Events

Apparently the Duchy of Lancaster, which is essentially the property of the British Royal Family, has suffered a bit of a decline: The Duchy of Lancaster - a portfolio of land, property and assets held in trust for the Sovereign - saw a drop of £75m to £322m in the 2008-9 financial year. But the income the Monarchy received from the Duchy, used to fund her public and private activities, increased by 5.4% from £12.6m to £13.3m. During the last financial year, the total cost to the taxpayer of keeping the...

Lots to do for the next, oh, 17 months, so I thought I'd get started. My first Duke box arrived today, containing 6 kg of books, course packets, handouts, and more books, all of which have to be read by August 15th. Fortunately I have a few extra hours each day to do all this (I use them to sleep right now, so they're kind of wasted). Just a couple news stories of note today: President Obama gave an hour-long press conference yesterday in which he spent 50 minutes discussing the single most important...

Via Beth Filar-Williams, the National Resources Defence Council has ranked U.S. cities by environmental factors. The study ranks 67 large (population 250,000+), 167 medium (100-250k), and 405 small (50-100k) cities on nine factors, including standard of living, water management, transportation, and environmental participation. Seattle comes out on top for big cities; San Francisco, 2nd; Chicago, 10th. Other leaders include Madison, Wis. (medium) and Bellingham, Wash. Bottom of the pack: Lexington, Ky....

Someone had time to have the sign made up, then had the inclination to stick it on the construction site. That's kind of sad: There's a building in Chicago, at the corner of Wacker and Clark, that could use similar treatment. Someday, there will be funding again. Someday. As long as we're in San Francisco, how about an iconic shot of a successful construction project? Here you go:

Airbus Industrie and the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) have worked out how to get an A380 to the EAA show at Oshkosh next weekend: The aircraft will do a seven-minute flight display before setting up for landing on Runway 36. In a web conference Friday, Airbus test pilot Terry Lutz said that while the 8,000X150 runway is plenty for the A380, there's only one taxiway that will accommodate the aircraft, although, happily, it's the one that leads to Aeroshell Square. That gives the crew about...

Forty years since that one, small step. NASA has real-time audio, 40 years later. The lunar module landed at 20:17 UTC, so if you're near a computer at 3pm Chicago time, you should listen to it.

Usually, my July visits to my family in San Francisco allow me to get away from Chicago's oppressive heat. This year, both cities are about the same, San Francisco just a little warmer than usual, and Chicago...well, it's the coolest July of my life: July has slipped to the coolest to date here in 42 years—its 68.7°F degree average temperature running nearly 5 degrees behind the long-term (138-year) average. Friday's 70°F high was the first time in 53 years a July 17 temperature failed to rise above...

Yesterday I pondered Amazon's deletion of works by Orwell, and asked for confirmation that they had deleted unauthorized (i.e., stolen) copies of the copyrighted material. Amazon last night confirmed this is, in fact, what happened: An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from...

A few things of note happened while I was en route to San Francisco yesterday: The Cubs continued winning, taking their second in a row after the All-Star break and moving up to second place, though only because they've beaten up the hapless (25-63) Nationals to do it. Wisconsin officials announced a deal to buy new 320 km/h train sets for the Chicago to Milwaukee route. Initially plans call for allowing the trains to run at 176 km/h (40% faster than today) while a new, dedicated high-speed line is...

Even though there are more important things going on in the world, there are also better bloggers out there, so I trust sticking with entirely petty and parochial issues won't offend anyone. Like this, for instance: Prying the Sears name off North America's tallest building was as simple as asking the leasing agent from U.S. Equities Asset Management to do it. "I kept saying, 'Sears Tower, Sears Tower. I'd rather have it be Kmart Tower,'" said Carmine Bilardello, the Willis executive who negotiated the...