Going with someone who’s more than 16 years older or younger? According to the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority’s “Research Bulletin” (March), the annual rate of homicides in Chicago from 1965 to 1996 among couples of the same age was 5.25 per 100,000 couples. When the woman was 16 or more years older than the man it was 21.41, and when the man was 16 or more years older than the woman it was 23.99.
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“The reasons behind the climatic stability that gave birth to the rise of agriculture and civilization remain elusive,” according to a University of Chicago Chronicle article on climatologist Ray Pierrehumbert (April 17). He’s disappointed that federal policy makers are paying little attention to strange blips in the ancient climate record, such as the “Younger Dryas cool event” 10,000 years ago, when postglacial warming in Europe was suddenly interrupted. “In as little as perhaps 10 years,” says Pierrehumbert, “the whole planet reverted to nearly full glacial conditions. It stayed there for maybe a thousand years, then [the temperature] popped back up and resumed its rise into the Holocene.” Computer simulations on which climate predictions are based have failed to reproduce this change.
Where all the roads are above average. In May the Road Information Program in Washington, D.C., issued a report, “Keep Both Hands on the Wheel,” that’s evidently designed to promote increased highway spending. It uses Federal Highway Administration data to claim that of the major roads and highways in Chicago, 38 percent are “good,” 42 percent “acceptable,” and 20 percent “unacceptable”–placing us slightly above the U.S. averages of 32, 43, and 25. The pavements were graded using “the International Roughness Index.” The roughest roads are said to be in Los Angeles and San Jose (67 percent unacceptable), the smoothest in Phoenix (0 percent unacceptable) and Atlanta (2 percent).
