The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Road trip, by the numbers

There were some unexpected numbers over the Thanksgiving weekend:

  • Trip down: 562 km, 4 hours 57 minutes; trip back: 561 km, 5 hours 53 minutes. We call that effect "Chicago Sunday-evening traffic."
  • Gasoline price: $2.16/gal for 93 octane (which my car requires)—the lowest price I've paid for gas since buying the car, less than half what I paid last Thanksgiving, and in real terms, the lowest price I've ever paid for gas. (In 1989 I once paid $1.11 per gallon, which is $2.17 adjusted for inflation—but that was regular 87-octane fuel.)
  • Steps, Thursday through Sunday: 19,901, giving me my worst Fitbit week ever. (My daily average is around 12,000.)
  • Rainfall: 62 mm, Friday through Sunday, which explains the step deficit.

I also consumed an unusual quantity of potatoes and turkey.

Scratch Beer

I mentioned yesterday that we stopped at Scratch Beer in Ava, Ill., on the recommendation of a local.

It's pretty remote, but worth the trip. They make one barrel of each beer, and when that barrel is empty, it's gone forever. So, yes, we'll have to go back, even though the 561-kilometer trip home took almost 6 hours. At least Scratch is dog-friendly (outside). So maybe the next road trip down there will be when it's warmer.

If it were clear, and dark, and there were no streetlights

...this app might be fun. CityLab explains:

Floating in space among the stars and planets are more than 2,250 satellites and “space junk” traveling at up to 18,000 miles an hour. Some are large enough to be seen with the naked eye—though you’d have to first figure out which ones are within your line of sight.

Luckily, there’s a map for that now, by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo, a graphics engineer at Mapzen who has a knack for turning pure data into mesmerizing visuals (like this one of New York City). His latest project, Line of Sight, traces the orbital path of more than a thousand of those satellites and predicts their current location using open-source data from tracking sites like CelesTrak andSatNogs. Plug in your address (or choose one of the pre-selected cities) to see if there are any satellites—shown as yellow dots—nearby. Or zoom out to watch all the satellites orbit the Earth at once in a dazzling visualization.

His city visualizer is also really cool.