Today in 1811, the first Luddite attack in which knitting frames were actually smashed occurred in the Nottinghamshire village of Arnold. Kevin Binfield, Writings of the Luddites: “The grievances consisted, first, of the sue of wide stocking frames to produce large amounts of cheap, shoddy stocking material that was cut and sewn rather than completely fashioned and, second, of the employment of “colts,” workers who had not completed the seven-year apprenticeship required by law.”

Today’s Boston Globe reports that “the city has trimmed its fleet of parking officers and installed new card-friendly meters that have made it easier for drivers to pay.”

Update: Also from today’s Boston Globe, “Rise of the crossword robots: Computers vs. humans hits the next frontier”:

“This Saturday, as about 700 of the nation’s top crossword solvers gather in the Grand Ballroom of the Brooklyn Marriott for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, there will be an interloper lurking in the back of the room.

The interloper is known as Dr. Fill. Unlike the other assembled crossword experts, Dr. Fill is not human. The Doctor is a crossword-solving program, and will be running on the notebook computer of Matt Ginsberg, a software engineer from Eugene, Ore. …

[Ginsberg] stresses that the way that Dr. Fill goes about solving is ‘really very inhuman.’ Machine intelligence, even when it makes impressive showings against carbon-based counterparts, is still fundamentally different from human intelligence. Cold comfort, perhaps, for Team Human, as we prepare to lose another battle to computers on our home turf.”