The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Happy 2016!

It's already 6:30 am on Kiritimati (Christmas) Island. I was going to have The Daily Parker automatically wish Kiritimatians a happy new year right at midnight, but I didn't think about it early enough, clearly.

So: Happy new year, Kiribati, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China, Irkutsk, Singapore, and everywhere else whose time zone is east of UTC+7.

Expect some silliness in today's Daily Parker time stamps, starting with this one (published 31 December 2015 10:32 CST).

Travel and Fitbit

It turns out, my Fitbit doesn't make me sad, but the numbers I get when traveling sometimes do. Despite a 3.5 km walk around Springfield yesterday, it was the second day in a row and the 4th in 10 days for which I missed my 10,000-step, 10 km goal.

On the other hand, last night I got almost 9 hours of sleep (according to my Fitbit), through several trains and a thunderstorm.

Yes, there was a thunderstorm in December in central Illinois. That's just weird. And in future, probably a lot more common.

Gift suggestion for The Daily Parker

This is cool. Explains CityLab:

Entomological unease aside, this poster of the planet’s 140 metros should make a fantastic holiday gift for the city-obsessed nerd. Made by Neil Freeman, an artist and urban planner who runs the site Fake Is the New Real, the roughly29 by 23-inch, black-and-white sheet stacks train systems with the largest ones at top…

...and the most basic at bottom.

Take a look at the artist's designs and find your metro.

Scratch Beer

I mentioned yesterday that we stopped at Scratch Beer in Ava, Ill., on the recommendation of a local.

It's pretty remote, but worth the trip. They make one barrel of each beer, and when that barrel is empty, it's gone forever. So, yes, we'll have to go back, even though the 561-kilometer trip home took almost 6 hours. At least Scratch is dog-friendly (outside). So maybe the next road trip down there will be when it's warmer.

If it were clear, and dark, and there were no streetlights

...this app might be fun. CityLab explains:

Floating in space among the stars and planets are more than 2,250 satellites and “space junk” traveling at up to 18,000 miles an hour. Some are large enough to be seen with the naked eye—though you’d have to first figure out which ones are within your line of sight.

Luckily, there’s a map for that now, by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo, a graphics engineer at Mapzen who has a knack for turning pure data into mesmerizing visuals (like this one of New York City). His latest project, Line of Sight, traces the orbital path of more than a thousand of those satellites and predicts their current location using open-source data from tracking sites like CelesTrak andSatNogs. Plug in your address (or choose one of the pre-selected cities) to see if there are any satellites—shown as yellow dots—nearby. Or zoom out to watch all the satellites orbit the Earth at once in a dazzling visualization.

His city visualizer is also really cool.

Home

Parker and I are home, unpacked, and well-rested. Part of the well-rested bit resulted from three days of rain. When you go to a cabin in the woods and plan on lots of hiking, and no hiking happens, there is disappointment.

There is also a serendipitous find: Scratch Beer in Ana, Illinois. They make beers from locally-found ingredients: Pignut Ale, from local pignut hickory nuts. Pumpkin seed ale, which "DOES NOT TASTE LIKE PUMPKIN SPICE OR PUMPKIN PIE." I'll have photos tomorrow.

Right now: unpacking, laundry, deleting hundreds of emails, and sampling Grand River Spirits whiskey.

If I had a month off

I might follow this map. Explanation:

Community beer and brewery review site RateBeer puts out a list every year of the top 100 breweries in the world, “according to reviews taken last year and weighted by performance within and outside of style, balanced by indicators of depth.” From this year's list, 72 of the breweries are based in the United States.

Randal Olson found a pretty good solution using genetic algorithms and the Google Maps API. He computed an optimal road trip to visit a historical landmark in each state.

Forget that though. I want beer. Tasty beer. I applied Olson's solution to breweries to get the order in which to visit them in the least miles possible.

The trip to see just the 70 breweries on Yau's list takes 197 hours over 19,789 km. He thinks he can do it in 8 days. Or he can stop at any of the 1,414 other breweries in between and extend the trip to a month.

On the other hand, given the same amount of time off, I might rather do a oneworld explorer fare.

Lottery, anyone?

Did you know Microsoft invented Google Earth?

No, really. In 1998 Microsoft wanted to demonstrate its SQL Server database engine with a terabyte-sized database, so it built a map called Terraserver. Motherboard's Jason Koebler has the story:

Terraserver could have, should have been a product that ensured Microsoft would remain the world’s most important internet company well into the 21st century. It was the first-ever publicly available interactive satellite map of the world. The world’s first-ever terabyte-sized database. In fact, it was the world’s largest database for several years, and that Compaq was—physically speaking—the world's largest computer. Terraserver was a functional and popular Google Earth predecessor that launched and worked well before Google even thought of the concept. It let you see your house, from space.

So why aren’t we all using Terraserver on our smartphones right now?

Probably for the same reason Microsoft barely put up a fight as Google outpaced it with search, email, browser, and just about every other consumer service. Microsoft, the corporation, didn't seem to care very much about the people who actually used Terraserver, and it didn’t care about the vast amount of data about consumers it was gleaning from how they used the service.

In sum, Microsoft saw itself as a software company, not an information company. It's similar to how Borders got destroyed: it thought of itself as a bookstore, while Amazon thought of itself as a delivery service.

I remember how cool Terraserver was, and how sad I felt when it disappeared for a couple of years before it morphed into Google Earth.