Events

Just a day after New Mexico allowed marriage equality, Utah has become the 18th U.S. jurisdiction to do so: At about 4:15 p.m. ET, the AP wire reported that a federal district judge had declared Utah's ban on gay marriage to be unconstitutional. Within an hour, one gay couple reported on Twitter that they had gotten married. Now 123 million people live in marriage-equality jurisdictions in the U.S., 38.8% of the population. (Yesterday's number statistic left out New Jersey. Oops.)

Astronomical winter officially begins tomorrow at 11:11 CST. But as anyone in the Midwest can tell you, meteorological winter began three weeks ago. The Chicago Tribune has a nice, clear graphic today showing the problem: The late, strong Alaska block this year is almost certainly hanging around because of anthropogenic climate change. Usually by this point the North Pacific has cooled enough not to drag the mid-latitude jet stream all the way up to the Arctic. Welcome to the new climate. Eventually...

The New Mexico Supreme Court was unanimous: New Mexico's highest court ruled on Thursday that the state must allow same-sex couples to marry. "We conclude that the purpose of New Mexico marriage laws is to bring stability and order to the legal relationship of committed couples by defining their rights and responsibilities as to one another, their children if they choose to raise children together, and their property," the court's ruling read. "Prohibiting same-gender marriages is not substantially...

The Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center (IDTWDC) will shortly be decommissioned. I first wrote about this in June 2012, when it looked like I could migrate all the apps running on my servers to Azure quickly. (It actually took until March.) Now, however, I'm done. And now I have about 100 kg of equipment to remove from my apartment. So: does anyone want some equipment? Here's the inventory: Two Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U servers with 1.6 GHz Xeon dual-core processors. One has 4GB of RAM, the other...

Shortly after my last trip to London I blogged that UK Prime Minister David Cameron's crowing about Britain's economic recovery entirely missed the point of how awfully and slowly that recovery was going. This morning Krugman freshens the evidence: A couple of weeks ago I tried to get at what’s wrong with the latest tactic of the austerians in terms of a classic Three Stooges scene. Curly is seen banging his head against the wall; when Moe asks why, he replies, “Because it feels so good when I stop.” As...

The Chicago Transit Authority cleaned out its attic recently and put a bunch of artifacts up for auction. The auction just ended, and I'm sorry to say I did not win anything. I bid on a couple of 1990s-era station signs, one from Main and one from Davis. I didn't want to risk getting both so I dropped off the Davis auction once it hit $50. Because, rusty 30 x 45 cm sign with the paint chipping? Yeah, $50 sounds right. But I kept going on the Main St. sign, using the ancient eBay technique of waiting...

From The Atlantic Cities blog: Over the past decade, 1,300 London pubs have emptied their cellars and wiped down their tables for the last time. It's not just obscure, unloved bars that are dying. This winter, two well-known historic pubs, both open for over a century apiece, will likely be turned into private housing. One is the Old White Bear, a red-brick building hidden away in village-like Hampstead, a former spa town swallowed up by Victorian London. The other, just down the hill, is The Star, an...

Yes. And snowy: Snowfall’s been quite relentless here. Flurries (or more) have fluttered to earth 8 of the past 9 days. And, with just under 250 mm on the books to date, the 2013-14 season has been accumulating snow at nearly twice the normal pace and ranks 33rd snowiest of the past 128 years. That places it among the top quarter of all Chicago snow seasons since records began here in 1884-85. There’s been only one day with a temperature even briefly above freezing in the past 12. An eight day string of...

Apparently, Chicago's Divvy is really popular with tourists—and tourists have trouble returning the bikes on time: Chicago's Divvy bicycle-sharing program took in up to $2.5 million during its first five months, a figure driven by tourists and others who bought daily passes and racked up the majority of overtime fees, according to a trove of preliminary customer data provided by city transportation officials. As much as $703,500 came from late charges, which kick in when bicycles aren't returned within...