Events

Once again, a major American newspaper has reported on something as universal fact, but that only makes sense in the U.S.: The day is a palindromic date: 01-02-2010, meaning the number can be read the same way in either direction. There will be 12 palindromic days this century, [Aziz Inan, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Portland in Oregon,] said, and Saturday is the second. The first was 10-02-2001. (To check out his complete list: faculty.up.edu/ainan/palindrome.html) Well...

...nothing happened. And I spent all night in a data facility in New York watching nothing happen. Fun times, fun times.

Happy 22! That's a little geek humor. See, 01/01/10 is 22. Get it? You know, like, "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't"? Right. Starting off the year well, I can see....

...could be today, depending on which competing definition you use: A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is...

It's time for the semi-annual update of the Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.) An interesting note about 2010: the sunset on November 6th will be the latest sunrise in Chicago (7:30am) until 2021—and that, only within 4 seconds of precision. Date Significance Sunrise Sunset Daylight 2010 3 Jan Latest sunrise until Oct. 29th 07:19 16:33 9:14 27 Jan 5pm sunset 07:08 17:00 9:51 4 Feb 7am sunrise 07:00 17:10 10:09 20 Feb 5:30pm...

Not only does Ben Gurion Airport have, by every measure, more effective security than at U.S. airports, but they move passengers through more quickly, too: Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that? The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International...

Do you have the feeling you're no better off today than you were ten years ago? That's because, probably, you aren't: It was a decade with basically zero job creation. ... And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened. It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what...