The Daily Parker

My phone, watch, and dog are all recharging right now after Cassie and I walked 9.5 km to the Horner Park DFA and back.

Right now it's officially 30°C with the occasional wind gust at O'Hare, but here in Ravenswood we've got 26°C with a light breeze. So once my watch has fully charged we're going back outside.

And hey, we might see this guy again:

Several people have identified this as a Cooper's Hawk, one of the more common raptors in the Illinois prairies, and I hope a more common visitor to my rabbit-infested neighborhood. Plenty to eat here!

Since I live in a temperate climate, I think about seasons more than my friends who live in, say, San Jose, Calif. This becomes especially pronounced the closer we get to the equinoxes as the change in daylight hours peak then. On my walk with Cassie earlier today, I started thinking about how actually to quantify the lengthening shadows in autumn.

Here, then, is a chart of the position of the sun in Chicago for the first day of each month, along with its equivalent day on the other side of the equinox. For example, today the sun is about 63° above the southern horizon at solar noon—almost exactly the same as on May 1st. This means also that the day has about the same length (14 hours, 2 minutes), and the sun rises and sets in the same parts of the eastern and western skies, respectively.

Using the code I wrote for Weather Now, it took just a couple of minutes to generate the basic data for this chart. It should make sense right away, except for the column marked "Shadow." That's the length of the shadow cast per unit of hight at solar noon. So, for example, today's 63.3° sun angle gave a 10-meter building a shadow almost exactly 5 meters in length. The two days of the year (in Chicago, anyway) when the sun is 45° above the horizon—giving everything a shadow equal to its own height—are March 13th and September 30th.

Enjoy:

Another thing I found interesting: notice how quickly shadows lengthen in the fall and shorten in the spring. That's what I noticed today, in fact: the east-west sidewalks were completely in shadow at noon today. They haven't been since, oh, the beginning of May.

Now, the date pairs should work for any point on earth, but all the other data will change. If you want to see your own location's sunrise and sunset times, go to Weather Now.

I just got back from walking Cassie for about half an hour, and I'm a bit sticky. The dog days of summer in Chicago tend to have high dewpoints hanging out for weeks on end, making today pretty typical.

Our sprint ends Tuesday and I still have 3 points left on the board, so I may not have time to give these more than a cursory read:

• DC Federal judge Tanya Chutkan slapped the XPOTUS with a gag order to protect the witnesses and evidence in one of his criminal trials. Let's see how well that works.
• The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the state's latest firearms regulations, even though the Republicans on the US Supreme Court will likely strike them down.
• Timothy Noah asks a question Paul Krugman has also asked: "why is the Fed so obsessed with 2% inflation?"
• Robert Wright calls 2022 "AI's Oppenheimer moment."
• Does Montana have a workable solution for the housing crisis? I mean, if you can forget the transport policy nightmare in the state...
• Speaking of, Edward Erfurt calls the traffic engineering around the University of Oklahoma's historic Boyd Street entrance "transportation vandalism." This is the same department of transportation, remember, that last year willfully misled the public about a $5 billion freeway expansion nobody wants.
• National Geographic checks in with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation to see if we should worry yet.

Finally, Andrew Sullivan adapts a column he wrote in August 2001 asking, "why can't Americans take a vacation?" One reason, I believe: all the time and money we spend in and on our cars.

In an effort to avoid liability for some things, Uber has decided to enter an entirely new area of potential liability:

Uber is rolling out a new safety feature Wednesday in Chicago and other markets that will allow drivers and riders to record audio during the trip to deter and resolve conflicts.

Once enabled, the safety feature will pop up on the app, giving both the driver and rider an option to hit the record button for all or part of the journey. The completed audio file is encrypted and stored on the user’s smartphone for seven days in the event that either party wants to submit an incident report to Uber.

The rollout was slated to go live in Chicago and remaining U.S. markets in phases beginning Wednesday. Uber users will get an email over the coming days to let them know the recording feature is available. Enabled through the app, riders and drivers will be able to activate the audio recording feature at any time during the trip. The recording will end automatically after the drive is completed.

To assuage privacy concerns, the audio files are encrypted, meaning neither the driver nor the rider can listen to them on their devices. The recording can be decrypted if a rider or driver submits the file as part of a safety report to Uber. As in “Mission: Impossible,” the audio file will self-destruct after seven days if no action is taken.

Whoo boy. Cue the subpoenas for completely unrelated lawsuits, both criminal and civil. And only seven days? That seems way too short to me, and will probably seem way too short to a court.

Plus, as the article reminds us, Illinois is a "two-party" state, meaning both parties to a conversation must consent to a recording of it—sometimes. It's a crime to "surreptitious[ly]" record someone without their consent, but not a crime to do it openly. Sometimes.

I understand why Uber wants to do this. But I also have opinions about Uber's lack of transparency and lack of commitment to adequate cyber security measures in the past. This will be interesting.

Anti-abortion Republicans, having discovered by getting their asses handed to them in multiple referenda, that the majority of Americans don't want to ban the medical procedure, tried a new tactic in Ohio yesterday: make referenda impossible. They failed by a large margin:

Ohio voters rejected a bid on Tuesday to make it harder to amend the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a significant victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled State Legislature from severely restricting the procedure.

Late results showed the measure losing by 13 percentage points, 56.5 percent to 43.5 percent. The roughly 2.8 million votes cast dwarfed the 1.66 million ballots counted in the state’s 2022 primary elections, in which races for governor, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House were up for grabs.

The ballot measure would have required that amendments to the State Constitution gain approval by 60 percent of voters, up substantially from the current requirement of a simple majority. Republicans initially pitched that as an attempt to keep wealthy special interests from hijacking the amendment process for their own gain. The lawmakers voted largely along party lines in May to put the proposal on the ballot.

Ohio resident and author John Scalzi buries Amendment 1 deep:

That Issue 1 is mostly about abortion rights isn’t just speculation; Frank LaRose, Ohio’s current Secretary of State, said the quiet part out loud, saying it’s “100%” about that, because the GOP these days can’t actually stop monologuing about their evil plans. That it would also toss out the possible marijuana legalization initiative for November, and possible future initiatives on things like raising the minimum wage or redoing the frankly ridiculous gerrymandering in the state, or anything else, was just the cherry on top. At the end of the day, the Ohio GOP wanted to make sure their broadly unpopular laws telling people with uteruses they had no control over their own bodies were never challenged.

And it might have worked, too, if the Ohio GOP hadn’t done what shitty people who want to take away rights always do, which was to almost comically overreach.

Basically, the Ohio GOP had to go out of their way to lose some traditionally GOP voters, and managed to do just that.

The blatant dishonesty of the GOP and conservative messaging on Issue 1 is par for the course with their political messaging elsewhere, and it reminds me of two things: The absolute contempt the GOP has for their voters, in that they don’t feel like their voters need or deserve anything close to the truth; and how extremely well-trained GOP voters have become to reject the truth when it is inconvenient for their personal political preferences. As noted before, this particular time, the GOP disinformation regime didn’t work as well as it usually does, and some portion of the usual GOP voters didn’t swallow the bullshit. This will not teach the GOP to back off on the bullshit. It will teach them to shove the bullshit even harder the next time.

Josh Marshall fills in the larger pattern:

The broader electoral question is whether the overwhelming backlash against Dobbs will extend to elections beyond ballot initiatives where abortion is literally on the ballot. There is lots of evidence that abortion rights were a key driver of Democrats’ unexpectedly strong showing in the 2022 midterm, though in the nature of things it’s hard to isolate just what role it played in any particular race.

The challenge for Democrats is simply to align as many elections as possible with the abortion issue and the backlash against Dobbs, especially in governorships and election to Congress. There’s little sign the full electoral potential of the issue has even come close to having been harnessed.

I can't remember who said, "your religion doesn't prohibit me from doing anything; it only prohibits you." It seems like an increasingly pissed-off majority of Americans are gearing up to remind the religious right of this simple truth in the next election.

Strong Towns summarizes an essay by Ivan Illich in which he explains how drivers, and not cars, are the product of the automobile industry. Cars, and car-focused infrastructure, create the problems that car ownership is supposed to solve in the first place:

[Illich] looks at the ratio of time invested to not just miles, but the utility we extract from that investment. If driving around for three hours allows me to travel 15 miles at 30–45 mph and accomplish three errands, Illich would focus less on the mileage and speed and more on the utility: should it really have cost me three hours (not to mention the gas) to accomplish these three errands, or is there a scenario in which I could have accomplished them in one half or one third of that time?

Auto-oriented thinking would focus on the mileage and speed: look at how much faster I can travel! Look at how far I can go! But if that mileage is mostly just a product of land use laws that spread destinations apart, then it’s a deceptive metric and one that traps cities into thinking that adding more car infrastructure is the only solution to any mobility-related challenges. This would be an example of what Illich calls a radical monopoly: a system in which a tool is presented as the solution to a problem that it causes in the first place. In our cities, cars are presented as the solution to sprawl, dangerous roads, and disconnected neighborhoods. But these design patterns exist because they are necessary to mandate the purchase and use of cars.

Real transit innovation would require setting different goals and setting out to solve real problems, not problems created to ensure the purchase of a machine. The goal for local transit systems shouldn't be to cover more speed at a faster distance. That’s suitable for traveling the world, not for running errands. When thinking about local transit systems, the goal should be to give people back their time and empower them to get more done in less of it.

In other words, if you need to own a car because everything you need is too far to walk, and also because your city hasn't got any other transit infrastructure, then car-oriented development patterns become self-reinforcing.

Illich does some other math:

The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

Someday, probably sooner than most Americans think, we're going to have significantly less energy to expend on driving cars. Again, this is why I live in Chicago. And why I have very little sympathy for people who choose to live in Schaumburg.

Every time I perform a major work like a Mozart opera, I'm tired and uncreative for about two days afterward. I often forget this. So yesterday and today are more for recharging than creating, which is fortunate as the story I'm working on at my day job just requires changing a label to a text box and adding a Save button. (I should have all that done in a couple of hours.)

I expect regular posting will resume tomorrow.

i just pushed a new build of Weather Now that corrects a problem no one else knew about in the way it managed time zones. The work took about 3 hours over several days this week, sneaking half an hour here and there between rehearsals, performances, and my day job.

I also worked on some code to interface with my home weather station. I've gotten it to download and parse reports from my Netatmo devices, and to refresh (and securely store) the API access token. I figure it'll take about 3-5 more hours to hook that code into the Azure Functions that download and store weather reports from other sources.

Today, however, I have one more performance of Die Zauberflöte. So...maybe next weekend?

Author Michael Wolff believes the prosecution in all three of the XPOTUS's trials has to climb a steep epistemological hill to secure any convictions:

It is precisely this behavior, unconcerned with guardrails or rules, unmindful of cause and effect, all according to his momentary whim — an overwhelming, almost anarchic instinct to try to invert reality — that prosecutors and much of the political establishment seem to most want to hold him accountable for. The chaos he creates is his crime; there is, however, no statute against upsetting the dependable order. Breaking the rules — often seemingly to no further purpose than just to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or simply an obstreperous child — is not much of a grand criminal enterprise, even though for many, it’s infuriating coming from someone charged with upholding the rules.

His prosecutors will try to use his words against him: among them, his exhortations that arguably prompted the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, his admission — on tape! — that he still had classified documents, his various, half-baked plots about how to game the Electoral College system, his relentless and unremitting insistence that he won his lost election and his comments to his bag man, Michael Cohen, before he paid off Stormy Daniels.

There’s an asymmetric battle here, between the government’s precise and thorough prosecutors and Mr. Trump’s head-smacking gang of woeful lawyers. The absolute ludicrousness and disarray of the legal team defending Mr. Trump after his second impeachment ought to go down in trial history. Similarly, a few months ago, a friend of mine was having a discussion with Mr. Trump about his current legal situation. A philosophical Mr. Trump said that while he probably didn’t have the best legal team, he was certain he had the best looking, displaying pictures of the comely women with law degrees he had hired to help with his cases.

As someone who has studied law, I believe the prosecutors only need to show that the XPOTUS intended the harms he caused, even if he didn't understand them. Regardless, it's clear that he's batshit crazy, and must never hold public office again.

I love it when something passes all the integration tests locally, then on the CI build, and then I discover that the code works perfectly well but not as I intended it. So while I'm waiting for yet another CI build to run, I'm making note of these:

• Who's dumber than the XPOTUS? His lawyers.
• The city of Chicago has released plans to build a tunnel connecting the existing Bloomingdale Trail with the other side of I-90/94 and the Union Pacific tracks, but they don't expect it to open for about 3 years.
• Developers turned a parking garage into apartments in my old neighborhood, hiding the remaining bits of the garage from the street. I approve!
• Because of Illinois and Chicago taxes, (legal) cannabis in Chicago costs more than just about everywhere else in the country.

Finally, WBEZ made me a shopping list of locally-produced hot sauces. First up: Cajun Queen—apparently available about a kilometer away.