Events

Downtown Chicago got the merest whisper of snowfall last night; O'Hare, our official station, got enough to set two records—in the negative. Just 200 km away, however, people got a little more than we did: The Madison, WI area was at the epicenter of this storm’s heaviest snows. Snowfalls as of 10:30PM Thursday included: 300 mm at Lena in western Stephenson Co, IL and up to 300 mm or more across Jo Davies County in far northwest Illinois where 33 km of US 20 were closed from Galena to Elizabeth due to...

Chicago has officially gotten measurable snowfall in the past couple of hours, ending the longest snow-free period in history. In the 291 days since March 4th, we haven't gotten more than a few flakes, less than the threshold 2.5 mm required to count as "measurable." The previous record, 280 days, was set in 1994. This is also the latest day for our first snowfall; the previous record was set on 16 December 1965. (With only ten hours left until the solstice, you think it could have waited?) Like so much...

As I've noted before, only one Web application still lives in my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center: Weather Now. In the last few days, it's showing one more good reason that it needs to get to Windows Azure pronto. Take a look at my Google Analytics view of incoming visitors: What is going on? How do I go from 300 daily unique visitors to 1,800 in two days? Take a look at where they're coming from: Yes, that's right. Close to 40% of Weather Now's traffic came from the Yukon...

Florida's pathological "Stand Your Ground" law is working about as you'd expect: Florida's controversial "stand your ground" law has been cited in hundreds of cases. People have used it to justify shooting, stabbing, killing and maiming would-be intruders, romantic competitors and rival gang members. And on Sunday, at a pizza joint in St. Petersburg, a man tried to use it as justification for shooting another customer who was yelling at workers because he wasn't getting his order fast enough. Police...

Coincident with last week's release of Chasing Ice, a documentary about how climate change is affecting the polar regions, this month's Scientific American looks at how sea ice loss causes extreme weather. In the article—unfortunately behind a tall paywall—Charles Greene demonstrates how the loss of Arctic sea ice allows large loops in the mid-latitude jet stream to form, and to persist. Last winter, a negative Arctic oscillation combined with a positive North Atlantic oscillation (which controls...

Three unrelated stories drew my notice this evening: PATH service has resumed to Hoboken. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—I lived in Hoboken, N.J., the birthplace of Frank Sinatra (really) and baseball (not really). I took the Port Authority Trans-Hudson train almost every day when I worked in SoHo, and about every third day when I worked in Midtown. Having experienced other ways of commuting to New York—in fact, the switch up to 53rd and Park finally got me to return to Chicago, after my...

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains: The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost. In particular, when you started the game, the ball would be delivered to the launcher, and then it would slowly fall towards the bottom of the screen, through the plunger, and out the bottom of the table. Games tended to be really short. Two of us tried to debug the program to figure out what was going on, but given that this was code written...

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams finds a comparison for Congress: I've never wanted to run for Congress until now. The job looks boring, but I'm attracted to a system that punishes total strangers for my bad performance. I assume this is some sort of "best practice" that our government is borrowing from a successful system elsewhere. So starting today, if you tell me you don't like my blog, I will pay a stranger to kick another stranger in the nads. If Congress is right about the trigger concept, you...

Japan has thrown out its government and restored the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (yes, that's right) to power: the dominant view of Sunday’s vote was that it was not so much a weakening of Japan’s desire for drastic change, or a swing to an anti-Chinese right, as a rebuke of the incumbent Democrats. They swept aside the Liberal Democrats with bold vows to overhaul Japan’s sclerotic postwar order, only to disappoint voters by failing to deliver on economic improvements. Mr. Abe acknowledged as...

Like James Fallows, I'm a member of the Airplane Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), which has a rigid, give-no-ground policy against aviation user fees. Fallows draws a parallel to the NRA, and notes the key difference: The merits of the user fee debate are not my point right now. (Summary of the AOPA side: non-airline aviation activity already "pays its way" through the quite hefty tax imposed on each gallon of airplane fuel, plus providing all kinds of ancillary benefits to the country. I agree...