we’ve been meaning to visit the chicago history museum for awhile, and today finally had the time to go. there was a small section devoted to the city’s sports teams, including michael jordan, of course. we gained a better understanding of how the city survived the 1871 ‘great chicago fire’ and then rebuilt and shined in the 1893 world’s fair. a few other tidbits we learned were that the name chicago is from the native word ‘checagou’ which means ‘wild leeks’. it is the birthplace of ‘crate and barrel’ (1961) as well as other items such as the world book encyclopedias, kraft macaroni and cheese, the first ferris wheel and the site of the first nuclear reaction (in fact, right on the field outside our gym at the university of chicago). now we know.

joe’s mom is visiting us for the week. we had some time over the memorial day weekend to bring her for a nice lunch in downtown and see a bit of the city.

a recent skype with the chen’s in nyc with pammy. smile!

we were looking for a place to eat lunch up north one day, and couldn’t help but notice this little restaurant.

joe got an italian beef sandwich and i got a meatball sandwich. the side of onion rings was our serving of vegetable.

mmmm….meat.

Today I came across this fascinating talk on the idea of our society’s “cognitive surplus” by a thinker named Clay Shirky. Here’s one of the many interesting tidbits from his presentation:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred… billion hours, in the U.S. alone… every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

If you have 15 minutes to spare (you’ll get the joke if you watch the video), take a look at it and tell me what you think:

after putting it off for more than a year, i finally went to get an illinois driver’s license. after an early start, we had to drive to the town of niles to find an office that was open on a saturday. it involved a lot of line-ups, sitting, and a written test, but two hours later we left with a brand-new license and a smile on our face.

we also noticed how the secretary of state’s name is always plastered on all the official buildings, which seems like a bit of a hassle for when jesse white quits or retires.

we went to our first ever kentucky derby party, hosted by tom and anne (a born and bred kentuckian). to get into the horse racing spirit, we first watched ’seabiscuit’ and then indulged in various delicious kentucky derby treats, including derby pie and a mint julep drink.

then after an exciting two minutes, Big Brown came in first (tragically, the runner up Eight Belles fractured both of her front ankles at the end of the race and had to be euthanized ). it was a sad end to it all, but still a great party.

the great thing about chicago is that everybody comes here for conferences…which means we get visitors trickling through once in awhile. thanks for visiting renata! goodbye mirko…et en francais?