So confusing.

At my last Cubs game, they beat the Cardinals to get into first place. But here's yesterday's result:

Let's see that in close-up, just to drive home the pathos and pain....

(Photo after the jump.)

The Chicago Tribune reports today that the City Council now, five months later, wants to have hearings about the late-night, rush-rush, badly-managed parking meter privitization they pushed through in December:

Less than five months after the Chicago City Council quickly and overwhelmingly approved the deal, aldermen buffeted by public complaints pushed a slew of ordinances Wednesday targeting the $1.2 billion lease of Chicago's parking meters to a private company.

One measure calls for hearings to examine the deal, which ushered in dramatic rate hikes at 36,000 meters across the city. Another would halt rate increases until all meters are uprooted and replaced with "pay and display" equipment allowing motorists to pay with credit cards and place tickets on their dashboards. Yet a third would require a 30-day waiting period before aldermen could approve any plan to privatize city assets.

The proposals appear aimed at giving aldermen political cover amid widespread discontent and technical problems as the parking meter system transitions to private control.

Not that people don't carry around buckets-full of quarters wherever they go. Not that charging the same price for parking all the time and throughout the city fails to take account of the fundamental principles of demand economics. No, now let's have hearings.

I can't tell whether they were stupid or if they all got paid off. That's how badly they handled this. (Usually in Chicago the politicians aren't actually stupid, they just lose IQ points when confronted with fat envelopes.)

Via TPM, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) thinks he stumped Nobel laureate Stephen Chu:

Barton: You’re our scientist. I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean?

Chu: (laughs) This is a complicated story, but oil and gas is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geology, and in that time also the plates have moved around, and so, um, it’s the combination of where the sources of the oil and gas are–

Barton: But, but wouldn’t it obvious that at one time it was a lot warmer in Alaska and on the North Pole. It wasn’t a big pipeline that we created in Texas and shipped it up there and then put it under ground so that we can now pump it out and ship it back.

Chu: No. There are–there’s continental plates that have been drifting around throughout the geological ages–

Barton: So it just drifted up there?

Chu: That’s certainly what happened. And so it’s a result of thinks like that.

(Low whistle...)

That's the word the first commenter used to describe Paul Krugman's conclusion about the march to war:

Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There's a word for this: it’s evil.

If that's shrill, we need to re-examine the 2002 State of the Union address, don't we?

Via Daily Howler, Naomi Klein argues we should throw out Larry Summers:

The criticisms of President Obama's chief economic adviser are well known. He's too close to Wall Street. And he's a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we're told we shouldn't care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain.

And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is the process wherein the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person is inflated and valued beyond all reason, creating a dangerous accumulation of unhedged risk. Larry Summers is the biggest Brain Bubble we've got.

...And that's the problem with Larry. For all his appeals to absolute truths, he has been spectacularly wrong again and again. He was wrong about not regulating derivatives. Wrong when he helped kill Depression-era banking laws, turning banks into too-big-to-fail welfare monsters. And as he helps devise ever more complex tricks and spends ever more taxpayer dollars to keep the financial casino running, he remains wrong today.

She makes a pretty good point.

So, on a recommendation, I picked up a copy of Barbara Bleau's Forgotten Calculus, to brush up on the subject in advance of starting business school this fall.

Only, I haven't forgotten calculus. No, my problem is, I never learned it in the first place.[1]

So if anyone knows of a book called "Calculus You Never Learned In The First Place," please let me know.

[1] I guess you could say I'm a bit behind the curve.

I announced Friday that I deployed a complete, ground-up rewrite of Weather Now, but it looks a lot like the old version. So what's really different?

(Because of the limited appeal of technical information, the answer is after the jump.)

(Mudville is that $1.5 billion park just over the Harlem River in the Bronx.) The Yankees had a disappointing 2nd inning hosting the Indians yesterday as Cleveland set a new Major League record:

A 37-minute top of the second at Yankee Stadium saw the Tribe put up 14 runs on 13 hits off right-handers Chien-Ming Wang and Anthony Claggett. The big inning, which set the Tribe on course for its eventual 22-4 victory, tied for the most productive inning in Indians history and set a record for the most productive inning by an opponent in Yankees history.

The 14 runs set a Major League record for the most in the second inning. The record was 13, and it was last accomplished, ironically, by the Yankees exactly four years ago against Tampa Bay.

In other news, the Cubs beat the Cardinals yesterday 7-5 at Wrigley after 11 innings.

1:15 pm, Chicago:

Full size:

This, I think, says it all...almost:

Weather Now 3.5 is now the official, public version of my 9½-year-old demo. I first launched the site in September 1999 as a scripted ASP application, and last deployed a major update (version 3.0) on 1 January 2007.

As threatened promised, I'll have a lot more to say about it in the next few days. But I should address the first obvious question, "Why does it look almost identical to the previous version?" Simply: because my primary goal for this release was to duplicate every feature of the existing application, without adding new features unless absolutely required. It also had to run on the existing databases. That's why this version is 3.5, not 4.0 (which I hope to finish in early 2010).

I couldn't avoid some user interface (UI) differences, mainly because I used better design techniques than in the last release. And just as a matter of course, as I re-wrote each UI feature, I corrected or obviated numerous defects along the way. That said, version 3.5 has all of the features that 3.1 had, and any URLs that worked in 3.1 will work in 3.5.

I invite everyone to play with the application, and let me know about any defects or hiccups you discover. I think you'll find that it's an improvement over the last version.

This passage from Almost Perfect, Pete Peterson's autobiography of his days at WordPerfect Corp., inspired me to get out of bed, walk to my computer, and post a blog entry:

We on the Board had no one to blame for the delays but ourselves. The project directors we had chosen were inexperienced managers, and they made the mistakes inexperienced managers make. They were prone to overly optimistic forecasts and had trouble chewing people out when they missed their deadlines. Another of our mistakes was that we waited too long to add new programmers to the project....

And here is the context of that passage, which Peterson, without irony or self-awareness, set up only two paragraphs earlier:

I was not entirely honest in making the admission [that our release date had slipped]. Rather than go with a realistic date or a vague date or no date at all, I announced a hoped-for second quarter release, which was the most optimistic date from our most optimistic developer.

Yes, the Board had no one to blame...but they blamed the managers and developers. Yes, the managers had trouble chewing people out...for missing deadlines the programmers thought impossible and never agreed to. Yes, the programmers came up with a range of estimates...which turned out to include the actual ship date. And there's more.