merely to interrupt your mom at the dinner table with a rousing game of Angry Birds.

‘Good Morning’ is a list of the three most interesting articles I read over coffee this morning. Topics generally include design, technology, politics and faith—oh, and sometimes goats. Feel free to subscribe via RSS, if you’d like.

Good morning!

→ President Obama’s second inaugural address

Together we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers. Together we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together we resolve that a great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all societies ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character.

For we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.