I saw this semi-alarming weather warning issued by the Department of Natural Resources for the Madison and southern Wisconsin area:

… AIR QUALITY WATCH FOR SOUTHERN WISCONSIN IN EFFECT SATURDAY THROUGH MONDAY… NOVEMBER 21 TO 23…
A STAGNANT AND INCREASINGLY DIRTY AIR MASS WILL INTENSIFY OVER THE UPPER MIDWEST DURING THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS. THERE IS A [...]

There’s this interesting trend with software: The first release of a program is barebones, and only focuses on accomplishing its primary function. As the process goes on, extraneous bells & whistles are added on. In the end, you have a program that looks fancy and does a lot of stuff, but you find that [...]

There was a lot of media coverage about the Large Hadron Collider startup last year, with many people freaking about about black holes, strangelets, and magnetic monopoles ripping apart the universe as we know it. As you may remember, the system was shut down before it could ever perform any collisions due to a fault [...]