Events

So, a couple weeks ago, I replaced my LG G4 with an LG G5. I thought about getting the Samsung Galaxy 7, but it was $350 more and didn't really have a lot of extra features. Turns out, it did have one extra feature that really my phone doesn't: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says owners of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphones should turn them off and stop using them because of the risk that their batteries can explode. The agency also says it's working with Samsung on an official recall of the...

Workers digging London's Crossrail tunnel have helped uncover a 350-year-old mystery about the Great Plague: [T]he Great Plague...killed 100,000 Londoners (roughly a quarter of the city’s population) around 350 years ago. Last year, workers constructing a future new ticket hall at Liverpool Street Station unearthed a charnel pit adjoining the old Bedlam Hospital, in which 3,000 skeletons were interred. Now it turns out that some of these skeletons had the answer to a centuries’ old mystery, hidden away...

I've been meaning to post this photo from July. No story behind it; I just think it's cool.

So far today, the following have crossed my browser: Donald Trump's campaign actually did set up a policy office, but after the convention most of them quit. Jonathan Chait thinks Matt Lauer completely sucked at the policy debate last night; Josh Marshall thinks he really didn't. The Economist's Schumpeter column has taken up the plight of us introverts in the workspace. Nature explains how to raise super-smart children. Back to the mines...

It's fascinating how working from home doesn't seem to give me more time to, you know, work. So these have backed up on me, and I hope to read them...someday: Simple Talk has a (year-and-a-half-old) article on MongoDB vs. Azure Document DB. UTA professor John Traphagan worries about America's cult of ignorance. Washington Monthly's Paul Glastris bemoans how the press is making the Clinton Foundation in to the new Benghazi. Fallows' 95th Trump Time Capsule entry points out the simple logic of Trump...

It turns out, no one wants to buy ugly big houses in the far suburbs. This apparently comes as a shock to their owners: The McMansion style, built between 2001 and 2007 and averaging 3,000 to 5,000 square feet, lacks the appeal with today's buyers compared to old vintage homes or large freshly built homes. The realization is especially hard on homeowners trying to sell because when they bought the giant homes in the early 2000s, they thought of them as great investments, Feinstein said. Then, the idea...

"...people do not relate guns with gun crime."—The American President And here in Chicago, where we lost more than one lawsuit over our attempts to get guns off the streets, we've had more murders this year than New York and Los Angeles combined. Thirteen people died this weekend alone: Thirteen people were shot to death in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend as the city logged its 500th homicide of the year. Thirty-one of the 65 people shot over the long weekend were wounded between 6 a.m. Monday and 3...

On my trip home from Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, I came across this lovely girl at the MSP airport: Didn't get to say hi, but ain't she sweet?

From yesterday's Times: you know how global warming is "just a theory?" Not anymore.

The results are in for meteorologcial summer 2016, and it was, in fact, really warm and soggy in Illinois. Chicago's average temperature of 23.5°C was 1.4°C above the 1980-2010 normal. That period was the warmest in history, however, so the summer that just ended Wednesday was Chicago's 18th warmest in recorded history, putting it at the 88th percentile. Did I mention wet? For June through August, we got 338.8 mm of precipitation, a damp 32.8 mm above normal—not a record, but still very squishy. Oh...