The earth will cast its shadow on the moon Monday night:
But on the longest night of the year, a full moon will disappear at 1:40 a.m. behind the Earth's shadow. There won't be another total lunar eclipse on the night of the winter solstice for 84 years.
Weather permitting — and the forecast isn't favorable in the Chicago area, calling for clouds building Monday and snow overnight — the eclipse will be visible everywhere in the continental United States, and at its darkest, the moon will be halfway up from the horizon in the south-southwest sky.
We'll be able to see the moon start to disappear around 12:30 am Central time, with a total eclipse from 1:40 am until 2:53 am.
Unfortunately, the weather forecast calls for snow, which in Chicago just makes everything look yellow. (Chicago uses sodium-vapor streetlights that cast banana-yellow light.) But if you're up, or you live west of here and have better weather, go out and look.
President Obama this afternoon:
Today, the Senate has taken an historic step toward ending a policy that undermines our national security while violating the very ideals that our brave men and women in uniform risk their lives to defend. By ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” no longer will our nation be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans forced to leave the military, despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay. And no longer will many thousands more be asked to live a lie in order to serve the country they love.
As Commander-in-Chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best led and best trained fighting force the world has ever known. And I join the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the overwhelming majority of service members asked by the Pentagon, in knowing that we can responsibly transition to a new policy while ensuring our military strength and readiness.
I want to thank Majority Leader Reid, Senators Lieberman and Collins and the countless others who have worked so hard to get this done. It is time to close this chapter in our history. It is time to recognize that sacrifice, valor and integrity are no more defined by sexual orientation than they are by race or gender, religion or creed. It is time to allow gay and lesbian Americans to serve their country openly. I urge the Senate to send this bill to my desk so that I can sign it into law.
Good work, Senators.
The President may sign the repeal as early as tomorrow.
Jon Stewart railed against the Republican minority this week for stopping a vote on a compensation bill for 9/11 first responders:
Update: Fox News's Shep Smith got the message:
Forty one Republican senators just now voted not to let the Senate vote on the DREAM act, which would have (among other things) let immigrants become citizens by serving in the armed forces. Think about that: a majority of the Senate and a majority of the House, and not for nothing but a majority of Americans, seem to believe that smart, dedicated people coming here to earn college degrees or fight and die in our wars deserve to become Americans, but the GOP doesn't.
On the other hand, as I wrote the previous paragraph, some of those Republican senators voted to allow the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" to move to a floor vote. This means, very soon, the U.S. will join most other advanced countries and not care who its soldiers want as partners and get back to caring about who they want to fight against.
I really hope, though it's irrational to do so, that the Senate changes its rules in the next Congress to end these virtual filibusters. If you want to block a bill, get up on the floor and hold it until the other side gives up the fight or until you pass out. It shouldn't require a supermajority just to have a vote. That's not what the Constitution says.
The New York Times has released an application mapping key Census indicators by census tract.
Seriously, you could spend hours playing with this thing.
Chicago Public Radio analyzes losing Bump to Silicon Valley as a demonstration of the lack of VC and incubator support here:
David Lieb and his friend Jake Mintz hatched [Bump] at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business when they discovered in that flurry of the first few weeks of school that they really, really hated manually typing all their new friends’ contact information into their phones.
So, along with their friend Andy Huibers, they figured out a way to “bump” two phones together to transmit that contact info. And their new smartphone application was born on March 27th, 2009. Things moved fast from there - they won the school’s New Venture Challenge business plan competition and in the summer of 2009, just like Gold Rush era miners of yore, they packed up and headed to California.
They didn’t go with the intention of staying. ... [And] just because they got [a $3m VC infusion] there didn’t mean they had to stay. They could have come back to Chicago. But they didn’t. They opened their headquarters in Mountain View, California, and now have 15 employees there and are “aggressively hiring.”
Lieb says the main reason was because Huibers lived in California already. But there was another reason that speaks to Silicon Valley’s dominance.
"We knew we needed to hire a bunch of people, and being here in the Valley is really where all that technical talent is," Lieb said in an interview.
Chicago has lots of talent as well, and it has amenities that the suburbs of San Jose simply can't offer. But I also have found some limitations on the Chicago startup scene, and that many startups here have to be self-funded for the reasons Ashley Gross mentions in her story. (I'll publish my paper later this week.)
Sullivan calls it out:
Does Assange want to be forced back to Sweden, where he is freer from possible US intervention? Or is this all a massive, unplanned clusterfuck?
I guess if you live in a country where the government stakes out an interest in whether a condom breaks or not in consensual sex, you may never find out.
In other news, the Senate just passed the tax compromise by a wide margin. Among other things, like some rejiggering that should add about $6 to my take-home pay, it reinstates the estate tax for estates over $10m. Watch out for news stories between Christmas and New Year's Day of very rich people dying under mysterious circumstances...
I almost forgot: the Inner Drive demonstration site, Weather Now, got a significant upgrade this weekend, to version 3.6. I added two new features that are part of long-term plan of improvements. They don't sound like much, but they're pretty important bits that other features will depend on.
First, the lists of weather stations that appear on the home page are now generated dynamically from a database table. This means that I can change them, remove them, add them, or schedule them without having to make code changes. For example, during NFL Football season, you'll notice a list of home football games that changes every Tuesday at midnight Eastern time. In the past, to add a list like that, I'd have to make code and configuration changes. Now I don't.
Now the cool part, and how this is just a step towards a larger feature: In version 3.7 (coming out in January, I hope), you, dear user, will be able to create your own lists.
Second, I've added caching to the current weather reports. Before, every page view required multiple round-trips to the weather database. Now, any time the site retrieves current weather from the database, it stores the reports for some length of time. Any subsequent page requests will find the weather reports in the cache. This means the home page loads significantly (10x) faster on most views. The site gets about 11,000 page views every day, so this is non-trivial.
The cache right now has a fixed expiration time of 180 seconds, and I can change that through the standard application configuration tools. By "fixed" I mean the cache will discard all reports older than three minutes, forcing the application to refresh those reports from the database. This strikes a good balance between current data and application speed, I think, especially since the National Weather Service (whence comes the data) has new information at about that frequency. (You can read more about how caching works in the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ SDK.)
I think these are really cool changes, and I'm excited about how much it moves me down the roadmap. And the 3.7 update will be even cooler.