The Daily Parker

This is why I love Sint Maarten:

It turned out that I had an actual task today. Two, in fact. Both were pure stupidity on my part. And both completely scotched my goal of doing nothing worthwhile for four days.

First, I had promised something to my team at work before I left, but didn't realize until I checked email this morning that, well, the task was not completed. (Notice the subtle use of passive voice there.) So I had that task, which took half an hour.

Second, mentioned forgetting a few vital items in my luggage, so I had to buy them. And I paid a stupidity tax. The cost of one hat, two pairs of shorts, one pair of sandals (which I didn't already own and therefore had planned to buy here anyway), and one bottle of sunscreen was two hundred bloody dollars. In other words, I paid a 100% tax on bad packing.

So to compensate for having to do things today, after accomplishing both tasks I put on my new shorts, sunscreen, and sandals, then walked the 800 meters from my hotel to the opposite side of Maho Beach and watched planes land for three hours. I need to point out that along the way, I walked through the Caribbean Sea. My new shorts got seawater on them. I think this is exactly what they're for. Especially since the seawater was about the same temperature as the air (27°C), and unlike walking through Lake Michigan on any day except that one day in the beginning of September when everything lines up perfectly, it felt really good. (My feet are, in fact, still wet.)

I also met a few good people, had a few good drinks, and learned that the best airplane landing of the week occurs tomorrow around lunchtime when KLM flight 785 lands. It's a 747-400, the largest plane that flies here. If I have to stand out in the rain, I'm going to see this thing land.

Of course, this means I now have a plan. Even though I came to this island with the explicit goal of not accomplishing or planning anything, except maybe reading a book or two, I just can't help myself. The Dude is onto something...I just can't get there yet...

My plan is:

• Tomorrow: sleep late, eat something, walk across Maho Beach, take photos of the 747 landing, walk back to my hotel, change my shoes, walk somewhere else (possibly Marigot or Phillipsburg), have some drinks.
• Saturday: sleep late, walk somewhere (maybe even take a bus and then walk), read something, walk somewhere else, read some more, have some drinks.
• Sunday: sleep late, shove things into my suitcase, walk somewhere, retrieve my suitcase, go to New York, have some drinks.

Understand that "have some drinks" is an ongoing activity. And the happy accident is that the room I got for cheap through Bookings.com includes free drinks.

Someday, and that day may never come, I will do nothing for an entire week. Meanwhile, this is the least I can do right now. Baby steps.

Via the IANA Time Zone Database mailing list, through Randy Olson, comes this map showing the difference between local solar time and what wall clocks show throughout the world:

At the time I’m writing, near the winter solstice, Madrid’s sunset is around 17:55, more than an hour later than the sunset in, for example, Naples, which is at a similar latitude. The same difference holds at the summer solstice and around the year. Just because it applies to most places I’ve been, a time like that in Naples feels more natural to me, and probably to most non-Spanish people. But is it?

Looking for other regions of the world having the same peculiarity of Spain, I edited a world map from Wikipedia to show the difference between solar and standard time. It turns out, there are many places where the sun rises and sets late in the day, like in Spain, but not a lot where it is very early (highlighted in red and green in the map, respectively). Most of Russia is heavily red, but mostly in zones with very scarce population; the exception is St. Petersburg, with a discrepancy of two hours, but the effect on time is mitigated by the high latitude. The most extreme example of Spain-like time is western China: the difference reaches three hours against solar time. For example, today the sun rises there at 10:15 and sets at 19:45, and solar noon is at 15:01.

If you live in the green areas of the map, the sun tends to rise and set earlier than in the red zones. Not coincidentally, the places that set time policy tend to be neutral: London, Washington, Sydney, Beijing, Ottawa...they're all nearly dead-center in their respective zones. The notable exception is Moscow, where time policy goes back and forth and may even change once more this year.

Finally, a commenter on the Reddit MapPorn post where this also appeared points out: "Fun fact: The small Afghan-Chinese border is the largest jump in timezone in the world. (3 and a half hour difference on each side) You'd get jet lag crossing that border."

In two and a half weeks, I'll be on a beach doing nothing of value to anyone but myself. Meanwhile, here are all the things I won't have time to read until someday in the future:

• The NOAA Climate Prediction Center has forecast essentially normal temperatures for the Midwest during February, March, and April. This is the same organization that predicted normal temperatures for January, so, you know.
• In Chicago, when there is snow, there are dibs. The practice has become more objectionable than ever to people who presumably like the idea of shared public space.
• Europe has much better credit-card security than is generally available in the U.S. My bank issued me a European, chipped card—but only on request.
• A McDonald's restaurant in Queens has a chronic geriatric infestation.
• Here's a cool chart showing U.S. city population rankings since 1790. Detroit's line is particularly interesting.
• Rush Limbaugh lives in an epistemical bubble (but we all knew that).
• Does Alcoholics Anonymous block real treatment of alcoholism?
• Birds fly in V formations because they are spectacularly good at physics.

Now my long day continues...

A century ago, engineers cut the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi Basin. It might be time to close the canal:

Over the last decade or so, a huge range of interests — from environmental groups to fishermen to shipping experts to politicians — have raised the alarm over just how much this artificial connection has created an opening for invasive species such as the Asian carp to make their way through North America’s waterways. And the costs associated with the damage caused by these species have been high enough to prompt serious consideration of closing off the link between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes.

How high? First, consider the figure $18 billion. That’s the estimate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released last week to re-insert a physical separation between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi system.

The proposal would dam the Chicago and Calumet Rivers' connections to the Canal, requiring changes to the Deep Tunnel reservoir system and the flood-control systems in the Western suburbs. Meanwhile, Asian carp have gotten within a few kilometers of Lake Michigan. Twenty of those fish in the lake is all it would take to create a permanent population all the way to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Reversing the Chicago River made a lot of sense in 1900, and probably saved thousands of lives from cholera and other diseases. Times change, though. We have new threats today.

WFM Lincoln Park Store Team Leader Rich Howley responded to my complaint right away:

We are really sorry for the inconvenience in our garage this afternoon, we realized immediately that we were over-whelmed and brought in additional security, they unfortunately had not yet arrived.

They are doing exactly what you had suggested.

I walked the entire area around the store, and what exacerbated the situation was traffic on North Ave was bumper to bumper in both directions, and this gridlocked traffic trying to get from Kingsbury/Sheffield Sts onto North, which in turn backed up the traffic directly in front of the store, in clogged up people trying to get out of the lot.

We are terribly sorry that you got hung up in our garage.

My response:

Thank you for your prompt reply. I have to disagree with you about the timing, however. There was a traffic jam on North Avenue around 12:30, true; but I didn't leave the store until almost 1:15. By that time the traffic on Sheffield going north and Kingsbury south of the store had thinned out to a still-heavy but more-common level for holidays.

However, by 1:30, when I finally got out of the parking structure, there was no traffic on Kingsbury south of Blackhawk. Had your team directed third-floor exiting traffic out the southeast exit and then south on Kingsbury, cars would have fanned out along Blackhawk, Fremont, and Eastman, reducing pressure on the Sheffield/Weed/Kingsbury intersection. Anyone observing the situation at the southeast exit would have seen this; but your security team didn't have anyone standing there, didn't have anyone on the third floor, and didn't appear to have radios.

People might have been annoyed had they wanted to go north on Sheffield, but at least they'd be moving. And--more to the point--people would have *seen your guys keeping traffic moving*. Instead of 30-40 seconds per car getting onto Kingsbury, you could have gotten maybe 3-4 seconds per car, and cleared the upper deck within five minutes.

Ask any airline: keeping customers informed, and keeping up the appearance of trying to solve the problem (even if it's truly insoluble), makes people less likely to fire off notes to Customer Service--or worse.

Sorry if this seems like a rant; I'm trying to help. I've seen the store handle huge surges of traffic before, so today's failure was really surprising. I think you need to have a serious talk with your security team about it.

Kudos to Howley for responding so quickly. And he's mostly right. But someone on his security team screwed the pooch on this one, whether by not thinking or by not acting, and a lot of people were inconvenienced.

I go to Whole Foods Market twice a week or more, almost always the Lincoln Park, Chicago store. Even when they have lots of customers, they have plenty of space and plenty of parking, so I didn't worry about ducking out of my house this afternoon to pick up lunch and dog food.

Here's the result. Don't let the international units confuse you; that's an hour and 13 minutes to go about 4 miles:

Here's the situation when I arrived, which looked remarkably like the situation when I left:

Here's the store layout from Google Earth; the red arrow points to the south exit ramp (click for full size):

Now that you have the visuals, here's the note I just dashed off to Whole Foods Customer Service:

Your response to a traffic surge this afternoon made a bad situation worse, and created a safety hazard even as it inconvenienced dozens of customers.

In short, dozens of cars were trapped on the third floor of your parking structure for more than an hour because your security team were unable or unwilling to take the simple, necessary actions to alleviate the problem.

I arrived at the store around 12:40 this afternoon. Because it appeared busy on the second floor parking area, I headed straight up to the third. Even before going up the ramp, however, I noticed cars having difficulty coming down the ramp because of snow. It was difficult for cars coming down the ramp to negotiate the tight turn, and they were slipping into the other lane. That, while dangerous and creating unknown liability for the store, wasn't the worst part, as I discovered when I finally got to the third floor and got stuck in a total gridlock.

No one could leave the third floor parking area. It took me twenty minutes to get into a parking space because of this. But that's still not the worst part. No, twenty minutes later, when I tried to leave, cars were still unable to leave the third floor, even though the parking area was nearly empty, and even though a CSR had told me that you had actually stopped people coming up the ramp.

When I finally got onto the ramp and arrived at the second floor, I discovered three security guards directing one car at a time up, down, or across. This was actually no help as drivers are perfectly capable of zippering together as long as the cars are moving. No, it wasn't until I got to the Kingsbury exit that it became obvious how the situation had become so grim. With no one directing traffic out of the parking structure at Kingsbury, cars could only exit singly and about every 30-40 seconds.

It's irrelevant that you may have needed Chicago Police permission to direct traffic onto Kingsbury. Given the traffic load and safety hazard it posed, you would have had no trouble getting permission--if it were even required. Regardless, anyone who observed and thought about the traffic situation would have seen this obvious bottleneck.

Here are a number of concrete suggestions to prevent this kind of unsafe and inconvenient situation from recurring in times of high traffic load:

1. Station a security guard at the south exit onto Kingsbury to halt southbound traffic on Kingsbury while directing exiting traffic south on the same street. This will avoid the bottlenecks at Weed and North, alleviate pressure on the exit ramp, and give the security team better visibility of the entire traffic situation.
2. Station a security guard at the top of the third floor ramp to keep all traffic on the third floor moving only clockwise. Cars should move only along the outside (south and east) walls before splitting into two streams by the third-floor main entrance near the air conditioning units. Cars that can't find parking moving south in the second and third rows can go around the outside again. But the security guard will have visibility into the parking situation and can let others know when the third floor is full.
3. Station a security guard at the second-floor junction of the third-floor ramp to keep cars moving clockwise on that level, too. When the Kingsbury guard allows a stream of traffic to leave, the second-floor guard should halt all traffic except those cars spiraling down to Kingsbury from the third floor.

This is not rocket science. It just requires that someone observe, coordinate, and above all _think_ about the problem. The security team today completely failed, costing me and dozens of other customers more than an hour of time.

I will post any response they send.

Nephew #1 arrived yesterday evening while I sat a mile away talking with the manager of San Benito House and, apparently, challenging people to a Scrabble game later today. Nephew #1 is a much lighter sleeper than the rest of us, which causes him frustration, and when he gets frustrated he sets out to determine how much noise is required to make everyone exactly as light a sleeper as he.

Fortunately, I'm on Chicago time, so getting up at 5am PST (7am CST) does not bother me. And it gives me some time to read the articles that crossed my inbox overnight:

• Talking Points Memo has released the Golden Duke Awards, given out to the best examples of corruption during the past year. Susie Bright's ballot was especially entertaining this year, as was Dan Savage's.
• The Atlantic Cities Blog rounds up their favorite maps of 2013, including Dustin Cable's dot map of everyone.
• After UPS and FedEx botched their roll-out of Christmas deliveries this year, can we take a moment to realize the private sector has problems too? (In fact, it's worth keeping in mind that the worst bits of government incompetence in the past year were actually farmed out to private companies.)
• I'm not the biggest fan of Upworthy, but sometimes they have amusing posts. Yesterday one was about patronizing women's ads.

It's still an hour before dawn here, so I'm rocking out the nearly-empty Peet's, about to resume some client work. I promise another photo of the ocean before I return home tomorrow.

This weekend's cover story in New York Times Magazine looks in detail at Google's grand plan to map everything:

Street View cars have already mapped six million miles. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a quite a lot (equivalent to 12 trips to the moon and back) or not much at all (only one-tenth of the world’s estimated 60 million miles of road). Either way, Google’s huge investment in the camera-equipped cars — not to mention trikes, boats, snowmobiles and, yes, rafts — has yielded the most detailed street atlas on earth.

Early last year, Google’s United States market share for where-type queries topped 70 percent, and Google started to get serious about recouping the fortune it has been sinking into making its map, putting a tollbooth in front of its application programming interface. Henceforth, heavy users would be charged for the privilege.

Today, Google’s map includes the streets of every nation on earth, and Street View has so far collected imagery in a quarter of those countries. The total number of regular users: A billion people, or about half of the Internet-connected population worldwide. Google Maps underlies a million different websites, making its map A.P.I. among the most-used such interfaces on the Internet. At this point Google Maps is essentially what Tim O’Reilly predicted the map would become: part of the information infrastructure, a resource more complete and in many respects more accurate than what governments have. It’s better than MapQuest’s map, better than Microsoft’s, better than Apple’s.

The article also looks at Open Street Map, the Wikipedia of GIS, and wonders whether Google's proprietary database will ultimately win.

The Atlantic Cities blog sounds the alarm about London's bike share program:

While the system recorded 726,893 journeys in November 2012, last month there were only 514,146. To cap these poor user figures, today Transport for London announced that the scheme's major sponsor, Barclays Bank, will pull out of its sponsorship deal in 2015. Given the bad publicity the system has received recently, it may be hard to find a replacement sponsor without some major changes.

None of this would matter much if London’s scheme was entirely self-sustaining. But while Paris's bike-share scheme actually makes money for the city, London's 4,000 bikes cost local taxpayers an average of £1,400 per bike per year. As the Daily Mail points out, this would be enough to buy each of the scheme's 38,000 registered users a £290 bike. Barclays has thus found its sponsorship deal a mixed publicity blessing – though the bank itself may be part of the problem. The £50 million it promised was never going to be enough, and the amount it has actually handed over so far suggests their ultimate contribution could be at little as half that.

So, Toronto and London are having problems; Chicago and Paris are booming. This is turning into a fascinating natural experiment.