Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Did this again last night.
Another big crowd. This time we started near the front, which made the whole experience better as most of the crashes and sudden stops happened behind us. Also it’s summer, so much of the ride took place when it was light enough to see the sights, including the more attractive female participants…
I went to Key West in late February. We go to Key West figuring that it would be the only place in the US that we were guaranteed some hot weather, because it was a long winter here in the Great Midwest. We flew right into Key West and back out (via Hot ‘Lanta) else I would have tried to hook up with Jonathan down in Florida.
I love the Ocean Key bar. It has everything I am looking for in a bar – a bit of a Tiki theme, it looks right out on the ocean, and it is always hot and warm. Highly recommended.
One of my favorite posts (OK it is a bit strange) is on the relative cost of alcohol when I went to Norway. By contrast, you can get by very cheaply on alcohol and reasonably fine dining down in Key West – these happy hour prices were so low I had to snap a picture. Roughly 1/6 the price per equivalent vs. Norway, for what that’s worth.
Radar was the “Revolution in Military Affairs” in WW2. If you wanted to know the fighting style of a particular military theater in World War 2 (WW2), you have to know the capabilities of the radars the theater had and how the theater was organized to use them. This isn’t just a matter of creating an early warning air defense system, like was used in the Battle of Britain. The far more important and little understood reason is stated in two words — “Operational losses.” The leading killer of aircraft in WW2 was “Operational Losses.” Operational losses are what happen when bad fuel, bad weather, bad parts, bad maintenance and just plain “getting lost” catch up with pilots. Radar as organized & practiced by the Western Allies saved many poor or average pilots that had all of the above happen to them to fight another day and become good pilots. However, when you try and find what radars MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area (SWPA) had in WW2, how and by whom they were used, there is very little in the US Army and US Air Force institutional histories.
The researching of Douglas MacArthur as a “Fighting General” in WW2 means you become used to discovering frustrating dead ends in established narratives. In the case of MacArthur’s radars, it was an exercise in internet searching to gain the understanding that these most important elements of MacArthur’s WW2 fighting style — his Australian and British radars — were designed completely outside the US Military. These radars were either not well documented in the narratives, or if they were, how they were used was classified until as late as the 1990s. Chief among these items from outside the US military were:
1) The Australian Light Weight Air Warning (LW/AW) and Light Weight Ground Control Intercept (LW/GCI) of radars the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and,
2) The British Light Weight (LW) radar, produced in Canada for the US Army Signal Corps as the SCR-602.
Australian Light Weight Air Warning (LW/AW) Mark I Radar Deployed in the SWPA
Michael Skapinker, writing in yesterday’s Financial Times:
A few weeks ago I received an email from a US professor whose dean had reprimanded him for trying to teach his students how to write. The professor, who has been teaching business and law students at some of America’s top universities for 50 years, told an MBA class that clear writing would be essential in their careers.
The consequences of bad writing within a company can also be quite malign. If your proposal for an improvement to the Gerbilator product line is sufficiently confusing, it’s likely nobody is going to bother investing the time needed for all that back-and-forth to understand what you are actually trying to say. More likely, they will choose to devote their attention to someone else’s crystal-clear and well-reasoned proposal to spend the engineering and marketing efforts on something else entirely.
Her proper given name was Myra Maybelle Shirley, later shortened to Belle, and she had a lamentable taste for dangerous men and walking on the far side of the law, which eventually brought her to an untimely grave, murdered by the last in that series of dangerous men. Her career brought considerable embarrassment to an otherwise respectable and law-abiding family, who resided near Carthage, Missouri in the year of her birth, 1848. Her father was a Virginian, a prosperous man, a pillar of the community, and a judge – and she was the only daughter in a family of boys. Her father the judge had her expensively schooled in those arts thought proper for a Victorian-era lady of good family at at the local female seminary, where she excelled in French and in playing the piano. Her older brother Bud, more problematically taught her to ride, to shoot, curse like a trooper and love the out-of-doors. A show-off and a bit of a tomboy – how could an independent and spirited girl with five indulgent brothers be anything else?
