Events

We're having our sixth consecutive day of cloudless skies and warm temperatures. No one's complaining: Thursday's fifth consecutive 100 percent sunny day was the longest such spell of any here over the past 18 years There wasn't a cloud in the sky Thursday. It led to Chicago being credited with 100 percent of its possible sunshine for a fifth consecutive day. A check of weather records here reveals it's the first set of five completely sunny days in 18 years. In an average year, 46 days (13 percent of...

A little housekeeping: if the blog seems slow today, thank this entry, which has got over 70,000 page views yesterday through 19:00 CDT and continues to get hit today. (Usual site traffic is about 4,000 page views per day, total.) So, there's nothing wrong with either the blog or with your carrier. It's just a lot more traffic than my servers usually get.

After the shocking disappearance of the Olson time zone database yesterday (described here and here), some things have become clearer overnight. o The wonderful land of Oz has stepped up. Robert Elz, an Australian computer scientist who has actively supported the tzinfo project throughout, has revived the time zone mailing list maintained at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). My, but the list was active overnight, with dozens of people volunteering to host the database, move it to non-U.S....

At lunch I thought more about the copyright case against timezone data that the crazy astrologers have launched. I believe Arthur Olson and Paul Eggert, the volunteers who coordinated the tzinfo database for years and who now find themselves sued for doing so, have two principal defenses, one of which may allow them to get the case dismissed. First, copyright law does not protect strictly-factual information. The Copyright Act only protects the expression of facts. 17 USC 102(b) clearly states: In no...

The National Institutes for Health, through a quirk of history, maintainsed the worldwide-standard time zone database until today. A Massachusetts-based company, Astrolabe, Inc., has sued the people who maintain the database for copyright infringement. The company claims to have purchased the rights to The American Atlas, from which the time zone database derived some of its data. From the complaint: Defendant Olson’s unauthorized reproduction of the Works have been published at...

So says Sullivan, reacting to the news that Sarah Palin is done, one hopes forever: Sarah Palin said on Wednesday that she will not seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, ending months of speculation and leaving the Republican field largely settled. Palin had left the door open to a run but gave little sign of joining the race to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama. She made it official in a letter to supporters and in an interview with conservative talk radio host Mark Levin....

The Economist has given me a timely help. Their "doing business in" series I've found accurate and useful; I hope this one keeps up the pattern.

Oh, not here. Heavens. We don't have a lot of real conservatives; they're all in the U.K. Like the Prime Minister, for example: I once stood before a Conservative conference and said it shouldn't matter whether commitment was between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, or a man and another man. You applauded me for that. Five years on, we're consulting on legalising gay marriage. And to anyone who has reservations, I say: Yes, it's about equality, but it's also about something else: commitment....

Owing to the unceasing rain over the weekend, we visited a couple of museums while in Montréal, including the Musée des Beaux Arts: My friend particularly wanted to see the exhibit on Jean-Paul Gaultier, the clothing designer whose work I only knew from The Fifth Element. I confess, I did not understand much of the work. This, for example, completely eluded me, though it looks kind of cool: (That one comes with webbed pumps.) That's the point of a museum, though: to get exposure to things you wouldn't...

The router at my remote office appears to have a cold, poor thing, which means only my phone and not my laptop can connect to the Intertubes right now. So after finishing this post (in Notepad), I'll go back to reading Joe McGinniss's The Rogue. Now, I never thought Sarah Palin qualified for any office, let alone U.S. vice president, but even I'm stunned. So, I imagine, is John McCain, who has made unexpectedly reasoned and clear statements that make me think he was abducted by aliens from 2007 to 2009....