Events

Problem: my keyboard suddenly wouldn't respond to the left-shift, enter, 3 or F5 keys. No idea why this is. Tested with mskey.exe, tested on another machine...still those four keys aren't working. Solution: Get a new keyboard. Walk 10 minutes to Staples, find the same make and model, buy it, return to office. New problem: New keyboard's spacebar is broken. When I say "rinse and repeat" I mean that when heading back from Staples—this is the Chicago Loop, so one walks everywhere—it started to rain. Which...

The three-month period ending July 31st was the wettest in Illinois history: Illinois experienced its wettest May – July on record with 500 mm of precipitation, 200 mm above the 20th century average, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Most of that was due to the record precipitation of June with 240 mm statewide, based on their latest numbers and discussed in more detail here. That is about an extra two months of precipitation during that three-month period. Factors include...

After not going to a Renaissance Faire in so long I don't even remember my last visit, it was fun going three times this summer, each with a different group of people. Yesterday was Steampunk Invasion, which attracted crowds one of the more regular Faire attendees in our group called "epic." Great costumes though: I didn't do real costumes myself this season, but I have been informed that next season, there will be a costume, oh yes, there will. This should be interesting...

Traveling to San Francisco and London as often as I do underscores to me how crappy some things are in Chicago. Take our ridiculous transit fare systems. Metra, the heavy-rail system, still uses little paper tickets, while Ventra only works on CTA buses and trains. I want one card that would let me tap in and tap out of any public transit service in the city. Citylab says this may be coming soon, at least to some cities: Unified mobile ticketing means riders no longer need to worry about having the...

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...