Chicago has had the longest streak of above-normal daily temperatures in any November since records have been kept:

The last day of November will see Chicago's 27th record-setting consecutive day with above-normal temperatures. Warmer readings are likely Tuesday as southwesterly winds and abundant sunshine allow afternoon high temperatures to approach and even exceed 50 degrees at many observation points around the metro area. A cold front should pass through Chicago early Wednesday, followed by a sudden turn to colder weather with falling temperatures.

In practice, this means that November felt like October, which, because of the 20 days of below-normal temperatures that month, felt like November. The forecast calls for a normal December, and who-knows-what in 2010.

Tomorrow we look forward to the correction: after the day's high of 11°C at midnight, a slow slide to -2°C before the snow pushes in on Wednesday. Yummy.

Why it's important to get your scanner settings correct, after the jump.

The bed is just a suggestion, apparently:

I did, in fact, fly yesterday. As usual, here's the Google Earth track.

It looks like I might fly this afternoon:

I've had to postpone my annual flight review four times because of weather. Finally, today, the forecast calls for what you see above: clear skies, light winds, cold temperatures. (It's 0°C this morning.)

As usual, the primary color is gray:

There's a rumor we will have sunlight tomorrow. Unconfirmed.

Pilot and author James Fallows is thankful for the reasonable and minimal changes to New York City airspace the FAA announced last week:

When regulators and security officials address a problem through minimal rather than excessive rule-setting and interference or panicky over-reaction, that is worth our thankfulness too. Building toward a crescendo of things to be thankful for at this time of year.

By the way, it's a very fun trip for private pilots:

(From a flight I took in March 2000.)

Not Always Right, vigniettes that demonstrate how customer stupidity is an absolute limit on customer service:

Me: "Thank you for calling ***. How may I help you today?"

Caller: "I'm having problems with my computer and–"

(Suddenly, what sounds like an air raid siren sounds off in the background.)

Me: "Ma'am, I apologize. I was unable to hear what you said."

Caller: "Stupid tornado warnings! They always make it hard to talk on the phone."

Me: "Oh...should I let you go?"

Caller: "Nah. This happens all of the time."

(In addition to the siren, I hear a door slam and the sound of someone else entering the room. I hear a male voice who I guess is the caller's husband.)

Caller's husband: "D*** it woman, are you crazy?! Get to the basement!"

Caller: "Oh, I guess I should go..." *hangs up*

There are 275 more pages of them. Lovely.

Carl Kasell is retiring December 30th:

Kasell will, however, continue as official judge and scorekeeper of the Chicago Public Radio-produced quiz program, "Wait Wait … Don't Tell Me!," "the show that turned him from a newsman into a rock star," as noted in a memo to staff Monday from David Sweeney, NPR's managing editor for news, and Margaret Low Smith, its vice president of programming.

Sigh.

The Chicago Tribune today has an in-depth article about the misuse of autism research in therapy:

In his letter, obtained by the Tribune, [Florida family physician Dr. Dan] Rossignol justified the unorthodox treatment in part by writing that "a recent study out of Johns Hopkins has shown that children with autism have evidence of neuroinflammation on autopsy and (cerebral spinal fluid) evaluations."

It was [Dr. Carlos] Pardo's study.

Rossignol did not mention that Pardo's team had written in its online primer, using capital letters for emphasis, that intravenous immunoglobulin "WOULD NOT HAVE a significant effect" on what they saw in the brains of people with autism.

"THERE IS NO indication for using anti-inflammatory medications in patients with autism," the team wrote.

There's a word for doctors who offer treatments to desperate people without any evidence that the treatments will work. Or, to put it another way, if it walks like a duck...

I have some experience dealing with the allure of long-shot treatments for diseases that no one actually understands. Fortunately my mother was a solidly rational person, so when she volunteered for an experimental treatment, she understood the possibility—one in three, in fact—that she would only get a placebo, and the bigger possibility that the drug wouldn't work anyway. And the experiment was conducted by an actual science team with actual experimental methods and an actual study-review board.

Quacks are dangerous because desperate people don't usually think rationally. Undergoing dangerous, not to mention costly, treatments that come from shaky foundations and incomplete research do far more harm than good. The hope these treatments bring has a cost that many families don't understand until, much later, they regain their rationality. Then they find that only the quacks have really benefitted.

From reader DW, a Durex commercial not likely to run in Alabama (obviously after the jump)...

Field trip to Noethling Park (a.k.a. Wiggly Field) today, with a ball and a Chuck-It:

IBM has created a supercomputer with more cerebral capacity (as measured by neurons and synapses) than a housecat:

The simulator, which runs on the Dawn Blue Gene /P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144TB of main memory, simulates the activity of 1.617 billion neurons connected in a network of 8.87 trillion synapses. The model doesn't yet run at real time, but it does simulate a number of aspects of real-world neuronal interactions, and the neurons are organized with the same kinds of groupings and specializations as a mammalian cortex. In other words, this is a virtual mammalian brain (or at least part of one) inside a computer, and the simulation is good enough that the team is already starting to bump up against some of the philosophical issues raised about such models by cognitive scientists over the past decades.

...[B]uilding a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn't mean that you'll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don't understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don't understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.

On the other hand, I've met a number of cats in my day, and as cute as I think they are...do your really need that much computing power to outsmart one? I've seen gerbils do it.

After two hours of classes this morning, both of which reminded me I need to study more, what better way to recover than with another Parker puppy video?

The bed, by the way, lasted about four days. He shredded the thing like a Cuisinart.

My cousin sent me this example of...something...but I couldn't stop laughing:

You think he's cute now? This is Parker at 12 weeks, just a couple days after I adopted him:

I don't know where this came from originally, but...well, look:

(Full size after the jump.)

From the Economist's Gulliver blog:

The Germans said in a letter to the Dubai-based carrier that under European law it was not allowed “to engage in price leadership” on routes from Germany to non-EU locations. Emirates, which condemned the decision as “commercially nonsensical”, responded by raising prices by 20% on some routes.

Andrew Parker of Emirates told the Financial Times, "We are adamant this is selective and clearly an attempt by Lufthansa [Germany's national carrier] to pursue Emirates versus a legitimate policy."

Yes, but on the other hand, it would not surprise me to learn that Emirates had priced the seats as a loss-leader to undercut its competitors, including Lufthansa. Regardless, this seems a good example of the African proverb, "When elephants wrestle, the grass suffers."

At this writing, a 7-day advance, Saturday-to-Thursday (discount) business class ticket from Frankfurt to Dubai was €2,245 on Emirates and €2,954 on Lufthansa. I can see why Lufthansa (and the German goverment) might suspect anti-competitive behavior...but still, raising prices for everyone doesn't seem sporting.

Of course we knew Bill O'Reilly didn't care about the Constitution, but it's refreshing to hear him admit it:

Silly me for forgetting that U.S. citizens need visas to visit India. (I'm usually more up on those things.) So yesterday I got mine, for the CCMBA Delhi residency.

Color me impressed. Travisa, the company that the Indian government employs to handle their visa processing, had me in and out in 15 minutes to drop off my application, then sent me a text the same afternoon letting me know my passport had come back, then had me in and out in 90 seconds in the afternoon. Total time spent getting the visa, including filling out the application: about 2½ hours, of which almost 2 hours was spent on buses getting to and from the Travisa office.

I sincerely hope (without much confidence) that China and Russia make it similarly easy.

You should see him after I've been gone a week. This is Parker after three days of boarding:

While the Burj Dubai will likely remain the tallest building in the world for a long time, the rankings of the next few buildings on the "world's tallest" list got shuffled today when the organization that ranks them changed the definition a bit:

The old standard was that a skyscraper's height was determined by calculating the distance from the sidewalk outside the main entrance to the building's spire or structural top.

The new standard is that height is measured from "the lowest, significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance" to the top.

This means that Trump Tower, Chicago, moved up to 6th place, and some of the other "official" heights got jiggled a bit. The new rankings as of January (when Burj Dubai opens) are:

1. Burj Dubai, U.A.E., 818 m
2. Taipei 101, Taiwan, 508 m
3. Shanghai World Financial Center, China, 492 m
4. Petronas Towers 1, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, 452 m
5. Petronas Towers 2, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, 452 m
6. Sears Willis Tower, Chicago, 442 m
7. Trump Tower, Chicago, 423 m
8. Jin Mao Building, Shanghai, China, 421 m
9. Two International Financial Center, Hong Kong, 415 m
10. CITIC Plaza, Guangzhou, China, 390 m

Notice that all but two of the entrants in the list are in Asia, the exceptions being within five blocks of each other right here in Chicago. Still, it's sad to see the Hancock Center, Empire State Building, and a few others I could name, missing from the top-10 list.

Reader EB has passed along Travel & Leisure's "World's Scariest Runways," including one of my favorites, Princess Juliana Airport in Sint Maarten:

Why It’s Harrowing: The length of the runway—just 2,180 m—is perfectly fine for small or medium-size jets, but as the second-busiest airport in the Eastern Caribbean, it regularly welcomes so-called heavies—long-haul wide-body jetliners like Boeing 747s and Airbus A340s—from Europe, which fly in improbably low over Maho Beach and skim just over the perimeter fence.

Today I had scheduled my annual flight review (required by my flight club—the FAA requires a review only every other year), but with 28 km/h direct crosswinds gusting to 48 km/h, I used the time-honored safety procedure called "staying on the ground."

Andrew Sullivan has a recap of the top 30:

Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor.

Palin lied when she denied that Wasilla's police chief and librarian had been fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day.

Palin lied when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not endangered; in fact, email correspondence between those scientists showed the opposite.

Palin lied when she claimed to be unaware of a turkey being slaughtered behind her during a filmed interview; in fact, the cameraman said she had picked the spot herself, while the slaughter was underway.

Palin lied when she denied having rejected federal stimulus money; in fact, she continued to accept and reject the funds several times.

And many, many more. This is the opposition party's de facto leader.

This is about the coolest aviation-related thing I've seen in years.

Two more photos, one of London and one of Dubai. Guess which is which:

It's sad when a trusted companion dies. Like my poor, inoffensive laptop, which blew out its monitor at Boston Logan airport two weeks ago.

I would rather not have just ordered a new computer to replace it. I will try to get the old laptop's monitor fixed, but the time, effort, and expense involved almost don't justify it. Everything else still works just fine; in fact, I'm using it now with an external monitor. In order to get it fixed I'd need to hand it over to strangers for an unknown length of time, which means removing all the security features, encryption, and data from the thing—a process that would require a complete hard drive wipe and then take hours to restore when I get it back.

(If that seems over the top, then you don't understand computer security.)

This brings me to the conundrum I hope I've resolved appropriately. My current laptop is a Dell Latitude D620, which replaced a Latitude D610, which replaced a Latitude D600. All three share parts, spare batteries, media bay devices, power supplies, etc., meaning I have quite a collection of Latitude D600-series peripherals.

Only, Dell no longer makes 600-series laptops. The last model in the series, the D630, they discontinued a few months ago. The logical replacements are the E5400 and E6400 models, which have similar characteristics but brand-new chassis that don't support my existing 600-series parts.

At this writing Dell had five D630s left in their factory outlet store, where they sell refurbished and scratch-and-dent leftovers. They have a ton of refurbished E6400s, though, for about $50 more.

Thus, the conundrum: buy the discontinued model for which I have all those parts, or go to the new series.

What to do?

The Duke CCMBA has a novel structure that includes two courses that spread out across five of the six terms. One of these, "Cultures, Civilization, and Leadership," aims to give us the context and a set of tools to deal with the myriad cultures we encounter during the program and after. The class requires us to compose a "cultural disconnect" essay each term, which the rest of the class, rather than the professors, evaluates.

Here's mine for Dubai, after the jump.

Another day, another trip to Heathrow. I picked the late-afternoon flight back to O'Hare instead of the mid-afternoon flight, because I thought I could sleep in to speed along my re-adjustment to Chicago time. No such luck. So off I go, having woken up at 6:30 GMT, looking forward to driving home from O'Hare at 2:00 GMT tomorrow morning.

There has to be an easier way...

Actually, London ties for second with New York and San Francisco. Here follow some reasons. First, Golden Square in the West End:

(More after the jump.)

Remember how I mentioned packing for two out of the three climates I expected to encounter on this trip? I should note that I expected London to be warmer than Chicago. I also expected that I would only be outside in Chicago traveling from the O'Hare tram to my car, and my car to my apartment.

I'm debating finding a wollens store and buying a good, heavy, Scottish sweater.

Our next residency lets me do the same thing only moreso, when I get to go from Chicago to Delhi, India, at the end of January. At least I'll have a heavy coat, gloves, and a hat with me on the trip. One of my classmates mentioned how cold Delhi gets in winter, but I think she meant "relative to summer" and not "relative to what anyone else would consider cold."

This isn't a complaint, of course. In Chicago, if you complain about any temperature warmer than, say, -20°C, you're just whining. So I'm not complaining. I'm just acknowledging that I'm dressed inappropriately for the weather.

Bonus photo from half an hour ago. I'm definitely not in Dubai anymore:

I've stopped in London for a day and a half to get my bearings and ease the transition back to real life. Also because it was less expensive than changing my return flight to the U.S. or staying one more night in Dubai.

Some observations:

• This isn't your granddad's British Airways. The flight from Dubai landed early, and the flight's bags got to the carousel before the passengers. Yes, you say, because British immigration takes forever. No! I say, because from the plane stopping at the gate (in their spanking-new Terminal 5) to baggage claim took me 20 minutes. You can't even get from the gate to immigration at O'Hare Terminal 5 that fast.
• While walking around South Kensington last night, I heard a weird snapping sound across the street from me. It turned out a fox was trying to remove a windshield wiper from a car. I must have spooked it because it jumped off the car and scooted into a nearby shrubbery when I looked at it. South Kensington is right smack in London's Zone 1—equivalent (in many ways) to Lincoln Park in Chicago, or the West Village in New York. You don't expect to see foxes in dense residential neighborhoods just like you don't expect to find coyotes in the drink cooler at a downtown Chicago Quizno's.
• In Dubai you might see a shawerma restaurant next to a Lebanese restaurant, both with Arabic signs. In London last night I saw a shawerma place next to a Lebanese place, both with Arabic signs, but with a wine shop between them. That you don't see in Dubai.
• Right now it's 34°C in Dubai, 4°C in London, and 14°C in Chicago. Good thing I packed for two out of three climates.

I am now off to explore this area of London, once I work out what day, time, and month it is.

The second CCMBA residency ended officially about an hour ago, so all that remains is the drinking. And the packing. And the flying to London and thence Chicago, and not having a functioning laptop for either flight.

One last photo for today, then on to other (if not better) things. I mentioned the Burj Dubai earlier, with factual comparisons to other tall buildings. I neglected to mention that it simply doesn't seem that tall, because it tapers to such a thin profile.

Last night, on the way to the desert dinner, I finally saw it from a perspective that convinced me, yes, it's really bloody tall:

(Larger photo after the jump.)

The good news: our professor extended the deadline for our Cultural Disconnect paper until tomorrow. The bad news: tomorrow at 6am. This is almost a distinction without difference, some of us muttered, and it means that I will probably submit the paper at 12:05 instead of 11:55.

While I'm doing that, you can see more photos. First, our hotel and its sister building:

(More after the jump.)

Mostly photos today, because I have an economics assignment due before I can get some desperately-needed sleep.

Today we did our Culture Dash (see the entry about the deliverable) through some of the same Dubai streets I walked just yesterday. Some highlights: first, Dubai Creek, with an abra (commuter flatboat) in the foreground and an Airbus 330 taking off in the background:

(More after the jump)

After a two-hour walk in the 34°C heat, I actually feel much better. (People who know me can feel free to express surprise and alarm.)

As I mentioned yesterday, spending too much time in a hotel depresses the life out of me. When will I ever again visit Dubai? Probably never. Since the hotel has gone to great lengths to make itself indistinguishable from any other similar hotel in the world, I fled the official corporate tours and hopped the Dubai Metro for Deira, the old part of the city.

Sadly for my scrap-book, and despite having my good camera, I spent nearly the whole time experiencing a place unlike any I'd ever seen rather than photographing it. The best part: a delicious one-dirham loaf of flat bread I bought from a "bakery" that consisted of a guy sitting cross-legged next to a small oven in a shop that couldn't have been two meters on each side. One dirham.

I did get some photos; here are two:

(More after the jump.)

Some people might enjoy a week in a five-star hotel where the weather is warm and the beaches are only 10 minutes away. I might, too, if I had time to leave the hotel.

Each residency, we have to write a "cultural disconnect" blog post describing an incident within the local culture that resulted from a disconnect between the cultures. For example, in London a student wrote about making a joke in an elevator that caused his American classmates to laugh out loud but the English people nearby to flee. He compared his personal communication style to the typical English style and analyzed the interaction using cultural and interpersonal-assessment tools the course has taught us. It wasn't as dry a paper as my description makes it seem, and since the professor singled it out the top paper, it was worth reading.

Since the only Emiratis I've met in five days have been the public speakers Duke brought in, and since I've only actually gotten a chance to leave the hotel twice, I think today I may skip the official corporate visit to Nakheel and instead go into the Deira neighborhood, where I hope to find people who actually live in Dubai.

I have a lot of impressions already of the city, which will take me a couple of weeks to fully process, but none of these thoughts have any data about living in Dubai supporting them.

Dubai has tall buildings. Many of them. Like our hotel, the Jumeirah Emirates Towers:

The 51-story hotel is 309 m tall, about the height of the Chrysler Building.

But that's not the tallest building here. No, from my hotel window I can see this (after the jump)...

Is anyone surprised that Hamid Karzai, who brazenly stole the election in Afghanistan not too long ago, managed to get rid of the constitutionally-required runoff scheduled for this week?

It really makes you wonder what we're fighting for over there.

Now that I have a functioning monitor once again, I can post a few photos.

Despite American's mess-up with my seat assignments, a lovely British Airways flight attendant found an empty upper-deck window seat, so I did, in fact, get to have a total aviation-nerd-heaven trip....

(Photos after the jump.)

When they ask why I missed a guest speaker and an alumni panel discussion, I will tell them about the lovely donation I'm making on Sunday. What donation? Why, a brand-new 50 cm widescreen monitor I bought this afternoon at the Dubai Mall:

And why did I buy this monitor for AED 449? Because the one built into my laptop looked like this...(after the jump).

My laptop monitor has horked.

On the way over to Dubai, while hanging out at Logan, the monitor went from normal to slightly magenta and missing every fourth column of pixels. This did not make me happy.

Finally today I had the opportunity to connect the laptop to an overhead projector, which showed it has a fully-functioning video chip. This means that the problem is either in the LCD monitor itself or its connection to the motherboard, neither of which I can fix. So, the Duke IT folks have gone after a loaner external monitor from the hotel, but I may have to duck out this afternoon to get one at the local mall. Not that I'd rather spend $50 on food or souvenirs, of course. And not that I didn't want to get a new laptop in general. (Repairing this kind of problem can cost almost as much as a new laptop, believe it or not.)

Worse things have happened. The laptop still has all its other parts, for example. And I remembered to pack ties this time.