Events

Cloudflare explains: BGP stands for Border Gateway Protocol. It's a mechanism to exchange routing information between autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. The big routers that make the Internet work have huge, constantly updated lists of the possible routes that can be used to deliver every network packet to their final destinations. Without BGP, the Internet routers wouldn't know what to do, and the Internet wouldn't work. The Internet is literally a network of networks, and it’s bound together by...

The United States Supreme Court began their term earlier today, in person for the first time since March 2020. Justice Brett Kavanagh (R) did not attend owing to his positive Covid-19 test last week. In other news: The Post, Guardian, and other news outlets have released their stories on the largest document dump ever, which purports to show how the ultra-rich avoid taxation by stashing their money overseas. Indians taking a highly-competitive test to become teachers in the state of Rajasthan paid...

Found at Little Free Library, Magnolia & Leland

The Great Chicago Fire started 150 years ago this coming Thursday. It not only destroyed almost every building in the city, but also it burned up official property records. Even today the consequences linger: Official property deeds stored in the Cook County Courthouse were destroyed when the building went up in flames in October 1871, as were many private records kept at home. Stored on microfilm in filing cabinets at the Cook County Court Archives and in boxes at the archives’ warehouse is a set of...

James Fallows and I share a hatred of the infernal machines: Pound for pound, gallon for gallon, and hour-for-hour, the two-stroke gas powered engines in leaf blowers and similar equipment are vastly the dirtiest and most polluting kind of machinery still in legal use. How can such little engines do so much damage? It’s all about technological progress, and the lack of it: Over the past 50 years, gasoline engines for trucks and automobiles have become so much more efficient that they have reduced most...

Forget the amount (especially because the headlines completely mis-state the value), the "human infrastructure" bill winding through Congress right now matters in all the places it needs to: Over the past few decades there has been a redistribution of dignity — upward. From Reagan through Romney, the Republicans valorized entrepreneurs, C.E.O.s and Wall Street. The Democratic Party became dominated by the creative class, who attended competitive colleges, moved to affluent metro areas, married each...

Chicago finished September with an average temperature of 21.27°C, making it the 5th-warmest on record, and almost tying September 1971's 21.33°C. Meanwhile, the NCDC predicts warmer-than-normal temperatures through the end of next week. This shows one of the ways global warming will actually make Chicago a better place to live. If trends continue, we'll continue to have warmer and wetter winters than the historical norms, at the cost of warmer and drier summers. The downside, of course, is drought, and...