Events

Washington Post writer Fritz Hahn is freaking out that the U.S. now has more breweries than ever: As of Dec. 1, 2015, the Brewers Association had counted 4,144 breweries in the United States, the most ever operating simultaneously in the history of the country. According to historians, the previous high-water mark of 4,131 was set in 1873. Even when they are given a chance, some small brewers have expressed frustration with the way beer bars order products. Instead of buying three kegs of a new beer and...

Via the Illinois State Climatologist, NOAA reported this week that 2015 was extraordinarily warm: The 2015 annual average U.S. temperature was 12.4°C, 1.3°C above the 20th century average, the second warmest year on record. Only 2012 was warmer for the U.S. with an average temperature of 12.9°C. This is the 19th consecutive year the annual average temperature exceeded the 20th century average. (Emphasis mine.) Moreover, in 2015, every part of the lower 48 states had above-average temperatures: Nineteen...

I may or may not have a letterspacing error in the headline... Short list today, so I may do it after work before rehearsal: Krugman takes Sanders to task for his single-payer proposal—not the idea of single-payer, but the plausibility of it in the current environment. Speed reading doesn't really work, according to a team of psychologists. "Ted Cruz Isn't Crazy—He's Much Worse." When does self-disclosure become over-sharing? It's not obvious. Not to mention, I still haven't finished the Economist's...

The Earth has global cool periods periodically, the last one ending around 10,000 years ago, which gave us humans the push we needed to invent complex civilizations. Even though global temperatures were higher about 8,000 years ago than they are today, they were dropping gradually until about 200 years ago. (Any guesses why?) In short, we're due for another glaciation. But it looks like that won't happen: [S]cientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that the relation of...

This means I have some time to digest this over the weekend: Temperatures in Chicago rose 25°C, from -18°C to 6°C, from Wednesday evening to yesterday evening. They're forecast to plummet tonight. Yay Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has a decent history of Captain George Streeter, who "discovered" what is now the Streeterville neighborhood. Astronomers have discovered a supernova that was 50 times brighter than our galaxy. The Atlantic said last night's Republican debate had "Trump's Finest Moment." Not...

Zach Weinersmith has abridged the Bible "Beyond the Point of Usefulness." And he has given this work a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC license, which lets me post it right here for you (281 k, PDF). Enjoy. Excerpts: Genesis: God made everything, but humans keep screwing it up; some Jews move to Egypt, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Amos: Amos becomes, like, the 14,000th prophet to note that Israel is making God mad and when you make God mad things go bad. Acts: Finding the market for Jewish...

Too many interesting things to read today. I've got some time between work and Bel Canto to get through them: An astronomer thinks he knows the origin of the Wow! signal. A Chicagoist writer has crunched the numbers on Restaurant Week. Crain's looks at the new Illinois Cloud Tax and its effects on tech startups. Krugman shows, one more time, how much better things are now than at the beginning of Obama's presidency. Hanselman describes WallabyJS, a new JavaScript test runner. Jetbrains has developed a...

After watching the state of the union address, my party (small sense) decided to watch The American President. In the first ten minutes, we watched agog as we realized that none of the principal political arguments in the U.S. have changed since 1995.

...a report from the Executive to the Legislature required by Article II, section 3. Everyone is following along, yes? 9:11pm: First applause line: "I'm going to try to make it a little shorter." 9:15pm: My companion: "Fear!" Me: "No, that's Feinstein." 9:18pm: Oh, dear. Third "fear" of the speech. Might not make it... 9:21pm: "Anyone who says America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction." 9:29pm: "There is red tape that can be cut." Bi-partisan applause, for different reasons. 9:32pm: "When the...

We're experiencing what everyone hopes will be the two coldest days of 2016. This morning Chicago woke up to -18°C temperatures and a forecast for more of the same through tomorrow night. And then Wednesday it all goes back to the weirdly warm winter we've been having. The Climate Prediction Center still says we're going to have a warmer-than-average winter, and even the long-term forecasts call for high probabilities of warmer-than-average temperatures through June and beyond. These temperatures kill...