Happy Saturday!
Only 7 shopping days until Boxing Day! So, what's going on in the world?Fortunately, Illinois seems to have escaped a post-Thanksgiving Covid-19 bump.Not so in the UK, where despite not having aĀ big...
View ArticleThe longest night of 2020
If you live in the northern hemisphere, tonight will last longer than any of the 365 others in 2020. Sunsets have gotten later by a few seconds a day since the 8th, but sunrises have also gotten later...
View ArticleToday is slightly longer than yesterday
The December solstice happened about 8 hours ago, which means we'll have slightly more daylight today than we had yesterday.Ā Today is also the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's meeting with Richard...
View ArticleErev Xmas Eve
It's 11Ā°C outside and I have a fuzzy houseguest for the day, so there will be walks! At least until the 20Ā°C temperature drop starts around 6pm... So while I'm enjoying the last above-freezing day of...
View ArticleChristmastime is here, by golly
Thank you, Tom Lehrer, for encapsulating what this season means to us in the US. In the last 24 hours, we have seen some wonderful Christmas gifts, some of them completely in keeping with Lehrer's...
View ArticleStudying how dogs age
How did I miss thisĀ Times article from November?Lab tests can tell how old a human is just from the pattern of methylation. Thanks to this research, the same can be done for dogs. The results will help...
View ArticleLazy Sunday morning reading
A couple of articles piqued my interest over the last day:Via IFL Science,Ā a team ofĀ graduate students from three European universitiesĀ studied how long humans would survive the emergence of a vampire...
View ArticleChicago sunrises, 2021
Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.)An interesting thing happens in 2021: on November 6th at...
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7,500
Just a housekeeping note: this is my 7,500th post since re-launching braverman.org as a pure blog in November 2005. On average, I've posted 41.2 times per month, though this year that has gone up...
View ArticleHow we got here
TheĀ New YorkerĀ next week has Lawrence Wright's excellent long-form history ofĀ "the mistakes and the struggles behind America's coronavirus tragedy:"There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe...
View ArticleLast lunchtime roundup of the year?
We're so close to ending 2020 that I can almost taste it. (I hope to be tasting tacos in a few minutes, however.) True to form, 2020 has apparently decided not to leave quietly:Senate Majority Leader...
View ArticleStatistics: 2020
What a bizarre year. Just looking at last year's numbers, it almost doesn't make sense to compare, but what the hell:Last year I flew the fewest air-miles in 20 years; this year, I flew the fewest...
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Truly horrifying numbers
Revisiting the numbers of people killed inĀ one day by a single disaster, we find that Covid-19 now occupies 10 of the top 15 spots:If we only look at the last 100 years, it gets even starker:And the...
View ArticleEphemeral GPS failure
Sony-made GPS chipsets failed all over the world this weekend when a GPS cheat-sheet of sorts expired:In general, the pattern of your route is correct, but it may be displaced to one side or the other....
View ArticleGood morning!
Just an hour or so into the first business day of 2021, andĀ morning news had a few stories that grabbed my attention:All 10 living former defense secretaries joined in an op-ed yesterday condemning the...
View ArticleNew batch of public-domain works
All works published before 1 January 1926 have now entered the public domain:1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz...
View ArticleMarching through Georgia
As millions of voters in Georgia today decide which party will control the US Senate, author Ruth Ben-Ghiat looks back on other world leaders who have had a hard time letting go:Trump has followed an...
View ArticleI'm screaming in my head
The Times continues its coverage of the SolarWinds breach, and adds a detail that explains why the Russians continue to eat our lunch:Employees say that under [SolarWinds CEO Kevin] Thompson, an...
View ArticleWhat the hell happened yesterday?
Where to begin.Yesterday, and for the first time in the history of the country, an armed mob attacked the US Capitol building, disrupting the ceremonial counting of Electoral Votes and, oh by the way,...
View ArticleCalmer today as the Derpnazis return home
We had a relatively quiet day yesterday, but only in comparison to the day before:Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (wife of presumptive Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) and Education...
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