Events

Andrew Sullivan tops my reading list every day. He and his staff post sometimes 100 items a day on The Daily Dish, and even if I only read a tenth or them, my day is better. He's infuriating, fascinating, informative, conservative, Catholic, gay, mercurial, level. I don't agree with him about a third of the time, but one of his best characteristics is his willingness to listen to arguments and change his mind. So last February, when he jettisoned a paid gig with The Atlantic to become a professional...

Tomorrow will be quieter than today, I hope, or I might not get time to think until next week. I didn't miss these meanwhile: The corporations have won massively: network neutrality might be really and truly dead. Chicago has banned indoor "vaping", for some reason. Spend 100 seconds with the demon baby of New York. When a convention wants to come to your hotel, don't insult them. 9,135 out of 9,136 scientists agreee: global warming is happening. Next meeting...

A century ago, engineers cut the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi Basin. It might be time to close the canal: Over the last decade or so, a huge range of interests — from environmental groups to fishermen to shipping experts to politicians — have raised the alarm over just how much this artificial connection has created an opening for invasive species such as the Asian carp to make their way through North America’s waterways. And the costs associated with...

CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen argues that the NSA, CIA, and FBI had all the information they needed to prevent 9/11, but the Bush Administration failed to follow through. Providing more tools to the NSA would do nothing except give them more power: The government missed multiple opportunities to catch al Qaeda hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar when he was living in San Diego for a year and a half in the run up to 9/11, not because it lacked access to all Americans phone records but because it...

Bruce Schneier makes the case: We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop...

Krugman outlines how the state of North Carolina cutting unemployment benefits has completely failed to encourage people back into the workforce: The idea behind cutting benefits is that we are “paying people to be unemployed”, and that tough love will force them to go out and create jobs. It’s never explained exactly how greater desperation on the part of the unemployed will, in fact, lead to higher overall employment. Still, you could imagine that an individual state might gain some competitive...

The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama Administration has dumped CGI Federal and hired...oh sweet baby dills, Accenture: Federal health officials are preparing to sign a 12-month contract worth roughly $90 million, probably early next week, with a different company, Accenture, after concluding that CGI has not been effective enough in fixing the intricate computer system underpinning the federal Web site, HealthCare.gov, the individual said. Accenture, which is one of the world’s largest...

Just 120 hours ago, a polar vortex wandered into the center of North America and froze us solid. Less than an hour ago, at 8:39am CST, the official temperature at O'Hare hit 0°C—27°C warmer than 9am Monday morning. It's also the first time the temperature has gotten up to freezing since December 29th. I've lived in Chicago for a long time, so I can say this graph is extraordinary (data from my demo at Weather Now: Of course, with 250 mm of heavy, wet snow on the ground, rain in the forecast, and...

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart . (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx .) Sunrises are just starting to get earlier, but today's (7:18 CST) is only a few seconds earlier than the latest sunrise of the year on January 3rd. Even though the sunrise times creep earlier by seconds every day, sunsets start to get noticeably later: 16:39 today, 7 minutes later in a week, 25 minutes later in three weeks. January is cold and dark, but (on average)...

Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel has his annual review of the state's weather for last year. Some highlights: Based on the latest data, the statewide average temperature for 2013 in Illinois was 10.6°C (0.8°C below the 1981-2010 average). That is much cooler than 2012 when the statewide average temperature was 13.1°C. The statewide average precipitation for 2013 in Illinois was 1112 mm (91 mm above the 1981-2010 average). The precipitation for the two halves of 2013 were very different. The...