Events

I did some landing practice yesterday morning: four at Waukegan and one at Chicago Executive. A quick review of my Google Earth track shows that my turns to final are getting much more consistent (within 350 m now) and my final approaches are right down the center line. I still need to work on squaring my turn from crosswind to downwind; I'm turning too early which makes the downwind leg slightly oblique. (By the time I'm abeam the numbers, though, I'm where I should be—about 1400 m from the touchdown...

A Wisconsin jury has convicted a couple of murder after they allowed their 11-year-old daughter to die right in front of them: Dale Neumann, 47, was convicted in the March 23, 2008, death of his daughter, Madeline, from undiagnosed diabetes. Prosecutors contended he should have rushed the girl to a hospital because she couldn't walk, talk, eat or speak. Instead, Madeline died on the floor of the family's rural Weston home as people surrounded her and prayed. Someone called 911 when she stopped...

Leave it to Krugman: The essence is really quite simple: regulation of insurers, so that they can't cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance. ...[W]hat it means for the individual will be that insurers can’t reject you, and if your income is relatively low, the government will help pay your premiums. That's it. Any commentator who whines that he just doesn't understand it is basically saying that he doesn’t want to understand it. The article he's reacting...

Yesterday around sunset I found myself driving down Halsted St., just west of the Loop. Here's the Sears Willis Tower and Presidential Towers:

Usually I hate July weather in Chicago. Not this year. We ended up with the coolest July in my lifetime (at Midway), and also one of the driest, making for an unusually pleasant month: Chicago's 69.4-degree average July temperature at O'Hare International Airport was the coolest of the past 17 years. But at Midway Airport, the month's 71-degree average temperature was the site's coolest in 42 years. Estimates based on the month's temperatures suggest the need for air conditioning was 30 percent below...

The Freakonomics blog interviews author Christopher Steiner about his book $20 Per Gallon: [At $8 per gallon, predicted in 2019,] our restaurant world won't be terribly different from what we’re used to now. We'll always have Chinese food — or at least the Americanized version of it (batter it, fry it, smother it in sweet and tangy sauce). The tricky part of the question concerns foods like sushi. When gas is $8 per gallon, sushi will still be hanging around. Things get interesting, however, at $18 per...

The Cubs' win against Houston yesterday started early. Here's the scoreboard after Kosuke Fukudome's two-run double in the 3rd, right before Ryan Theriot got to first on a throwing error: The inning started with back-to-back solo home runs by Jake Fox and Milton Bradley, and ended with Derek Lee striking out and Fukodome, in one of the stupidest base-running moves I've seen in a long time, running on the dropped third strike and getting caught sealing home. Final score, Cubs 12, Astros 3: Notice the...

I'm going to be in London two weeks from now, so it saddened me to hear this on NPR's Morning Edition today: The British Beer and Pub Association says an average of 52 pubs are closing each week. Changing consumer tastes, a two-year-old smoking ban and the deepening economic recession have hit pubs hard. But for thousands, the death blow has been dealt by rising government taxes on beer — up to 20 percent in the past two years. The traditional pint glass of beer now runs about $6, meaning few...

When Chicago-based Horizon Realty sued a former tenant for defamation because of a Twitter tweet, did anyone tell them how badly this could go for them? Seriously, that's some atrocious lawyering: "Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay," Amanda Bonnen apparently wrote in her Twitter feed May 12 at 9:08 a.m. Horizon Group Management, which leased Bonnen's Uptown apartment, wasn't pleased. Last week the company filed suit against Bonnen in Cook County...

"Landing" might be too subtle a term for it, but when you put 327 tonnes of airplane on a runway designed with Cessnas in mind, graceful is less important than intact. This is what a super-jumbo looks like landing at OSH: Yes, they can use the airplane again. Possibly the runway, too. (Note: "PIO" is "pilot-induced oscillation," which you can see on three axes in the video.)