Events

I've finally gotten around to extending the historical weather feature in Weather Now. Now, you can get any archival report that the system has, back to 2013. (I have many more archival reports from before then but they're not online.) For example, here's the last time I arrived in London, or the time I took an amazing photo in Hermosa Beach, Calif. I don't know why it took me so long to code this feature. It only took about 4 hours, including testing. And it also led me to fix a bug that has been in...

Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole points to the Trump Administration putting babies in cages as one example of how they're building up to fascism: Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we...

I despise Eddie Lampert. The harm he has caused Sears and the people who work for the company should be criminal. But he's going to continue to get rich driving it into the ground selling the real estate from its carcass. Tomorrow, the last store in the company's home town will close, just shy of its 80th anniversary: The Six Corners store, on the edge of Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood, will shut its doors for the last time Sunday, two months shy of its 80th anniversary. The closure is part of...

Thursday, I hit a new PR for total steps over 7 days. Yesterday I said if I got 22,149 steps I'd hit 175,000 for the week, averaging 25,000 per day. Sadly, I only got 18,327 yesterday. So I did hit a new PR for 7-day total, 171,122, but I fell almost 4,000 steps short of 175,000. Boo. My 7-day average was just 24,446. Right now I'm waiting for my co-worker to sync up his steps from our Workweek Hustle step challenge. As of 10pm he had 104,720, and as of midnight I had 105,523. That's a lot of steps for...

A predicted consequence of anthropogenic climate change is that the air won't cool as quickly overnight, leading to ever-increasing temperatures overall. It's happening, and it's dangerous: Nationwide, summer nights have warmed at nearly twice the rate of days, with overnight low temperatures increasing 0.8°C per century since 1895, when national temperature records began, compared to a daytime high increase of 0.4°C per century. (Nights have warmed faster than days during other seasons, too.) While...

It's been a busy news day: The Post's Robert Kagan says everything will not be all right. Andrew Sullivan asks, "did Trump just stop Brexit?" TPM has a rundown on Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross's chicanery. A state board in Michigan controls, to some extent, the water levels in Lakes Michigan and Huron. There was also an article on tuple equality in C# 7.3 that, while interesting to me, probably isn't interesting to many other people.

In the 7 days through yesterday, I walked 169,083 steps, a new personal record (PR). That averages out to 24,154 per day. On the one hand, I can set a new PR of 25,000 per day, or 175,000 for 7 days, by walking 22,149 steps today. On the other hand, or if the shoe is on the other foot so to speak, my feet do not like this idea. Nor do my calves, quads, hams, or glutes. On the third hand, if I don't hit that PR today, I won't have another shot at it without either walking 25k consistently for a week, or...

My dentist is all the way up in Hubbard Woods, which turns out to be a 21.3 km walk from my house. I know that because I walked it this morning. In fairness, I did it in two roughly-equal parts with a stop in downtown Evanston for lunch. But my total time for the walk, 3:12:36, over what was almost exactly a half-marathon, implies a legal finishing time for the Chicago Marathon (6:30 allowed for the 42.2 km course). I'm in a step challenge with a co-worker who got 11,000 ahead of me yesterday. Let's see...

Greg Hinz reports that Republican Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner's internal polling numbers suggest his re-election race is a lot closer than the rest of the state believes: The message came in an exclusive interview with Rauner campaign manager Betsy Ankney in which she claimed the incumbent has pulled within single digits of Democratic nominee J.B. Pritzker in internal campaign polls, and promised to empty a "very full" book of opposition research on him.  "In our focus groups, people can't cite a...

As I write this, my Ancestral Homeland's football team are up 1-0 over Croatia in the World Cup semifinals. This wasn't supposed to happen: Since 2006, England’s performance on the world stage has been lamentable, a comedy of errors marked by group-stage evictions, racism scandals, and grifters. In 2016, after the abrupt departures of two successive managers, the former England player and manager of its feeder under-21 team Gareth Southgate was given temporary charge of the national team, a decision...