Events

I complained this morning that we haven't had much sunlight so far in December. Just now, the Illinois State Climatologist reported that November's weather sucked too: It was a cold and snowy November in Illinois. The statewide average temperature for November was 1.8°C, which is an impressive 4°C below normal, ranking November 2018 as the 8th coldest on record. Looking at meteorological Fall (Sept, Oct, Nov), temperatures for the season ended up near normal in southeastern Illinois, and between 1-2°C...

As we plod towards the earliest sunset of the year on December 8th, it hardly matters, because we haven't seen the sun much at all this month. So far this month we've seen 45 minutes of sunlight. That's 7% of the possible 604 minutes the sun has been up. But hey, it's winter in Chicago, and it builds character.

Researchers used the Iris Murdoch's last novel to quantify how Alzheimer's first signs show up in language: As [neurologist Peter] Garrard explains, a patient’s vocabulary becomes restricted, and they use fewer words that are specific labels and more words that are general labels. For example, it’s not incorrect to call a golden retriever an “animal,” though it is less accurate than calling it a retriever or even a dog. Alzheimer’s patients would be far more likely to call a retriever a “dog” or an...

First, today is the bicentennial of Illinois becoming a state, which involved a deal to steal Chicago from Wisconsin: If Illinoisans had played by the rules to get statehood, Chicagoans would be cheeseheads. By all rights, the Wisconsin border should have been set at the southern tip of Lake Michigan when Illinois was admitted into the union, 200 years ago Monday. That would have made a 60-mile strip of what’s now northern Illinois a part of southern Wisconsin. Stripped of the smokestacks of Chicago’s...

Let me elaborate on last night's post. Microsoft has two flavors of .NET right now: the .NET Framework, which has been in production since February 2002, and .NET Core, which came out in June 2016. .NET Core implements the .NET Standard, which defines a set of APIs that any .NET application can use. Here's the problem: The 18-year-old Framework has a lot more in it than the 2-year-old Standard specification or Core implementations. So while all .NET Standard and Core code works with the .NET Framework...

I'm mostly done with a major revision to the Inner Drive Framework, and I've discovered, to my horror, that one part can't be done yet. Microsoft Azure Table support doesn't work with .NET Standard yet. This will make more sense at some point soon.

The 41st president of the United States died last night at the age of 94. President Bill Clinton, who succeeded Bush in 1993, remembers his friend: No words of mine or others can better reveal the heart of who he was than those he wrote himself. He was an honorable, gracious and decent man who believed in the United States, our Constitution, our institutions and our shared future. And he believed in his duty to defend and strengthen them, in victory and defeat. He also had a natural humanity, always...

Yesterday, a combination of moisture and cold caused snow to fall in a singularly odd pattern near Chicago: Although no widespread weather systems were in the area to crank out snow, flurries were still falling across parts of the area. These unusual phenomena were thanks to a supercooled atmosphere interacting with exhaust from a power plant and also the air flow around commercial aircraft. Farther to the north, a bizarre radar signature in the shape of a loop showed up just northeast of the Windy...

CityLab just alerted me to a card game that I am going to order as soon as I finish this post: The nail-biting drama of rush-hour congestion, shuttle bus transfers, and airport mix-ups—now in a deck of cards: It’s LOOP: The Elevated Card Game, developed by Chicago merchandiser Transit Tees. The game draws on the relatable pleasures and perils of using the Windy City’s elevated rapid-transit network, the venerable L; it’s a love letter to the joys of public transit, as well as an opportunity to mocking...

New research suggests that men insecure about their masculinity tend to support the president more. No, really: We found that support for Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches for topics such as “erectile dysfunction.” Moreover, this relationship persisted after accounting for demographic attributes in media markets, such as education levels and racial composition, as well as searches for topics unrelated to fragile masculinity, such as “breast augmentation” and...