Events

Work, work, work, and more than an hour each way to the airport, and it turns out I haven't flown in three years. Time to renew my medical certificate and get back in the air. I miss this, this, and this. Oh, and this.

Maps? Check. Dogs? Check. New York? Check. I give you, Dogs of NYC: If you own a dog in New York City, odds are it’s a mutt named Max. The city’s dog licensing records show that out of almost 100,000 registered dogs, this is the most common breed and name in town. WNYC obtained the complete list from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which runs the dog licensing program. The first thing you notice is the names. The most popular ones in the city hew pretty close to the most popular names...

While in New York this past weekend, I visited my old hangout in Hoboken, N.J., The Nag's Head: It looked subtly different than I remembered it, about which I asked the manager. She explained that they had to nearly gut the place after Sandy. Take a look at this: You can just make out a change in the bar's finish about halfway up from the floor. That's where the floodwaters sat for about four days. This blogger posted a flood map of Hoboken after the storm that gives you an idea just how bad things...

This is exceedingly cool: What is this This is a map of every person counted by the 2010 US and 2011 Canadian censuses. The map has 341,817,095 dots - one for each person. Why? I wanted an image of human settlement patterns unmediated by proxies like city boundaries, arterial roads, state lines, &c. Also, it was an interesting challenge. Who is responsible for this? The US and Canadian censuses, mostly. I made the map. I'm Brandon Martin-Anderson. Kieran Huggins came to the rescue with spare server...

Earlier I brought up yesterday's (tonight's in the U.S.) elections in Israel, which surprised me because (a) they're not taking the country into a right-wing dystopia and (b) it started to look like Binyamin Netanyahu might lose his job. (b) is important because the farther away Netanyahu gets from the button, the less likely the U.S. will get drawn into an unwinnable war against Iran. Well, some hours later, the reports from Tel Aviv are encouraging, but not definitive: Hours after polls closed on...

Via some Facebook friends in Tel Aviv, I'm getting news that the Israeli election may result in a center-left coalition and sacks Netanyahu: Israel's three major television networks published exit polls on Tuesday night, after polls closed across the country at 10 P.M. According to Channel 2's exit polls, the battle was tight between the left and right, with 59 percent of votes going to the left-wing block, and 61 percent to the right. Yes, that's right, 59-61 is a possibility the way Israeli voting...

For the first time in almost two years, Chicago woke up to below--18°C temperatures. We last had a day this cold on 11 February 2011, when it got down to -19°C. And we still haven't got any snow: Lake snowfall across Michigan, despite the relatively low westerly wind-fetch (the "fetch" is the distance over which winds travel across Lake Michigan's comparatively "warm" waters) which is generating it had produced as much as 100-150 mm accumulation late Monday—and more snow is to fall there Tuesday....

After a quick weekend in New York, I'm back debugging and fixing and going to lots of meetings. So this was much appreciated:

On Wednesday's Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed actor Jessica Chastain, star of the film Zero Dark Thirty. There was a moment, at the end of the interview, in which she absolutely horrified me—and, it seems, him (at around 20:30): Chastain: The cover of ... was about the CIA agent going to prison for talking to a journalist about waterboarding. Stewart: You can waterboard, but the first rule of waterboard club— Chastain: Don't talk about it. Stewart: You should see it, in theaters now, Zero Dark...

...and it's pretty hideous: Reactions have been a mixed bag of negative and scathing. Here's Patrick Smith: Simply put, I cannot believe how awful a makeover this is. It’s so disappointing that it pains me even to write about it, and how anybody signed off on this I’ll never understand. The body and tail manage to be boring and garish at the same time, with a cheap, downmarket lilt to the whole thing. The typeface is the strongest aspect of the whole mess, and that’s not saying much. Those are (almost)...