Events

Bloomberg analyzes the reasons that British Airways continues to invest in its Boeing 747 fleet when everyone else is retiring the model: A clue to BA’s lingering love affair with the 747 lies in the model’s ability to eke out capacity from scarce operating slots at its London Heathrow hub at a time when lower fuel prices make retaining older planes an option. The revamped jets, the first of which returns next month from a refit center in Cardiff, Wales, will also get 16 extra business-class seats...

Chicago has five of the 20 most-congested roads in the U.S.: Drivers in the northeastern Illinois-northwest Indiana region suffered the misery of 61 extra hours behind the wheel on average in 2014 — equivalent to a week and a half of work — because of delays caused by gridlock, construction zones and collisions that tied up traffic, according to the Urban Mobility Scorecard released late Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The Los Angeles area took the top three spots on the congestion...

Krugman writes, and I agree, that Donald Trump scares the Republican establishment precisely because he's too honest: Conservative religiosity, conservative faith in markets, were never about living a godly life or letting the invisible hand promote entrepreneurship. Instead, it was all as Corey Robin describes it: Conservatism is a reactionary movement, a defense of power and privilege against democratic challenges from below, particularly in the private spheres of the family and the workplace. The...

Since development of DasBlog petered out in 2012, and since I have an entire (size A1) Azure VM dedicated solely to hosting The Daily Parker, I've been looking for a new blog engine for this blog. The requirements are pretty broad: Written in .NET Open source or source code available for download Can use SQL Server as a data source (instead of the local file system, like DasBlog) Can deploy to an Azure Web App (to get it off the VM) Still in active development Modern appearance and user experience See?...

Twenty years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It's hard to explain how revolutionary the OS was at the time. To celebrate the anniversary, Microsoft is offering a free Rolling Stones song. Trust me; it makes sense. And here, for your listening enjoyment, is the Microsoft sound.A And C-Net's coverage of the day:

I am not a food writer, so I don't have the vocabulary to describe dinner the other night at 42 Grams. Let me just reproduce a few items from our meticulously-presented, precisely-timed courses: Carabinero: finger lime, phytoplankton, kelp, and lacto-fermented vegetables Sweet pea custard: bacon, whey, brown butter, herbs & lettuce Summer corn: corn silk, roasted corn broth, polenta Organic Irish salmon: tea smoked with fallen pine, muhroom dashi, spent grain toast, nastrurtium Lamb neck: smoked yogurt...

Via DNAInfo, this is awesome:

Yesterday I mentioned that the extreme El Niño underway in the Pacific right now is making long-range climate predictions a little easier. Also yesterday, the Climate Prediction Center released their December—February Outlook: The NWS Climate Prediction Center released their latest seasonal forecasts today. Here are the results for Illinois. The biggest news is that Illinois has an increased chance of above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation for the winter months of December, January...

CityLab and Slate are sharing an article today about how the warm Pacific surface temperatures are helping climatologists—because they're so extreme: Now that the event is in full swing, we have an even better idea of how U.S. weather will be affected over the next nine months. That’s because El Niño acts like a heat engine that bends weather in a predictable pattern worldwide. Typically, the stronger El Niño is, the more predictable its influence. And this year’s event is on pace to be one of the...

Crain's reported this morning that the MacArthur Foundation has started making grants to help curb climate change: Initial grants will help continue and accelerate U.S. greenhouse gas reductions, increase and sustain U.S. political consensus for climate action, and provide incentives for a low-carbon economy. The climate initiative is the second big bet MacArthur has announced in pursuit of transformative change in areas of profound concern; the first was a $75 million initiative to reduce...