Events

We have a bit of smoke drifting down from Minnesota this afternoon, pushing our AQI up to 69. It's enough to taste, unfortunately, but not enough to hurt. We've also got yet another line of thunderstorms coming through in an hour. Cassie and I caught a little bit of drizzle just now, which was just an added bonus on top of the humidity. Once my shirt dries sufficiently I'll peel it off and take a shower.

Architect and University of Illinois-Chicago professor Stewart Hicks explains why the architecture of data centers will result in a generation or more of unusable land, and how architects of the past avoided this outcome (mostly):

First run released 23 July 2026. Available through Amazon Prime.

While a new wave of storms drenches the South Side, an old wave of sensible Democrats stopped the insanity in Wisconsin, nominating moderate Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley for governor in a squeaker against state representiative Francesca Hong. And once again, left-wing activists seem to have gamed the polls(https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/prediction-markets-get-trounced-in-hongs-defeat) and prediction markets. Not to put too fine a point on it, but most Democratic voters seem to have...

The National Weather Service confirmed that the storms we had in Chicago yesterday resulted from a derecho:

I'm just far enough north that we didn't get the worst of the derecho tearing through the area:

I posted on Friday that I planned to make pasta sauce over the weekend, and in fact I did. This also gave me a chance to play with Claude AI a bit more. Now, it's well known that some older LLMs sucked at basic math. Anthropic seems to have solved that, as I've seen when I've run other queries. What does this have to do with pasta sauce? Well, you need math if you're going to make nutrition labels from an ingredient list:

One of the Air Force Thunderbirds has been tooling around Chicago this morning, preparing for this weekend's Air & Water Show. He passed right by my window doing almost 350 knots, and I had my 300 mm lens ready:

My dog and I had a pretty good day yesterday. I took her to the dog beach, giving her the opportunity to bogart everyone else's balls:

Welp, there it goes. The sun just set after 8 pm here in Chicago for the last time until next May. It's at this point every summer that we start to realize how close we are to autumn. In just 20 days, the sun will set before 7:30; and just 18 days later, before 7.