Events

The bitter cold we expected has arrived. This morning the temperature fell to -16.6°C (2°F) at Inner Drive Technology WHQ and -18.9°C (-2°F) at Chicago's official reporting station at O'Hare. It hasn't been this cold since the wee hours of January 22nd. Unlike that frigid week when we got 5 days in a row below -10°C, this time around things will change quickly. Just look at the latest CPC forecast for Christmas week: The CPC hasn't revised their January and February forecasts since mid-November, before...

The north magnetic pole has wobbled around Canada and the Arctic very quickly for the past few years, and no one knows why. A consequence of its traversal of the Arctic has been to create an unprecedented geographic situation in the UK for the past three years, which alas is ending today: ‘True north’ is the direction to the geographic north pole; ‘grid north’ is where the vertical blue lines shown on Ordnance Survey (OS) maps converge, and ‘magnetic north’ is the direction that a compass needle points...

Ah, December, when the easy cadence of weekly rehearsals becomes a frenzy of performances and, yes, more rehearsals. This is Messiah week, so I've already spent 8 hours of it in rehearsals or helping to set up for them. Tonight I've got the first of 4 Messiah performances over the next two weeks, plus yet another rehearsal, a church service, and a Christmas Eve service. Then, after Christmas, a bunch of us will be singing at the 50th anniversary party for a couple who have sung with us for longer than...

On this day 100 years ago, Arthur and Alfred Heineman opened the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo, Calif., filling a need for lodging that Americans didn't even realize they had: At the time, motorists had limited options. Their dust-covered clothes hardly suited the highbrow standards of most hotels, and parking in cities could be challenging. So many drivers stayed in autocamps, roadside resting places that sometimes offered basics like firewood and communal bathrooms, pitching tents off their...

From 2pm Tuesday until just before noon yesterday, Inner Drive Technology WHQ had temperatures above freezing. You can now see the previously-hidden box containing the IDTWHQ outdoor thermometer: We're going to have a few temperature gyrations over the next two weeks. Today we're holding steady just below freezing (-3°C), but we expect a plunge down to -18°C (-1°F) by Saturday night/Sunday morning before an equally-jarring return to above-freezing temperatures next Tuesday through Christmas Eve. The...

Sometimes, you just need a chuckle. In Mediaite, Colby Hall put the OAFPOTUS's Tuesday night rant through the three major LLMs to see if they could diagnose him. They did not disappoint: Former Republican congressman Justin Amash cut through the noise on X, writing “If anyone else wrote something like this, it would be universally acknowledged that the person is mentally unstable.” To test that hypothesis, I asked three leading AI models — ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude — to analyze the text as psychological...

I'm listening to the corporate annual update, which is neither corrupt nor stupid, though only about 20% of it applies to my job. So I'll just spend the other 80% lining up these articles about corruption and stupidity for lunchtime reading: Whether because of "you can't make me" or just doing the opposite of whatever President Biden's administration did, the latest toddler behavior in the administration comes from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who decided that Calibri is too DEI so State will go back...

Of note: Jeff Maurer wants every Democratic candidate in the next election cycle to hammer the OAFPOTUS for selling pardons (and all his other corruption). Former Republican US Representative Adam Kinzinger takes his party to task for rejecting its own history by attacking the civil service. (By the way, Netflix has a great four-part miniseries about Presidents Garfield and Arthur called "Death by Lightning" that you can watch now.) Paul Krugman frets that we have become a "digital narco-state." Amanda...

The eaves on the west side of my house have a row of impressive-looking icicles that I expect will come crashing down on my driveway over the next few hours. Though the temperature hasn't crested freezing yet, it's gone up slowly since midnight at my house and a bit more rapidly elsewhere nearby. It's possible that my outdoor thermometer isn't responding to changes in temperature as quickly as it should, as you can probably guess. It's in a box on this table: As of this morning, 33.6% of the continental...

Global warming—anthropogenic climate change—has warmed the entire planet, on average, about 2.6°C above the pre-industrial baseline. Last year was the warmest since global records began in 1850. In fact, the 10 warmest years since 1850 were the 10 years between 2015 and 2024. The north-central US, where I live, experienced some of the highest relative temperatures of anywhere on earth. That doesn't mean it's hot every day. What it actually means is that the atmosphere has more heat generally, and thus...