The Daily Parker

To read:

• Pepsi is dropping Aspartame, which, by the way, doesn't stop obesity.
• Bad urban planning exacerbated the destruction in Kathmandu and puts other Asian cities at risk.
• Indian food is delicious, and now we know why. (My bet was on turmeric.)
• American Airlines rejiggered its operations in Chicago and Dallas in March, which is a good thing.
• The Economist reports that Chinese scientists have changed the genome of 86 zygotes, which, had the zygotes been viable, could have resulted in genetically-modified humans. Creepy.
• Does Duke create corporate stooges? Not always.

Back to cleaning up after a production bug this weekend.

This was the view at the top of North Pond on my walk this afternoon:

After seeing Carousel yesterday, I'm going to take advantage of really gorgeous weather today. Parker will also benefit. Updates as the situation warrants.

Wow, I have a lot of things on my Kindle. And I'm adding more:

• The roots of the Flash Crash of 2010 go back a lot farther
• Chicago's yellow night sky (see below) may be turning...black?
• Via Schneier, an investigation of an insecure voting machine by Virginia's elections board.

Back to debugging...

Photo: Chicago at night. Note the yellow-orange sodium vapor lamps.

First, a not-so-smart car:

I'm not sure what amused me more, the disproportionate tow truck or that the Smart Car driver parked in a rush-hour tow zone long enough for Streets & Sanitation to remove him.

Then, for everyone who takes his dog to work, there's this food truck:

I didn't pick anything up for Parker yet. ($2.50 per biscuit? Did I read that right?) But if it comes back, maybe.

Now that Chicago's bike share has hundreds of stations, its efficiencies are becoming clearer:

But what about convenience? Recently Divvy held its second annual data visualization challenge, and one of the winners, by Shaun Jacobsen at Transitized, compares the speed of Divvy with the speed of the CTA. And Divvy wins by a nose.

Jacobsen’s “Who’s Faster” project starts with a look at the 1,000 top “station pairs"—i.e. the places that people most often go from point A to point B using Divvy. Then, those are compared to the same route on the CTA at noon on a Monday.

And a couple patterns emerge. One is that the bulk of station-to-station trips are faster, centering on five minutes’ savings. It might not sound like much, but it adds up; Jacobsen calculates 32,023 hours saved over 571,634 trips. The other is that the most heavily-used station pairs tend to save more time than less frequently-used ones, as if people are starting to figure out how it works.

Cool stuff.

After almost two years, the trail opens June 6th:

Built on a long-defunct railroad line, the trail runs through Bucktown, Wicker Park, Logan Square and Humboldt Park.  Work on the $95 million project began in fall 2013.  Take a look at the path under construction.

When the trail opens, four of the access points will be through ground-level parks: Walsh Park, 1722 N. Ashland Ave.; Churchill Park, 1825 N. Damen Ave.; Julia de Burgos Park, 1805 N. Albany Ave.; and Park 567, 1805 N. Milwaukee Ave.

When completed, the 606 it will include six parks, an event plaza, an observatory, art installations, educational programming and other amenities, Emanuel said in a news release.

Parker and I will take a hike on it as soon as practical—possibly June 7th.

...and also preparing for a fundraiser at which I'm performing tomorrow:

• Microsoft has moved Azure Premium Storage to general availability...
• ...and also improved SQL backup and export services.
• Coincidentally, my favorite performance analysis tool just added a feature I need this week. Color me happy.
• The United Center, where the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks play, is getting beer robots.
• British photographer Marcus Lyon does not like sprawl. And his photos are kind of cool.
• There's also a poetry map of Toronto. One of my friends just discovered her street corner has a poem about it.
• The long-range climate forecast for Illinois predicts bog-standard weather. I can live with that.

And did I mention Apollo After Hours?

The Trib expects noise complaints to take off:

The Federal Aviation Administration is expected within the next four months to release a preliminary report based on thousands of computer-generated flight simulations involving what will become O'Hare's fifth east-west runway and a subsequent runway that the city plans to open in 2020.

All this work, however, might not bring relief after a record year for O'Hare jet noise complaints. The simulations are aimed in part at finding the best way to squeeze in hundreds more daily flights at the airport.

Suburbs expected to hear more jet noise as the result of the 7,500-foot runway opening this fall include Bensenville, Franklin Park, Wood Dale, Bloomingdale and Addison, FAA and city aviation officials say.

So, people in Bensenville—which lies along the southern edge of O'Hare and is notable for its immense rail classification yard—are unhappy with their noisy neighbor. Keep in mind, the runway plans have been around for over 10 years. And jet noise today is far lower than before.

My to-do list today only has 14 items on it, of which 6 are checked off already. The actual time it will take to accomplish the remaining eight items varies between 20 minutes (laundry, tonight, essentially a fire-and-forget activity) and four hours (Staging release of the Holden Adaptive Platform).

So, once again, I'm going to shove a bunch of articles to my Kindle:

• Within a 10-minute walk from my house is a mausoleum built in 1858 that the city didn't move when it created Lincoln Park.
• Virgin America will fly A320s from San Francisco to Honolulu, which means we really are living in the future.
• Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens will close 200 stores in the next few months. No word yet on which Chicago stores it might close.
• Wildlife porn alert! Urban coyotes.
• I missed the Last Week Tonight episode last October in which John Oliver asks, Ayn Rand: How is this still a thing?
• Another one from Citilab: see L.A.'s amazingly-clear parking signs. How come we don't have them in Chicago yet?
• Did I already link to the new Azure Table Storage design guide?

Now to do the next few things on my list...and watch the thunderstorm outside my office window.