Events

Sixty years ago yesterday, on 30 October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the most destructive bomb ever designed: The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around 58 Mt (243 PJ),[13] which was the accepted yield in technical literature until 1991, when Soviet scientists revealed that their instruments indicated a yield of 50 Mt (209 PJ).[4] As they had the instrumental data and access to the test site, their yield figure has been accepted as more accurate.[4][12] In theory, the...

The Department of Health and Social Care now allows visitors to the UK to satisfy their testing requirement with a £22 lateral-flow test, rather than the more expensive (and invasive) PCR test: Eligible fully vaccinated passengers arriving in England from countries not on the UK’s red list can take a cheaper lateral flow test instead of a PCR from today (24 October 2021). Lateral flow tests must be taken as soon as possible on the day of arrival in England or at the latest before the end of a...

As the last workday in October draws to a close, in all its rainy gloominess, I have once again spent all day working on actually coding stuff and not reading these articles: Andrew Sullivan says the GOP could own clean energy by pushing nuclear power. Brian Merchant says Facebook has decided to change its name because it's boring. The last sane GOP representative, Adam Kinzinger (IL-6), won't run for re-election to the House, both because the new Illinois district map favors Democrats and also because...

About a month ago I bought a Netatmo Smart Weather Station, which has both indoor and outdoor Internet-connected sensor arrays. The indoor array includes a CO2 gauge, which taught me last night that my gas oven produces lot of carbon dioxide:   Now, 1360 ppm doesn't pose a serious health risk, but you can see how quickly the CO2 shot up when I turned the oven on and how slowly it dissipated. The other thing I've learned is how stable my indoor temperature is when the weather is cool but not cold. The...

I had to pause the really tricky refactoring I worked on yesterday because we discovered a new performance issue that obscured an old throttling issue. It took me most of the morning to find the performance bottleneck, but after removing it a process went from 270 seconds to 80. Then I started looking into getting the 80 down to, say, 0.8, and discovered that because we're using an API limit with a request limit (180 requests in 15 minutes), I put in a 5-second delay between requests. Sigh. So now I've...

Quick hit list of stuff I didn't find time to read: There is an online map of the most pleasant walks in London, and an app that will get you from one place to another down the most aesthetically-pleasing streets. We could tax billionaires without much difficulty if Congress didn't have such close relations with them. Vice explains how the FBI can get your location data from your mobile carrier. NPR explains the legal problems that may face the production team on Rust. Finally, Alexandra Petri guesses...

Cassie's year-end performance review might have to take this sort of thing into account:

I said before lunch I wouldn't post barring catastrophe. This may qualify: Over the weekend in California, a storm system dropped to a barometric pressure of 945.2 mB, making it the strongest storm to affect the Pacific Northwest on record. For perspective, this is equivalent to the central pressure you would see with a strong hurricane. For Sacramento, the stats are even more startling. Sacramento picked up 5.44 inches of rain Sunday, making it their wettest day in history (or any calendar month)....

My day started before dawn waiting (unsuccessfully) for Cassie to pee in a howling rain storm, and will end late tonight after our penultimate rehearsal before our November 7th concert. So unless something truly catastrophic happens, no real post today. Tomorrow I'll have something about the book I just finished.

A collection of weather phenomena off the west coast of North America, including a bomb cyclone, will give northern California record rainfall over the next day and a half: Amid an exceptional drought that has wrought havoc on California for years, a Level 5 out of 5 atmospheric river is soaking the region, dumping double-digit rainfall totals and up to six feet of mountain snow. This heavy precipitation will help ease the drought but produce dangerous mudslides and debris flows in areas recently...