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.

We're experiencing what everyone hopes will be the two coldest days of 2016. This morning Chicago woke up to -18°C temperatures and a forecast for more of the same through tomorrow night.

And then Wednesday it all goes back to the weirdly warm winter we've been having. The Climate Prediction Center still says we're going to have a warmer-than-average winter, and even the long-term forecasts call for high probabilities of warmer-than-average temperatures through June and beyond.

These temperatures kill my Fitbit steps, though. After a 21,000-step weekend, so far today I've barely passed 2,000, and not a lot of motivation to walk miles in this cold. (Usually by lunchtime I've hit 6,000 or so.) During the coldest days of last January I had a similarly awful record, bottoming out at 4,447 steps on January 12th. The week ending January 18th was my lowest 7-day total (60,302) until November 29th (56,109).

So says Australian recruiter Greg Savage in a viral post from 2011 just now making another round on click-bait sites:

In recent years it seems that a meeting set to start at 9 am, for some people means in the general vicinity of any time which starts with the numeral ‘9’. Like 9.30 for example.

People drift in at 9.10 or 9.20, or even later. And they smile warmly at the waiting group, as they unwrap their bacon sandwich, apparently totally unconcerned that others have been there since five to nine, prepared and ready to start.

It’s simply that some people no longer even pretend that they think your time is as important as theirs. And technology makes it worse. It seems texting or emailing that you are late somehow means you are no longer late.

Rubbish.

You are rude. And inconsiderate.

Savage takes a hard line where few others would in some cases. For example, he hates that people arrive late to dinner parties, but anyone who's hosted one would really prefer people not show up exactly on time. And he may not fare well in cultures that have more flexible views of time, like much of the Middle East. If someone sets a 3pm appointment in Mexico, as an English-speaking Westerner it might be helpful to (tactfully) clarify what cultural effects will act on that appointment time, or you might be waiting for a long time.

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.

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. I'm posting it as a regular post in addition to posting it as a permanent page, to maintain deep-linking archiving. The previous post was here.

In just a few hours we'll see the latest sunrise of winter, until the days just before the change back to Standard Time in November. That will bring us something really rare: the latest sunrise in Chicago until November 2027, at 7:29am on November 6th. Thank leap years and orbital eccentricity for that. This statement holds true in all parts of the U.S. and Canada that observe daylight saving time until the first Sunday in November. The worst place to be that morning will be in the U.P. of Michigan, where the sun won't rise until after 8:30am. That's almost British.

You can get sunrise information for your location at wx-now.com.

Here are some numbers illustrating 2015 (cf. 2014 also):

• I took only 14 trips and flew only 25 segments, visiting 7 states and 4 countries*.
• Of those, 11 flight segments took off or landed outside the US, which is the highest proportion of international-to-domestic flights in any single year. Those years in which I've flown more international segments were also heavy-travel years in general. For example, in 2001, my heaviest travel year ever, I flew 15 international segments—my record—out of 63 total—also my record.
• I flew 67,187 km, barely re-qualifying (with bonus points) for American Airlines elite status.
• The Daily Parker had 493 posts, the lowest since 2010. The daily mean dropped to 1.35, continuing a slight downward trend since 2013.
• Chargeable hours no longer made any difference as I no longer work as a consultant. However, I did log 148.82 hours walking Parker, 10 more than in 2014.
• Reading suffered a bit. I started 21 books but only finished 15. On the other hand, I went to more operas in 2015 than any year previously, and also ate at more Michelin-starred restaurants than in the preceding 45 years combined.
• 2015 was the first full year for which I have complete Fitbit statistics. During the year, I walked 4.67 million steps, averaging 12,787 per day; slept 2,287 hours, averaging 6.3 per night; and had a net loss of 1.2 kg. (Though at one point in 2015 I had lost 4.1 kg, and am now hoping that the slight bump in November and December was simply holiday food.)

In 2016, I expect more travel, more Daily Parker posts, about the same number of books, and the same number of live performances.

* Germany, Poland, the UK, and Italy; DC, Virginia, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona, California, and Texas.

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.

After all the kvetching I did this morning, I'm pleased to report that I hit my step goal today (before 5pm), as I expect to do the remaining two days of the year.

There will be stats and sunrises soon. Stay tuned.

I'm having my worst week ever since getting a Fitbit: only 65,000 steps from last Tuesday through yesterday. Christmas, traveling, and yesterday's horrible weather have really hobbled my step count.

So far today I'm at 4,200 steps, and I have some errands to run this afternoon that will help. But wow, five days below 10,000? Scandal. Even Parker is bored.