Events

The temperature in Chicago hasn't gone above freezing for 12 days, and got down to -20°C only last night. So right now, at -2°C, and with the sun out, it feels positively tropical. Unfortunately, the forecast doesn't show us actually getting above-freezing temperatures as far out as it goes. Medium-term forecasts also show below-normal temperatures all the way out through mid-March. And in the latest bit of good news, the Great Lakes are almost 86% covered in ice, close to the record of 94.7% set in...

Between rehearsals, work, and life, I haven't had a lot of time during the day to goof off keep abreast of world developments. So here's what got sent to my Kindle just today: Fallows on Sebastian Junger's response to previous blog posts on the U.S. military (read through the history—it's really interesting) TPM on Yitzhak Rabin and Binyamin Netanyahu The Daily WTF with a tale from the interview Chicago History Today on Mayor Martin Kennelly The Washington Post on Gerbils being responsible for the Black...

Saturday night I attended the Chicago Symphony's performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto #24 and the Requiem, both pieces I know well. I was disappointed, particularly in Riccardo Muti's direction of the Requiem. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus comprise some of the best musicians in the world. The CSC, in fact, had a reputation for being the best chorus in the world when I was growing up. But Saturday, they seemed robotic. Every note, rhythm, cutoff, dynamic, and pronunciation was perfect; and...

Last week, Parker's daycare and boarding facility had a serious scare when two men stole one of their vans: The van was found abandoned near 21st and Wabash — dogs still inside — by a Good Samaritan who notified authorities. On Wednesday, two gunmen took the van, which was left running and unattended in the 800 block of West Superior, police said. Though the driver wasn’t in the van when it was taken, the robbers did point a gun at someone who tried to stop them, police said. Joseph Giannini, owner of...

A joint US-UK operation has obtained the master encryption keys to billions of mobile phones: The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data. With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence...

Yesterday was 17°C below normal in Chicago, the 8th consecutive day of frigid temperatures here, including a new record low maximum yesterday of -16°C. And while 19 states had record lows yesterday, western states are baking: "Winter seems to have completely forgotten about us out here," Kathie Dello, deputy director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University, told the Associated Press. "If we could find a way of sending [the Northeast] snow out here, we'd really, really appreciate that."...

...and we had record cold this morning: Around daybreak, the temperature at O'Hare International Airport dropped to -22°C, beating the record of -21°C for this date set in 1936. Winds from the northwest at 15-25 km/h made it feel like -30 to -35°C, and a wind chill advisory remained in effect until noon. The coldest places this morning included -25°C in Aurora, Harvard and Island Lake, -24.4°C in DeKalb and -23.9°C in Mundelein, Union, Waukegan and West Chicago. Wind chills ranged from -33°C in Fox Lake...

Yesterday I found out that Weather Now, my demonstration app, got a mention on local TV in New Hampshire. Apparently it's now in newspapers as well. Are the mentions driving traffic? Hard to tell. According to Google Analytics, the site had 1,957 unique visitors on Monday against an average of around 400. Yesterday that number fell to 760. But for the three days ending yesterday, 18% of the site's visitors came from New Hampshire and another 23% from Massachusetts and New York. So it is getting picked...

Local Manchester, N.H., television station WMUR mentioned my weather application on the news last night: There was only one place in the world colder than Mount Washington this morning: the south pole. The weather website wx now.com says the summit's temperature of 35 degrees below zero early this morning was the second coldest reported temperature on the entire planet. I can't wait to see the Google analytics.

The Bode-Museum: Brandenburg Tor: And another view of the Reichstagsgebäude: