Events

Today is Kirk Douglas' 100th birthday. And back in September, he had a warning for us young 'uns: I’ve also lived through the horrors of a Great Depression and two World Wars, the second of which was started by a man who promised that he would restore his country it to its former greatness. I was 16 when that man came to power in 1933.  For almost a decade before his rise he was laughed at ― not taken seriously.  He was seen as a buffoon who couldn’t possibly deceive an educated, civilized population...

Trump has outdone himself with this doozy of a cabinet nomination: Donald Trump intends to select Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a senior transition official confirmed to NBC News Wednesday — the clearest sign yet the president-elect will pursue an agenda that could undo President Obama's climate change legacy. An ally to the fossil fuel industry, Pruitt has aggressively fought against environmental regulations, becoming one of a number of attorneys...

Tales in the war against reality waged by Trump and his party: The Weather Channel took the unusual step of calling out Congressional Republicans repeating Breitbart lies concerning climate change yesterday. Trump's Twitter tantrum after Boeing criticized him could cost thousands of American jobs (and create thousands of French jobs to boot). Trump's narcissism sees only the recognition, not the criticism, in his joining Hitler and Stalin as one of Time's persons of the year. And yet, James Fallows sees...

Via Deeply Trivial, the Stack Overflow blog comes up with some answers: Here on the Stack Overflow data team we don't have to hypothesize about where developers are and what they use: we can measure it! By analyzing our traffic, we have a bird's eye view of who visits Stack Overflow, and what technologies they're working on. Here we'll show some examples of what we can detect about each city based on one year of Stack Overflow traffic. When developers are using a programming language or technology, they...

(Meteorological) Winter is less than a week old and already we've set a winter weather record. We got our first snowfall of the season yesterday, and the 163 mm we got officially in Chicago was the largest snowfall we've ever gotten for the first snow of the season. Davenport, Iowa, got an inconvenient 259 mm. Yikes.

I wasn't quite 100% today and neither was a fried of mine, so we're taking the opportunity to re-watch (or watch for the first time in the friend's case) HBO's Westworld. I've seen the first 9 episodes—tomorrow night is the 10th and final episode of the season—so the nuances and clues are making a lot more sense on second viewing. This show is almost as good as Game of Thrones. Seriously.

So many meetings today, so many articles in my queue: Trump voters are already feeling like Trump has betrayed them, for the simple reason that he has. In some cases, though, it's hard to empathize, as clearly some Trump voters live inside deep pools of misinformation. Also, it turns out, the only thing that can replace Obamacare is something identical to Obamacare, which will expose even more direct contradictions in the way Trump voters understand the world. Forget Trump voters for a moment; the...

The Illinois State Climatologist reports on the autumn season, which for meteorologists ended Wednesday: This was the 5th warmest November on record for Illinois, based on preliminary data. The statewide average temperature was 8.6°C, and 2.7°C above normal. It was also the 2nd warmest fall on record for Illinois. The statewide average temperature for fall was 15.2°C, 2.8°C above normal. Only the fall of 1931 was warmer at 15.4°C The climatological fall months are September, October, and November. It...

Jeet Heer sees Trump's incessant tweeting as a real strategy: Trump is using Twitter it as a substitute for press conferences—as a means to make serious policy announcements in a safe space where he can spout off without being questioned or challenged. On Wednesday morning, for instance, Trump issued a string of tweets that, when strung together, announced: “I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to make America great again. While I am not...

That, as of today, is the number of votes that Clinton won more than Trump: Hillary Clinton's popular vote lead has now reached 2.52 million votes. In percentage terms that's a 1.9 percentage point margin. It will rise at least a bit more. We can likely be confident that her final margin will be at least 2 percentage points. To compare, that's 5 times the margin of Al Gore's popular vote win in raw vote terms and 4 times his margin in percentage terms. At this point, not only did Clinton win the popular...