Events

NPR reported this morning that Brazilian police arrested a man carrying packages of cocaine in his intestines adding up to a full kilo: The Irish guy was reportedly taken to the Santa Misericordia Hospital where the capsules were removed from his body. How exactly? That isn't clear from the press coverage.... Surgical removal of the packages is one option. But as doctors reported in the Canadian Journal of Surgery two years ago, surgical removal is far less likely than it used to be. Cocaine-filled...

Right-wing Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is tired of willfully ignorant Republicans: [Perry] was trying to be self-deprecating, but it’s disturbing to see that he thinks being a rotten student and a know-nothing gives one street cred in the GOP. Is it so important to defy the MSM by flaunting affection for anti-intellectualism? Just imagine if Sarah Palin had said all that — the conservative cheerleaders who gave up on her (but are still rooting for Perry) would roll their eyes in disgust....

One of my friends, Nature Nerd Naomi, reported that she saw frost on her roof this morning. She lives about 40 km away. And Chicago Tribune meteorologist Tom Skilling says yesterday was the coldest September 14th in 37 years: Temperatures failed to reach 16°C at the city's official O'Hare observation site Thursday, topping out at 14.4°C instead. It's the coolest reading which has occurred there since late May and a temperature which equals the normal high on Oct. 28. But even more significantly, a...

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...