Events

I'm visiting one of my oldest friends in Durham, N.C. She is fostering Lexi, who had nine puppies on the 5th: So, it turns out that puppies under two weeks old (a) smell horrendous, no matter how often you change their bedding, and (b) don't do a lot. But in the 18 hours I've been here most of them have opened their eyes for the first time. And they are really cute. This morning we took a short hike at the Museum of Life and Science, which encourages John Cleese to visit: It helps that while Chicago...

Started in Durham, N.C.

This looks very familiar to me: As does this: And it means that my 10:20 flight connecting through Charlotte is now a 12:06 flight connecting through Washington. Welcome to travel from O'Hare in January. At least I'll have some time to nap. Or read. Or nap while reading...

Started on AA831, ORD-DCA

Lake Michigan continues its record-high levels this month. As of yesterday, the Michigan-Huron system was at 177. 4 m above sea level, 51 cm above last year's level and more than a full meter above average January levels. This has caused massive erosion and the loss of entire beaches in Chicago: Since 2013, the lake has risen nearly 2 meters, going from a record low to near-record high levels last summer. On Saturday, waves nearing 6 meters pummeled an already drowning shoreline. A 1-meter wave can pack...

I'm not the only one who questioned whether a Delta B777 dumping fuel over Los Angeles made a lot of sense: Fuel dumps occur only to reduce planes' weights for unexpected landings because some of them have maximum takeoff weights higher than their landing weights, said John Cox, a former US Airways captain who runs Safety Operating Systems, an aviation safety consulting company. While the procedure is standard for an emergency landing, it can be accomplished more safely if it is done at a high altitude...

Fortunately, I'm debugging a build process that takes 6 minutes each time, so I may be able to squeeze some of these in: Bruce Schneier reports on a new critical vulnerability in Windows that the NSA told Microsoft about. That's new. The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead takes a thoughtful (and only mildly snarky) look at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex withdrawing from royal life. In the same issue, John Cassidy examines the reasons behind our assassination of Qassem Suleimani. The Washington Post documents the...

Data released today by NOAA and NASA confirm a frightening fact scientists had already guessed: The past decade was the hottest ever recorded on the planet, driven by an acceleration of temperature increases in the past five years.... According to NOAA, the globe is warming at a faster rate than it had been just a few decades ago. The annual global average surface temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.07 degrees Celsius (0.13 Fahrenheit) per decade since 1880, NOAA found. However, since...

Remember Y2K? Oh, boy, I do, especially as I had to spend part of New Year's Eve in a data center on 1 January 2000. Apparently, some of the fixes people made to their software back then solved the problem...for a time: A Register reader, having sold a vehicle, filled out the requisite paperwork and sent it off to the agency, which is responsible for maintaining a database of drivers and vehicles in Blighty. An acknowledgement was received, which helpfully noted that it been printed in 1920. Sadly, we...