Events

I hung out with some very old friends yesterday, and throughout our barbecue we checked up on the Cubs. By the time we went inside, it was top of the 7th, no score. Then this happened: Rafael Furcal's go-ahead single in the seventh turned out to be a mere appetizer as the Cardinals also matched an 86-year-old franchise record for runs in an inning. St. Louis totaled 10 hits with multiple hits by three players including pinch-hitter Allen Craig, who doubled twice with an RBI. The Cardinals totaled nine...

After seven days above 32°C in a row, Thursday gave us a humid, rainy 28°C before yesterday's perfect, dry 27°C. We've had a record 32 days above 32°C since June 1st, six more than we had by this time in the previous-hottest summer I remember, 1988. The forecast for the next few days looks grim: 32°C today, 34°C Sunday, and 39°C Monday. Welcome to the new normal: in just a couple of years, Chicago has gone from hard winters and mild summers to mild winters and broiling summers. And the climate is still...

(This is cross-posted on the 10th Magnitude blog.) In my last post, I talked about using Azure web sites to save beaucoup bucks over Azure Cloud Services web roles on nonessential, internal, and development web applications. In this post I'll go over a couple of things that bit me in the course of deploying a bunch of applications to Azure web sites in the last two weeks. First, let me acknowledge that engineering a .NET application to support both types of deployment is a pain. Azure web sites can't...

I'm a little late getting the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart out this summer. Sorry. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2012 2 Jul 8:30pm sunset 05:20 20:30 15:09 16 Jul 5:30am sunrise 05:30 20:24 14:53 8 Aug 8pm sunset 05:53 20:00 14:06 16 Aug 6am sunrise 06:00 19:48 13:48 28 Aug 7:30pm sunset 06:13 19:30 13:16 13 Sep 6:30am sunrise 06:30 19:03 12:33 15 Sep 7pm sunset 06:33 19:00 12:28 22 Sep Equinox...

Via Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel, the Climate Prediction Center has new 1- and 3-month outlooks for the continent. Chicago has a 60% chance of being hotter and a 30% chance of being drier than normal through the end of August: This is already a hotter summer than 1988, and on its way to become one of the hottest summers in recorded history. Oh, joy.

A couple of days ago I discovered a new behavior in Parker. While listening to Martha Berner's song "A Town Called Happiness," which has an extensive harmonica part, Parker started to howl. Not in pain, though: he stayed in the room, and even got closer to the noise, tail wagging. Apparently this is common dog behavior, and it really does mean he's just singing along. So I dug out my dad's old harmonica and, yes, he sang along with that, too. In the upper ranges he really put his heart into it, too. I...

Via Sullivan, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg is creating 3D portraits from random hairs: Collecting hairs she finds in random public places – bathrooms, libraries, and subway seats – she uses a battery of newly developing technologies to create physical, life-sized portraits of the owners of these hairs. You can see the portrait she’s made from her own hair in the photo below. While the actual likeness is a point of contention, these images bring about some creepy-yet-amazing comments; on genetic identity...

Even though the temperature outside tied the record 38°C set 70 years ago, I'm happy to report that Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters has remained tolerably cool: Those are degrees Celsius vertically and the last 24 hours of time horizontally. The lower temperatures overnight come from me turning the air conditioning to a cooler setting in the evening and back up in the morning. What you can't see in this snapshot is that during our last hot, hot summer (2008), I had trouble keeping the office...

Today marks the 31st time this year Chicago's temperature has exceeded 32°C as another record falls: The July 17 record high of 38°C for this date has stood 70 years, having been set in 1942 during World War II. Tuesday's heat gives the city a shot at replacing this record. [It was 36°C just before noon.—DB] New USDA crop report paints bleak picture across much of the Midwest; more than half of Illinois' corn crop is "poor" or "very poor"! Crops are struggling in many Midwest fields this year. USDA's...

Some Japanese students have invented a gadget that stops people from talking: The NoiseJammer works by recording the irritating voices of rude individuals and playing it back to them [a quarter-second] later, overriding their annoying conversations with a flood of their own words. If you want the technical details to build your own jammer, it's all described in this academic paper, which explains the reasoning behind such a device. Here's a demonstration: