Events

We've bred wolves for 40,000 years to have social intelligence, which makes them better than chimps and cats at understanding us: [Duke Canine Center student Evan] MacLean stands near a wall with the dog on a slack leash, while a female graduate student sits on a chair in the center of the room. She sets two opaque red cups upside down on the floor, one on each side of her. Then, as [the dog] Napoleon watches intently, a third graduate student enters the room. She places the dog’s tennis ball under one...

I don't know how this little snippet of code got into a project at work (despite the temptation to look at the file's history): Search = Search.Replace("Search…", ""); // Perform a search that depends on the Search member being an empty string // Display the list of things you find First, I can't fathom why the original developer made the search method dependent on a hard-coded string. Second, as soon as the first user hit this code after switching her user profile to display Japanese, the search...

CTA service on the Skokie Swift (now Yellow Line) began 20 April 1964: The five-mile-long Niles Center branch of the ‘L’ had opened in 1925. Using the tracks of the North Shore electric interurban line, trains ran from Howard-Paulina station to Dempster Street in the suburb of Niles Center (today’s Skokie). There were seven stops between the terminals. North Shore continued to run trains after CTA service was discontinued in 1948. In 1963 North Shore itself went out of business. During the fifteen years...

I just returned from Outer Suburbistan in record time, in under an hour, which was pure dumb luck. As soon as I change I'm going out into the 25°C afternoon. We still haven't hit the 28°C we last saw November 7th, but this is close enough for me. More later, including possibly some interesting stuff about how I've started (slowly) refactoring the 10-year-old Inner Drive Extensible Architecture to use modern inversion-of-control tools including Castle Windsor and Moq. First, I need to walk the dog. A lot.

I don't usually post personal things, but in this case, I have enough psychic pain that I want to vent. After last Sunday's car-killing problem, I took the car in to get fixed. It turns out, I was right about the problem and about the estimated repair costs. But wait: the car needed routine maintenance as well. All told, it got: a new water pump; an oil change; new brake fluid; a new microfilter for the air conditioner; new wiper blades; a minor recall service; and a partridge in a pear tree. Total...

Crain's reported today (sub.req.) that Lagunitas Brewing will cap their first Chicago-brewed beer today: Workers at the 300,000-square-foot Douglas Park facility are firing up the bottling line this morning and slapping on Lagunitas India Pale Ale labels. Once they flip the switch, the line will fill 500 bottles a minute. "It's just the IPA right now," said owner Tony Magee. "It's the beer we know best." The first 750-barrel batch of beer was mixed a few weeks ago before heading to the brewery's...

After years of doing whatever they were doing, the CTA has released details of its planned Red and Purple Line renovations north of Belmont: We already know the first phase of the project, set to begin in 2017, will involve rehabbing the Lawrence, Argyle, Berwyn and Bryn Mawr Red Line stations and replacing tracks for the Red and Purple Lines at those stations to reduce slow zones. CTA has started the process of securing federal funding to extend the Red Line from its current southern endpoint at 95th...

As of today, 8 million people have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Krugman puts it in perspective: [T]he benefits of Obamacare, for all its imperfections, are immense. Millions of people who lived extremely anxious lives now have far more security than before. Compared with those benefits, the complaints of some already insured people that they have less choice of doctors than before, or that they’re no longer allowed to retain minimalist plans, look like whining. (And of...

So, Sunday's car problem is decidedly non-trivial. As I suspected, the water pump failed. I got lucky yesterday because the cold air allowed me to get the car all the way to the nearest dealer (barely 2 km away), but the car is essentially undriveable. This is a $1400 repair. I am selling a kidney. Any takers?

This lovely spring morning in Chicago: It's April 15th. And we have snow on the ground. Again. At least we got a new record: Snow has historically been no stranger in Chicago during the month of April. Official snow records indicate a trace or more of snow has fallen this late in 86 of the past 129 seasons dating back to 1884-85. That’s 67% of the time. But the amount of snow which fell Monday and the fact it occurred within 3 days of 27°C warmth (on Saturday) and on a day which opened near 20°C is...