Events

Today is my birthday, which makes this year's Beloit College Mindset List even harder to read: Students heading into their first year of college this year are mostly 18 and were born in 1999. 2. They are the last class to be born in the 1900s, the last of the Millennials --  enter next year, on cue, Generation Z! 11. The Panama Canal has always belonged to Panama and Macau has been part of China. 12. It is doubtful that they have ever used or heard the high-pitched whine of a dial-up modem. 16. They are...

I'll just levee where I foundee.

Jackson Square, New Orleans, where it's currently 32°C:

Yesterday I posted a photo of the hotel I'm staying in. Apparently it caught my eye on my first trip to New Orleans, in December 2003: Also, I didn't really take a lot of photos on the 2003 trip, presumably because the camera (a 1.8 Megapixel Nikon E2100) had limited storage.

I'm taking a couple of days to shadow some friends in New Orleans. It's a nice end to summer: while Chicago already feels like early autumn, here it'll get up to 32°C in a couple of hours. My hotel is historic, and really cute: Updates as events warrant. Brunch first.

Eleven years ago today, Parker came home with me: He's still a brat about photos. This is from earlier this afternoon: Ten years ago I wrote about my first year with him. It's all still true.  

A 1990s study by New York City showed that in-sink garbage disposals punch above their weight in environmental benefits. So why are they so rare in the city? Misconceptions, apparently: The city installed more than 200 of the devices in select city apartments for a 21-month trial run; they then compared apartment units that had disposers with disposer-less units in the same building. Careful analyses from this study and others formed the basis of DEP’s report: the projected impact of citywide disposal...

One week after Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods Market, what have we learned? Mainly that Amazon is great at marketing: Amazon-owned Whole Foods wasted no time in reducing prices on certain food items across the store, including avocados, tomatoes, bananas, ground beef and eggs. A few examples: At a Whole Foods in Evanston, a dozen white eggs went from $3.39 to $2.99; New York strip steak, from $18.99 a pound to $13.99; and organic bananas from 99 cents a pound to 69 cents. But some analysts say the...

More Scotland photos. On the 10th, we visited the Lagavulin Distillery. But we got our first look at it from the ferry two days earlier: Up close, from the ruins of Dunyvaig Castle, it looks like this: And for comparison between the LG G6 and the Canon 7D mark II, here's the camera-phone photo I took at about the same time:

At 8:40 CDT on 31 August 2007, I joined Facebook. And then did nothing with it for several days. I didn't add any Facebook friends until September 4th. My first post, on September 5th at 7:43 CDT, was "in Evanston," which makes more sense when you remember that Facebook used to preface every post with "Nerdly McSnood is...". (This was before Facebook allowed public posts, and there doesn't seem to be any way to change the post's privacy, so if you're not Facebook friends with me you probably can't see...