Events

Andrew Binstock lists things he wishes he'd learned about programming earlier. Local business owner David Borris explains that low-minimum-wage advocates are big businesses, who have different goals than small-business owners. Krugman wonders how climate science became a Marxist plot, while Alec MacGillis reminds Marco Rubio that his state is drowning. Ten days until I get a couple days off...

The FAA facility handing arrivals and departures for Chicago's two main airports shut down earlier today: The FAA started issuing revised flight departure times to airlines Tuesday afternoon after an approximately two-hour “ground stop’’ halted all flights to and from Chicago’s two airports because of smoke in an air traffic radar facility serving northeastern Illinois, airline officials said. The ground stop was ordered as FAA workers were evacuated from the radar facility and operations transferred to...

Security expert Bruce Schneier is not an alarmist, but he is alarmed: In addition to turning the Internet into a worldwide surveillance platform, the NSA has surreptitiously weakened the products, protocols, and standards we all use to protect ourselves. By doing so, it has destroyed the trust that underlies the Internet. We need that trust back. By weakening security, we are weakening it against all attackers. By inserting vulnerabilities, we are making everyone vulnerable. The same vulnerabilities...

Snopes just republished the legend of the E.T. game cartridges in light of the actual burial site being dug up recently. Forgetting for a moment the legend itself, the background story was a description of how Warner management killed Atari: In 1982, Warner Communications could honestly claim to own a goose that laid golden eggs. Its money-producing fowl was called Atari, a video game company it purchased for $28 million in 1976 which had since burgeoned into a $2 billion concern. In the early 1980s...

I'm uploading a couple of fixes to Inner-Drive.com right now, so I have a few minutes to read things people have sent me. It takes a while to deploy the site fully, because the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ documentation (reg.req.) is quite large—about 3,000 HTML pages. I'd like to web-deploy the changes, but the way Azure cloud services work, any changes deployed that way get overwritten as soon as the instance reboots. All of the changes to Inner-Drive.com are under the hood. In fact, I didn't...

The Chicago Tribune has an infographic this weekend with the final statistics of the past winter. After defining the "cold season" as the "period from the first freeze of the fall to the last freeze of spring," and asserting we've had our last freeze (I'll let that float for now), then the 2013-14 winter looked like this: Measurement Value First freeze Oct 22nd (-2°C) Last freeze Apr 16th (-4°C) Days below freezing 76 (Nov through Mar) Days below -18°C 26 (Dec through Mar) Total snowfall 2,082 mm It...

Their super-hero mayor had a fun night in March, apparently: Loaded behind the wheel of his Cadillac Escalade, high on his Jimmy Kimmel interview, Mayor Rob Ford is winding through the streets of his city. It’s two days after Ford’s celebrated appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, two months before rehab. In the course of this March 5 night, Ford will bring together two of his closest felon friends, beating one and accepting drugs from another; go on a racist tirade; and boast that he often has sex with...

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...