Earlier this year the Illinois State Treasurer's newsletter mentioned the state database of unclaimed property. It took two quick searches to discover that the state had about $200 of my money, and would happily hand it back to me if I filled out a form. (The state also has about $40 of my mother's money, but the effort to gather all the documentation—including her will and trust documents—does not make this a worthwhile effort. Maybe the state will use it to improve public transit? But I jest.)
This got me thinking: do other states have money of mine? Yes, it turned out, they did. New York coughed up about $40 from an insurance refund owed me since 1998. And yesterday, I finally got another refund that New Jersey had held since I moved from Hoboken in 2000.
The New Jersey check was just over $325, the equivalent of $607 today. So even though inflation ate away 47% of it, I still got a couple extra bucks to stick in my stocking this week.
Kudos to the state treasurers who have made this possible. You, too, should check for unclaimed property. Somewhere, some insurance company may have tried to send you money and given up when they couldn't read a forwarding notice.
The Chicago Department of Planning and Development has proposed changing the zoning rules along a stretch of Broadway between Montrose and Devon to increase its density while simultaneously reducing its car-oriented ugliness:
The move could jumpstart housing construction, support local businesses and create a streamlined and consistent process for development in a part of town that has seen increased developer attention, city officials have said.
A driving factor in the rezoning is the CTA’s Red Line overhaul between the Bryn Mawr and Lawrence stations, city planner Danielle Crider said. The project is expected to be completed on time in 2025, at which point the CTA will have four properties along Broadway it acquired for construction and will no longer need, making it prime land for redevelopment.
Normally, things like a drive-thru, gas stations or other auto-related businesses could also be developed under a C1-5 zoning, but the planning department would also create a “pedestrian street designation” on the areas with this zoning to prevent certain car-oriented businesses, according to materials from the meeting.
A pedestrian street designation means curb cutouts for driveways are prohibited, parking must be from the alley and the building’s exterior must be on the sidewalk — effectively barring strip malls — according to the department. It’s intended to “preserve and enhance pedestrian oriented shopping districts,” but won’t affect strip malls along Broadway that already exist, materials show.
Naturally, people living in less-dense areas near Broadway like Lakewood-Balmoral are yelling NIMBY. That said, this sounds like an excellent proposal, and a good way to use the Red/Purple El reconstruction to the city's benefit.
I also love that Block Club Chicago pays attention to these things. I've let my Chicago Tribune subscription lapse because the hedge fund that owns it couldn't give two shakes about the neighborhoods near mine.
The Library of Congress has named Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 24 other films to the National Film Registry this week. A quick view of the list tells me I've only seen 5 of them, so I need to start watching more movies.
In other news:
Finally, Illinois could, if it wanted to, redirect $1.5 billion in Federal highway funds to mass-transit projects in the Chicago area under President Biden's 2021 Covid relief plan. Unfortunately, a lot of the state would prefer to build more useless highways, so this probably won't happen.
We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too:
Finally, the Washington Post says I read 628 stories this year on 22 different topics. That's less than 2 a day. I really need to step up my game.
In a podcast this week, the woman who accused Duke University lacrosse players of gang-raping her in 2006 has admitted the she made it all up:
“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” she told interviewer Katerena DePasquale on Nov. 13. “And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me and made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”
“And that was wrong.”
The case dominated national news for months. But as the months went by, the case against the lacrosse players unraveled. After the state bar association filed ethics charges against the prosecutor handling the case, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, accusing him of withholding evidence and making inflammatory statements, then-North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper took over. Nifong, who resigned, was eventually disbarred and held in criminal contempt for lying to a judge about the case.
Meanwhile, Mangum found herself once again entangled in the criminal justice system. In 2013, she was sentenced to up to 18 years for murdering her boyfriend two years earlier.
The Durham prosecutors absolutely should have taken Magnum's allegations seriously, and initially they did. But when Magnum's story started to fall apart, their emphasis needed to shift from winning a conviction to protecting the rights of the accused. Instead Nifong rode over the men's rights with a steamroller.
The Duke players won millions in settlements from the City of Durham, yet the accusations put them through unbelievable stress and pain for years. Not to mention, false accusations like this put other women at risk of not having their real accusations taken seriously.
So far today, Cassie has gotten almost exactly 10 km of walks, including a swing through the Horner Park DFA. This is a happy dog:

We also passed by a controlled burn in Winnemac Park:

They burn out the natural prairie areas periodically to help them grow back stronger. My only concern is that I believe there are several families of coyotes in the park. I hope they didn't lose their homes, or worse.
The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime.
Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these:
Finally, a friend recently sent me a book I've wanted to read for a while: The Coddling of the American Mind, which civil-liberties lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt expanded from their September 2015 Atlantic article. I have noticed that people born after 1995 don't seem to have the same resilience or tolerance for nuance that even people born a few years earlier have. Lukianoff and Haidt make an interesting case for why this is. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I finish.
Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context:
Elsewhere,
There is some good news today, though. In the last 6½ hours, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rose almost 9°C (15°F), to an almost-balmy -3.5°C. The forecast says it'll keep rising another 12°C or so through Sunday. So our first cold snap of the winter appears to be behind us.
I just had a hilarious meeting with a vendor.
We (at my day job) use a JavaScript library for a small but useful feature in our application. We've used it for probably the app's entire 10 year lifespan and haven't given it a second thought. Recently, a security issue showed up on a routine scan, implicating the (obsolete) version we use. So we have to get the latest version, and company policy requires us to get a commercial license to protect our own IP.
So we got in touch with the vendor, which took some doing because this library has existed for such a long time and passed through so many owners.
First problem: the vendor's sales guy didn't have the first clue what our app does, even when explained three different ways. I feel like I spread a little knowledge into the world when I spelled "actuary" for him. I hope he reads at least the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.
Second problem: after I guessed (inaccurately) how many actual customers use the app, he threw out a license fee of $12,000 per year. I had to choke back actual laughter. I said "well, that's not what we were expecting; are you sure that's the number you want me to take back to our head of engineering?"
In fact, our license costs would probably wind up around $2,000 per year. But given that an entire library of tools like Syncfusion offers would only cost $3,600 per year and would give us all kinds of bells and whistles, not to mention an actual support organization and frequent, predictable upgrades, even that seems high.
So, in conclusion, if you produce a tiny JavaScript library whose functionality can be found in a few dozen other libraries out there, you may want to reconsider requesting a license fee so high that the customer's only rational action would be to swap your library out for another one. If it takes one of our developers two entire days to put in a new library, it would still be cheaper than the requested license fee.
Remember: price is a function of supply and demand, not of wishful thinking.
My, we've had a busy day:
Finally, paleobiologists have narrowed the range of Neandertal-Sapiens interbreeding down to a period that peaked 47,000 years ago. Cue the jokes, starting with: "Who knew yo mama was that old?"