Events

The forecast for Chicago today calls for 13°C temperatures and sunny skies. This is the normal high temperature April 10th, not January 10th—that would be -1°C—and would be only a bit shy of the record (16°C). Don't worry, January will arrive this weekend. The same forecast calls for -9°C Friday night.

Via Gulliver, a Chinese company has built a 30-story hotel in Hunan Province from prefabricated, energy-efficient parts: From Next Big Future: The buildings are five times more energy efficient in operation and use about 6 times less cement. They plan to build one hundred and fifty 30-story apartment building, hotel, office plans using the new system. They have started building a 1.33-million-square meter “NO.1 Sustainable Building Factory” and it will be able to produce 10 million square meters of mass...

This looks a lot like a shot from last February: It's still cool. And it's only about five minutes old. It suggests, however, that I might want to rent a really cool lens sometime. I used the same equipment (Canon 7D, 200mm), but shot hand-held at ISO-400, f/5.6 at 1/1000, then developed it differently than the one from 11 months ago. I also shot this one raw instead of as JPEG, which gave me a lot more flexibility in post. Mostly, though, we have clear skies and a full moon, so what more reason do I need?

The Red Rooster, Chicago: Canon 7D, 37mm, ISO-400, f/5.6 at 1/60, here.

Via Strange Maps, malts.com has a free handy whisky chart everyone should bring to Duke of Perth this week:

Via Microsoft guru Raymond Chen, news that tourists continually block traffic outside Abbey Road Studios: Apparently the studio also has a webcam. The famous zebra crossing is here.

Brilliant:

The Paris Observatory has announced a leap second between June 30th and July 1st this year: A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2012. The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be: 2012 June 30, 23h 59m 59s 2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s 2012 July 1, 0h 0m 0s ... Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC at the end of the months of December or June, depending on the [available rotation data]. Leap seconds occur from time to time because the earth's rotation on its axis doesn't...

A couple of us have come to Brown Deer, Wis., to work with a vendor on an upcoming software release. (Brown Deer is about 160 km north of Chicago.) The vendor has been über-cooperative, the trip up (for me, anyway) took less than two hours, and we're getting everything done we weren't able to do from our respective offices in other states. Two of the guys are from Texas, one is from Delhi, and I'm from the Greatest City in North America. So the only thing we're having any difficulty negotiating is food....

Via Sullivan, writer Mike Konczal reviews economist Donald Schoup's book about parking pricing with a clear enunciation of good and bad parking schemes: We now have two ways to distinguish changes in the provisioning of government services. On one axis, there’s who controls the provisoning and the residual – is it in public hands or private hands? On the second axis there’s how much competition and market reforms are driving the reform versus how much there’s monopolies and single firms dictating the...