Events

As the election gets closer, we need to remember that climate change is real and will affect hundreds of millions of people in the next few decades—despite what one of the candidates seems to think. Here's an article from The New Yorker back in December that puts the issue in stark relief: To cope with its recurrent flooding, Miami Beach has already spent something like a hundred million dollars. It is planning on spending several hundred million more. Such efforts are, in [University of Miami's...

Wow. For the first time since August 2014, I just saw the Cubs win a baseball game at Wrigley. Astounding. And with back-to-back home runs in the 5th. I can report they still play "Go Cubs Go!"

Chicago historian John R. Schmidt frequently has "Then and Now" features where he shows a part of the city as it appeared when he was a kid against how it appears now. I just found a trove of historical photos produced by the Illinois Dept. of Transportation, including a few dozen from my neighborhood, so I can play the same game. Here's the intersection of Sheridan, Broadway, and Montrose, looking west down Montrose, from March 1936, more than 80 years ago: Here's this past Tuesday: Though some of the...

Pilot Patrick Smith outlines, one more time, a number of sensible ways to shorten airport security lines while providing better security overall: As I’ve argued for years, there are two fundamental flaws in our approach. First is the idea that every single person who flies, from infant children to elderly folks in wheelchairs, is seen as a potential terrorist of equal threat. Second, and and even more maddening, is the immense amount of time we spend rifling through people’s bags in the hunt for...

Scott Hanselman suggests that, rather than dividing the world into technologists and non-techies, the division is simply about curiosity: I took apart my toaster, my remote control, and a clock-radio telephone before I was 10. Didn't you? What's the difference between the people that take toasters apart and the folks that just want toast? At what point do kids or young adults stop asking "how does it work?" There's a great interview question I love to give. "When you type foo.com into a browser, what...

Michigan Avenue at the river:

From a couple of weeks ago, when I went to a networking event by the river: And from Sunday, on the way to perform Mahler:

Yesterday I did, in fact, get a butt-load of steps—and so did Parker. He and I walked over 16 km together, bringing my totals to 26,144 steps and 21.6 km overall. That's only my 5th 25k day (out of the 584 since I got a Fitbit), the last one being on March 8th.

We had perfect weather this weekend, including for last night's performance of Mahler's 2nd, and it's still pretty epic, which is why I haven't posted a lot. Except for a brief interval to do a stupid task in my office, and after catching up on Game of Thrones, it's time to take a walk. Not sure when I'll be back. I haven't hit 25,000 steps since March 8th, and I've only hit 30,000 steps once. I don't think I'll hit either today, but if I do, I'll blog about it.

What was to be the tallest building in the hemisphere, the Chicago Spire, now can't seem even to become a proper park because of the bickering: When plans for the twisting downtown skyscraper known as the Spire died, so, too, did the project to turn a weedy nearby lakefront lot into a park named for Chicago's first non-native settler, Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable. And there doesn't seem to be a timeline for developing the 3-acre stretch on the north side of the Chicago River where it feeds into Lake...