Events

I'm splitting my time between Chicago and Raleigh lately, and it looks like I'll continue to do so for quite a while. This causes one minor inconvenience: my car doesn't fit in the overhead compartment on a CRJ. (For that matter, an anorexic gerbil won't fit in the overhead compartment on one of those things, but that's another issue.) Chicago, however, is a major city with an extensive public transportation system (no snickering from natives, please). Chicago also has Zipcars, a by-the-hour car-rental...

These are kind of cool: Winston Churchill Avenue, Gibraltar's busiest road, cuts directly across the runway. Railroad-style crossing gates hold cars back every time a plane lands or departs. "There's essentially a mountain on one side of the island and a town on the other," Schreckengast says. "The runway goes from side to side on the island because it's the only flat space there, so it's the best they can do. It's a fairly safe operation as far as keeping people away," he says, "It just happens to be...

You really have them: Technically known as the enteric nervous system, the second brain consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the long tube of our gut, or alimentary canal, which measures about nine meters end to end from the esophagus to the anus. The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system, [says Michael Gershon, chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at New York–Presbyterian...

Bought 19 Nov 2009

I'm not even going to bother explaining this.

I remembered one anniversary on the right day but totally forgot another one: ten years ago January 15th, I passed my private pilot checkride.

My corporation, whose name appears on contracts as "Punzun Ltd., an Illinois corporation doing business as Inner Drive Technology," turns 10 today. No, really. The name Punzun Ltd. (a trademark, by the way) dates back to 21 March 1985, when I dreamed it up while drifting off in Mr. Collins' Algebra class. It is, in fact, the only thing I remember from that class, for which I apologize to Mr. Collins.

What if the stimulus package signed into law a year ago today had actually worked? Let’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let’s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs — employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now. If that had happened, what would the economy look like today? Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the...