Events

I just got some great news that, unfortunately, is embargoed possibly for a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

American Airlines is changing the way it apportions miles and awards tickets. As predicted, they're moving to a dollars-per-mile system that rewards travelers for spending more money on the airline. Instead of just needing 50,000 miles to get to Platinum, you also need 6,000 elite qualifying dollars. They're also adding a new level, Platinum Pro, at 75,000 elite-qualifying miles, which would have helped me more than once. In all, the system seems fair, and pretty much everyone new it was coming. I'll be...

Richard North Patterson, writing in Huffington Post, outlines one more time how Donald Trump's obvious personality disorder disqualifies him from political office of any kind: There is only one organizing principle which makes sense of his wildly oscillating utterances and behavior - the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder. The Mayo Clinic describes it as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of...

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...