Events

At 1pm, the official temperature at O'Hare was 28°C. It has not been this warm in Chicago since November 7th, six months ago. The last time we had weather warmer than that was September 28th (29°C). Good thing I'm inside...working... Update: The official 2pm temperature of 30°C has not occurred in Chicago since September 11th, 239 days ago.

I may come back to these again: Sullivan on America's dynasties, and how they're bad for us. One of the better blog comments I've read: Codethulu. (The article commented on is also a good read.) Gulliver wonders whether a new sensing technology could end the ban on liquids aboard airplanes. Elsewhere at the Economist, a writer speculates on the reductio ad absurdam of Putin's language doctrine. Publishing the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ to NuGet is still coming up...just not this weekend.

I almost forgot, even though Illinois Climatologist Jim Angel blogged it earlier today. The new NCA is here. Highlights—with a distinctly Illinois-centered view—via Angel: In the next few decades, longer growing seasons and rising carbon dioxide levels will increase yields of some crops, though those benefits will be progressively offset by extreme weather events. Though adaptation options can reduce some of the detrimental effects, in the long term, the combined stresses associated with climate change...

Actually, it's a live feed from the ISS: Live streaming video by Ustream IFLS explains: One of the latest missions from the ISS is kind of amazing. The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment consists of four cameras that have been attached outside of the ISS. Though temperature is controlled, the cameras are exposed to the radiation from the sun, which will allow astronauts to understand how radiation affects the instruments. The cameras point down at Earth at all times, which makes for some...

I want to try this: In less than an hour [my website] went from a small prototype in a data center in Chicago and then scaled it out to datacenters globally and added SSL. The step-by-step explanation is worth a read if you do anything in .NET.

Via Sullivan, a great example of someone committing journalism on a politician: Sullivan comments: Over the weekend, Washington’s journalistic class was hobnobbing with the people they cover. Bob Woodward has helped pioneer access-journalism in which favored courtiers in The Village act as stenographers for the powerful – their skills deployed merely to figuring out which of their exclusive sources is telling the truth (a wrinkle unknown, it seems, to the access-journo of the day, Jo Becker). The idea...

...these: An infographic series explaining Game of Thrones. How much Cliven Bundy benefited from the government. Yet another 5-4 Supreme Court decision, this one allowing prayers at public meetings. Aircraft traffic-avoidance software got confused when a U-2 spy plane flew over Los Angeles. Since arguing with creationists is pointless, how can we preserve science education in vulnerable regions? Julia Louis-Dreyfus, playing VP Selena Meyer, teams up with real VP Joe Biden in this introduction to the...

Apparently OCR software sometimes still has trouble interpreting older books: [A]s Sarah Wendell, editor of the Romance blog  Smart Bitches, Trashy Books noticed recently, something has gone awry. Because, in many old texts the scanner is reading the word ‘arms’ as ‘anus’ and replacing it as such in the digital edition. As you can imagine, you don’t want to be getting those two things mixed up. The resulting sentences are hilarious, turning tender scenes of passionate embrace into something much darker...

Via WGN's weather blog, here is the coolest climate visualizer I've seen: The site also has forecast maps and animation, climate information, and (of course) a blog.

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD reported this week that atmospheric carbon dioxide averaged more than 400 ppm in April, a new milestone: Every single daily carbon dioxide measurement in April 2014 was above 400 parts per million. That hasn’t happened in nearly a million years, and perhaps much longer. Climate scientists have proven that the rise in human-produced greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are “extremely likely” to be the dominant cause of global climate change. The likelihood...