Events

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...

The forecast as late as yesterday morning called for 25-50 mm of snow. We got over 100 mm: Of course, someone loves snow a lot more than I do: And she made a new friend: Fortunately, I don't have anywhere particular to be today, so I don't have to drive in this stuff. And looking ahead to the revised prediction of 3°C and rain on Wednesday, I expect most of the snow will melt before I wake up Thursday morning—just in time for it to freeze solid as the temperature falls to -9°C Thursday evening and -14°C...

Cassie

A weak La Niña has already started affecting the weather in the United States, as this week's cold snap demonstrates. Weak La Niña events typically cause cooler, wetter winters in Chicago. Last night's temperature got down to -12.8°C (9°F), just a few degrees above the coldest December 5th on record. Normal for today would be 4.3°C (39.8°F); this godawful cold is 5°C below the normal low for the coldest day of the year, January 24th. Fortunately the forecast this weekend calls for more seasonable...

The Post has woken up to the lack of success Federal incentives have had in promoting Vision Zero, an international strategy "to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all." Despite the success of Vision Zero in Europe (especially in the Netherlands), it isn't doing particularly well over here, which the Post blames on drivers: Vision Zero’s failures in more than two dozen cities fit a predictable pattern, according to the Post...