Events

No matter what it's called, or how it's ranked, it's still the tallest building around:

Crain's Chicago Business has done a yeoman's job investigating the Illinois pensions crisis. Today's installment digs into how it happened: A dense, 78-page bill aimed in part at curbing pension abuses in downstate and suburban school systems landed in lawmakers' laps two days before their scheduled May adjournment [in 2005]. One sponsor called it the first “meaningful” reform in 40 years, a reversal of “decades of neglect and bad decisions.” Another predicted that it could save the state up to $35...

New Zealand is voting over the next year to replace its national flag: It’s not everyday that a nation chooses a new flag by its own volition, with the support of the voters, without any drastic regime changes. New Zealand is doing exactly that. With the Flag Consideration Project, the Kiwis are trying on a new look. In an open letter to the peoples of New Zealand, the panel for the Flag Consideration Project introduced 40 finalist designs for an all-new flag. Voters will decide what happens next in two...

For my upcoming trip to London I have once again planned a trip to West Sussex. I last visited six years ago this week, and walked along the River Arun and through the village of Amberley before refreshing at The Bridge Inn and heading back to London. For just £13 I've booked a train not to Amberley, but one stop further, to Arundel, on my birthday. The plan is to walk through the village, past Arundel Castle, and then on various footpaths up the River Arun to Amberley and, yes, the Bridge Inn. Wow, I...

Problem: my keyboard suddenly wouldn't respond to the left-shift, enter, 3 or F5 keys. No idea why this is. Tested with mskey.exe, tested on another machine...still those four keys aren't working. Solution: Get a new keyboard. Walk 10 minutes to Staples, find the same make and model, buy it, return to office. New problem: New keyboard's spacebar is broken. When I say "rinse and repeat" I mean that when heading back from Staples—this is the Chicago Loop, so one walks everywhere—it started to rain. Which...

The three-month period ending July 31st was the wettest in Illinois history: Illinois experienced its wettest May – July on record with 500 mm of precipitation, 200 mm above the 20th century average, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Most of that was due to the record precipitation of June with 240 mm statewide, based on their latest numbers and discussed in more detail here. That is about an extra two months of precipitation during that three-month period. Factors include...

After not going to a Renaissance Faire in so long I don't even remember my last visit, it was fun going three times this summer, each with a different group of people. Yesterday was Steampunk Invasion, which attracted crowds one of the more regular Faire attendees in our group called "epic." Great costumes though: I didn't do real costumes myself this season, but I have been informed that next season, there will be a costume, oh yes, there will. This should be interesting...

Traveling to San Francisco and London as often as I do underscores to me how crappy some things are in Chicago. Take our ridiculous transit fare systems. Metra, the heavy-rail system, still uses little paper tickets, while Ventra only works on CTA buses and trains. I want one card that would let me tap in and tap out of any public transit service in the city. Citylab says this may be coming soon, at least to some cities: Unified mobile ticketing means riders no longer need to worry about having the...

My friend Sara, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, wrote in her blog today about dreaming's influence on inspiration, and incidentally why psychoanalysis isn't science: REM (dream) sleep specifically is associated with increased abstract reasoning as well as increasing the strength of normally weak associations in the brain (see here). What that means is, two different things that your waking brain might not even see a connection between could become associated rather easily in a dream. Our brain does this...

NASA released a really cool video yesterday: The agency explains: The images were captured by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). EPIC maintains a constant view of the fully illuminated Earth as it rotates...