Events

If so, these are queued up: A piece about Wrigley Field's quirks. Two about how Oklahoma botched an execution yesterday, coinciding with the Economist (and I) wondering why America still has the death penalty. Chicago's city council will vote today on ride-sharing, with consequences to friends who Lyft and Uber. Via Bruce Schneier, an article about the Quantified Toilet hoax. Yes, there is such a thing. More later...

Here: House prices in my neighborhood are back to 2007 levels, almost. BASIC is 50 years old. GoGo Inflight shares fell 25% today on the news of AT&T's vaporware. After banning a book at the local school, irate religious fundamentalists called the cops when a student started giving the book away for free. More later.

Or, a few reasons why the "Send to Kindle" button helps me get through the day: Cubicles suck. We already have laws that sort out liability for driverless-car accidents. How do you feed a two-headed snake? (No, really. You have to watch this.) Learn the history of business class airline seats. Railroads are investing $10 billion in technology over the next two years, nominally more than they invested in laying rail in the last century. Sarah Palin is obscene.

Parker and I ran around all day because I had an open house. (For some reason, people don't want to meet dogs at open houses.) I'm now catching up on everything I didn't do all day. The best part of having an open house, though: my apartment Inner Drive Technology WHQ is spotless.

I didn't post a lot yesterday because (a) I had tons to do for work and (b) once I'd finished, I had to go out into this: It got all the way up to 21°C, briefly, and there were actual leaves on the trees for the first time since November. Today it's sunny and 7°C. It might get up to 14°C sometime this coming week, once it stops raining. Hey, at least it's spring.

The New York Times has an interactive map of which ZIP codes support which baseball teams, according to Facebook. Some teams, apparently, just can't catch a break. Oh, there they are, that other little team in Chicago:

Busy day, so I'm just flagging these for later: Microsoft has released new Azure Database tiers in preview, with migration required in a year. Stephen Colbert told Jon Stewart he's leaving. Via the Atlantic Cities blog, an interactive map of London rents by Tube stop. Atlantic Cities also reports on a new opera about Jane Jacobs that tells the story of her victory in 1960 over Robert Moses. Also check out the interactive Manahatta Project map showing New York in 1609 overlaid by 2014, in block-level...

I mean that literally. With the wind whipping off the lake, our shaded seats never got above 10°C, and felt a whole lot colder. We fled after the 5th inning. One of the (metaphorically) cool things was how the Cubs used the names of the two teams that played at Weeghman Park when it opened on 23 April 1914: the Chicago Federals and the Kansas City Packers. Here's the scoreboard: And here's first baseman Mark Rizzo in his historical uniform: The Cubs lost, of course, 7-5. Some things really never change.

The park is 100 years old today: The ballpark, which opened April 23, 1914, and celebrates its centennial Wednesday, is a quintessential Chicago building: practical, quietly graceful, a creature of function, not fashion. Despite those rationalist roots, it's a vessel for human emotion: hope, dreams, escapism, nostalgia, wonder — and, as Cubs fans know all too well, disappointment, disgust and bitterness. Only a smattering of those fans, I suspect, could name the original architects of Wrigley (Zachary...

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...