Events

The Atlantic Cities blog examines why we don't see tons of dead pigeons in cities, even though we see tons of live ones: Here's a brief accounting of all the ferocious animals that eat urban pigeons: Red-Tailed and Cooper's Hawks: These stocky killers know that fat city pigeons have the juiciest meat. So they roost all throughout the states in trees, on roofs and atop telephone poles, waiting to take the birds “on the wing,” as Seerveld puts it. “In Orlando where I live, it's unbelievable,” he says....

But only if you're near the Pacific: The midwest might not have the best view but the annular solar eclipse will at least be partially visible from here. The southwest will have the best vantage point when the sun appears as a "ring of fire" when the moon passes between it and the earth on Sunday. The moon will cover about 95% of the sun's diameter during this event. The eclipse will follow a path 8500 miles long for about 3 and a half hours. The "ring of fire" spectacle will last up to 5 minutes...

Two unrelated but interesting items. First, Walter Russel Meade rings down the curtain on OWS: To some degree, it was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. At the same time, the movement...

From James Lipton:

I agree with Jeff Atwood that learning to code isn't really a good goal: The "everyone should learn to code" movement isn't just wrong because it falsely equates coding with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math. I wish. It is wrong in so many other ways. It assumes that more code in the world is an inherently desirable thing. In my thirty year career as a programmer, I have found this … not to be the case. Should you learn to write code? No, I can't get behind that. You should be...

For the last day or so, Chicago has had record-low humidity of all things, with dewpoints below 0°C for much of it: This is the third day this year and only the 19th day in 142 years dating back to 1871 that the city has officially logged a relative humidity below 20%. At Midway Airport the relative humidity also dropped to 17 percent at 5pm. This is the lowest relative humidity recorded in Chicago in more than six years since another 17 percent humidity was logged on February 20, 2006. The other two...

Via Sullivan, a suggestion from Dan McAdams about the difficulties some people have accepting natural selection theory: A story is a narrative account of a motivated character who acts to achieve certain goals or ends over time. Every great story you can think of—from Homer’s Iliad to your favorite television show—involves characters who pursue goals over time, characters who want something and set out to achieve it. In this sense, the classic biblical creation stories are very good stories. You have a...

Or, as Krugman puts it, Eurodämmerung: Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like: 1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month. ... 4b. End of the euro. And we’re talking about months, not years, for this to play out. Good thing I only have about €15 in cash. Though I do have some escudos and pesetas somewhere...

It looks like we're not hearing the truth about anthropogenic climate change. Who's keeping the lid on the data? Climate scientists: Climate scientists have been consistently downplaying and underestimating the risks for three main reasons. First, their models tended to ignore the myriad amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks that we now know are kicking in (such as the defrosting tundra). Second, they never imagined that the nations of the world would completely ignored their warnings, that we would...