Events

Pilot and author Patrick Smith points out that air travel is so much better than it was even 20 years ago, it's hard to see how far we've come: People often talk about a proverbial “golden age” of air travel, and if only we could return to it. That’s an easy sentiment to sympathize with. I’m old enough to recall when people actually looked forward to flying. I remember a trip to Florida in 1979, and my father putting on a coat and tie for the occasion. I remember cheesecake desserts on a 60-minute...

We have a child in the White House. And European leaders are saying they can no longer rely on the United States: Trump’s speech alone is likely a sufficient explanation. But I suspect there’s an additional element. Most of the major European and NATO leaders had already met Trump in Washington – Merkel, May, Gentiloni, Trudeau and others. But I suspect in meeting as a group, over a more extended period and in a context specifically focused on Europe and NATO there was a further realization that what...

Andrew Sullivan's note Friday analyzes the President's trip to the Vatican from a distinctly conservative and Catholic perspective: Trump is not an atheist, confident yet humble in the search for a God-free morality. He is not an agnostic, genuinely doubtful as to the meaning of existence but always open to revelation should it arrive. He is not even a wayward Christian, as he sometimes claims to be, beset by doubt and failing to live up to ideals he nonetheless holds. The ideals he holds are, in fact...

Yesterday's step count did, in fact, reach top-5 numbers: 2016 Jun 16 40,748 2016 Oct 23 36,105 2017 May 27 33,241 2016 Sep 25 32,354 2016 Jun 8 32,315 Today's will not, if only because it looks like rain.

I took a short walk today, from Central Street in Evanston to my house. Totals: 16.37 km, 2:25:29, 8'53" per km, 18,357 steps. It's not as far as my epic 28 km walk last June, but I'll probably do another walk that distance sometime later this year. I mean, why not a 32 km walk? Right. Because my feet hurt. So far today I'm just shy of 30,000 steps. So I'm not quite in the top 5—but I will be if I walk another thousand steps, which seems pretty likely: 2016 Jun 16 40,748 2016 Oct 23 36,105 2016 Sep 25...

British Airways cancelled all of its flights out of its two biggest hubs in London today because of a power-supply failure: The airline hoped to be able to operate some long haul inbound flights on Saturday, landing in London on Sunday, Mr Cruz added. The GMB union has suggested the failure could have been avoided, had the airline not outsourced its IT work. BA refuted the claim, saying: "We would never compromise the integrity and security of our IT systems". All passengers affected by the failure -...

The Microsoft Windows operating system has millions of lines of code maintained by thousands of developers. And in the past three months, Microsoft has moved 90% of its code to the open-source Git version control system: The switch to Git has been driven by a couple of things. In 2013, the company embarked on its OneCore project, unifying its different strands of Windows development and making the operating system a more cleanly modularized, layered platform. At the time, Microsoft was using...

"A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot." —Robert Heinlein, Friday Montana's at-large congressional district will stay Republican after millionaire Greg Gianforte won yesterday's special election by 6 points. This is despite him assaulting a reporter Wednesday afternoon and being charged with the crime: The Republican candidate for Montana’s...

The U.S. Census Bureau yesterday released new estimates showing that Chicago's population declined slightly last year. The deeper numbers are more troubling: According to Alden Loury, director of research and evaluation at the Metropolitan Planning Council, while the degree of black flight from the city has slowed some this decade, it's still averaging about 12,000 a year, based on data from the American Community Survey, also issued by the Census Bureau. Blacks leaving Cook County tended to move either...

Crain's has a 3-part series this week on why Chicago has so much gun violence: So far in 2017, more than 1,200 people have been shot and 220 killed in Chicago. Shockingly, 30 of those deaths were children 18 or younger. As Memorial Day approaches—historically one of the city's most violent weekends—Crain's examines a facet of the issue that isn't often discussed: the psychological reason so many young men in Chicago are pulling the trigger. The sobering statistics suggest that the rate of violence in...