Just look at that cold front, wouldn't you? And notice how the dewpoint dropped hardly at all:
The same thing happened at the official Chicago station at O'Hare, where the temperature dropped from 31°C to 22°C in 15 minutes, while the dewpoint went up. At least the forecast predicts tomorrow will be lovely.
In a related note, the OAFPOTUS's and the Republicans' 40% reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped the agency's Atlas 15 project, which will have a ripple effect through urban planning and disaster management for decades:
The tool is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlas 15 project — a massive dataset that will show how often storms of a given duration and intensity could be expected to occur at locations across the United States. The project was intended to be published in two volumes: one that would assess communities’ current risks and a second that would project how those risks will change under future climate scenarios.
The release of Atlas 15 had been long awaited by civil engineers, regional planners and other groups that use NOAA’s precipitation frequency estimates to develop regulations and design infrastructure. Many parts of the country rely on decades-old data to determine their rainfall risks, and there is no authoritative national dataset of how rainfall and flood threats will rise in a warmer world.
But work on Atlas 15’s climate projections has been on hold for months after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered a review of Volume 2 this spring, according to current and former NOAA officials with knowledge of the project.
The review of Atlas 15 is among a number of efforts by the Trump administration to curb climate science. The administration dismissed the scientists responsible for writing the National Climate Assessment — a congressionally mandated study typically published every four to five years — and dismantled the program that oversees the reports. In a budget document submitted to Congress last month, Trump proposed zeroing out funding for NOAA’s climate research and eliminating many of the agency’s laboratories and institutes.
Do you know that more Republican voters live in areas negatively affected by climate change than Democratic voters? Neither did they.
We cannot comprehend the damage this administration has already done to the United States. And they plan to do so much more.
The temperature dropped 7.7°C in the last 90 minutes, and yet it still feels sticky. I had hoped to take Cassie to the beach one last time before her surgery Tuesday; unfortunately, the lines of thunderstorms accompanying the cold front did not allow it.
So, at least she'll get another decent walk today (she's already had over an hour, including a 5 km walk before breakfast), and tomorrow it looks like it'll be cooler and drier.
Also, I fixed a long-standing architectural problem with the way Weather Now handles weather lists for registered users (not yet in production though) that will enable users to add multiple weather lists in the future. As with all architecture fixes, however, it took a lot of running in place: 6½ hours and it works the same as before. (I hope to push these changes into production next week.)
I started today a bit earlier than I usually do because I woke up somewhere between dawn and my usual time of 6:30. So, with the extra morning time, the day still cool enough to enjoy, and the rain still about an hour away, I took Cassie on a 3½ km walk before 7am. Then I sat down and refactored how Weather Now stores personal weather lists. Sometimes you just have to run with your creative energy, you know?
Cassie needs another walk, and I've (mostly) finished the feature, so I'm now going to enjoy the rest of my holiday, and contemplate whether America will make it to 250 years old with most of its Constitution intact.
Somehow, tomorrow is July 1st. As far as I can tell, this is because today is June 30th, and yesterday was June 7th, and last week was sometime in 2018.
And yet, I have more stuff to read at lunchtime from just the last day or so:
And now, despite an uncomfortable 34°C heat index, I must walk Cassie.
We spent some time at Montrose Dog Beach yesterday:
Of course, we walked 3.2 km to the beach, 1 km to The Dock for lunch with Butters and her family, and then almost 5 km home, so by 5pm Cassie was pooped:
Including one more walk around the neighborhood in the evening, Cassie got 12 km of walks over 2½ hours yesterday. Today will be less strenuous for her: only about 6 km. And lots of nap time.
I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.
Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:
- The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
- Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
- Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has quietly killed the most onerous MAGA over-reaches from the ridiculous Republican budget proposal.
- Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
- Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
- Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
- Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
- Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
- Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
- What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?
Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.
I'm done with work for the week, owing to my previously-mentioned PTO cap, so later this afternoon I'm teaming up with my Brews & Choos Buddy to visit two breweries on the North Side. Later this weekend (probably Sunday), I'm going to share an unexpected result of a long-overdue project to excise a lot of old crap from my storage locker: articles from the proto-Daily Parker that ran out of my employer's office a full year before braverman.org became its own domain.
Before I do any of that, however, I'm going to read these things:
- The US Supreme Court temporarily and partially paused rulings by three lower-court judges on the OAFPOTUS's birthright citizenship order on the narrow question of whether lower courts can enjoin the entire country. (I will read Justice Coney Barrett's opinion when I have an empty stomach and a strong gummy.)
- Paul Krugman does the math on the Medicaid provisions in the ridiculous Republican budget proposal now winding through the Senate, and calls it "the coming health care apocalypse."
- Politico describes how Georgia's Medicaid work mandate has resulted in 97% of eligible residents being unable to register for the state's work verification program—which, given the current state of the Republican Party, seems exactly on brand.
- Julia Ioffe scoffs at the inability of the OAFPOTUS and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to utter more than three consecutive words about our attack on Iran last weekend without lying.
- Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) sees omens and portents in Zohran Mamdani's win in Tuesday's New York City Democratic Party primary. So does Dan Rather. Jeff Maurer jokes about who really won.
- Writing in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan bawls out the gay-rights movement for morphing into a radical, illiberal, and ultimately ineffective leftist crusade: "Far from celebrating victory, defending the gains, staying vigilant, but winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives — including the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague — gay and lesbian rights groups did the opposite. Swayed by the broader liberal shift to the “social justice” left, they radicalized."
- Yascha Mounk shares "18 observations about learning Chinese."
- Bruce Schneier argues that we need to care more about data integrity in systems design.
- What the hell happened to the Lincoln Yards development site?
Finally, though I have not seen the Apple TV show Dark Matter, it's on my list. And if I really like it, I can buy the house whose façade is used as the protagonist's house. It's going on the market for only $2.5 million.
New York City adopted Ranked-Choice Voting before the 2019 Democratic mayoral primary, and they got Eric Adams—their least-popular mayor in decades—out of it. Since ranked-choice voting was supposed to reduce the likelihood of electing an extremist, this was a surprising result. Fortunately New Yorkers have had a few years to get the hang of ranked-choice, so in this year's Democratic primary, they won't make that mistake again, right?
Oh, bother. The extreme leftist won. With incumbent Eric Adams running for re-election as an independent, and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost last night, threatening to do the same, it's quite possible the Republican (Curtis Sliwa) could squeak on through. Good work, guys.
(For what it's worth, I don't know who I would have voted for if I still lived in NYC. I am fairly certain it would not have been Cuomo or Mamdani.)
In other disappointments:
- Former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken argues that the OAFPOTUS's attack on Iran "was a mistake," but he hopes it succeeds.
- Surprising absolutely no one, Illinois governor JB Pritzker (D) has announced he will run for a third term, without a hint of whether he'll run for president in 2028.
- Is US Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) the future of the Republican Party?
- The Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Scott Turner, has decided he'd like the National Science Foundation headquarters to serve as his executive mansion.
- Chase Strangio, the guy who lost the most important trans-rights case perhaps ever, blamed everyone and everything except his own extremist strategy for the loss, proving once again that narcissism knows no political party.
- A rumor going around town says the Bank of New York might buy Chicago's last locally-owned bank, Northern Trust, though the latter denies it.
- The Economist goes deep into the history and consequences of OnlyFans.
- Apparently I was one of a record number of travelers to pass through O'Hare on Sunday.
Finally, how did I not know about the Lake County Forest Preserve Districts's giant 18-hectare off leash dog area in Lake Forest? Cassie, honey, guess where we're going this weekend?
Inner Drive Technology World HQ hit 34.3°C yesterday afternoon and only cooled down to 25.7°C by 6 this morning. As we do on hot days, Cassie and I started our long walk just before 7am, doing exactly 5 km in 50 minutes while the temperature (and dewpoint) rose a full degree.
Fortunately, it looks like a much-anticipated cool front went through just after 10. I wouldn't know; I've been in meetings. So I'm about to take Cassie out again before the thunderstorms hit.
I might even have time later today to read all the horrible things going on in the world. My tl;dr: no one actually knows what will happen next in the Middle East, least of all the OAFPOTUS, which you can tell because any bad thing he says about someone else, he's really projecting about himself.
I got in a bit early this morning to beat the heat. Good thing, too, as my train line partially shut down upstream of my stop just as I got on the train. It's up to 34°C at O'Hare and 33°C at Inner Drive Technology World HQ (feels like 42°C—107°F), with a forecast of 36°C and continued horrible heat indicies for this afternoon when I walk Cassie home from dog school.
Chicago isn't the only place getting this awful weather. The record heat will affect over 200 million people this week with similar temperatures from North Carolina to Connecticut hitting tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the Lake Michigan-Huron system's water level has dropped more than 150 cm since its soggy peak in 2020, giving us our beaches back and ending routine flooding on lakefront streets on the South Side. (Don't worry, we still have a fifth of the world's fresh water.)
The weather should moderate tomorrow, with thunderstorms coming through in the afternoon. I very much preferred the weather in Seattle this past weekend, though. And I hope that Cassie and I can get some real walks this week.