Events

I keep thinking of this clip from Remains of the Day: The "gentleman diplomacy" conducted by British nobility in the 1930s exemplifies the maxim "any sufficiently-advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

In February 2022, a US Navy amphibious assault ship—basically, a smallish (250-meter) aircraft carrier—sailed from Pearl Harbor to San Diego without using electronic navigation: With the approval of the Essex’s commanding officer (CO), Captain Kelly Fletcher, her navigator (coauthor and then–Lieutenant Commander Stanton), and the lead navigation instructor from Surface Warfare Schools Command in Newport, Rhode Island (coauthor Walter O’Donnell), the Essex tested its own proof-of-concept for navigating...

Somehow it's the 3rd day of 2025, and I still don't have my flying car. Or my reliable high-speed  regional trains. Only a few of these stories help: James Carville admits he got the 2024 election wrong. Matt Ford thinks "John Roberts is imagining things." A new book by Anita Say Chan equates the tech-bro culture with 20th-century eugenics. Molly White examines Elon Musk's war on Wikipedia. The US Surgeon General has called for adding cancer warnings to alcohol labels. Brazil's experiment in abolishing...

The Times morning newsletter highlighted a story from Tuesday about yet one more example of people who have come to believe something that is not only crashingly stupid, but potentially fatal: [A] small number of spring water aficionados...believe untreated water, or “raw water,” contains enriching minerals that are removed from tap water during the purification process. The trend, however, alarms health experts, who say that spring water devotees are taking unnecessary risks. The country’s robust water...

After my general statistics for 2024, here are the books and media I consumed since 2023. Books I didn't read as many books in 2024 as in 2023, mainly because they were longer. Any one of the Culture novels is the equivalent of 3 or 4 times The Outsiders, for example. The 30 books I started (and 26 I finished) included: Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. An excellent handbook for the kakistocratic country we now live in. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. I hope this does not become a handbook...

Item the first: Weather Now got an update today. Under the hood, it got its annual .NET version refresh (to .NET 9), and some code-quality improvements. But I also added a fun new feature called "Weather Score."  This gives a 0-to-100 point value to each weather report, showing at a glance where the best and worst weather is. A perfect day (by my definition) is 22°C with a 10°C dewpoint, light winds, mostly-clear skies, and no precipitation. The weather at O'Hare right now is not, however, perfect, and...

Despite getting back to a relative normal in 2023, 2024 seemed to revert back to how things went in 2020—just without the pandemic. Statistically, though, things remained steady, for the most part: I posted 480 times on The Daily Parker, 20 fewer than in 2023 and 17 below the long-term median. January and July had the most posts (48) and April and December the fewest (34). The mean of 40.0 was slightly lower than the long-term mean (41.34), with a standard deviation of 5.12, reflecting a mixed posting...

Here's the annual Chicago sunrise chart. As always, you can get sunrise data for your own location at Weather Now. Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2025 3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 28th 07:19 16:33 9:13 27 Jan 5pm sunset 07:08 17:00 9:52 4 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:11 10:10 19 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:41 17:30 10:48 26 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:30 17:38 11:08 8 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr 13th Earliest sunset until Oct 28th 06:14 17:50 11:36 9 Mar Daylight saving time begins Latest sunrise until...

Here's the annual Chicago sunrise chart. As always, you can get sunrise data for your own location at Weather Now. Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2024 4 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct 29th 07:19 16:33 9:13 28 Jan 5pm sunset 07:08 17:00 9:52 5 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:11 10:10 20 Feb 5:30pm sunset 06:40 17:30 10:49 27 Feb 6:30am sunrise 06:30 17:39 11:08 9 Mar Earliest sunrise until Apr 14th Earliest sunset until Oct 27th 06:12 17:52 11:39 10 Mar Daylight saving time begins Latest sunrise until...