Events

The low-light performance of my new camera astounds me. I took an hour-long hike around Midtown Manhattan right around sunset. Cranking the camera up to ISO-6400 allowed me to do this: That's f/3.5 at 1/30, using available light. Sorry about the nerd moment but: day-um. Another one, in Washington Square: ISO-3200, f/5.6 at 1/30. Again: day-um. To celebrate, I had a greasy slice of New York pizza from a corner pizzeria for dinner.

Sometimes you get a happy combination of flight plan, weather, and seating on an airplane. Today, on departure from O'Hare: A few moments later: On approach to LaGuardia:

I had planned a quick getaway to New York this weekend, one involving a single carry-on, dropping Parker off this morning and picking him up tomorrow afternoon, and putting my new camera through a live-fire exercise in Manhattan. Then, Thursday evening, I found out I'll spend the next two weeks in southwestern Connecticut. So now I have a checked bag and Parker has almost a week of boarding ahead of him. The client wants us onsite Monday at 8am through 2pm Friday, which few clients ever ask for. This...

It's snowing again in Chicago. Not a lot. But definitely flurries. The Tribune predicts our snow cover may melt within two weeks. They also report that 49 states have snow on the ground today; only Florida seems to have missed it. (Hawai'i, don't forget, has a 4,200 m volcano that gets snow occasionally.) And they report that Oklahoma will experience a 55°C swing in temperatures over the next few days, from yesterday morning's -34°C to next week's expected 22°C. But it's snowing again. Crap.

The good news: today we've probably had the coldest day we'll have all year. The bad news: it's just now gotten above -10°C, after hitting -23°C this morning. I've been really Zen about winter, but I'm losing patience. At least I don't have the problems our local squirrel population has. Poor dudes.

Ain't she purdy? This new Canon 7D replaces my five-year-old Canon 20D, and finally, finally, gets my digital photography back to the resolution and color fidelity of the film cameras I used from 1983 to 2000. (The shot of my car from this morning came from the new 7D.) Take a look at this snapshot of how my cameras have evolved: In 17 years I took about 9,000 photos on film. The 20D has shot over 17,000 and I'll keep using it for several thousand more. I expect to shoot even more than that with the new...

Checking up on my car this morning I found this: Yeah, no way I'm getting it out without a backhoe or a serious thaw. This shot doesn't make it obvious that the city pushed my car into contact with the SUV to its front. And given the massive glacier at its back, I don't think my little VW can push its way back, either. Three cheers—albeit half-hearted ones—for the CTA.

The University of Illinois has a stash of aerial photographs of Illinois from 1938 and 1939, including one that shows the house I grew up in under construction. The photo at left is 1938; at right is 2001: Here's a larger crop of the 1938 photo overlaid with a 2010 image: Natives of the town will probably recognize it instantly. Here's an extreme close-up with the foundation of my house highlighted: I also looked at photos of Chicago from the same batch, and after posting this, I will look for more...

Nobel-laureate economist Paul Krugman lays out a simple demonstration of how an increase in the global average temperature necessarily leads to more extreme weather events without eliminating other effects: Now suppose that a warming trend shifts the whole probability distribution to the right — which is what we mean when we talk about climate change. Then the result looks like this: What happens is that the right tail gets fatter: the probability, and hence the frequency, of extreme events goes up. Two...

A micromort is the amount of risk that equals a one-in-one million probability of death. Drinking two beers, smoking 1.4 cigarettes, traveling 6 minutes by canoe, and living for two days in New York are all 1-millimort activities. (Intentionally jumping out of a perfectly-flyable airplane, which some people call "skydiving," is a 17-millimort activity.) This unit does not pip my favorite unit of measure, the millihelen, which is the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. (Negative helen values...