Events

If you wondered how often people actually ride Divvy bikes, everyone's Divvy online trip summary page has the answer. They put the trip ID right on the page. My first Divvy trip, on September 18th, was #522105; this morning's was #732089. Assuming they use an ID field that auto-increments by 1 for each ride, that means Divvy users rode about 210,000 times in the past 22 days, or about 9,500 times a day (on average). That rate gives them nearly 3.5 million rides over the next 12 months. Compare that with...

I've got about an hour to prepare for a Meet-Up I'm presenting. While I'm doing that, you read these: Sarah Lawrence College professor Nicholaus Mills compares Ted Cruz to Huey Long; Zack Beauchamp at ThinkProgress says racism caused the shutdown (but more broadly than you think); Mimi Cowan has put up a history of the Chicago fire, which started 140 years ago yesterday; and David Auerbach at Slate explains why the ACA website sucks, but not as badly as you think, and probably not for much longer. OK...

I have a new post up on the 10th Magnitude developers' blog.

A Gallup poll released today shows the largest drop in economic confidence since 2008: Americans' confidence in the economy has deteriorated more in the past week during the partial government shutdown than in any week since Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 15, 2008, which triggered a global economic crisis. Gallup's Economic Confidence Index tumbled 12 points to -34 last week, the second-largest weekly decline since Gallup began tracking economic confidence daily in January 2008. Fiscal brinksmanship...

I've held off posting this one from my walk through Hampstead Heath last month because it needed a little Photoshopping. Today at lunch one of my colleagues let me use her laptop for five minutes. Voilà: I'll have to round up some of the HDR sequences I've shot over the past couple of years...this is fun.

Just as I start poking around Logan Square, the Reader reminds me it's prime hipster habitat—though it hasn't always been, and it might not be for much longer: The way Jason Hammel tells it, his arrival in Logan Square in 1995 was like a fairy tale, everyone's dream of arriving in a new, yet-to-be-anointed hipster mecca: "I asked a friend for advice on moving to Chicago. He said, 'Go to Logan Square. There's a cool coffeeshop there called Logan Beach.' I got an apartment without looking at it. It was...

Probably not. But Bixi, who manufacture the bikes and stations used here in Chicago, has cash-flow problems: Montréal’s own Bixi bike-share, the inaugural PBSC venture launched in 2009, was the largest system in North America until Citi Bike launched in New York this summer. (Technically, PBSC is the parent entity and Bixi refers to the bike-systems in Montréal and other cities where PBSC runs operations, although in practice the two names are often used interchangeably.) But according to a letter filed...

No kidding: A group of dedicated Doctor Who fans tracked down at least 100 long-lost episodes of the show gathering dust more than 3,000 miles away in Ethiopia. The recovered episodes from the 60s include much-loved scenes from The Crusade, The Enemy of the World and The Ice Warriors series. In the four-part Crusade story [the First Doctor, played by William] Hartnell, and his ­assistant Vicki, played by Maureen O’Brien, arrive in the TARDIS in Palestine in the 12th century just as King Richard the...

Some astute readers may have gathered that spending time in a different neighborhood plus complaining about the government shutdown affecting mortgages implies something is changing at Inner Drive Technology Worldwide HQ. For now, I'll just say that a happy side-effect of all this disruption is an unusually clean and orderly house. More details as the situation develops.

Day 5. Today, though, Congress did something right: With the partial shutdown entering its fifth day, the GOP-run House passed a bill Saturday that would make sure the furloughed workers get paid for not working. The White House backs the bill and the Senate was expected to OK it, too, but the timing was unclear. The 407-0 vote in the House was uniquely bipartisan, even as lawmakers continued their partisan rhetoric. The White House has said President Obama will sign the bill. Of course, "back pay"...