Events

I'm trying to make sense of why the Chicago Teachers Union's fight with the Chicago Public Schools has blown up into a teachers' strike (the first in 25 years). One of my neighbors, for years a member of the local school board, said "every parent in Chicago will vote against Rahm Emanuel" in the next Chicago mayoral election. My experience of the strike, however, was being trapped in the Loop for an hour yesterday as the teachers' rally outside the school board building stopped traffic. So, in no...

I'll have something about the Chicago teacher's strike after lunch, but first, I must complain about the returning heat: The warm-up brings Chicago its 100th day of 27°C-plus degree temperatures; another due Wednesday putting us 2 days from 2005's all-time record annual tally Tuesday afternoon’s predicted 29°C high is an early August-level reading and 4°C above the September 11 average maximum of 25°C. The warm-up follows a chill Monday morning, the likes of which hasn’t happened here since early June...

Slate's Mark Vanhoenacker wonders whether the lock-down at lower Manhattan's World Trade Center memorial is a monument to something other than intended: Advance tickets are required to enter this public, outdoor memorial. To book them, you’re obliged to provide your home address, email address, and phone number, and the full names of everyone in your party. It is “strongly recommended” that you print your tickets at home, which is where you must leave explosives, large bags, hand soap, glass bottles...

As Josh Marshall tweeted just now, "If a Mayor from NJ can be arrested on corruption charges, what's left for us to believe in?" I don't know: Trenton, N.J. Mayor Tony Mack and at least six other people were arrested by federal authorities on Monday morning as part of a corruption investigation, according to WNBC. The arrests follow the FBI's search of Trenton City Hall in July. Federal prosecutors are expected to announce the details of the investigation later on Monday.

Over the weekend, a tornado hit Coney Island. And there's video: Note to people unaccustomed to tornadoes: when you see a tornado that appears stationary, it's either going away from you or coming straight at you. In the northern temperate zone they usually move northeast, so if you're looking southwest at a stationary tornado, you might want to take cover. Just sayin'.

Despite my enthusiasm for Microsoft Windows Azure, in some ways it suffers from the same problem all Microsoft version 1 products have: incomplete debugging tools. I've spent the last three hours trying to add an SSL certificate to an existing Azure Web application. In previous attempts with different applications, this has taken me about 30 minutes, start to finish. Right now, however, the site won't launch at all in my Azure emulator, presenting a generic "Internal server error - 500" when I try to...

This month's Atlantic explains: "So you want to make a map," [former NASA engineer Michael] Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. "There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than...

They just launched high-resolution aerial photos of another batch of cities: Improving the availability of more high quality imagery is one of the many ways we’re continuing to bring you the most comprehensive and accurate maps of the world. In this month’s update, you’ll find another extensive refresh to our high resolution aerial and satellite imagery (viewable in both Google Maps and Google Earth), as well as new 45 degree imagery in Google Maps spanning 30 new cities. Google Maps and Earth now...

President Clinton Wednesday night: President Obama last night:

Apparently all that junk DNA in your cells isn't junk after all: Now scientists have discovered a vital clue to unraveling these riddles. The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex...