Events

My friend Sara, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, wrote in her blog today about dreaming's influence on inspiration, and incidentally why psychoanalysis isn't science: REM (dream) sleep specifically is associated with increased abstract reasoning as well as increasing the strength of normally weak associations in the brain (see here). What that means is, two different things that your waking brain might not even see a connection between could become associated rather easily in a dream. Our brain does this...

NASA released a really cool video yesterday: The agency explains: The images were captured by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). EPIC maintains a constant view of the fully illuminated Earth as it rotates...

While eating lunch, I read this cheerful article from Rolling Stone: Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next. The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen....

We're working on a software release this week which seems to have absorbed all my free creativity. So I will leave you with this random tweet I discovered today: Cats seem unpredictable until you realize that their primary goal in life is to be on top of warm things. pic.twitter.com/v7Jdj7vIGY — Allen Pike (@apike) July 24, 2015

Sometimes it takes a while for me to pull things off my phone, like this photo from Pentatonix' show at Allstate Arena last Saturday: Funny thing about that: when we found our original seats, in the last row way above stage right, our view of the stage was blocked by a temporary platform directly next to us. An usher came by and handed us 10th-row seats directly below us. Nice upgrade.

The ink on the Iranian nuclear deal isn't dry yet, but already American and European companies are starting to benefit: Iran plans to buy as many as 90 planes per year from Boeing and Airbus to revamp its antiquated fleet once Western sanctions are lifted, its state news agency IRNA quoted a senior aviation official as saying on Sunday. "Iran will buy a total of 80-90 planes per year from the two aviation giants in the first phase of renovating its air fleet," said Mohammad Khodakarami, the caretaker...

I've had a lot going on over the past couple of weeks so posting has been a little slow. I spent yesterday at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, following Saturday night's Pentatonix (and, right, Kelly Clarkson) performance, following running around during the day Saturday trying to get everything done ahead of both those events. I'm a little fried. I'm also apparently slowing my average posting rate, having failed two months in a row to post 40 times. Before June 2015, the last time I failed to post 40...

After two of the remaining four diagonal runways at O'Hare close later this month, the airport is planning to experiment with alternate landing runways to reduce noise: The city has developed a concept to rotate the designated "fly quiet'' runways at night to abate noise. Instead of planes flying over the same air corridors night after night, the rotation of runways — on possibly a weekly basis — would move the worst noise impacts from one community to another, aviation officials said. The experiment...

Via Schneier, a new paper by researchers at Google discussed the differences between the ways security experts and non-experts treat online security. Not surprising, experts have better habits. When asked about the security practices that most matter to them, experts talked about multi-factor authentication, password safes, and getting the latest software patches, while non-experts worried about anti-virus software and changing passwords frequently: The most common things-you-do responses from each...

Just some of the news stories I haven't got time to read this morning: Two men stole a puppy at knifepoint on a CTA train last night. I mean, WTF? An airplane part that could be from Malaysia Airlines 370 was found on Réunion, an island near Madagascar some 4,000 km from where searchers were looking for the missing plane. Via Schneier, an argument that it wasn't a legal limit on spying that prevented the NSA from intercepting a crucial phone call to Osama bin Laden in 2001, it was incompetence in the...