On the day after Squid Day, I got mail from the publishing company Immedium*, letting me know they'd just come out with a new children's book: Sid the Squid and the Search for the Perfect Job. It might be of interest to me and my readers. Would I like to preview a pdf?

Flattered beyond all reason by the suggestion that I have "readers," and obsessed as I am with both squids and literature, I answered with a swift affirmative. (Apparently I was not the only cephaloblogger thus recruited.)

In the alchemical days of building your own circuit boards, you had to swirl hand-masked boards in noxious chemicals to burn away the layers you needed. Now, you can just pay by the inch. It's a glorious time for using home-designed printed circuit boards (PCBs).

Arctic Ice November 2010

Return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely

Record temperatures across Canadian Arctic and Greenland, a reduced summer sea ice cover, record snow cover decreases and links to some Northern Hemisphere weather support this conclusion

Arctic Report Card 2010
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/

It's playoff time in baseball and the Giants have home field advantage over the Texas Rangers starting tomorrow, October 27th.

Baseball, more so than any other sport, lends itself to numerical analysis because virtually everything except defense is rigorously quantifiable.   There are some details, such as an umpire who might call a wider strike zone than another, but at least from a rules perspective the strike zone is what it is. 

Anyone in their late 20s who lived in Minnesota in 1991 remembers the record-setting Great Halloween Blizzard, which dropped several feet of snow across the state and bestowed upon children a few rare snow days.¹

For folks living in the upper Midwest today (particularly the Great Lakes region), we're experiencing what one of my colleagues called a "land hurricane" and Mother Nature is setting more records. It is already becoming one of the strongest storms on record, and it's just getting going.

When the skies of October turn gloomy²