Events

Quick note, via the Chicago Tribune Daywatch, the Wall Street Journal today has a mildly-interesting article on why you can usually donate frequent-flier miles but not actual tickets. Hint: the miles don't have your name on them: As much as $2 billion worth of nonrefundable airline tickets expire every year without being used, but those who want to give them to charities rather than throw them away are grounded with only good intentions. Most airlines make their tickets "nontransferable" to protect...

Forecasters predicted that Chicago would break its old record high (technically "high maximum") temperature of 13.3°C today. Well, we just hit that temperature, so let's see how high it goes. For what it's worth, I walked from class to my client today. In many parts of the world that's not extraordinary. In February in Chicago, though... Update, 11:10 CT: 11 am temperature officially 14.4°C, new record. How high will it fly? (Sorry...) Update, 12:05 CT: now 15°C, another new record. Update, 13:00 CT...

The President will visit Chicago Friday for the first time since taking office. As I've speculated before, he brings with him a temporary flight restriction (TFR) affecting the second-busiest airspace in the world: ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATIONS WITHIN THE 10 NMR AREA LISTED ABOVE, KNOWN AS THE INNER CORE, ARE PROHIBITED EXCEPT FOR: APPROVED LAW ENFORCEMENT, MILITARY AIRCRAFT DIRECTLY SUPPORTING THE UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE (USSS) AND THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, APPROVED AIR AMBULANCE...

The numbers yesterday turned out to be correct, but there was one aspect of the thaw I forgot to mention. We've had snow on the ground in Chicago since just before New Year's Eve. Just 36 hours ago, O'Hare had 27 cm of the stuff, and all of it melted by dinner time yesterday. Welcome to Chicago's fifth season: Mud.

The official score won't be in until past midnight, but it looks like the temperature at O'Hare today topped 13°C—about 33°C warmer than Thursday morning's -20°C. It's quite a relief. And almost all the snow is gone. In celebration, Parker and I will now take our second long walk of the day.

Now that Illinois has started the long process of removing our ex-governor's name from tollway signs, this essay from the New York Times' Freakonomics blog extolling the virtues of congestion tolling is worth a read: [I]t can be hard to convey this because the theory behind tolling is somewhat complex and counterintuitive. This is too bad, because variable tolling is an excellent public policy. Here's why: the basic economic theory is that when you give out something valuable — in this case, road space...

Chicago O'Hare just recorded a temperature of 4.4°C, the warmest it's been since December 30th. That is all.

The first, from the Poynter Institute, concerns how Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm's staff made Twitter into journalism: I tuned in an Internet broadcast of ... Granholm's annual state of the state speech because it was expected to be laden with energy and environment issues. On impulse I logged into Twitter and asked my followers if there had been a hashtag established for the speech. There was: MiSOTS (Mich. State of the State). To my amazement, the hashtag had been established by the governor's...

In case you were thinking about building one, Rick Gold has calculated the approximate price of constructing your own Death Star: While watching [Star Wars], an odd question popped into my head, “How much would it cost to build the damn thing?”. Impossible to figure out? Truthfully … yes. A complete and utter waste of time, absolutely! So why not try and find out! ... Add it up, and we have a figure of exactly $15,602,022,489,829,821,422,840,226 and 94 cents. Tell you what, I’ll pitch in the 94 cents....

After 31 days of snow cover, 40 days without a temperature above 10°C, 67 days without four consecutive days above 5°C, and not one night above freezing since December 29th, Chicago is finally, finally getting warmer weather: Warming in coming days—a slow process at first—leads to a 50-degree [Fahrenheit] temperature increase by Saturday afternoon. The day may produce the first 50-degree high here since late December. (Skilling wrote that around 11pm CST yesterday when the temperature was heading down...