Transport analyst and writer Tom Vanderbilt has a four-part series in Slate about the crisis in American walking:

The United States walks the least of any industrialized nation. ... Why do we walk so comparatively little? The first answer is one that applies virtually everywhere in the modern world: As with many forms of physical activity, walking has been engineered out of existence. With an eye toward the proverbial grandfather who regales us with tales of walking five miles to school in the snow, this makes instinctive sense. But how do we know how much people used to walk? There were no 18th-century pedometer studies.

[S]ince our uncommon commitment to the car is at least in part to blame for the new American inability to put one foot in front of the other, the transportation engineering profession’s historical disdain for the pedestrian is all that much more pernicious. In modern traffic engineering the word has become institutionalized, by engineers who shorten pedestrian to the somehow even more condescending “peds”; who for years have peppered their literature with phrases like “pedestrian impedance” (meaning people getting in the way of vehicle flow).

As Vanderbilt says, traffic engineers and our obsession with the car have driven most of the problems. Even though engineer Charles Mahron and people like him crusade against the worst urban designs (see, e.g., Brainerd, Minn.), I don't think anything will change without a disruptive and permanent external shift. I don't really want $10 gas, but wow would that focus people's attention on driving.

I found out, after too many failed download attempts for no reason I could ascertain (come on, Amazon), the 1940 Census data is also available on Ancestry.com. Their servers actually served the data correctly. And so, I found this:

The apartment numbers aren't listed, and the building added an apartment to my entrance sometime in the last 70 years, but I think I can work it out. The first column shows the rent for each apartment. The three higher-rent apartments have to be the larger ones to the west. That means mine is either one of the two $65 apartments on the table or was vacant on 1 April 1940.

So the best I can do is that the three apartments on my side of the stairs that existed in 1940 contained a 35-year-old divorcée from Illinois who worked as an office manager in a brokerage, and a 64-year-old broker/solicitor from Nebraska who lived with his 84-year-old mother. My neighbors included a 51-year-old mother who lived with her 29- and 23-year-old sons, both of whom worked as wholesale salesmen; the 57-year-old treasurer of a wholesale varnish company and his 53-year-old wife; the 46-year-old head of the complaints department at Illinois Bell and his 39-year-old wife; and the building engineer and his wife, both of whom were 49.

All of these people were white, professional, and at least high-school educated. Six of eleven had college educations, a significantly higher proportion than the general public at the time. There were no children in the tier. All but two were U.S.-born. (The varnish-company treasurer came from the Republic of Ireland; his wife was English-Canadian.) All but the divorcée had lived in the same apartment for at least 5 years. Seven of eleven worked at least 40 hours during the previous week, including the poor janitor who worked 70. Salaries ranged from $600 (the 29-year-old son who sold furniture wholesale) to $5000+ (the Irish varnish company treasurer). Mrs. G.R. Walker, the most likely candidate for my predecessor in this apartment, made $2000, somewhat higher than the U.S. average salary in 1940 and approximately eqivalent to $32,000 today.

Today we're entirely professional (including three attorneys and two professional musicians), with a handful of young children, all of us college-educated or better. There is one foreign-born person; our average age, not counting the children, is about 38; and none of us worked 70 hours last week. Two of the seven apartments are rentals, the rest are owned. Adjusting for inflation, they cost almost exactly the same as in 1940.

In other words, the people who lived in my apartment building 70 years ago looked a lot like the people who live here today. And I wish I could meet them.

The Census and the National Archives have released the entire 1940 enumeration quasi-digitally. I think the data drop is great. I am going to download a few specific documents based on what I know about my own family, and about some of the places I've lived that were around in April 1940.

But as a software developer who works mainly with Cloud-based, large-data apps, I am puzzled by some of the National Archives' choices.

I say "quasi-digitally" because the National Archives didn't enter all the tabulated data per se; instead they scanned all the documents and put them out as massive JPEG images. I'm now downloading the data for one census tract, and the 29 MB ZIP file is taking forever to finish. The actual data I'm looking would take maybe 1-2 kB. That said, I understand it's a massive undertaking. There are hundreds of thousands of pages; obviously entering all the data would cost too much.

But this goes to the deeper problem: The Archives knew or should have known that they'd get millions of page views and thousands of download requests. So I need to ask, why did they make the following boneheaded technical decisions?

• They used classic ASP, an obsolete technology I haven't even used since 2001. The current Microsoft offering, ASP.NET MVC 3, is to classic ASP what a Boeing 787 is to a DC-3. It's an illuminated manuscript in the era of steam-driven presses.
• They organized the data by state and city, which makes sense, until you get to something the size of Chicago. Northfield Township, where I grew up, takes up one map and about 125 individual documents. Chicago has over 100 maps, which you have to navigate from map #1 to the end, and a ridiculous number of individual documents. You can search for the census tract you want by cross streets, but you can't search for the part of the city map you want by any visible means.
• I'm still waiting for my 32-page document after 22 minutes. Clearly the Archives don't have the bandwidth to handle this problem. Is this a budget issue? Perhaps Microsoft or Google could help here by donating some capacity until the rush is over?

In any event, once I get my documents, I'm going to spend some time going over them. I really want to find out what kind of people lived in my current apartment 70 years ago.

Update: The first download failed at 1.9 MB. The second attempt is at 6.6...and slowing down...

Update: The second and third attempts failed as well. I have, however, discovered that they've at least put the data out on Amazon Web Services. So...why are the downloads pooping out?

Via reader MG, a beautiful visualization of the wind on a map. A static example, from Tuesday:

The Atlantic has noticed a trend among millenials: they aren't buying as many cars as we did.

The Times notes that less than half of potential drivers age 19 or younger had a license in 2008, down from nearly two-thirds in 1998. The fraction of 20-to-24-year-olds with a license has also dropped. And according to CNW research, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 buy just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, a far cry from the peak of 38 percent in 1985.

The billion-dollar question for automakers is whether this shift is truly permanent, the result of a baked-in attitude shift among Millennials that will last well into adulthood, or the product of an economy that's been particularly brutal on the young.

[But] Millennials are more likely than past generations to live in an urban community, and this may be part of what terrifies car markers. About 32 percent reside in cities, somewhat higher than the proportion of Generation X'ers or Baby Boomers who did when they were the same age, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center report. But as the Wall Street Journal reports, surveys have found that 88 percent want to live in an urban environment. When they're forced to settle down in a suburb, they prefer communities like Bethesda, Maryland, or Arlington, Virginia, which feature plenty of walking distance restaurants, retail, and public transportation to nearby Washington, DC.

Absent Parker, I don't know if I would own a car. With two ZipCar locations within 400 m of me, I'd hardly need one. My takeaway, however, is that we're becoming more urban, and that means less car-dependent. This is one American trend I particularly like.

Researchers at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station have been watching the sun set for weeks. At the poles, the sun traces an excruciatingly slow corkscrew between equinoxes, first spiraling up to a point 23° above the horizon (only about as high as the sun gets in Chicago around 10am on December 21st) on the solstice, then slowly spiraling back down to the horizon over the next three months.

In about an hour from now, the last limb of the sun will slip below the south polar horizon, the twilight gradually fading for another three weeks. The sun won't appear again until September 20th.

Fourteen people will spend the next five months at Amundsen-Scott, with no possibility of leaving until the end of August.

The astrology nutters who sued the time zone database for copyright infringement have withdrawn the suit.

Plaintiff's attorney Julie Molloy filed the notice of voluntary dismissal today in the District of Massachusetts under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1).

So, reason prevailed. Good.

Via Atlantic Cities, a description of Baarle-Nassau, which not only straddles the Belgian-Dutch border, it appears to have run into the border at great speed and splattered:

[T]he Belgian town consists of 24 non-contiguous parcels of land. Twenty-one of them are surrounded by the Netherlands. while three are on the border between the two countries and thus share a jurisdictional boundary with the rest of Belgium, if also with the Netherlands and if not with each other.

And get this: there are Dutch enclaves within the Belgian enclaves that are within the Netherlands. And, actually, the main part of Baarle-Hertog is about five miles southwest of the portions you see here, and completely in Belgium.

...[B]uildings sitting within both countries pay taxes according to where their front doors are located. Some shops have apparently moved their doors "as a tax dodge of sorts." Indeed, there was a complicated legal case in which a bank engaged in money laundering had a front door in the Netherlands, but a vault in Belgium.

Road trip! And to Point Roberts, Wash., a little town attached to the underbelly of British Columbia.

I've wanted to hike the New York Highline since I first heard about it. I should go back when it's warmer, of course, but I still thought it pretty cool:

The Highline shows that an elevated urban park can work, both as public space and as a great way to preserve historical (or expensive-to-remove) infrastructure. I hope Chicago's Bloomingdale Trail follows the same model, once the city sees fit to authorize it. (The Bloomingdale Trail umbrella organization has comparison of the two projects, about half-way down.)

Reader Curtis Manwaring alerted me this morning to movement in the copyright infringement case against Arthur David Olson, late of the Posix time zone database. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken up Olson's (and Paul Eggerts') defense, and yesterday threatened a motion for Rule 11 sanctions against the plaintiff's attorney if they don't withdraw the case within 21 days:

If there were ever a pleading that invited Rule 11 sanctions, Plaintiff Astrolabe, Inc.'s Complaint is it. ... Astrolabe's frivolous and unfounded Complaint has already caused harm, and not only to Mr. Olson and Dr. Eggert. ... Perhaps realizing the folly of filing such a Complaint, Astrolabe has not yet served Defendants. Yet Astrolabe refuses to voluntarily dismiss its baseless Complaint, and thus the threat of full-blown copyright litigation looms, to the detriment of Defendants and the public interest in obtaining accurate time zone information on the Internet.

Astrolabe's Complaint illustrates the harm that frivolous claims of copyright infringement can cause to a public, collaboratively maintained factual resource. Under Rule 11, the Court should remedy this abuse of the legal system and deter future abuses by striking the Complaint and awarding defendants their costs and attorney fees.

I predicted this motion back in October. I can't wait to see how Astrolabe and their attorney respond.

Charles Mahron at Strong Towns has the step-by-step description:

As the transformation from traditional to auto-centric continues, parking becomes more valuable for those establishments that remain. Commercial businesses that in another era would have been expanded or rebuilt at a grander scale as the community grew are now more valuable being demolished for parking. The same thing is happening to the homes throughout these neighborhoods. They are being taken down in favor of garages and "buffering". Neighborhoods originally designed to define space are now becoming space.

These changes are devastating to the tax base. Where the public has made the greatest investments in infrastructure (and has the greatest obligations for maintenance) the neighborhoods stagnate. But nobody has the job of worrying about the tax base throughout the existing neighborhoods. The traffic engineer worries about moving cars. The public works director runs the utilities and is primarily concerned with new connections. The planner administers the zoning code and is particularly zealous about parking ratios.

This all devolves into a farcical feedback loop. More people driving means that more transportation improvements are needed. There is a greater need to channel cars, to control the flow, to improve the capacity of the transportation system. The more the public realm is given over to cars, the more people must drive. The more people that drive, the more cars on the road. Etc. Etc. Etc. Nobody realizes that we're not actually adding cars. We're all just making more trips.

The whole article is worth a read, and if you like livable cities, will make you sad. There is hope, though: many cities—Chicago, for example—have avoided or reversed the spiral.

Via Gulliver, a Chinese company has built a 30-story hotel in Hunan Province from prefabricated, energy-efficient parts:

From Next Big Future:

The buildings are five times more energy efficient in operation and use about 6 times less cement.

They plan to build one hundred and fifty 30-story apartment building, hotel, office plans using the new system. They have started building a 1.33-million-square meter “NO.1 Sustainable Building Factory” and it will be able to produce 10 million square meters of mass produced skyscrapers each year. The 30 story building is 17,000 m² so the factory can produce about 500 of the 30 story building each year and many more factories will be built.

It did take a while to build the parts that they assembled at the building site, of course. But even then, the building cost 2/3 less than similar buildings to construct.

There is no tomorrow for the island nations of Samoa and Tokelau:

At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 29, time in Samoa and Tokelau will leap forward to Dec. 31 — New Year's Eve. For Samoa's 186,000 citizens, and the 1,500 in Tokelau, Friday, Dec. 30, 2011, will simply cease to exist.

[Samoan] Prime Minister Tuila'epa Sailele Malielegaoi earlier said it would strengthen trade and economic links with Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

Being a day behind the region has meant that when it's dawn Sunday in Samoa, it's already dawn Monday in adjacent Tonga and nearly dawn Monday in nearby New Zealand, Australia and increasingly prominent east Asian trade partners such as China.

"In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two working days a week," Tuila'epa said in a statement. "While it's Friday here, it's Saturday in New Zealand, and when we're at church on Sunday, they're already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane."

The islands move from UTC-10:00 to UTC+14:00, and will therefore be the first places on earth to enter 2012.

Tokyo has maps in all the metro and train stations showing where you are and where everything else is. However, throughout the city I found exactly one map where north was on top. Otherwise, they were all oriented in different directions. Here are two maps near Ueno-Koen within sight of each other that illustrate the problem. Exhibit A, with north towards the bottom left:

Exhibit B, with north in exactly the opposite direction:

Exhibit C, near my hotel, shows two maps next to each other with completely different orientations:

Why does this matter? Because whenever I looked at a map in Tokyo, I always had to spend several seconds figuring out what it represented. And it wasn't as if the orientations followed any pattern, for example showing what happens if you turn right or left from your current position, as the photo directly above shows.

I have no idea what, if any, principles are at work here. It's almost as if every map's orientation is completely left up to occident.

I had planned to visit the Tokyo National Museum today, and possibly one of the other museums at Ueno Park, but then this happened:

Yes, a sunny autumn day with the temperature passing 21°C simply did not allow me to go inside. I spent a few hours just walking around Ueno-Koen, encountering the local fauna:

More fauna:

Oh, and hey, my camera shoots video:

(Apologies for the jerkiness; I was hand-holding a 250mm lens.)

Yesterday (er, earlier today in the U.S.), American Airlines filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11, hoping to reorganize itself into profitability. A few hours after the news, the head of the frequent-flyer program sent out a reassurance to us members:

We want to assure you that your AAdvantage® miles are secure. The AAdvantage miles that you've earned are yours and will stay yours, subject to usual policies, until you choose to redeem them for a great award with us. Likewise, your elite qualifying miles and your elite status, including lifetime status granted under the Million MilerSM program is secure and remains intact. You will continue to earn miles through all our existing AAdvantage participating companies and you will be able to redeem those miles for the same great awards — flights, upgrades, car rentals and hotels just to name a few. And, throughout the coming year, we will be adding even more opportunities to earn miles, as well as new ways to redeem those miles.

(Emphasis in original.)

Of course, the X factor remains the attitudes of the pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, and other front-line employees who stand to lose the most (other than, obviously, bondholders) from the restructuring. I'll keep an eye out—and I'll keep flying American and it's oneworld partners.

In a related bit, private pilot and journalist James Fallows has a lively debate on his blog today about electronic devices on airliners, and how your Kindle most certainly will not crash the plane if you forget to turn it off.

I'm off on my penultimate day of exploring Tokyo. Yesterday I hit the photography museum; today, I think, the Tokyo National Museum.

Yesterday I took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto and back. The 476 km trip takes two hours and twenty minutes, averaging 200 km/h including stops.

The best we have in the U.S. over the same distance, the Acela from Boston to Philadelphia (511 km), takes just over five hours on a good day and more if it snows. Chicago to St. Louis (457 km) is scheduled for five and a half hours, but I haven't ever made the trip in under six.

The U.S. made different choices than Japan (or Europe: London to Newcastle, 483 km, takes 2 hours and 50 minutes), because our vast depopulated spaces made an automobile-based infrastructure deceptively appealing. Wouldn't it be incredible if the U.S. experienced some kind of economic situation where it made a lot of sense to start correcting that monumental error? Oh, right.

In any event, I left the Tokyo train station a little past 10 in the morning and got to see this by 2, which is really the point:

Exhibit 1, a very fast train:

Exhibit 2, autumn at Tenryu-ji, one of 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Kyoto:

Exhibit 3, a juxtaposition of transportation technologies:

Explanation, to the extent required, follows tomorrow morning.

Every year, the Economist publishes the Big Mac Index, "a fun guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of a basket of goods and services around the world." The current spot price of a Big Mac in Tokyo today is ¥680: just under $9. Yes, NINE DOLLARS.

This fact might cushion the surprise I experienced this evening when I discovered that four small chicken skewers (yakitori), one medium bowl of rice, and a beer, cost $32.75, including tax. This wasn't at the Tokyo equivalent of Charlie Trotter's; this was at an anonymous izakaya near the Shinjuku train station.

Now, friends and enemies alike will tell you that I routinely spend that much at, say, my remote office. There's a tip, for starters, not to mention the occasional disnumeria after I've spent an afternoon there. Only, at Duke of Perth, that amount goes a little farther.

I've noticed other things beside the angina-inducing prices in this city. In no particular order:

• I stand out. I've traveled all over the world, and in no other city (except possibly Shanghai) do I stick out more obviously than I do here. I find no small irony in that here, people don't know whether I'm American or Albanian; but they know I speak English, they know I'm not from these parts, and they know I'm the most likely person in any crowd to act unpredictably. It's not just me; all European-looking people look out of place here. And we all smile wanly at each other on the streets. It's odd.
• Shibuya at night looks just like you'd imagine, sort of Piccadilly Circus, Times Square, and North Michigan Avenue smashed together and fed amphetamines. I'm glad I had the experience. People who know me will understand how happy I am to report that I have been to the most crowded, most chaotic, and most commercial place I have ever seen (i.e., the Shinjuku train station), on my way to the most crowded, most chaotic, and most commercial place the world has ever seen (i.e., Shibuya Crossing at 5pm). And this was Sunday night. Tomorrow, when both the train station and the shopping area are actually busy, I might avoid it. In fact, since my access to the rest of Japan depends on going through the busiest train station in the world, I may start fantasizing about renting a cabin in upper Manitoba for my next vacation.

Obligatory Shibuya-at-night photo:

• No one here speaks English, but it doesn't matter. I've encountered none but helpful, patient people for the last two days. The price of dinner tonight may have made my baby cheeses cry, but the wait staff really dug in and helped me find the right words in my little dictionary. They were also enormously impressed that I know how to use chopsticks, which puzzled me, because I haven't encountered too many Americans who can't. Perhaps they thought I was British?

None of these things really bothers me, by the way. Well, all right, the crowds in Shibuya did, but it's Tokyo, so there are crowds, so what? I mean, we don't have this back home:

Lonely Planet has by far the most helpful guidebooks in English. Their Tokyo City Guide recommends hopping on the Yamanote train to get an overview of the city. The train goes around central Tokyo in a little more than an hour; when combined with an all-day rail/subway pass (¥1580), it gives you a good overview of the place. Here's the inside (counterclockwise) train pulling into Tokyo Station:

More photos at The Daily Parker.

I failed at both tasks last night. I didn't find sushi (at least, not for less than ¥1,000 per piece), so I had—wait for it—Lebanese. After dinner I came back to the hotel room and managed to read until about 8:30, before I could no longer remember the last sentence I read.

It's just 7am now, and I feel like I've had the best sleep in weeks. Good morning Japan:

After I get showered and caffeinated, I plan to wander around Tokyo randomly, and find sub-$12 sushi. Then I will read the instruction manual for the washroom, because this:

...is just too intimidating right now.

I've arrived in Tokyo, not sure if it's Friday night or Saturday night. This is a known hazard of flying across the International Date Line, one I get to experience in reverse in a few days.

For now, I'm just looking for sushi. Must...stay...awake...until...9...

I'm 10,500 m over the Yukon on a Japan Air Lines 777-300.[1] In the last couple of hours, I have started to understand, rather than just "know," that Japan is the most technologically advanced country in the world. I'm also wondering why my main carrier, American, can't learn how to do some of these things.

First, the plane is spotless inside and out. I mean, immaculate. I mean, if you wanted to give visitors a good feeling about your country, you would start by making your airplanes really attractive, right?

Next, unlike in American's fleet, the washrooms on this plane have a device to select how hot or cold to make the tap water, and another device that magically senses when you've put your hands under the spigot. Previously I'd only seen those two technologies—continuously-varying water temperatures and motion sensors—almost everywhere else. American Airlines planes, by contrast, have two buttons or levers, and you push the buttons or levers either alone or in combination to get about 10 seconds of water. In other words, the water shuts itself off regardless of how much soap you still have on your hands, and you only get three temperatures. I believe it's the same technology they've used since, I think, 1930.

Then we have the incredible service in business class.[2] For lunch, I eschewed the steak in wine sauce for a 9-item array of Japanese morsels including duck meatball, yuzu pepper chicken rolls, a soba (noodle) sushi roll, deep-simmered pork in shoyu, grilled Greenland halibut in miso sauce, steamed fluke with apple vinegar, two pieces of "Philadelphia" roll (smoked salmon around cream cheese), and steamed sea-bream with lotus root mousse. Throw in a small bottle of dry sake, some green tea, a bowl of rice, and an amuse bouche of shrimp in avocado sauce and marinated mushrooms, and a cup of English tea with milk for dessert, and I don't want to leave. (Except, you know, I'm in an aluminum tube high above the Canada-Alaska border, and there's another reason to stay.)

The service continues until 90 minutes before landing, or about 6 hours from now (we land in 7:40, according to the moving map). They have two pages of food and drink options passengers can order any time, plus a two-page wine list and a reasonably stocked open bar just past the bulkhead.

I can only imagine what's going on in first class. I believe I saw Charlie Trotter opening an entire restaurant up there, plus a sushi bar and, for the Americans, a charcoal grill.[3]

Finally, a little thing American and other carriers should consider: mirrors in the overhead bins (which have enough room for small elephants, I should mention). You can actually see, using the extremely high-technology reflective plastic at the back of the bin, what you can't see standing on the floor. How much does this cost, I wonder? Maybe $100 per airplane?

We are now passing the northern-most point on our trip. All the windows are closed so I don't know if the terminator is visible off the right. Off the left, we have snow-covered snow, on top of mountains.

I'm going to try napping now, though the tea I mentioned earlier—not to mention the coffee necessary to get me awake enough to find O'Hare—might make that impossible. We land just past 23:30 Chicago time, or 14:30 in Tokyo. I sense a horrible exhausted crash coming right around dinner...

[1] I'm going to sync this entry with the flight's track from FlightAware so you can use the location feature to see exactly where I posted this. Unfortunately, I'll have to copy the post to the live blog after I get to my hotel.

[2] Yes, business class: I paid with frequent-flyer miles! My entire round-trip to Tokyo cost me $53 in cash, and I'm not even using up all the miles I've earned so far this year. I also paid for the hotel room with points, except for the last day, for which they gave me a deal. Total cash for five nights in Tokyo: $200.

[3] I'm making that up, of course. The airline's website has the business- and first-class menus, if you want to drool more.

Via Atlantic Cities, the recession may help move developers away from the 19 standard building types identified in a report from UC Berkeley in 2005:

[T]he Grocery Anchored Neighborhood Center...is generally about 5 or 6 hectares in size on a plot of land that’s 80 percent covered in asphalt. It’s located on the going-home side of a major four-to-eight lane arterial road, where it catches people when they’re most likely to be thinking about what to buy for dinner.

It has a major, 4,600 to 6,500 square-meter supermarket on one end and a drug store with drive-through on the other, with national and regional chain stores, maybe a Hallmark and a Starbucks in between. The parking lot contains four or five spaces per thousand square-feet of retail. There is, in theory, a sidewalk, although no one is expected to use it. Every shop is designed to be seen by potential customers passing by at 45 mph. And – with the exception of a few last-minute regionally specific touches for art-deco paint schemes or Mediterranean roof tiles – this L-shaped shopping center looks the same whether you’re pulling into it from Denver or Orlando.

Seventeen of the 19 types create what one of my friends has called "Suburbistan," a landscape oriented towards cars and tract homes. But:

In Washington, D.C., one of the few U.S. cities largely immune to the real estate downturn, construction has continued, and Leinberger estimates that a good 90 percent of new development in the area has lately been planned for walkable, high-density living (see the makeover of Tyson’s Corner and the new Navy Yard development around the Nationals’ ballpark). These are the real estate products [Christopher] Leinberger believes we’ll need going forward: ground-floor retail with rental apartments on top, hotel/convention centers with condos above and a subway corridor below. These models may very well become standardized, too.

One can hope. Walkable cities, with good transit, are good for almost everyone.

The AP has picked up the story about the tzinfo database moving to ICANN:

The organization in charge of the Internet's address system is taking over a database widely used by computers and websites to keep track of time zones around the world.

The transition to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, comes a week after the database was abruptly removed from a U.S. government server because of a federal lawsuit claiming copyright infringement.

Without this database and others like it, computers would display Greenwich Mean Time, or the time in London when it isn't on summer time. People would have to manually calculate local time when they schedule meetings or book flights.

Ah, I do love the popular press, trying to explain things. AP writer Anick Jesdanun generally did all right explaining the problem and the move, except the story has no information about the tzinfo community's response to the mess. (I'm just sad they didn't mention The Daily Parker.)

This morning The Daily Parker received a press release from Gary Christen, responding to my analyses of their lawsuit against the guys who maintain the Posix time zone database (here, here, and here).

Unfortunately for Christen, Astrolabe's response fails to rebut my central assertions. I said, essentially, they have failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted by a Federal court (or, as one of my colleagues who actually practices law suggested, their complaint is actionable in itself). Their response doesn't make their original claim any stronger.

Christen seems at pains to make non-technical people feel better about the alarm we technical people raised regarding the likely effects of shutting down the tzinfo project. "Astrolabe has now done a careful reading of ... the various industry publications that broke this story on October 7," Christen claims, but if so it was a reading without comprehension. We technical folks got over our panic in about thirty seconds, in favor of outrage and scorn. And with their detailed, bullet-pointed release, Astrolabe systematically reinforces this writer's outrage and scorn.

Taking each of Christen's points in turn:

1. Astrolabe’s lawsuit is in no way intended to interfere with compilation of current time-zone information maintained by Mssrs. Olson and Eggert, or any other persons.

Read in the light most favoring the plaintiff, this is irrelevant. Read in the light of my office, it's false. Astrolabe's intent is irrelevant in any case; the tzinfo database contains historical and prospective time zone data because computers on occasion need to represent times and dates in the past. For that, and other technical reasons I'll get into in another post, "past" and "future" data can't be separated. Shutting down the tzinfo project shuts down the whole thing.

You can experience more of my outrage at The Daily Parker.

After the shocking disappearance of the Olson time zone database yesterday (described here and here), some things have become clearer overnight.

o The wonderful land of Oz has stepped up. Robert Elz, an Australian computer scientist who has actively supported the tzinfo project throughout, has revived the time zone mailing list maintained at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). My, but the list was active overnight, with dozens of people volunteering to host the database, move it to non-U.S. servers, and continue to research and develop it.

o The current database is available from an Australian site at ftp://munnari.oz.au/pub/tzdata2011k.tar.gz. (This is the version running on Weather Now.)

o Astrolabe, Inc., the mom-and-pop Cape Cod outfit responsible for this insanity, has a suddenly-popular Facebook page upon which hundreds of people have expressed themselves. (I wonder if the company will figure out how to disallow wall postings? Oopsi.)

o Software developer Curtis Manwaring, CEO of Zodiasoft Technologies in Las Vegas, claims that he and Astrolabe have had a running fight for years about ownership of various software implementations of time zone data. Says Manwaring:

Gary Christen (CEO of Astrolabe) tried to hire me on three separate occasions and I refused. When Astrolabe obtained the ACS Atlas (when ACS went bankrupt in July 2008), I was concerned that I wouldn't have an atlas for my software anymore. The last time that they tried to hire me, the ACS Atlas became leverage to coerce me into working for them because I had no guarantee that they would give me access to the ACS Atlas. When I refused the last time, I managed to obtain a verbal agreement that I would send my customers to them for a special discount on the ACS Atlas and was relieved for a while. But over the next several months, my customers started complaining about the run around they were getting on the special deal that Gary promised my customers. Eventually one of my customers said that he thought that Astrolabe was trying to make me look bad and disadvantage my business by making it difficult to obtain the stand alone version of the ACS Atlas which is required by my software (but not Solar Fire which has the ACS Atlas bound with it). He was so fed up with the run around Astrolabe gave him that he formatted a database of latitudes and longitudes for me and asked me to add it to my software. That got me back on the issue of researching time zones after which I found the Olson time zone database. I subsequently found from the Olson sources that the ACS data was extremely unreliable, much more than I previously thought.

Note to Curtis, Gary, and everyone else involved in this nonsense: there's a difference between software, which enjoys copyright protection, and data, which does not. This is established, black-letter law in the U.S. (and in most other countries). The fact that both of you produce products that use the same data does not in itself constitute copyright infringement.

What this sounds like—and I'm sorry, Curtis, but you're in it up to your neck—is that you're both amateurs, and your narcissistic dispute has started claiming innocent lives. Arthur Olson and Paul Eggert were trying to help people, as part of the open, collaborative effort we in the software community like to call "open collaboration."

Now, I write software for money, and in fact I have a time zone factory written in .NET, that reads and parses the entire tzinfo database so you can use it in .NET applications. (Send me an email if you want to license it!)

But here's the thing: I know it's a lot less expensive for someone to license my tzinfo parser than to roll their own. Like, two or three orders of magnitude less expensive. And if someone else writes a better parser, they might take my customers away—but that's not copyright infringement (unless they actually use the same C# code or documentation), that's creation.

Speaking of professional software development, I have to start billing now. I'm glad Robert Elz has stepped up, along the dozens of other volunteers, to keep this hidden but vital software project going.

The Economist has given me a timely help. Their "doing business in" series I've found accurate and useful; I hope this one keeps up the pattern.

On a quick weekend in Montréal, where it's mostly grey and rainy, I find bits of color:

14:15 ET today, Canon 7D at ISO-400, f/5.6 at 1/100, 55mm, here.

Further down the street:

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title.

The Daily Parker is about:

• Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
• Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
• Photography. I took tens of thousands of photos as a kid, then drifted away from making art until a few months ago when I got the first digital camera I've ever had that rivals a film camera. That got me reading more, practicing more, and throwing more photos on the blog. In my initial burst of enthusiasm I posted a photo every day. I've pulled back from that a bit—it takes about 30 minutes to prep and post one of those puppies—but I'm still shooting and still learning.
• The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
• Chicago, the greatest city in North America, and the other ones I visit whenever I can.

I've deprecated the Software category, but only because I don't post much about it here. That said, I write a lot of software. I work for 10th Magnitude, a startup software consultancy in Chicago, I've got about 20 years experience writing the stuff, and I continue to own a micro-sized software company. (I have an online resume, if you're curious.) I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.

I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first blog twenty years ago.

If you like what you see here, you'll probably also like Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, Josh Marshall, and Bruce Schneier. Even if you don't like my politics, you probably agree that everyone ought to read Strunk and White, and you probably have an opinion about the Oxford comma—punctuation de rigeur in my opinion.

Another, non-trivial point. Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed, so many people reading this may think I'm just posting notes on Facebook. Facebook's lawyers would like you to believe this, too. Now, I've reconnected with tons of old friends and classmates through Facebook, I play Scrabble on Facebook, and I eagerly read every advertisement that appears next to its relevant content. But Facebook's terms of use assert ownership of everything that appears on their site, regardless of prior claims, which contravenes four centuries of law.

Everything that shows up on my Facebook profile gets published on The Daily Paker first, and I own the copyrights to all of it (unless otherwise disclosed). I publish the blog's text under a Creative Commons attribution-nonderivative-noncommercial license; republication is usually OK for non-commercial purposes, as long as you don't change what I write and you attribute it to me. My photos, however, are published under strict copyright, with no republication license, even if I upload them to other public websites. If you want to republish one of my photos, just let me know and we'll work something out.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.

I love these odd stories about time. Samoa, a small archipelago in the South Pacific, has passed a law to shift from the UTC-11 zone to UTC+13. This shift will cause them to skip December 30th entirely:

But the bill was not passed without its doubters. Faleata East MP, Aveau Niko Palamo, suggested that instead of one day for the transition to happen, it should be two days.

“What about the people who were born on that day, the weddings and anniversaries commemorated on that day,” says the MP. “The Seventh Day Adventists go to sleep on Thursday and wake up in the middle of the Sabbath.”

As for Aveau’s concern, [Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi] says; “Research shows that no one was born or married on 30 December.”

This is not true. A call to the Samoa Statistics Bureau confirmed that there are 767 births and 43 marriages registered on 30 December.

Well, with respect to the Prime Minister, no one will be born or married this December 30th, but that was a silly thing to say.

Samoa's change moves the International Date Line to the east, but it's not as extreme as Kiribati's wrenching of the IDL two hours east to ensure that it was the first place to greet the new millennium.

This is cool. American Airlines now offers frequent-flyer trips to U.S. elite members (those who fly more than 40,000 km per year) at demand-based costs. This means, instead of costing a flat 25,000 miles per round-trip, elite members will be able to book trips for less if the flights have lower demand—or more, if there's more demand:

Dynamic Air awards are an enhancement to our existing flight award offerings, providing AAdvantage® elite status members with a range of flight redemption options below the AAnytime® award level. The amount of miles required for a Dynamic Air award is based on published fares, so award levels will vary as fares vary. MileSAAver® and AAnytime® awards are still available at AA.com.

I poked around. The Dynamic Air awards go through a different Web application than their main reservations system, so it's hard to compare directly. And there are some annoyances. Well, one big annoyance: there doesn't seem to be any flights.

For Chicago to San Francisco the weekend of September 3rd, flying out Saturday and back on Tuesday, there were no flights with dynamic pricing. Nor for the next weekend. Nor the next. Chicago to Raleigh? Nope. Des Moines? Nope. LaGuardia? Uh-uh.

What about short-notice flights? LaGuardia, the weekend after next? Nada.

Using the main reservations system, which displays a grid of dates and award types, showed ordinary 25,000-mile awards for most of the options above—even for Chicago to LaGuardia leaving today.

I'll play with this new system a bit more, but at the moment it looks like it's in late Beta. Pity, it sounds like a really cool idea.

Tokyo.

Two things about this of interest to travelers: First, because it's a frequent-flyer miles purchase, I can hold the reservation without fully committing for a week. So, if something changes before the 3rd, I'm not out anything. Second: as much as the Congressional Republicans boggle my mind, and as much as I wish they'd shut up for ten seconds and reauthorize the FAA, their idiocy is my gain. Instead of the usual expensive tax I'd have to pay to the US for a premium frequent-flyer ticket, I only have to pay Japanese taxes of about $50.

Arigato gozaimas, Congress.

I'm getting closer to finalizing plans to blow some frequent-flyer miles this fall. I'm down to three choices, though one city has taken a slight lead:

• Tokyo. The end of November is supposed to have the best foliage. I can also have enough hotel points for three free nights.
• Budapest. Colder than the other two top choices, but a very old friend would meet me there for a day or two. Oddly, having to connect through New York gives the trip the longest travel time of the three options.
• Madrid. Excellent opportunity to practice Spanish. Warmest weather of the three choices. Also the smallest city—which could be relaxing, or not. Also, a nerdy reason: Iberia, which operates the non-stop service from Chicago, flies an Airbus 340 on the route, which would be a pleasant change from the 777s and 767s that I usually take overseas.

What reasons am I overlooking?

I will probably book the trip Saturday.

I'm looking for community input.

Mostly because of business travel, but also because I have signed up for almost every reward program that American Airlines offers, this year I expect to earn around 200,000 frequent-flyer miles. I need to spend them. And when best to spend them then off-season, in late November or early December, when people aren't traveling much?

But where to go? American and its partner oneworld carriers fly non-stop from Chicago to about 95 destinations, ranging in distance from Milwaukee to Delhi, India.

So here are my rules for this long weekend in November or December: the destination must be 12 hours total flying time or closer; outside the Lower 48; avoid the infamous Newark-to-Kennedy connection that American loves to inflict on people using miles; no visa requirement; and nowhere I've been before. Oh, and it has to be somewhere I actually want to go.

To see the list, go to The Daily Parker.

Another one of my favorites, from Maho Beach, Sint Maarten:

14 February 2009, ISO-400, 1/2000 at f/8, 31mm, here.

Shanghai, 18 April 2010:

ISO-400, 1/800 at f/8, 47mm. Taken approximately here.

Tuomiokirkko (The Lutheran Cathedral), Helsinki, Finland:

30 June 2010, ISO-100, 1/160 s. at f/14.

The Arch at Washington Square Park, New York:

This is the complement to an earlier shot I posted. I'm not sure which I prefer.

12 February 2011, ISO-1600, 1/15 at f/5.6, 18mm.

Another reprise, this time of Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg:

To see a larger size and a comparison with the original image, visit The Daily Parker.

As I play around with high-dynamic-range imaging, I remembered a photo I took in 1991 while driving through North Dakota. I remember taking about a bunch of bracketed shots because of the scene's wide exposure range. Last night I looked for the image and found that one of the two negative strips covering the bracket is gone. Not only gone, but I wrote a note to myself in May 1992 on the negative holder pointing out that it's gone. Without the full bracket, an HDR image won't work.

Fortunately, I have the first image in the series, which I took using the camera's recommended exposure. A quick rescan at 3600 dpi, then a few minutes in Lightroom, and voilà:

(For comparison, here's the raw image from my scanner:)

I'm still about 60 rolls behind that image in the scanning project, unfortunately, so other photos from the trip will have to wait a while.

Kodachrome 64, 20 July 1991, near Sturgis, N.D. Exposure unrecorded.

As I ride my bike past all the cars stuck in traffic this evening, I will think, briefly, about gasoline prices. So far this year, I've filled up my Volkswagen twice, for a total of $90 or so. Ouch, I said as I paid $50 for a tank last week, that's a lot. Of course, living in a dense urban area, taking public transit, and using my own legs to get around almost all the time (plus driving a car that gets 8 L per 100 km), I think gasoline eats up about 1% of my annual spending.

According to the Chicago Tribune, it actually doesn't make up that much of anyone's budget, but people still freak out about high gas prices for obvious reasons:

For consumers, there's no escaping the high prices, which helps explain their obsession.

Not only do many drivers see gas prices every time they fill up, but tracking the price is unavoidable because gas is about the only product consumers regularly buy that requires visiting a special store. So, they're intensely focused on a single product, as opposed to noticing the price rise of tomatoes when buying a full shopping cart of goods.

They also stand in front of the pump and feel the financial pain as the price digits whiz upward.

And why are gas prices so high? Economics 101, baby. Combine low supply with high, inelastic demand and you get high prices:

So how can we get lower gas prices? Use less of it. Increasing supply won't change the price much because of gasoline's demand inelasticity, meaning how much gas we buy doesn't respond to price increases very much. (The actual rate is about -0.25; that is, for every increase in price of 1, demand goes down about 0.25.)

The New York Times reports on new data about how languages diversified:

A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.

The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. He has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: a language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

I'd like to get more information about this; in particular, how does it account for languages like Basque that seem unrelated to their neighbors?

Via Gulliver:

ONE of the obvious difficulties with lead times in the magazine industry is the way events can overtake stories. This is problem enough with a weekly publication such as The Economist, but the results can look even more bizarre in a monthly. Thus, in an article in its April issue titled "The 15 Best Places to See Right Now", Condé Nast Traveler tells readers to head to Libya.

"With Syria being called the new Morocco and Beirut the new (gasp!) Provincetown, travelers with an eye for antiquity are moving on to Libya."

Oops.

For several reasons—about 730 of them, really—I'm at Raleigh/Durham Airport for a couple of hours between London and Chicago. Yes, a direct flight to Chicago today would have cost $730 more. Someday, we'll discover that airline pricing schemes actually tap into the deepest secrets of the universe; for now, I'll just scratch my head and sit at RDU until 5pm.

On the way out to London, I got a photo of a phenomenon I've seen many times but never documented clearly. You know how the planet is more or less spherical? Here's some proof:

You can see this if you fly about 15 minutes past the terminator between night and day. The dark-blue wedge with the point on the left and the wide part under the wingtip is the earth's shadow.

I met one of my oldest surviving friends in York this afternoon, thanks to the fast and cheap railways they've got in the UK. It's one thing to stay in a hotel built before my home town was founded; it's quite another to walk along a wall built over a thousand years before that.

First obligatory photo: York Minster, which opened as a small wooden church in 627 CE, and achieved this form somewhere around 800 years ago:

We also took advantage of an open house hosted by the York Glaziers Trust, who work to restore the stained glass at the Minster. I snapped this before seeing the "no photographs" sign:

That's one panel of the 120 or so that make up the east wall of the Minster. John Thornton installed the windows about ten years before Columbus got lost in the Atlantic, or about 300 years before my country came into being. My friend and I both wondered if they'd ever dropped a piece of 15th-century glass, but we were both too chicken to ask the conservationists.

Getting out of York required jumping forward to the last few years, when York restored its Victorian-era railway station:

I've got one more day in the Land of Uk, so tomorrow look for some nighttime shots.

(About this post's title: for some reason I keep hearing the Swedish Chef in my head.)

I've walked on the Queen's Walk along the Thames about a half-dozen times, but on a day like today, I just had to do it again. This time, though, I had the beast with me, so I could do this:

And this:

When I last photographed Tower Bridge on a sunny day, the painting crews hadn't finished yet. Today it looked perfect.

This is the Brompton Oratory, South Kensington, London, just today:

The answer, and more photos, at The Daily Parker.