Events

Via Schneier, it may be that England's political system was stable: For over a century the longbow reigned as undisputed king of medieval European missile weapons. Yet only England used the longbow as a mainstay in its military arsenal; France and Scotland clung to the technologically inferior crossbow. This longbow puzzle has perplexed historians for decades. We resolve it by developing a theory of institutionally constrained technology adoption. Unlike the crossbow, the longbow was cheap and easy to...

We've been using CloudMonix for a while to manage and monitor our Microsoft Azure assets. By "we" I mean both Inner Drive Technology (home of The Daily Parker) and Holden (my day job). CloudMonix recently added a new feature that automates virtual machine (VM) management. See, Microsoft charges for VMs by the hour. So if you have a VM that is only used at specific times, you're wasting money by having it run all the time. A great example: Our continuous integration (CI) server, which builds and tests...

The latest Climate Prediction Center forecasts came out this week. Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel says it's pretty unusual: [T]here is a chance that La Niña conditions (the opposite of El Niño) could develop in the summer or fall time frame. Unfortunately, the appearance of La Niña in summer or fall in Illinois typically means hot, dry weather. This is the first time I can remember CPC forecasting an increased risk of warmer and drier conditions so far out for Illinois. If the forecast comes to...

The Economist peeks under the skirts of the top tech firms and finds what people in my field have known for a long, long time: However, a career as a software developer or engineer comes with no guarantee of job satisfaction. A survey last year of 5,000 such workers at both tech and non-tech firms, by TINYPulse, a specialist in monitoring employee satisfaction, found that many of them feel alienated, trapped, underappreciated and otherwise discombobulated. Only 19% of tech employees said they were happy...

Even though the U.S. only had its second-hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA reported today that worldwide temperatures were the hottest since records began in 1880: Globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius). Only once before, in 1998, has the new record been greater than the old record by this much. The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1.0 degree Celsius) since the late-19th...

I've just spent a few minutes going through all my company's technology expenses to figure out which ones are subject to the completely daft rental tax that Chicago has extended to cover computing services. The City theorizes that rental tax is payable whenever you pay to use a piece of equipment that belongs to someone else for a period of time. This makes a lot of sense when you go to Hertz, but less when you use Microsoft Azure. My understanding of the tax and the City's might not be completely...

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...