Events

A week from today, part of a 400-year-old country may elect to secede: YouGov’s latest survey has No, on 52%, narrowly ahead of Yes, 48%, after excluding don’t knows. This is the first time No has gained ground since early August. Three previous polls over the past month had recorded successive four point increases in backing for independence. In early August Yes support stood at 39%; by last weekend it had climbed to 51%. Just one week ago, Scots divided evenly on whether their country would be better...

The Chicagoist reports that new FDA regulations may curdle the raw-cheese market: ...due to the FDA’s decision to change the allowance for non-toxigenic Escherichia coli (E. coli) in dairy products. Non-toxigenic E. coli is a typically harmless bacterium found in the human gastrointestinal tracts as well as in raw milk cheeses. Recently, the FDA changed their allowance for this bacteria from a Most Probable Number (MPN) of 100 per gram, a fairly average amount in raw cheese, to 10 MPN per gram. Because...

From my first trip to New York, August 1984:

We live in a wondrous age of travel. The mobile phone has revolutionized it: You can get travel alerts, boarding passes, taxis, delay notifications—everything you need. Against that you have the state of the human brain at 5 in the morning. According to my mobile phone, I actually woke up at 6. But I'm not in my home time zone. Nor have I exactly gotten enough sleep this week. So when I woke up at 6, I started executing the Leave Louisville Plan, which did not, unfortunately, include checking my mobile...

West Monroe Partners (my employer, who have no editorial control over this blog, nor do they endorse anything I write here) has a thriving mergers and acquisitions practice. In order to provide appropriate advice to our private equity clients, we perform "diligences," which are thorough investigations of a company's strengths and weaknesses. Almost always, the target companies have technology assets that we evaluate as part of the diligence. Which is why I'm up at the crack of dawn in a hotel outside...

Meteorological autumn began last Monday, but as usual in early September we slouched through some sticky heat most of the week. Then Friday the weather broke, and this past weekend's weather was spectacular. Partially because the lake was so cool from last winter, this summer we had only three 32°C days—fewer than in any year in history except 1979. It gets better (i.e., cooler). The forecast calls for slightly-above-normal but comfortable days today and tomorrow, followed by a cooling trend taking...

I haven't posted a lot this weekend because the weather has been too nice. Yesterday and today Chicago has had temperatures around 23°C, sunny skies, and gentle breezes. It's hard to stay inside, even with the windows open. And in the evening, our annual cicadas are finally out. Talk about getting a nice buzz on a late-summer evening... Yesterday Parker got more than two hours of walks; today he'll get at least an hour, though I'm likely to get a lot more as well. (My phone's pedometer says I got 13.3...

The Air Force Times reported Thursday that an unnamed U.S. Air Force airman was denied re-enlistment because he refused to swear an oath "so help me God:" Air Force Instruction 36-2606 spells out the active-duty oath of enlistment, which all airmen must take when they enlist or reenlist and ends with “so help me God.” The old version of that AFI included an exception: “Note: Airmen may omit the words ‘so help me God,’ if desired for personal reasons.” That language was dropped in an Oct. 30, 2013...

Birthday dinner last night at Tru followed by burlesque. I have wonderful friends.

CityLab's Kriston Capps wants to stop Florentijn Hofman: The Dutch artist has just debuted, and I cannot believe I am about to write this word, HippopoThames, a wooden hippo river sculpture headlining a festival on the Thames. At least, that's what it's doing this week. In the months to come, you might find it on the Yangtze or the Ganges or the Rhône. Rubber Duck, on the other hand—that's the floatation for which Hofman is best known—is a decidedly Western fixture. Los Angeles sculptor Peter Ganine...