Events

While in Phoenix, I took an unscheduled side-trip to Rúla Búla in Tempe: The bar features prominently in Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series, which one of my oldest surviving friends turned me on to about a year ago. In the series, the protagonist frequents the bar, including at one point to buy a shot for Jesus. (Yes, that Jesus, in one of the funniest scenes in the novels.) Since I was only 18 km away, I just had to make a field trip. I did not, alas, have the fabled fish and chips, so I'll never know if...

Why would anyone go to Arizona in July? A geas. On Friday I visited Park #26: The trip also gave me a chance to take my 7D Mark II for a spin. Sitting 18 rows behind the Diamondbacks' dugout, I was able to get photos like this, no problem: Let's take a closer look, yes? This is at ISO-3200, 1/500 at f/5.6, from about 100 meters away: Cool, right? More photos of the game and of my field trip to Tempe later.

Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, is 38: On this day in 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) is born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents Lesley and Peter Brown. The healthy baby was delivered shortly before midnight by caesarean section and weighed in at five pounds, 12 ounces. Before giving birth to Louise, Lesley Brown had suffered years of infertility due to blocked fallopian tubes. In November...

For some reason—and rest assured I will ask, because I'm really curious—we're flying at an unusually low altitude right now (7800 m—officially FL240), and dodging clouds. I'll post the FlightAware track at some point so you can see the waltz we've just danced over central Colorado. I know future generations will look back on my glee about posting a blog entry from an airplane whose geo-tag is derived from looking at my mobile phone's GPS feature, but allow me this moment. Look where we are. Look where...

So far Chicago has had a milder-than-normal summer, with only a couple of over-32°C days and a lot of rain. Given our greenhouse gas emissions, that will change: The NASA climate projections offer a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provided daily records and estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe....

Tomorrow afternoon I'm flying to Phoenix to visit Park #26. Fortunately, Chase Field is air-conditioned, because the forecast calls for 38°C at game time after a high temperature of 41°C earlier in the day. Photos and a frank assessment of the weather conditions to follow this weekend.

Jeff Skilling at the Chicago Tribune updates us on the equatorial Pacific: The current El Nino comes together against a backdrop of warming oceans and oceans which are growing more acidic as they observe mass quantities of CO2 produced through the burning of fossil fuels and the release of CO2 into the atmosphere this produces. More on the rate at which the planet’s oceans are warming here. It’s estimated that the warming which has taken place in the world’s oceans since 1990 is the equivalent of having...

Not a lot of time to write today because I'm spending most of the day as CTO and the rest of the day as Lead Developer. The context switches are horrible. Tomorrow should be a little easier.

Stuff I found on the Interwebs this week: Apparently, un-schooling is still a thing. Now that we're removing sanctions from Iran, maybe they'll be able to maintain their airplanes? Illinois has been very wet and very cool for a while now, thanks to a hot ridge of high pressure in the western U.S. That's all for now.

During the first half of 2015, I took four trips, slightly fewer than the 22 I took in the second half of 2014. As of today I have four scheduled in the next three months—still not a huge number by historical standards. This coming weekend I'm restarting the 30-Park Geas. Then from mid-August to mid-September I've got trips planned to downstate Illinois, London, and San Francisco, the last one to attend the Dreamforce conference. It's still murder on my EQM numbers. It will hurt in 2016 if I can't...