Events

The New Yorker next week has Lawrence Wright's excellent long-form history of "the mistakes and the struggles behind America's coronavirus tragedy:" There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the covid-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently. The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was...

Just a housekeeping note: this is my 7,500th post since re-launching braverman.org as a pure blog in November 2005. On average, I've posted 41.2 times per month, though this year that has gone up somewhat: For whatever reason, the average (so far) in 2020 is 50.5 times per month. I'll know the exact stats and have more to say about this on Friday.

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.) An interesting thing happens in 2021: on November 6th at 7:30:11, we'll have one of the latest sunrises possible—indeed, the latest sunrise in 47 years. I found only one occasion from 1975 to 2040 when the sun rises later: at 7:30:35 on 6 November 2032. The last time the sun rose after 7:30 was at 7:31:26 on 26 February 1974, after Chicago started daylight saving time...

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.) An interesting thing happens in 2021: on November 6th at 7:30:11, we'll have one of the latest sunrises possible—indeed, the latest sunrise in 47 years. I found only one occasion from 1975 to 2040 when the sun rises later: at 7:30:35 on 6 November 2032. The last time the sun rose after 7:30 was at 7:31:26 on 26 February 1974, after Chicago started daylight saving time...

A couple of articles piqued my interest over the last day: Via IFL Science, a team of graduate students from three European universities studied how long humans would survive the emergence of a vampire population. (It depends a lot on how effective your slayers are.) They even built a calculator. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe, writing in the Financial Times, argues the STBXPOTUS should face prosecution for using the pardon power to obstruct justice. Emma Goldberg describes some coronavirus-era...

I just wanted to shout out to two dogs I've been able to hang out with this week.  On Wednesday I watched my neighbors' dog Sophie for the day. She really didn't care that I don't allow dogs on the couch: And yesterday, I hung out with this pretty girl: I'm not ready to adopt another dog yet. But I'm glad my friends occasionally need dogsitting services.

How did I miss this Times article from November? Lab tests can tell how old a human is just from the pattern of methylation. Thanks to this research, the same can be done for dogs. The results will help researchers studying aging in dogs to translate findings to humans. None of this research was done on dogs kept in a laboratory. All of the dogs in the aging comparison study were pet Labrador retrievers and the owners gave permission for blood samples. Scientists are unsure about whether the physical...

Sure, the temperature got down to -13°C this morning, but we haven't had any real cold yet this winter, despite the 25°C temperature drop yesterday. Yesterday's high of -3°C was the first below-freezing high temperature of the winter. We've only had that occur this late in the year on five other occasions—two of them this century. Chicago gets its first below-freezing high temperature by November 24th on average. Yesterday's event ties 2001 and is only a few days before the latest occurrence of January...

Thank you, Tom Lehrer, for encapsulating what this season means to us in the US. In the last 24 hours, we have seen some wonderful Christmas gifts, some of them completely in keeping with Lehrer's sentiment. Continuing his unprecedented successes making his the most corrupt presidency in the history of the country (and here I include the Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding presidencies), the STBXPOTUS yesterday granted pardons to felons Charles Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone. Of the 65 pardons...

The STBXPOTUS has, in the words of Greg Sargent, "detonated a truth bomb in the Georgia US Senate runoffs:" By abruptly calling for $2,000 stimulus checks on Tuesday night, Trump inadvertently exposed core truths about the consequences of continued GOP control of the Senate — ones that Republicans are working to conceal — and about the post-Trump Republican Party in general. In the video that Trump tweeted, he threatened to wreck the carefully negotiated settlement that led Congress to pass a $900...