Events

Local-news organization DNAinfo asked people to draw their neighborhood boundaries a while back. They now have results: After getting thousands of drawings from DNAinfo readers, we wanted to show where there was broad agreement (and disagreement) about where each begins and ends. On first glance, both Boystown and Wrigleyville residents make clear where they think their neighborhoods are. The core of Wrigleyville — appropriately around Wrigley Field — is between Grace, Racine, Sheffield and Newport...

The weather in Chicago cleared up enough that we got a great view of the total lunar eclipse last night: For comparison, here is the full moon when Earth doesn't get in the way: Note that it's a lot harder to photograph the moon when it's eclipsed. The full moon reflects 9% of the light falling on it, or about half as much as a standard gray card or green grass. So when shooting the moon, the correct exposure is surprisingly fast: about 1/250 at f/5.6 at ISO 100. Shooting the eclipse last night, I used...

OK, so, astronomers predicted tonight's lunar eclipse about 6,000 years ago, but it was still bloody cool. I'll have photos tomorrow. Meanwhile, I am happy the clouds over Chicago parted long enough that I could see one great rock cast a shadow on another. It happens every six months, I realize, but it won't be visible again in Chicago for many years.

Yesterday I ate a quantity of food that I think only Ribfest has ever surpassed, but it was spread out over six very sunny hours. Today I'm recovering. Probably more interesting blog entries and a photo or two tomorrow.

In the last 48 hours, I've upgraded my laptop and surface to Office 2016 and my phone to Android 5.0 and 5.1. Apparently T-Mobile wants to make sure the Lollipop update works before giving you all the bug fixes, which seems strange to me. All four update events went swimmingly, except that one of my Outlook add-ins doesn't work anymore. Pity. I mean, it's not like Outlook 2016 was in previews for six months or anything...

New York Times science correspondent Carl Zimmer explains how Penicillium molds have given us yummy cheeses: By comparing the genomes of different species of molds, Dr. Rodríguez de la Vega and his colleagues have reconstructed their history. On Thursday in the journal Current Biology, the scientists reported that cheese makers unwittingly have thrown their molds into evolutionary overdrive. They haven’t simply gained new genetic mutations to help them grow better in cheese. Over the past few...

First, Bruce Schneier warns about living in a Code Yellow world: The psychological term for this is hypervigilance. Hypervigilance in the face of imagined danger causes stress and anxiety. This, in turn, alters how your hippocampus functions, and causes an excess of cortisol in your body. Now cortisol is great in small and infrequent doses, and helps you run away from tigers. But it destroys your brain and body if you marinate in it for extended periods of time. Most of us...are complete amateurs at...

WGN's Tom Skilling is optimistic about seeing Sunday night's eclipse: While the first vestiges of Sunday evening’s full moon will begin at 7:40pm, the partial eclipse stage is to be reached at 8:07 pm Chicago time moving toward the “total eclipse” phase at 9:11pm. The disc of the moon will take on a dim rusty-red cast in the total eclipse phase for 1 hour and 12 minutes (through 10:23pm Sunday evening). The partial eclipse phase is to be reached at 11:27 pm and the eclipse ends at 11:55 pm. The early...

It's a little warmer today than it was yesterday in Chicago, but it's still gorgeous. Here's the river yesterday afternoon: I'm glad I took that walk, because I actually had some trouble getting steps with my schedule yesterday. Today, not as much of a problem—and also several degrees warmer. My office right now is north of 26°C. Opening a window hasn't helped much as the wind is blowing out. Back to the mines anyway...

I just Googled a problem I'm having setting up a continuous-integration build, because I've had this problem before and wanted to review how I solved it before. Google took me to my own blog on the second hit. (The first hit was the entry I cross-posted on my old employer's blog.) Why even bother with my own memory?