Events

Another shot from Christmas afternoon, as promised:

Nephew #1 arrived yesterday evening while I sat a mile away talking with the manager of San Benito House and, apparently, challenging people to a Scrabble game later today. Nephew #1 is a much lighter sleeper than the rest of us, which causes him frustration, and when he gets frustrated he sets out to determine how much noise is required to make everyone exactly as light a sleeper as he. Fortunately, I'm on Chicago time, so getting up at 5am PST (7am CST) does not bother me. And it gives me some time to...

What is it about the right? I have difficulty imagining what it must be like to have such a constricted worldview that every provocation requires an escalation. The latest example of right-wing anti-diplomacy comes not from a state representative somewhere in the southern U.S., nor from a local Chinese official, nor from Marine le Pen. No, this time it's serial dick-swinger Shinzo Abe, who decided to help diffuse the tense diplomatic situation in the Sea of Japan by poking his finger in China's and...

Check these out: Calculated Risk posits the 10 most important questions about the U.S. economy in 2014. Chicago History maps out some fun bits of street trivia, including this: One street crosses under the same El line four times. Name the street and the El line. The Dictionary of American Regional English is exactly what it says on the tin, and it's fun. Not sure you want to go on that trip but want to lock in the airfare for up to a week? Buy a call option on the fare. McDonald's may have had a...

Not when they're 13 months old. And not when the weather looks like this. And not when someone needs a nap: Yes, these are the privations and suffering that my 13-month-old nephew must endure: A little earlier, he was chasing what my sister calls "California snow:" For those who care, it's a very un-Christmaslike 21°C here. I can see the appeal.

The intemperate, irascible judge's dissent in U.S. v. Windsor is the gift that keeps on giving: For the second time in a week, a federal judge embraced U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent from this summer's ruling overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act in a case challenging a state's ban on gay marriage. Scalia was adamant in his dissent that the logic of the DOMA decision would result in state bans being overturned. In his decision Monday declaring that Ohio must recognize...

Back in October, Chicago O'Hare International Airport opened its fourth east-west runway and promptly switched most operations to east-west from the diagonal pattern they'd used before. Chicago Tribune transportation writer Jon Hilkevich, a private pilot, explains the implications: Today taxi times to the gate are generally longer than they were several months ago because of a longer route that takes arrivals an extra mile or more around the airfield. The purpose is to have the planes taxi behind other...

I had a reasonably productive morning cleaning up the Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, including removing all all the decommissioned hardware from the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center. Contrast the before with the during: Both DSL modems are still there; so is the NAS, the PDC, and the switch. However, the dead UPS (thank you, TrippLite, for creating a UPS whose battery you can't replace), four decommissioned servers (including one in the back you can't really see), and a whole...

One of my favorite groups played at Evanston SPACE last night. They don't tour very often anymore, so I was glad to catch them live. From left to right, Robbie Schaefer, Julie Murphy-Wells, and Michael Clem: (Drummer Eddie Hartness—he's not really from Ohio—was hard to photograph from where I was sitting.) Another shot of Murphy-Wells and Clem: It was a fun concert. Their opener, Jake Armerding, played with the group during their entire set, and added something to what was already a pretty tight...

A couple of days ago people wigged out that car-share service Uber had significantly increased prices during a snowstorm out East. I posted on Facebook that this made perfect sense, and people getting all mad about it just didn't understand economics. Today on his blog, Krugman adds Keynesian context: Uber, it turns out, doesn’t charge fixed prices; it practices surge pricing, in which prices depend on the state of demand. So when there’s a snowstorm or something that makes everyone want a car at the...