From NBC News...

The amount of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide is at an 800,000-year high, according to the report, with concentrations of CO2 showing a 40 percent spike over pre-industrial levels. About a third of the gas emitted by humans has been absorbed by the ocean, making the waters acidic.

Top scientists urge cap on carbon emissions to limit climate change

Knoxville Airnow site. Although the note Data courtesy of TDEC gives me a little pause ...

Knoxville Airnow

Glad to see action taken

here

Education is critical to our community. The first step in being successful is often just showing up. There will be 8 community meetings to discuss the next strategic plan for Knox County Schools. Parents, businesspeople and others who are (or should be) interested, please take the time to show up at these meetings! (link...)

Betty Bean reports on the latest development in Debby Jennings' suit against UT's Dave Hart at Metropulse.com...

The FBI has indicted the former executive director and deputy director of the Upper Cumberland Development District along with an accomplice for diverting $670,000 of government funds intended for UCDD. They are also accused of obtaining bank loans and lines of credit in excess of $1,000,000 in connection with the scheme.

This FBI press release has more, including details that make you wonder how they thought they were going to get away with it....

(FBI disclaimer: An indictment is merely an accusation and is not evidence of guilt. Defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.)

A few weeks ago we were jolted out of bed by a screaming false alarm from our smoke detector. Of course, this always happens around 2AM, right?

Anyway, ours are all wired together so if one detects smoke it sets them all off. (I believe this is code for all new construction.) We couldn't figure out which one was complaining (there's probably a way but I don't know how). We had recently replaced all the batteries so I didn't think that was the problem.

So we started doing some research, and here's what we learned...

Knoxville Focus reporter, photographer, and man about town Dan Andrews was on WBIR yesterday to talk about living with Parkinson's Disease and the similarities between his experience and the character played by Michael J. Fox in his new show.

Dan said that when he was diagnosed the first place he went to learn more was the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and that they have been a huge help. He said the online community is like a support group and now he is there to support others and give back. Michael J. Fox (who is on the cover of this week's Rolling Stone) has been an inspiration, Dan said, partly because he, like Dan, was diagnosed at such an early age.

On a personal note, we've met Dan a few times out and about at press events, and you couldn't meet a nicer guy. He's also a great photographer.

"....and, once it's working well, I guarantee you, they will not call it Obamacare." - Barack Obama

If there was any doubt as to whether the Baptist Hospital property redevelopment project is a real deal, here you go.

The City of Knoxville has just announced a proposal for a joint city/county $22 million TIF for the $165 million project.

I haven't been a big fan of TIFs in the past, but if there was ever a project that justified a TIF this could be it. (Of course, I'm biased.) Also, we talked with the developer at the announcement back in June, and my BS detector only registered about a two on a scale of one to ten. I think they are for real and have the wherewithal to get it done.

The South Waterfront project has been on a long and publicly vetted rocky road, and now something big might finally happen with one of the biggest obstacles. This seems like good news.

(Up next: tank farms?)

Anyway, the City's press release after the jump...

From NASA ...

...shows the model estimate of the average number of deaths per 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) per year due to air pollution....

A few areas—such as the southeastern United States—saw PM2.5 concentrations decline relative to pre-industrial levels (shown in blue). In the southeastern United States, the decrease in PM2.5 is likely related to a decline in local biomass burning that has occurred over the last 160 years.

Global toll of fine particulate matter

Administration officials said today that launch of the online health insurance exchanges for small businesses will be delayed for one month until Nov. 1st. Applications can still be made using paper forms and a help line will be available starting Oct. 1st.

A feature that allows employees to pick from a group of small business plans approved by their employer was previously delayed until 2015. More from the Washington Post...

Popular Science's rationale sounds very familiar:

Article

L.A. Times, 6/18/2013:

Apple Inc. won a $30-million contract Tuesday from the L.A. Unified School District, paving the way for the company to provide every student with an iPad in the nation's second-largest school system.

L.A. Times, yesterday:

It took exactly one week for nearly 300 students at Theodore Roosevelt High School to hack through security so they could surf the Web on their new school-issued iPads, raising new concerns about a plan to distribute the devices to all students in the district.

Clearly nobody could have anticipated this!

In the process of divorcing from our domain controller, I was reworking our network to use our Sonicwall as the DHCP controller. At some point in monkeying around I needed to hard code an IP address and DNS server. I recalled that Google has an open public DNS server and used that.

It seemed a little faster than our ISP, so I just left it that way in the router. The IP address is 8.8.8.8 and the secondary is 8.8.4.4. Bonus: if you type a wrong domain name in a URL you get a basic "page not found" instead of those creepy ISP spam link pages.

I guess the only downside is that it's yet another way for Google and the NSA to track your online movements. Apparently that's the price we pay for progress.

More info:

• Introduction to Google Public DNS
• Using Google Public DNS

We trained hard . . . . but, it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization . . ." Petronius Arbitor. A.D. 65

Forbes [h/t]

On Thursday, July 25, dozens of bankers, hedge fund types and private equity investors gathered in New York to hear about the latest and greatest opportunities to collect a cut of your property taxes. Of course, the promotional material for the Capital Roundtable’s conference on “private equity investing in for-profit education companies” didn’t put it in such crass terms, but that’s what’s going on.

So I go out on my run today and run into....A HOSTAGE SITUATION???
Apparently some elderly gentleman has taken someone hostage and is holed up in his house, about six blocks from mine, surrounded by a zillion cops, a swat team, police dogs, and a nice sounding man on a bullhorn trying to talk him down. Nothing on the news about this....yet.

Does Knoxville or Knox County offer any self defense classes for women? I have looked around their web sites but do not see anything.

WATE reports that RouXbarb owner/chef Bruce Bogartz is asking customers and the community for cash assistance to keep the doors open. Don't think I've ever heard of that before.

Russ McBee tweeted links to the letters yesterday. Here's the first one, and here's a follow up in which Bogartz says he doesn't want to be "pushy" but the "clock is ticking."

The letters don't really explain the reason for the unusual request, but his remarks to WATE are, let's just say, rather blunt about it.

From NBC News ...

“In many cases, premiums will cost significantly less than what was originally projected,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told reporters on a conference call. The report finds that 95 percent of Americans live in states where the premiums for individually purchased health insurance will be less than what had originally been expected.

$11 a month? Obamacare super-cheap for some, feds find