Events

On this day 180 years ago (28 January 1836), John L. Wilson purchased 33 hectares of land about 16 km from the city, by what is now 83rd and Cottage Grove. At the time it was a swath of prairie two hours outside Chicago. But through a series of missteps, slow City workers, and a very long-lived lawsuit, no one developed the land until 1940, by which time the city had grown to surround the lot on all sides: The property was so remote—and the value so depressed—that nobody paid much attention to it for...

On this day in 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean: A little more than a minute after launch and high above Kennedy Space Center, shuttle Challenger was ripped apart after failure of a rubber seal allowed a spurt of rocket flame to ignite the spacecraft's giant fuel tank. The roiling plume of Challenger's disintegration would sear an image in the nation's psyche that spoke of a particular sorrow; among seven astronauts killed 30 years ago [today] was teacher Christa...

Republican Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner believes in smaller government and lower taxes, so much so that he's blocked the state budget process since the last budget ended in June 2015. Since the state has no budget, we haven't paid our bills, so our IOUs just keep getting bigger: Moody's Investors Service says the state's backlog of unpaid bills and other obligations now is rising roughly $450 million a month, hitting $6.6 billion as of Dec. 31. Projections from Rauner's budget are that the total will...

President Obama and I have the same fitness tracker. His, however, has some customizations: What counts as must-have features for many people — high-definition cameras, powerful microphones, cloud-connected wireless radios and precise GPS location transmitters — are potential threats when the leader of the free world wants to carry them around. And so using the latest devices means more than merely ordering one on Amazon for delivery to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It means accepting the compromises...

Britons, concerned about the decline of one of their most popular (and useful) species, have found a simple helper for them: Gary Snyder has holes in his garden fence. That's not normally the kind of oversight you'd find in a well-kept British garden in a market town like Chipping Norton, 75 miles northwest of London. But the holes are there for a reason: hedgehogs. Snyder's backyard is now one small rest stop on what conservationists hope will be a network of hedgehog superhighways crisscrossing...

Almost a meter of snow fell on parts of the United States over the weekend. Even in places that get big snowfalls from time to time, the results were grim: While New York City emerged from the season’s first blizzard with relatively little damage, the toll along the Eastern Seaboard as a whole was more sobering: 29 deaths related to the storm, thousands of homes without power and serious flooding in coastal areas. In Baltimore, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said on Sunday that she could not give a...

Everything from New York to Richmond, Va., is shut down today as a major winter storm drops meters of snow on 50 million people: Weather emergencies were declared in at least 10 states, including in New York and New Jersey, and the storm has disrupted travel throughout the region, with thousands of flights canceled and public transit shut down in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New Jersey. In New York, bus lines were scheduled to be suspended at noon Saturday. Forecasters were predicting 300 to...

Via Schneier, it may be that England's political system was stable: For over a century the longbow reigned as undisputed king of medieval European missile weapons. Yet only England used the longbow as a mainstay in its military arsenal; France and Scotland clung to the technologically inferior crossbow. This longbow puzzle has perplexed historians for decades. We resolve it by developing a theory of institutionally constrained technology adoption. Unlike the crossbow, the longbow was cheap and easy to...

We've been using CloudMonix for a while to manage and monitor our Microsoft Azure assets. By "we" I mean both Inner Drive Technology (home of The Daily Parker) and Holden (my day job). CloudMonix recently added a new feature that automates virtual machine (VM) management. See, Microsoft charges for VMs by the hour. So if you have a VM that is only used at specific times, you're wasting money by having it run all the time. A great example: Our continuous integration (CI) server, which builds and tests...

The latest Climate Prediction Center forecasts came out this week. Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel says it's pretty unusual: [T]here is a chance that La Niña conditions (the opposite of El Niño) could develop in the summer or fall time frame. Unfortunately, the appearance of La Niña in summer or fall in Illinois typically means hot, dry weather. This is the first time I can remember CPC forecasting an increased risk of warmer and drier conditions so far out for Illinois. If the forecast comes to...