The Daily Parker

Too many interesting things to read today. I've got some time between work and Bel Canto to get through them:

• An astronomer thinks he knows the origin of the Wow! signal.
• A Chicagoist writer has crunched the numbers on Restaurant Week.
• Crain's looks at the new Illinois Cloud Tax and its effects on tech startups.
• Krugman shows, one more time, how much better things are now than at the beginning of Obama's presidency.
• Hanselman describes WallabyJS, a new JavaScript test runner.
• Jetbrains has developed a new cross-platform C# IDE.
• Paleontologists have discovered fossils from the K-T extinction event itself.
• Parking causes traffic. Seriously.

I have not read Bel Canto, though I understand it's loosely based on an actual historical event. I also haven't ever heard anything from composer Jimmy López before, since it only permiered last month. Friends who work for the Lyric tell me it's pretty good. I'll find out in a few hours.

After watching the state of the union address, my party (small sense) decided to watch The American President. In the first ten minutes, we watched agog as we realized that none of the principal political arguments in the U.S. have changed since 1995.

...a report from the Executive to the Legislature required by Article II, section 3. Everyone is following along, yes?

9:11pm: First applause line: "I'm going to try to make it a little shorter."

9:15pm: My companion: "Fear!" Me: "No, that's Feinstein."

9:18pm: Oh, dear. Third "fear" of the speech. Might not make it...

9:21pm: "Anyone who says America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction."

9:29pm: "There is red tape that can be cut." Bi-partisan applause, for different reasons.

9:32pm: "When the Russians beat us into space, we didn't argue whether Sputnik was up there. ... Twelve years later, we were on the moon."

9:41pm: "People of the world do not look to Moscow or Beijing to lead. They call us."

9:46pm: "If you doubt the resolve of the American people, or mine, just ask Osama bin Laden."

9:54pm: On the Guantanamo line, PBS showed Kelly Ayotte, and her lonely tear. She knows he's right. She knows her party's gone barmy. She knows she's out soon. But she's a decent senator.

9:58pm: "It doesn't work if we believe the people who oppose us are motivated by malice."

10:06pm: Overwhelming urge to watch The American President right now.

10:09pm: "The state of our union is strong. God bless America." Mic drop.

The Dept of Homeland Security says we can still use our drivers licenses at airports until 2018:

The shift gives breathing room to Illinois, which had expected its driver's licenses and IDs to be inadequate for air travel, including domestic flights, as early as this spring.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security last fall declined to give Illinois a third deadline extension for meeting the Real ID Act standards put into place in 2005. As a result, it was expected that Illinois travelers by the middle of this year would need to present a passport or be subject to extra security checks unless Illinois was able to get another extension for compliance.

Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White still plans to seek another compliance extension, said spokesman David Druker. Also, White's staff is talking with members of the General Assembly about potential legislation to fund the changes necessary to bring the state's ID cards up to the federal standards.

The cost for that effort is estimated at $50 million to $60 million. The costs, as well as concerns about protecting individual privacy, have been stumbling blocks so far.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State's office can't even mail out reminders to drivers to renew their vehicle registrations, because governor Bruce Rauner doesn't want to pay taxes.

And it's -10°C today. Moan moan moan.

As the work week slowly grinds down, I've lined these articles up for consumption tomorrow morning:

• Paul Krugman has thoughts about Fitbits.
• Chicago is going ahead with a $1bn plan to finish the O'Hare Modernization Project.
• Elsewhere in our fair city, a Meetup group walks the entire length of a Chicago street once a month. I might join.
• Monkeys can't own copyrights in the U.S., even for their own selfies.

And now it's off to the barber shop. And then the pub.

First, from the scientist behind Deeply Trivial, a Times report that giving people money to answer survey questions makes their answers more accurate:

[W]hen you ask people about the economy, the answers are less a statement of objectivity and more like what they’d say if you’d asked which pro football team was the best. That has important implications for democracy. How can people judge whether a party is effective if there is no sense of objective truth? And it could even have implications for the economy itself if, for example, conservative-leaning business executives freeze hiring or investment when the president doesn’t share their politics.

[W]hen money was added to the equation, questions about the economy became less like asking people which football team they thought was best, and more like asking them to place a wager. Even a little bit of cash gets people to think harder about the situation and answer more objectively.

“People are not telling you what they actually believe in ordinary surveys,” [researcher John G. Bullock at the University of Texas at Austin] said. “With a payment, we’re eliciting not necessarily thoughtful responses, but more sincere responses.”

In the same newspaper, Paul Krugman demonstrates that a right-wing trope about academia doesn't mean what they think it means:

Overall, the evidence looks a lot more consistent with a story that has academics rejecting a conservative party that has moved sharply right than it does with a story in which academics have moved left.

Now, you might argue that academics should reflect the political spectrum in the nation — that we need affirmative action for conservative professors, even in science. But do you really want to go there?

No, you really don't.

Since my company is closed today, and I have no obligations until late this afternoon, I'm taking my time fixing a bug and deploying a software package. So I actually have the bandwidth to read these articles right now, as opposed to "someday:"

• Citylab has a list of terms and myths they'd like to retire, including "Artisinal" and "Wider roads = less traffic." (They also have a list of traffic myths that need retiring too.)
• Back in November, Paris' Orly airport couldn't give pilots runway visual range because of a Windows 3.1 glitch. You read that right. (And notice that PC Mag's site still uses classic ASP. That, right there, is irony.)
• Cory Doctorow points out the security and legal problems with self-driving cars, from which one should draw more general lessons about the intersections of law, ethics, and code.
• Anita Sarkeesian reviews "The Force Awakens" positively. (If you're familiar with Feminist Frequency, you know why this is noteworthy.)
• Talking Points Memo has announced the 2015 Golden Duke Awards. Winners include Dennis Hastert, Kim Davis, and other people deserving ridicule.

I do have to fix this bug, though. Better get back to it now.

Via Fallows, whose series on our "Chickenhawk Nation" should be required reading before talking about U.S. defense policy, comes a recent poll showing that 60% of young Americans believe we should send troops to fight ISIL, but only 15% say they, personally, would enlist:

The disconnect in joining the fight comes down to how millennials feel about the government writ large, according to Harvard IOP Polling Director John Della Volpe.

"I'm reminded of the significant degree of distrust that this generation has about all things related to government," said Della Volpe. "And I believe if young people had a better relationship with government ... they'd be more open to serving."

Della Volpe does caution, though, that this poll doesn't dig into the size or the scope of the military campaign that young folks would be willing to theoretically support.

"I can't tell you that young people support 5,000 troops or 50,000 troops," he said.

So kids "support the troops" as long as they don't have to be one. And this is consistent with other age groups. And with the late Roman Empire.

Scott Adams and James Fallows have some overlapping thoughts on Donald Trump after the GOP debate last night.

First Adams, who has a pretty good outline of how to detect a lack of thinking about the election:

1. If you are comparing Plan A to Plan B, you might be doing a good job of thinking. But if you are comparing Plan A to an imaginary situation in which there are no tradeoffs in life, you are not thinking.

2. If you see quotes taken out of context, and you form an opinion anyway, that’s probably not thinking. If you believe you need no further context because there is only one imaginable explanation for the meaning of the quotes, you might have a poor imagination. Sometimes a poor imagination feels a lot like knowledge, but it’s closer to the opposite.

He posits another six tests before summarizing his hypothesis about why Trump is doing so well.

Fallows believes Trump "fundamentally disqualif[ied]" to be president, of course, but he was more concerned that CNN deliberately fed into the fears the GOP are trying to whip up:

[T]he GOP’s overall goal was to replicate the tone on Fox News, and vice versa, which in both cases is essentially: risk, risk, risk; fear, fear, fear; ISIS, ISIS, ISIS; alien, alien, alien. All of this is toward the end of demonstrating Obama’s weakness and failure. Unfortunately, it is also at direct odds with U.S. strategic interests. A resilient nation seeks to minimize the effects of such terrorist attacks that, in a society that retains any liberties, still lamentably occur. A nation that wants to magnify the effects of terrorism yells “The attackers are everywhere!” “We’re all going to die!!!” Because they consider it useful against the “feckless” Obama, the latter has been the 2016 GOP approach (as Jeet Heer wrote on Tuesday night). It could box them into strategically foolish policies if they took office.

Ramp-up-the-fear was also the result of CNN’s approach tonight. Much more than half of the show was about ISIS / ISIL, Syria, and refugees. Here’s a promise: whoever becomes the next president will and should spend much less than half of his or her time on ISIS and Syria. The presidential topics that are not directly about ISIS—China, Russia, Mexico, the economic and political tensions in Europe, the entirety of Latin America and Africa, Iran, India, Pakistan, Japan, the South China Sea—any one of these, on its own, has a chance to occupy more of the next president’s time and attention than ISIS. Together they very certainly will. Not to mention: trade deals, the economy, job creation, budgets and deficits, medical care, and a thousand other issues.

But ISIS-centrism, which at the moment is shorthand for fear, is the way Wolf Blitzer set up the meat of the debate.

CNN ceased being relevant years ago, which is sad, because for a decade or longer they were the most relevant network.

We're not well-served by most of the big networks anymore. (NPR is a notable exception, but they have perhaps two million listeners out of 70 million eligible voters.) On the one hand, saying people disagree with you because they have lousy data is an adolescent mindset most of the time; but on the other hand, in some cases, like those whose only information about the Republican party came from CNN last night, it may be true.

I'm not looking forward to the 2016 election.

Both Krugman and Marshall came to the same conclusion today, and I, to quote Tom Lehrer, begin to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis:

Without Jeb, Marco Rubio is the guy Republicans really need to nominate. But he just hasn't shown the sort of strength or political acumen that's required for the task. In a way that doesn't surprise me. I've always found the guy unimpressive and green. But the GOP is in a position where if "Marco Rubio" didn't exist they'd have to invent him.

That is one of the many things that makes the current Trump-Cruz phony war so compelling. Trump is baiting Cruz into the same smackdown he's used to eat up Bush, Walker, Fiorina and others. But Cruz won't take the bait. Like two zen masters facing off in a martial arts classic or perhaps two wizards do battle in The Lord of the Rings, we have an epic confrontation between two master who have trained for decades in the arts of assholery and bullying. But their powers equally matched, it is a stand off.

I just have to hope that Trump's overall polling numbers (he's the choice of 41% of Republicans, which translates to less than 20% of the total electorate) stay steady. We've all seen what happens when right-wing demagogues get into power.