Events

Airways magazine has the heartwarming story of American Airlines MD-80 N9401W heading off to retirement in New Mexico: This aircraft, and 19 others, were part of a symbolic retirement. A 20-aircraft order placed by American Airlines to McDonnell Douglas in 1982 marked the beginning of an era in which AA became the world’s largest MD-80 operator, but as the decades passed through and as new and more efficient aircraft joined the fleet, the venerable Mad Dog era is now heading into the sunset. Once the...

Two stories, in two directions. First, a cool interactive history of how the construction of Chicago's Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) displaced thousands of people and destroyed thousands of buildings: In the late 1940s, the Oak Leaves newspaper in Oak Park predicted that the new superhighway would replace the West Side’s “appalling slums” with “orderly dwellings where orderly people are living in health and comfort.” Of all the neighborhoods that the expressway sliced through, the Near West Side had the...

Today is the 10th anniversary of Parker and me adopting each other. I can scarcely believe he's lived with me for that long. I mean, this was just yesterday: And this afternoon, when he was a total brat and refused to sit still, so we went through about 45 frames just to get this one: That's actually the only one completely in focus without any extraneous dog movements. This was second-best, though at this resolution you can't see that he's not sitting still: I tell him this often: he's my favorite dog...

I love getting an email at 7am because of a production bug. I love it even more when it's pre-release software, still in development and changing almost every day, that the client has decided to demo to a customer. Parker is happy I'm still home, though he may be left all by himself for a few hours if I have to go into the office anyway. Real blog entry later if I get a break.

The Cubs actually won, and it was a great night for a ballgame: Also, I'm digging my new LG G5. That kind of photo is not what I'd expect from a mobile phone.

After Maine Governor Paul LePage (the Rob Ford of New England) made yet more inappropriate comments into a recording device earlier this week, the Portland Press Herald has apologized to the rest of the U.S. for electing him: Dear America: Maine here. Please forgive us – we made a terrible mistake. We managed to elect and re-elect a governor who is unfit for high office. You probably heard about the latest episode. He was asked about the toxic racial environment that he created in the state with...

So, this happened on my train line: A Metra train on the Union Pacific North Line was struck by lightning Tuesday morning in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the North Side. Outbound train No. 309, scheduled to arrive in Kenosha at 8:18 a.m., was stopped shortly before 7:30 a.m. when it was struck by lightning, causing a mechanical failure near the Rogers Park Station... Metra spokesman Tom Miller said no injuries were reported. It actually only added about 15 minutes to my commute. Of course, if I'd...

Amen: Overreliance on slides has contributed to the absurd belief that expecting and requiring students to read books, attend classes, take notes and do homework is unreasonable. Courses designed around slides therefore propagate the myth that students can become skilled and knowledgeable without working through dozens of books, hundreds of articles and thousands of problems. If slide shows are so bad, why are they so popular? Universities measure student satisfaction but they do not measure learning....

The UK's Daily Mail has a decent explanation and creepy photos of how the southernmost city in Illinois went from a thriving (and historical) port to a nearly-abandoned shell in 50 years: The town's luck began to fall in 1889 when the Illinois Central Railroad bridge opened over the Ohio River - although much railroad activity was still routed through the town, so its effects were not severe. The same can't be said for a second bridge that opened around 23 miles up the Mississippi at Thebes, Illinois in...

The Economist's Gulliver blog explains: America is a big country, and its airlines have to focus most of their attention on domestic flights. In 2014, Delta flew more passengers than any other in the world, but less than one-fifth of them were on international routes. Despite recent consolidation, there is still much competition at home: on top of the big four, customers can sometimes choose among JetBlue, Spirit, Frontier, Alaska, Hawaiian, Virgin America and others. And flyers have made it clear that...