Covered this week; After a long healthy life, bookkeeper of Auschwitz dead at 96… Jake Arrieta says goodbye to Chicago… His mind roamed the cosmos, Stephen Hawking dead at 76… The tragic story behind Tetris… For the men and women who use the Deep Space Network to talk to the heavens, failure is not an option… When times got tough, early humans got craftier, more social, and eventually brainier… WLUP-FM 97.9 has switched to a Christian pop format…
March 12, 2018
Oskar Gröning, an unassuming onetime corporal in Hitler’s Waffen SS who became known as the bookkeeper of Auschwitz, one of the very last Germans to face war-crime charges arising from the Holocaust, has died. He was 96.
March 13, 2018
The Phillies will hold a press conference at 9AM this morning to introduce Jake Arrieta. Before he departed for Clearwater, however, Arrieta penned a nice farewell to Chicago, where he plied his trade for the past four and a half seasons. Like, he literally penned it, in pretty nice handwriting.
March 14, 2018
Stephen W. Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
March 15, 2018
“While his friend and former business associate Pajitnov was beginning a new chapter in his life which would bring the wealth and recognition he had been so cruelly denied following the initial success of Tetris, Pokhilko’s story was about to come to an abrupt and tragic end. On the night of September 21st, 1998, Pokhilko used a hammer and hunting knife to murder his wife Elena while she slept. He then killed his 12-year-old son Peter using the same tools. Pokhilko then slit his own throat with the knife and was found by the police on the floor of his son’s bedroom.” A sad, sad story…
March 16, 2018
“The heart of the Deep Space Network started beating on Christmas Eve 1963, when JPL confirmed their long-term intentions of sending missions into deep space. It hasn’t been turned off since. Its dishes, operators, and radio astronomers around the world have worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the past 54 years. The DSN has many vital roles, but one of its biggest is to serve as the communication link between Earth and its robotic emissaries in deep space — anything from the moon and beyond. Every image we’ve ever received from deep space, every relay of scientific data, even those famous words the Eagle has landed, was collected by the dishes of the Deep Space Network. (In addition to being a vital communication link, the DSN also tracks potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, monitoring around 100 each year.)”
March 17, 2018
“Three new studies suggest that early humans in East Africa started doing much more complex things—making more sophisticated tools, trading with neighboring groups for better stone, and maybe even using symbols to communicate—in order to survive rapid climate shifts 320,000 ago. Those findings may support the theory that bigger social networks, more complicated tool-making technology, and symbolic thinking helped drive early humans to evolve larger brains by the Middle Pleistocene, around 200,000 years ago.”
March 18, 2018
‘The Loop’ is gone, stations are bankrupt and Chicago radio is struggling to stay relevant in the digital age.
