Events

Philip Shorer on the Atlantic's CityLab blog argues for a 4-day work week: Beyond working more efficiently, a four-day workweek appears to improve morale and well-being. The president of the UK Faculty of Public Health told the Daily Mail that a four-day workweek could help lower blood pressure and increase mental health among employees. Jay Love of Slingshot SEO saw his employee-retention rate shoot up when he phased in three-day weekends. Following this line of thought, TreeHouse, an online education...

The Wall Street Journal explains why the Cubs can sell 38,000 seats and only get 19,000 asses in them: Since 2009, ticket sales are down almost 6,500 a game. Where have all the Cub fans gone? The answer may be that they've in effect awakened from a beer-soaked party. Over the first four years of Ricketts ownership, attendance sank 13.7%. It is flat so far this year versus 2013, but the figures don't include the legions of no-shows. "I have plenty of friends with tickets who can't get rid of them," said...

I'm waiting for Azure to provision a virtual machine for me, so I thought I'd solve a nagging annoyance. Even though I travel a lot, I don't have a good carry-on-sized bag. My medium-sized travel bag, which has been around about ten years, goes into the hold of the airplane and sometimes I don't see it again for an hour after landing at my destination. This is especially irksome when I go on a 3-day business trip. So I've been thinking about replacing my medium-sized bag with a smaller one. I've got it...

I had planned to write today about aviation weather radar, being an accidental landlord in Chicago, or the latest plan to replace a burned-down grocery in my old neighborhood. Instead, I'm going to gush a little about my new phone. I've used a Windows HTC-8 for almost two years now, and I've been frustrated with it nearly the whole time. Today, while waiting out a thunderstorm at the local T-Mobile store, I decided to pick up a Samsung S5. Instead of complaining about the HTC-8, I'll link to a...

And wow, is it frustrating. I mentioned last week that my cousin, a professional musician, had replaced his old stage piano and given me the old one. I implied but never stated explicitly that I took many years of piano lessons as a child, ending about 30 years ago. Off and on since then I've picked up some music and banged away at it in a practice room—I was a music major for a year, after all—but I haven't done anything of significance in such a long time I'd almost forgotten what it was like. So I've...

Writing at The Dish, Freddie deBoer argues that we made police misconduct inevitable: But as we did with the presidency, the military, the intelligence services, and soldiers, we responded to 9/11 by buffeting our police officers with obsequious respect and endless displays of extreme gratitude. We feted them at football games and through parades in their honor. We plastered stickers celebrating them on our cars. We exhorted each other to “thank a first responder today.” We set about to create a culture...

The Chicago Air and Water Show may not happen today because of rare weather conditions: [T]he Chicago National Weather Service said "rare low clouds" are impacting the Air and Water show. Low clouds have a ceiling height of 1,000 feet, the weather service said. Only 2 to 3 percent of August days have had low clouds since 1973, the weather service said. Now, skipping the foggy understanding of weather terms and government agencies the ABC reporter showed in that paragraph, it doesn't look good for the...

Two of my favorite authors, Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, recently had a long phone conversation (which Harris transcribed) about Israel. I haven't finished reading it, but as I respect both men, I consider this a must-read. Also, I'm back in Chicago, possibly for two whole weeks. That said, the Cleveland Client was pretty happy with our work and may move to the next phase, so I may be going back there soon.

I mentioned over a month ago that, given some free time, I would fix the search feature on Weather Now. Well, I just deployed the fix, and it's kind of cool. I used Lucene.NET as the search engine, incorporating it into the Inner Drive Gazetteer that underlies the geographic information for Weather Now. I won't go into too many details about it right now, except that I was surprised at how much the index writer was able to crunch and store (in Azure blobs). The entire index takes up 815 MB of blob...

On Saturday, an 18-year-old black man was shot to death while running away from a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, the town has imploded. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an editorial yesterday calling on Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to get involved. The governor put out a statement saying nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the New Republic has three stories in the last 24 hours: drawing a straight line between 9/11 anti-terror spending and the terror facing Ferguson residents this...