Events

Apparently my creativity isn't alone in its suffering this time of year. I'm also finding it a lot harder to learn Japanese than I expected. Anyone else feeling a little leaden the past couple of weeks?

For the last three years running—including, it seems this one—my ability to find passably-interesting topics to write about plummets in September and picks up again mid-October. Any hypotheses about why? I haven't got any, except maybe that the shortening days do something. Which is all just a longer way of saying, chirp...chirp...chirp...

It happens every year, and every year it surprises me: from mid-August to mid-October, the days get shorter quickly. Three weeks ago I was waking up to daylight; this morning, I realized I was waking up to twilight. In three weeks it'll be dark at that hour. Right now, every day, the sun rises a minute later an sets a minute earlier. Nothing profound or particularly surprising here. Just an observation.

On this day in 1986, I got my first PC: an original, 1982-vintage IBM PC, with a 1 MHz 8088 processor, 256 kB of RAM, twin 360 kB drives, a 30 cm 80 x 25 character green monochrome monitor, and a steel clickety-clackety keyboard. The laptop I'm writing this on, 25 years later, has a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 processor, 4 GB of RAM, an internal solid-state 250 GB drive, a 36 cm 1280 x 800 pixel monitor with 16 million colors, and a silent keyboard. And this laptop cost less than half what the PC cost in nominal...

From the Hoboken Ferry: 27 June 1998, Canon EOS Rebel with Kodachrome 64, 35mm, about here. The view on 20 October 2001:

I don't have all the details, but it looks like an employee at one of the hospital's vendors did something really stupid: A medical privacy breach led to the public posting on a commercial Web site of data for 20,000 emergency room patients at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., including names and diagnosis codes, the hospital has confirmed. The information stayed online for nearly a year. Since discovering the breach last month, the hospital has been investigating how a detailed spreadsheet made...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported yesterday that 2011 was hot, damn hot, real hot: The average U.S. temperature in August was 24.3°C, which is 1.7°C above the long-term (1901-2000) average, while the summertime temperature was 23.6°C, which is 1.3°C above average. The warmest August on record for the contiguous United States was 24.3°C in 1983, while its warmest summer on record at 23.7°C occurred in 1936. Precipitation across the nation during August averaged 58.7 mm, 7.4 mm...

David Frum is calling Rick Perry's statement last night about Social Security "the mother of all unforced errors:" Perhaps not since George McGovern’s annihilation at the hands of Richard Nixon in 1972 has a candidate’s Primary base been so alienated from the center of American political thought as the Tea Party is today. Make no mistake: no candidate who doesn’t convincingly throw the red meat to the Tea Party audiences will have a sliver of a chance of getting nominated. I’m not going to go so far as...

I have to acknowledge the Terminal 3 atrium at O'Hare. I see it, on average, once a week: Canon 7D at ISO-1600 (+1 1/3), 1/320 at f/8, here.

I have to leave all this behind today. Fun (but quick) weekend, though: Canon 7D at ISO-800, 1/2000 at f/6.3, 250mm, here.