Events

My first order of business upon returning from watching the marathon was to get this guy out of my apartment: That appears to be a silver-haired bat, one of the most common species, but one usually found in more forested areas. He got into my apartment because, after taking the screens out last week for the window washers, I didn't feel a crushing need to put them back in. (I do now.) I didn't hurt the little dude. I opened the bottom half of the window and then encouraged the bat to go through it with...

This is one of the best parts of living in Lincoln Park: After watching one group of runners go up Stockton Drive, I can catch them going the other way down Clark. Even Parker gets into the action—sort of: We had perfect running weather today, 12°C with light winds and plenty of sun. Kenyan Dennis Kimetto set a new course record at 2:03:45, which is just about 3 minutes per kilometer.

Really interesting analysis from No More Mr Nice Blog. Key grafs: The Republican Party at this point in time is entirely made up of Punishers who think they are entitled to treat the government--and especially the government of Barack Obama--as waiters who need to be shown their place. This should surprise no one. At heart the entire Republican Party is made up of winners and losers and they are united in just one thing: they think that money is the only way to tell who is who. If you have money, you...

Links, the posting of which does not constitute endorsement: Christian delusions are driving the GOP insane Engagement rings are barbaric Create an air gap to keep your stuff secure Azerbaijan releases election results before polls open Government shutdown causing needless lab animal deaths Back to the mines. Sarah Jarosz tonight.

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...