Events

In yet another unprecedented rejection of historical norms that has tremendous potential to encourage corruption and double-dealing, Senate Republicans are rushing Trump cabinet confirmations so much that the Office of Government Ethics can't keep up. This means that some confirmation hearings might start before nominees have even finished their background checks and ethics disclosures: In a letter to Senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the leader of the Office of...

The last two days, I've been in meetings more than 7 hours each. I'm a little fried. Meanwhile, the following have popped up for me to read over the weekend: Making people reveal their real names stops online trolling, right? Um, no. A poet discovered that two of her poems were used in Texas' state assessments, but she couldn't answer the test questions about them. Hanselman asks, should we teach programming from the machine up or from the glass down? Photographer Kaylee Greer has a video about how to...

Now that Eddie Lampert has killed Sears almost with his bare hands, he's selling the best bits off. The Craftsman brand of tools is probably the most respected piece of the formerly-august company, so naturally it's the first to go: Sears Holdings agreed to sell its Craftsman tool brand to Stanley Black & Decker for about $900 million, marking CEO Edward Lampert's third move in the past two weeks to prop up the beleaguered retailer with fresh sources of funding. Under terms of the deal, Stanley will pay...

The first brick-and-mortar Sears store, which closed this past fall, will become apartments and a giant liquor store by next year: Chicago developer Springbank Capital Advisors has purchased the old Sears store in Ravenswood and plans to turn it into a $30 million apartment and retail complex, said David Trandel, chairman and chief executive of Springbank. The building at 1900 W. Lawrence Avenue was closed last summer by Hoffman Estates-based Sears Holdings as the retail firm shuttered dozens of Sears...

January 3rd is one of my favorite days of the year in astronomy, because it's the day that the northern hemisphere has its latest sunrise of the winter. This morning in Chicago, the sun rose at 7:19 (though it rose behind a thick rainy overcast), just a few seconds later than it rose yesterday. But tomorrow it will rise just a few seconds earlier, then a few more, until by the end of January it'll rise more than a minute earlier each day. Meanwhile, thanks to the eccentricity of our orbit around the...

Welcome to another of my annual traditions: the stats dump. In 2016: Traveling was way, way down over previous years. I only visited one foreign country (the UK) and took only 15 flights all year. That amounted to only 42,588 km, not enough to re-qualify for Platinum status for the first time since 2008. The Daily Parker had only 459 posts, down from 2015's 493, and the lowest since 2010. I was really, really busy this year. Posting suffered. Parker got 211 hours of walks, up 62 from 2015. So he did not...

The 2017 Chicago sunrise chart is now available. Share and enjoy.

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2017 3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 28th 07:19 16:33 9:13 27 Jan 5pm sunset 07:08 17:00 9:52 4 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:10 10:10 19 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:39 17:30 10:48 26 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:30 17:38 11:07 11 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr 16th Earliest sunset until Oct 26th 06:09 17:54 11:44 12 Mar Daylight saving time...

Via Deeply Trivial, this:

With the passing of midnight just a few moments ago in Samoa, the world has officially and completely moved into 2017. Whew.