Events

Lake Michigan continues its record-high levels this month. As of yesterday, the Michigan-Huron system was at 177. 4 m above sea level, 51 cm above last year's level and more than a full meter above average January levels. This has caused massive erosion and the loss of entire beaches in Chicago: Since 2013, the lake has risen nearly 2 meters, going from a record low to near-record high levels last summer. On Saturday, waves nearing 6 meters pummeled an already drowning shoreline. A 1-meter wave can pack...

I'm not the only one who questioned whether a Delta B777 dumping fuel over Los Angeles made a lot of sense: Fuel dumps occur only to reduce planes' weights for unexpected landings because some of them have maximum takeoff weights higher than their landing weights, said John Cox, a former US Airways captain who runs Safety Operating Systems, an aviation safety consulting company. While the procedure is standard for an emergency landing, it can be accomplished more safely if it is done at a high altitude...

Fortunately, I'm debugging a build process that takes 6 minutes each time, so I may be able to squeeze some of these in: Bruce Schneier reports on a new critical vulnerability in Windows that the NSA told Microsoft about. That's new. The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead takes a thoughtful (and only mildly snarky) look at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex withdrawing from royal life. In the same issue, John Cassidy examines the reasons behind our assassination of Qassem Suleimani. The Washington Post documents the...

Data released today by NOAA and NASA confirm a frightening fact scientists had already guessed: The past decade was the hottest ever recorded on the planet, driven by an acceleration of temperature increases in the past five years.... According to NOAA, the globe is warming at a faster rate than it had been just a few decades ago. The annual global average surface temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.07 degrees Celsius (0.13 Fahrenheit) per decade since 1880, NOAA found. However, since...

Remember Y2K? Oh, boy, I do, especially as I had to spend part of New Year's Eve in a data center on 1 January 2000. Apparently, some of the fixes people made to their software back then solved the problem...for a time: A Register reader, having sold a vehicle, filled out the requisite paperwork and sent it off to the agency, which is responsible for maintaining a database of drivers and vehicles in Blighty. An acknowledgement was received, which helpfully noted that it been printed in 1920. Sadly, we...

...that I finally passed my private pilot checkride and got my certificate. I finished all the requirements for the checkride except for two cross-country flights for practice on 18 July 1999. Unfortunately, the weather in New Jersey sucked on almost every weekend for the next six months. I finally took a day off from work in early December, took my checkride...and failed a landing. (I was too far off centerline to pass, but otherwise it was a perfectly safe landing.) It then took another six weeks to...

A Delta 777 en route from LAX to Shanghai declared an emergency and had to dump thousands of kilograms of fuel to land under the safe landing weight. Planes, particularly heavy transport-class aircraft, do this so they don't destroy their landing gear and the runway itself when landing in an emergency situation. Now, if you know LAX, you know that generally planes take off over the ocean. In those rare cases when they have emergencies and need to circle back, they dump fuel over the ocean. Not this guy...

I had a lot going on at work today, so all I have left is a lame-ass "read these later" post: Cranky Flier wonders why Delta is Tweeting to individual passengers. James Fallows looks at Bob Garfield's latest book. Bruce Schneier says China isn't the problem in crappy 5G security. And John Scalzi has a new book coming out, which he'll sign if you pre-order. I'd say "back to the mines," but I believe I have a date with Kristen Bell presently.

A few articles to read at lunchtime today: Will Peischel, writing for Mother Jones, warns that the wildfires in Australia aren't the new normal. They're something worse. (Hint: fires create their own weather, causing feedback loops no one predicted.) A new analysis finds that ocean temperatures not only hit record highs in 2019, but also that the rate of increase is accelerating. First Nations communities living on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron—the largest freshwater island in the world—warn that...

The New York Times analyzed eight social-studies textbooks published in both California and Texas. Both states have state-wide standards for education, which textbook makers have to honor given the number of students in each state. You can guess some of the results: The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation’s deepest partisan divides. Hundreds of...