Events

A couple of articles floated through my awareness today: Vladimir Putin has gone so far into the language of paranoia around today's shoot-down that one starts to get nervous. (Richard Hofstadter should be required reading.) Josh Marshall, ever the optimist, says it can still get worse. Bruce Schneier is nervous, too, about the policy repercussions from the Paris attacks. News flash: Donald Trump is a racist liar who sounds a lot like George Wallace and Ted Cruz Joseph McCarthy. IFLS outlines what...

This video shows the point-of-view of an engineer on the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad in 1945. From Linden Street in Wilmette on up to Waukegan, none of these tracks exists anymore; it's now the North Shore Trail, which I've ridden and walked on for most of my life. Check it out:

By one measure, Chicago is the Craft Beer Capital of the U.S.: Craft brewers in the Chicago area occupy an estimated 1.6 million square feet of commercial real estate, more than any other metro area in the country, according to a report from Seattle-based brokerage Colliers International. The area also has the second-most craft breweries with 144, behind only Portland, Ore.'s 196. And craft beer—defined as being made by small, independent brewers—is still growing here. Just four U.S. markets have more...

For the last couple of days, I've missed my 10,000-step goal by 100 to 500 steps. This is why: Yesterday Chicago got its biggest November snowfall in 120 years; today it's well below freezing. Walking is treacherous at best for bipeds and uncomfortable for quadrupeds. So today might also be a miss. I haven't missed three days in a row since March 5th-7th—when, not coincidentally, we had a miserable, snowy week. Winter is hard on fitness.

I might follow this map. Explanation: Community beer and brewery review site RateBeer puts out a list every year of the top 100 breweries in the world, “according to reviews taken last year and weighted by performance within and outside of style, balanced by indicators of depth.” From this year's list, 72 of the breweries are based in the United States. Randal Olson found a pretty good solution using genetic algorithms and the Google Maps API. He computed an optimal road trip to visit a historical...

I missed an important anniversary last Friday, probably because I was traveling and got distracted. The Daily Parker is now ten years (and six days) old. I launched it officially on 13 November 2005, from Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters in Evanston, Ill. In the 10 years ending last Thursday night, I posted 4,842 entries, averaging 40 per month, or one every 32 hours or so. Not a bad record. Any odds the blog will be around another 10 years?

The good: A new study shows that drinking 3-5 cups of coffee a day has measurable health benefits. The bad: A black resident of Santa Monica, Calif., got hauled out of her apartment at gunpoint by 19 police officers after a white neighbor reported someone trying to break in. The ugly: Yale law student Omar Aziz writes about the soul of a Jihadist. And the neutral, which could be ugly: forecasters predict 15-30 cm of snow in Chicago tomorrow night into Saturday morning.

Well, maybe Mark Kirk isn't really the narrow-minded tool he seems to be, but a letter his office sent to the President sure makes him look like one. He's yet another Republican calling for us to exclude Syrian refugees on the grounds that a few of their countrymen are extremist criminals. Here's my response, which I sent to his office just now: Senator, The letter you sent to President Obama about not admitting Syrian refugees "unless the U.S. government can guarantee, with 100 percent assurance, that...

American's A'Advantage program will change in January to accrue miles based on how much a ticket costs. The formula is pretty simple: members will get X dollars per flight mile based on their elite status, though elite status qualification will still be based on segments or miles actually flown (though not on a third "points" option currently in force). Everyone who watches these things knew this was coming. And it won't make that much difference to most people. For example, my mileage run this weekend...

The L.A. Times reports today that temperatures in the Eastern Pacific are far higher than previous El Niño events: Temperatures in this key area of the Pacific Ocean rose to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the week of Nov. 11. That exceeds the highest comparable reading for the most powerful El Niño on record, when temperatures rose 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the average the week of Thanksgiving in 1997. The 5.4 degree Fahrenheit recording above the average temperature is the highest such...