Events

Excellent take-down of one of my least favorite historical figures by Bruce Levine: Only rarely in U.S. history do writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian...

Retail genetic-research company 23 And Me analyzed the genetics of the blue dress phenomenon: For one, there was no clear genetic association with seeing either a blue and black dress versus seeing white and gold one, according to Fah Sathirapongsasuti, PhD, a computational biologist here at 23andMe. That doesn’t mean there is no association, it just means that we didn’t find one that met our threshold for a strong association. We did see a small effect size for a genetic variant in the gene ANO6. While...

The French abbey Mont-Saint-Michel was completely cut off from land yesterday as once-in-a-century tides flowed into the English Channel: Tens of thousands of curious visitors have crowded historic Mont Saint-Michel and other beauty spots along the French coastline with the promise of a ‘tide of the century’, but it may not have lived up to everyone's expectations. Anticipating a wall of water that could equal the height of a four-storey building, tourists and locals staked out positions around the...

In the past week I've gotten almost 100,000 steps (and 73 km ) of walking, including a few relatively long ones today. This also takes into account the 10% hit to my counts from moving my Fitbit to my left hand. The best part of all this is that I can eat more. Like last night, when I consumed Lao's Sze Chuan in mass quantities. As this may, in fact, be the most interesting thing I can report this weekend, maybe I need to get out more. Or stay in and read more. But I've got at least another 3,000 steps...

Things I will read or explore more this weekend: Ryanair will apparently not fly to North America anytime soon. British economists are stuck in 2011. MapBox has very recent satellite photos to ogle. Must run.

The National Aeronautical and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported today that the climatalogical winter of December 2014 through February 2015 was the warmest on record, despite what happened in the eastern United States and Canada: During December–February, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.42°F (0.79°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest for December–February in the 1880–2015 record, surpassing the previous record of 2007 by 0.05°F (0.03°C)....

Just hours after a jury handed down a $26-million verdict against the company, Yellow Cab filed for bankruptcy protection overnight: The verdict was reached around 7 p.m. Tuesday. At 3:45 a.m. Wednesday, Yellow Cab Affiliation Inc. of Chicago filed for Chapter 11 reorganization with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chicago, according to the court documents. In its filing, company officials said Yellow Cab is "experiencing financial difficulty due to, among other things, a judgment entered against the...

Under the status update "...it's as though millions of llamas suddenly cried out and were suddenly silenced," one of my Facebook friends posted this sad news: Maxis—the developer of SimCity, and a studio I’m comfortable calling one of the most influential of all time—is closing shop. The news was confirmed by designer Guillaume Pierre over Twitter. “Well it was a fun 12 years,” wrote Pierre, “but it's time to turn off the lights and put the key under the door.” Founded by Will Wright and Jeff Braun in...

Very cool simulation: A new data visualization from a coder named Will Gallia shows commuters working their way through a day in the life of London’s Tube as exactly that: busy little pixels of commuting energy. There are a few fun takeaways from this living, breathing transit map. Things get really, really busy, for instance, at around 8:40 in the morning, and again at around 6:10 at night. But there are also areas of consistent low activity: The Hainault Loop in the far right corner, for instance...

Yesterday evening when I walked to rehearsal the temperature in Chicago was 22°C. Four hours later it was 8°C, and it fell to 2°C by sunrise. This is what we call a "pneumonia front," especially when this sort of thing happens mid-day. People go to work or school dressed for warm weather and catch pneumonia on the way home. Add to that the 46 km/h wind gusts out of the north and it's a banner spring morning here in Chicago. Sláinte!