Events

Jennifer Rubin says what I've been thinking: I have never been a fan of the Olympics. Or, I should say, I have never been a fan of the International Olympic Committee. An organization that rewards dictatorial regimes (Russia in 2014, and now China for the second time) with events that attract billions of eyeballs and sappy worldwide coverage — all while punishing athletes who stand up for human rights — is not apolitical or “promoting the Olympic spirit.” It’s making money off and providing cover for...

What does it mean to say that Covid-19 has become endemic? The Atlantic argues, not much: Endemicity says nothing about the total number of infected people in a population at a given time. It says nothing about how bad those infections might get—how much death or disability a microbe might cause. Endemic diseases can be innocuous or severe; endemic diseases can be common or vanishingly rare. Endemicity, then, just identifies a pathogen that’s fixed itself in our population so stubbornly that we cease to...

We only got about 50 mm of snow overnight, but the second wave came in the morning and hasn't stopped. And yet, not everyone cares about the natural disaster unfolding around us: She followed up on her romp this morning by eating my earmuffs. Sigh.

While we wait for the snow to start falling, the World Meteorological Organisation announced today that a lightning flash on 29 April 2020 extended for 768 km across three states and lasted for 10 seconds: The new record for the longest detected megaflash distance is 60 kilometres more than the previous record, with a distance of 709 ± 8 km (440.6 ± 5 mi) across parts of southern Brazil on 31 October 2018. Both the previous and new record used the same maximum great circle distance methodology to...

We seem to get our worst snowstorms during the first week of February. A big one has formed southeast of here, and though forecasters know it will hit the Chicago area tonight, they don't know exactly where: The majority of the snow is expected to fall beginning around 6 p.m. Tuesday and continuing through most of the day Wednesday, according to meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Romeoville. As much as 8 inches to 1 foot of snow could fall in the Chicago area and points south. Forecasters...

It turns out, tenors don't actually spread Covid more readily than the other three sections, despite what you may have heard from the Welsh Government: The advice appears to have been motivated by a spoof social media news post, created by meme page Quire Memes to appear as if written by us here at Classic FM. A doctored headline claimed that ‘Tenors should sit three metres away from other choir members, COVID study says’. The post, which is categorically fake news, is captioned: “Tenors found to...

The XPOTUS promised yet another thing that would hurt the people he claims to want to help, in part because he (and obviously they) deeply misunderstand how the laws work in this country: Former president Donald Trump suggested Saturday night he will pardon the rioters charged in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol if he is elected president in 2024. Trump, who has teased but not confirmed another run for president, has repeatedly criticized the prosecution of individuals who...

I'm waiting for my flight home at the Raleigh-Durham airport, watching Jim Cantore in Boston. You never want to see Cantore in your home town: it means horrible, rotten, no-good weather. The only nice thing about Boston's weather this morning is that the snow has moved on—for now: Boston received 23.6 inches [600 mm] of snow Saturday, tying its record for a one-day snowfall, according to the National Weather Service. We haven't seen 600 mm of snow in one day in Chicago ever. Even in the Blizzard of...

The coffee shop I went to about an hour ago had a sign that said, "Snow day - open at 10am." It did, in fact, snow overnight here. And some of the sidewalks were, in fact, icy. But the temperature only got down to one degree below freezing, it snowed less than 20 mm, and none of it stuck to the roads. Ah, North Carolina in winter, bless your heart!

The Bureau of Geographic Names has a multi-year plan to rid the US of racist place names: Usually, the public eye is far from the BGN, a member of the class of government bodies whose work you could go a lifetime without thinking about, even though it’s all around you. But the board now finds itself in the middle of the fiery national debate over racism and language. In recent years, the BGN has spent more of its time reconsidering offensive names than doing anything else, but the process typically...