The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Why we still need humanities degrees, Tech Forum edition

I'm in Phoenix for my company's Tech Forum, where all the technology professionals come together for a few days of panel discussions and heavy drinking networking events. This morning's lineup, including the keynote speaker, emphasized to me the dangers in the United States' declining ability to teach kids English and history.

I will have more details later, but for now I'll mention these three things. First, if you show the ubiquitous graph of the growing gap between productivity and wages that the US and UK have experienced since the mid-1970s and blame technology for this gap, I'm going to point you to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the history of capitalism as possibly contributing factors. I mean, there was a similar wage-productivity gap in the southern US from about 1800 to 1865, which technology certainly made possible, but ultimately public policy had a lot more to do with it.

Second, if you present your company's most exciting new AI technology, and someone in the audience asks you if you can show some non-scripted input, saying "no" calls your entire presentation into question. But that's OK; it was already the most boring presentation on an exciting topic I'd seen in years, so I the guy may have challenged them to go off-script with less-than-honorable intentions.

Finally, to the junior developer presenting for the first time to other professionals: if your slide has content on it obviously copied and pasted from the previous slide, your colleagues will forgive you with a little razzing. If you then cannot for the life of you figure out what the content should be, your colleagues—particularly the more senior ones—will think you've blown off your homework and as a consequence your presentation has wasted their time. Because what am I learning from you anyway, if you have not learned it yourself?

What does this have to do with humanities education? I guarantee all of these presenters were engineers without much history or English study, and their lack of breadth showed.

Next up: the "Sonora Desert Hike" experience, with 45 of my best friends. It's cool and cloudy right now so I anticipate I will enjoy it immensely.

Phoenix

I'm in the desert southwest for a company event. They gave me this (East) view:

Since I last visited Phoenix in 2015, they've added a light rail system. It got me from the baggage retrieval carousel at the airport to the hotel (which is by the convention center, pictured above) in 32 minutes, which I appreciate.

The first airplane they had us on to get here broke, so I got to Phoenix two hours later than planned, which I did not appreciate.

I've got nothing scheduled for the next two hours so I'm going to explore. Unlike the 39°C that baked my last visit, right now it's about 22°C and pleasant, and I need 3,000 more steps for today.

Scott Adams' career approaching Schwartzchild radius

The unfunny cartoonist answered a few questions from the Post:

“I shook the box intentionally. I did not realize how hard I shook it,” he told The Washington Post via text.

Adams tells The Post that his remarks that day were intended to be hyperbole, while also contending that he was responding to a larger sociopolitical narrative. He does not apologize for what he said in the episode — viewed more than 360,000 times — though he asserts that he disavows racism. Meanwhile, on a follow-up “Real Coffee” podcast, he called both White people and the press “hate groups.”

“Only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me (for out-of-context news of course),” Adams tweeted Thursday. “Social media and banking unaffected. Personal life improved. Never been more popular in my life. Zero pushback in person. Black and White conservatives solidly supporting me.”

We have yet to see whether Adams' financial acumen has the same results as his cultural sensitivity. He reports his income has collapsed, but he did make a lot of money back when he wrote funny cartoons.

It's sad, really, but I did tell you so.

Art History Brewing, Geneva

Welcome to stop #82 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Art History Brewing, 649 W. State St., Geneva
Train line: Union Pacific West, Geneva
Time from Chicago: 72 minutes (Zone H)
Distance from station: 1.0 km

Art History Brewing opened in the summer of 2020, a few months after their planned March 15th opening (oops). They got through the pandemic in part by brewing for Hopleaf, the excellent Belgian-inspired restaurant less than a kilometer from my house. But for whatever reason, none of their beers exactly knocked my socks off. Plus, I really didn't like the brewery's location in a strip mall along the stroad that cuts through one of the cutest small cities in Illinois.

I wound up trying five beers, because I actually couldn't finish one of the ones you see above. The Gravitace Pils (5.1%, 38 IBU) was pretty good: not too malty, good hop balance, clean and refreshing, something I would order again. I also liked the ESB (5.3%), which tasted like it came straight from London. But the Isla New England IPA (7.2%, 18 IBU) just didn't work for me. It was way too sweet, with a bizarre banana note thanks to the isoamyl acetate left over from the brewing process. The Ceres American Pale (7.3%, 65 IBU) was like whiplash after the Isla, with huge hops and a bitter finish that I liked, but wouldn't make it my go-to. I tried one more, the Lincoln Highway IPA (5.8%, 40 IBU), that had a good vanilla-malt flavor over a strong hoppy foundation.

I think Geneva is worth the trip, especially the historic district just north of the train station. And I guess I'd go back to Art History, but I probably wouldn't make it past Stockholm's on my way there.

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Yes, unavoidable
Serves food? Pretzels, but BYOF allowed
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Maybe

The Flamingo Incident

The Atlantic's Ross Andersen recaps a mass murder at the Rock Creek Park Zoo in Washington, D.C.:

Tales of fox cunning are as old as culture. Aesop’s foxes were constantly involved in deceptions. In Apache lore, a thieving fox stands in for Prometheus, stealing fire for humans. I imagine that at the zoo, the fox walked back and forth along the flamingo fence, sussing out its vulnerabilities. Tunneling underneath wasn’t practical: A concrete dig barrier extends underground, too deep for a single night’s digging. If the fox tried to chip away at it over several nights, zookeepers would have noticed. Whether out of insight or frustration, at some point in the dark hours before dawn, the fox began to grind the fence mesh between his teeth. Like a spy cutting a circle of glass out of a high-rise windowpane, he was able to chew a softball-size hole in the fence and, with some wriggling, slip through.

Sara Hallager arrived at the Bird House just after 6 o’clock that morning. As the zoo’s head curator for birds, Hallager makes sure to check on the animals first thing when she works the early shift, methodically looking in on the cranes and herons. When she reached the flamingo enclosure, she was alarmed to find herself eye to eye with the fox. Not all foxes react skittishly upon spotting a human, but this one seemed to have consciousness of guilt. “As soon as he saw me, he ran away through the hole in the fence that he had created,” Hallager told me. Any hopes that the fox had just arrived were dashed when she saw that pink-feathered mayhem was strewn across the enclosure’s bare soil and in its shallow pool. “I could already see a large number of dead flamingos,” Hallager said.

Sad to say, it did not end well for the flamingos or for "a fox, but not necessarily the fox." Personally, I'd have rooted for Team Vulpes.

Obscurity Brewing, Elburn

Welcome to stop #81 on the Brews and Choos project.

Brewery: Obscurity Brewing, 113 W. North St., Elburn
Train line: Union Pacific West, Elburn
Time from Chicago: 85 minutes (Zone I)
Distance from station: 1.2 km

Elburn, Ill., is the end of the line for the Union Pacific West line. The station opened in 2006, extending the line past Geneva for the first time since the Chicago & North Western ceased intercity train service in 1971. In fact, when the last C&NW train pulled into Elburn 51 years ago, it stopped right at what is now the Obscurity Brewing Co.

Obscurity opened in the summer of 2020, after I'd already visited Penrose Brewing, at that point the farthest western Brews & Choos stop. They have two notable features: really good BBQ, and lots of honey, which makes sense as they have a sister location just across Main St. that makes mead and honeyed ciders. (Unfortunately, the mead hall only opens after 5pm on Fridays, so I'll have to stop back in Elburn some Saturday or Sunday when the train schedules work out better.)

I ordered a flight of four very different styles and a brisket sandwich. Starting at the top left, I tried the Train with Square Wheels milk stout (5%), a smooth, subtle, chocolatey pour with a clean finish. The American Pilsner (bottom left, 5.2%) would refresh me on a hot day, with its nice balance of malt and hops. The Good Kiss Braggot IPA (top right, 6.5%) had a sweetness I didn't expect and pretty subtle hop notes for an IPA, but I learned that "braggot" means they brewed it with honey. The Launch Juice hazy IPA (bottom right, 6.7%) was my favorite of the four, with nice Citra notes of grapefruit and pear, with a lingering finish and delicious mouthfeel.

I also sampled the Nemesis Cider (not pictured, 5%), which had lots of flavor: honeycrisp apple, pear, and a few other notes, sweet without cloying.

I would go back for the brisket, too.

And I love that they lean into the Metra theme:

Beer garden? Yes
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Yes, unavoidable
Serves food? Really good BBQ
Would hang out with a book? Yes
Would hang out with friends? Yes
Would go back? Yes


Photo: The Elburn Metra station with its one train waiting to head back to Chicago.

Quiet Saturday morning

The storm predicted to drop 100 mm of snow on Chicago yesterday missed us completely. That made my Brews & Choos research a lot more pleasant, though I did tromp all over the place in heavy boots that I apparently didn't need. Of course, had I not worn them, I would now be writing about my cold, wet socks.

So while I'm getting two reviews together for later this week, go ahead and read this:

Finally, author John Scalzi celebrates the 25th anniversary of his domain name scalzi.com, exactly one month before I registered my own. But as I will point out again in a couple of posts later this spring, The Daily Parker started (as braverman.org) well before his blog. Still, 25 years is a long time for a domain to have a single owner.

Use-it-or-lose-it PTO, plus the oncoming storm

My company distributes each employee's paid time off (PTO) by distributing a certain number of hours of per half-month pay period. The hours accumulate in a bank that the employee can tap into at any time. Salaried employees can spend it in half-day increments, making it a straightforward arithmetic problem to see how much time off one has available.

There is, of course, a catch: At some point, you hit your maximum number of PTO hours, and it stops accruing. I will be at that point on the 31st of this month.

So, today, I'm taking a day off, and will use it to perform necessary research for the Brews & Choos Project.

There is, of course, a catch:

Yeah. That crap is slowly moving northeast and looks likely to hit Chicago in a couple of hours.

Well, I'll be on trains for a while, and the places I'm visiting are pretty close to the stations. And I can always adjust the plan on the fly. But it does look like I'll get a bit of snow.

Anyway, look for a couple of Brews & Choos entries this weekend.