Events

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, The Daily Parker will participate in this year's Blogging A-to-Z Challenge. Today's the official Theme Reveal day. My topic will be: Programming Concepts using Microsoft C# .NET. My topics will include: Compilers vs Interpreters Generics Human factors (and errors) LINQ Polymorphism ...and will finish with a real-world practical example on April 30th. I will also keep up my annoying political and Parker posts through April. And, full disclosure, many of the 26 A-to-Z...

Over the past few weeks I've gotten several emails from someone purporting to be "Jess Miller" in New Zealand, mentioning she'd noticed a post I did on the Maldives in 2012. That post reported on the violent coup d'état that overthrew the democratically elected government of the island nation just southwest of the Indian subcontinent. And just a few weeks ago, the military dissolved Parliament and threw the country into more unrest. The U.S. State Department has issued a level-2 caution. Understandably...

The New York Times last week suggested that people who sleep with their dogs sleep just as well as those whose dogs sleep elsewhere: The dogs wore a device called a Fitbark, an activity tracker that attaches to the collar and records whether an animal is at rest and sleeping or active and at play. The people wore an Actiwatch 2, an activity monitor that records people’s movements and whether they are sleeping soundly or not. Both monitors were set to sample movement every minute, while the humans also...

Duke advanced yesterday to the Sweet 16. Cool, but their 87-62 win over Rhode Island wasn't exactly a fair fight. Loyola, though. Loyola advanced on a hail-Mary three-pointer with 3 seconds left on the clock: Loyola did it again with a 63-62 NCAA tournament thriller against No. 3 seed Tennessee to advance to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1985 — the last time the Ramblers were in the tournament. On Saturday night, it was guard Clayton Custer who delivered a game-winning 15-foot jumper with 3.6...

As of just a few moments ago, I passed 1.5 billion seconds old. Yes, this is a thing most people don't really think about, but as someone who works in software, this actually has some significance—and another Y2K problem that will occur just a few months before I get to 2.0 Gigaseconds (Gs) in 2038. The problem is a thing called the Unix epoch. Computers can only count as high as they have bits to count. Unix computers, which include Macs and most of the infrastructure of the Internet, count time in...

Via Cranky Flyer, blogger Jon Ostrower has a look at early drawings of Boeing's next transport airplane, which could fly as early as 2025: The yet-to-be-launched NMA is slated to arrive in 2025. First with the base model, the NMA-6X (225 passengers at 5,000nm) and the NMA-7X (265 passengers at 4,500nm) two years later, according to two people familiar with Boeing’s planning today. Elements adapted from existing aircraft are apparent across this early iteration of the NMA design: A 737 Max-style tail...

An article in this month's Atlantic points out that we humans can wonder how we got here only because we got here: After all, there are 100-mile impact craters on our planet’s surface from the past billion years, but no 600-mile craters. But of course, there couldn’t be scars this big. On worlds where such craters exist, there is no one around afterward to ponder them. In a strange way, truly gigantic craters don’t appear on the planet’s surface because we’re here to look for them. Just as the wounds of...

Two of my almae matres yesterday advanced in the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament. One of them, Duke, didn't exactly struggle, so I'll just acknowledge them for now. Another of them, Loyola University Chicago, didn't even expect to get to the tournament, so their win yesterday felt really great: Donte Ingram’s 3-pointer just before the final buzzer delivered the 11th-seeded Ramblers’ first NCAA tournament victory in 33 years — a 64-62 upset of No. 6 seed Miami. As the players partied Thursday afternoon...

Writing in the New York Times, University of Washington professor Cecilia Bitz sounds a four-klaxon alarm about the rapidly-warming Arctic: In late February, a large portion of the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole experienced an alarming string of extremely warm winter days, with the surface temperature exceeding 25 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. These conditions capped nearly three months of unusually warm weather in a region that has seen temperatures rising over the past century as greenhouse gas...

I'm writing a response to an RFP today, so I'll have to read these when I get a chance: Aaron Blake says that "Trump's admission that he made stuff up to Justin Trudeau is particularly bad." American Airlines has signed off on the city's O'Hare Expansion plan. Chicago's Deep Tunnel flood-control system got overloaded by a recent storm, despite a recent $1 bn upgrade. Bruce Schneier outlines how artificial intelligence can help defend against cyberattacks. Cranky Flyer thinks "airlines can't be stupid...