Events

Oops: The cause of the communications equipment problem that caused a United Airlines flight out of O'Hare International Airport to make an unscheduled stop in Toronto this week was the pilot's spilled cup of coffee, Canadian officials said. The flight to Frankfurt, Germany was diverted after the pilot dumped a cup of coffee on the plane's communication's equipment. The unwanted liquid triggered a series of emergency codes, including one for a hijacking, according to Transport Canada, the agency that...

I've just gotten a reply from the Duke University registrar's office in response to my question: During the CCMBA, our advisers told us that our degrees would be conferred on 30 December 2010. ACES[1], however, still lists us as "active in program." How will we get official notification that we’ve earned our MBAs? The registrar's reply: Thank you for your email. We do not add the degree to your record until the University Trustees meet to officially confer the degrees. They generally meet in mid-January...

The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee is bankrupt: On the first anniversary of his installation, Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki announced Tuesday afternoon that the archdiocese will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Listecki said the move was necessary to fairly compensate victims and continue the "essential ministries" of the church, and urged the faithful not to blame the victims. Yes, Archbishop, blaming the children that priests raped for the Church passing the criminals around...

I admit that phrase doesn't have as much pull with Orthodox Jews as it might with other religious groups. Still, the story of an Orthodox couple who don't accept that they're divorced even though they have a perfectly valid divorce under state law encapsulates much of what frustrates me about fundamentalists: The Friedman case has become emblematic of a torturous issue in which only a husband can "give" a get. While Jewish communities have historically pressured obstinate husbands to give gets, this was...

No, I'm not making a dig about the Republican Party. Wired has a story this month about the quiet increase in AI happening all around us: Today's AI bears little resemblance to its initial conception. The field’s trailblazers in the 1950s and '60s believed success lay in mimicking the logic-based reasoning that human brains were thought to use. In 1957, the AI crowd confidently predicted that machines would soon be able to replicate all kinds of human mental achievements. But that turned out to be...

The fight continues today over whether Rahm Emanuel meets Chicago's residency requirements. Of course he does: he always intended to return to Chicago after finishing his service with the Federal Government, which makes him prima facie a Chicago resident. But don't take my word for it; let Cecil Adams explain it: Let's review. There are two laws applying to Rahm's situation. My friend Greg Hinz says one is a city law and one is a state law. Not so — they're both state laws. If you read only the first...

It turns out, December was a lot colder (relatively) than the rest of 2010: So after nine months of above-average temperatures, including three in the top-10 warmest in recorded history, we got December, in the top decile of coldest months. I'm happy about the last two days when we had a brief, spring-like spell of 10°C temperatures, but wow, what a tease.

Happy new year, Chicago; winter's back:

My year in numbers: Air miles flown: 66,674 Flight segments: 50 (Of those, arriving or departing O'Hare: 43) Countries visited: 7 (UK, India, Japan, China, Finland, Russia, Estonia) Hours working for pay: 1,488 Hours working for free: 128 Hours working for school: 848 Hours walking Parker: 146[1] Blog postings: 398 Photos taken: 4,633 CDs purchased: 12 Books read: 51 Movies watched: 61 (In theaters: only 8, sadly) But really, the only statistic that matters is: Duke MBAs earned: 1 [1] He got much more...

The last Kodachrome processing machine is gone: In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced [to Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas], transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of...