Events

I am agog at a bald impossibility in the New York Times' article today about the ACA exchange: According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code. By comparison, a large bank’s computer system is typically about one-fifth that size. There were three reporters in the byline, they have the entire Times infrastructure at their disposal, and still they have an unattributed "expert" opinion that the healthcare.gov codebase is 33 times larger than Linux. 500 MLOC? Why...

On Thursday afternoon, Amazon delivered a USB cassette player. Yesterday I dug out an aircheck—a recording made in the radio station's master control room of what actually went over the air—from my broadcast on WRHU-FM exactly 23 years earlier. Here is the 9pm newscast. Trippy. (And scarily similar to the newscast you might have heard last night.)

Nate Cohn draws the map of these 61 United States: What would happen if all of them succeeded? Each new state would get two senators and its share of electoral college votes. We ran the numbers and recalculated the 2012 presidential race. In this bizarro United States, the GOP would have a structural advantage in the expanded Senate, and Barack Obama would have had a tighter fight against Mitt Romney in the electoral college (which he won, in reality, 332–206). Of course, Cohn assumes that once the...

Northbrook, Ill., has always been a suburb. Until the end of the last century, no one had developed large hunks of the village, because two entities controlled several square kilometers of land around it. One entity, the U.S. Navy, operated an air station until 1994; the other, the Catholic Church, had a smallish farm, a convent, and a dairy barn well into the 1990s, and still owns Techny Towers, a religious retreat. A conversation with a friend this week turned to a discussion of the Whole Foods Market...

Tuesday night, after the House of Representatives approved the deal ending the government shutdown, the House Stenographer...well, she added some commentary of her own: As the House finished their vote to reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling, a House stenographer decided it was a good time to let everyone know her feelings about God, Congress, and the Freemasons. “He [God] will not be mocked,” the stenographer, apparently named Molly, yelled into the microphone as she was dragged off...

The Chicago technology scene is tight. I just had a meeting with a guy I worked with from 2003-2004. Back then, we were both consultants on a project with a local financial services company. Today he's CTO of the company that bought it—so, really, the same company. Apparently, they're still using software I wrote back then, too. I love when these things happen. This guy was also witness to my biggest-ever screw-up. (By "biggest" I mean "costliest.") I won't go into details, except to say that whenever I...

From WBEZ's Chicago History blog: Chicago had actually started building two subways, with another tunnel following Milwaukee-Lake-Dearborn. Then the war came, and construction materials became scarce. The second subway would not be completed until 1951. But on this glorious Saturday morning--October 16, 1943--the city was ready for a party. Starting at 9:15, ten special trains were dispatched from ten different outer terminals along the "L" system. They carried various dignitaries to a rendevouz in the...

The American Idol 2010 runner-up Crystal Bowersox played City Winery Chicago last night: Another: Anna Rose opened for her; I was impressed: Tough shooting conditions. I forgot my seats were right against the stage. I wound up shooting everything with a 50/1.8, trying to get around the enormous monitor just to my right. It sounded great, though.

Via Sullivan, Reuters' John Judis points out Thursday's deadline doesn't matter: The best way to look at this, I think, is that there’s a spectrum of default severities. At one end, you have the outright repudiation of sovereign debt, a la Ecuador in 2008; at the other end, you have the sequester, which involves telling a large number of government employees that the resources which were promised them will not, in fact, arrive. Both of them involve the government going back on its promises, but some...

Two clients, both alike in dignity, yadda yadda yadda...so no time to read these yet: The shutdown (Ted Cruz is an ass) The shutdown (Ted Cruz is a ridiculous ass) The shutdown (Ted Cruz and all his friends are asses) Lake Shore Drive gets 3400 meters longer this week More about the American-US Airways merger, partially involving that ass Ted Cruz's home state Hello, "Read Later" button...