The Daily Parker

Via Sullivan, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg is creating 3D portraits from random hairs:

Collecting hairs she finds in random public places – bathrooms, libraries, and subway seats – she uses a battery of newly developing technologies to create physical, life-sized portraits of the owners of these hairs. You can see the portrait she’s made from her own hair in the photo below. While the actual likeness is a point of contention, these images bring about some creepy-yet-amazing comments; on genetic identity (how much of “you” really resides in your DNA?); on the possibilities of surveillance (what if your jealous partner started making portraits from hairs they found around your house?); and on the subjectivity inherent in working with “hard” data and computer systems (how much of a role do human assumptions play in this machine made portrait?).

The artist's site is here.

All right. This came a little sooner than I expected, and from a different source. I've long recognize the necessity of adapting to, rather than raging impotently against, the fundamental changes to the security and privacy mores we've had for several thousand years. (As Bruce Schneier has pointed out, "Fifteen years ago, [CCTV cameras] weren't everywhere. Fifteen years from now, they'll be so small we won't be able to see them.") But this project, if it works as hoped, actually freaks me out a little.

I'm going to whistle past this graveyard for the time being...

Even though the temperature outside tied the record 38°C set 70 years ago, I'm happy to report that Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters has remained tolerably cool:

Those are degrees Celsius vertically and the last 24 hours of time horizontally. The lower temperatures overnight come from me turning the air conditioning to a cooler setting in the evening and back up in the morning.

What you can't see in this snapshot is that during our last hot, hot summer (2008), I had trouble keeping the office below 27.5°C. That's where the server fans spin up, power consumption skyrockets, and the electronics within the servers start crying. So far in the last two months, I've only had about three hours total above that threshold temperature, caused not by inadequate air conditioning but by me not closing the windows and turning the AC on in the first place.

I credit the window replacement completed in December 2010. Since 2011 had neither a particularly harsh summer nor a harsh winter, it was harder to see this data before.

Also, having turned off 40% of my servers probably helped.

Still, I do not want to go outside right now...

Today marks the 31st time this year Chicago's temperature has exceeded 32°C as another record falls:

The July 17 record high of 38°C for this date has stood 70 years, having been set in 1942 during World War II. Tuesday's heat gives the city a shot at replacing this record. [It was 36°C just before noon.—DB]

New USDA crop report paints bleak picture across much of the Midwest; more than half of Illinois' corn crop is "poor" or "very poor"!

Crops are struggling in many Midwest fields this year. USDA's weekly report on crop conditions released Monday indicates the condition of the corn crop continues to deteriorate. 56 percent of corn in Illinois is rated "poor"or "very poor". That percentage stands at 43 percent in Wisconsin; 27 percent in Iowa; 56 percent in Michigan; and grows to 69 percent in Missouri; and a whopping 71% in Indiana.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert points out we made this happen 30 years ago:

One of the most salient—but also, unfortunately, most counterintuitive—aspects of global warming is that it operates on what amounts to a time delay. Behind this summer’s heat are greenhouse gases emitted decades ago. Before many effects of today’s emissions are felt, it will be time for the Summer Olympics of 2048. (Scientists refer to this as the “commitment to warming.”) What’s at stake is where things go from there. It is quite possible that by the end of the century we could, without even really trying, engineer the return of the sort of climate that hasn’t been seen on earth since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

Along with the heat and the drought and the super derecho, the country this summer is also enduring a Presidential campaign. So far, the words “climate change” have barely been uttered. This is not an oversight. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have chosen to remain silent on the issue, presumably because they see it as just too big a bummer.

And so, while farmers wait for rain and this season’s corn crop withers on the stalk, the familiar disconnect continues. There’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change, even as the insanity of doing nothing becomes increasingly obvious.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

Some Japanese students have invented a gadget that stops people from talking:

The NoiseJammer works by recording the irritating voices of rude individuals and playing it back to them [a quarter-second] later, overriding their annoying conversations with a flood of their own words. If you want the technical details to build your own jammer, it's all described in this academic paper, which explains the reasoning behind such a device.

Here's a demonstration:

As Chicago temperatures today and tomorrow will likely hit 35°C, I find myself looking forward to October. While temperatures will undoubtedly be lower then, we may not actually have a very interesting leaf season:

Deciduous trees (trees that lose their foliage in the winter) are sensitive to the increasing length of night during the autumn. When the hours of darkness reach a threshold value, fall colors begin to appear. The U.S. National Arboretum says, "Because the starting time of the whole process is dependent on night length, fall colors appear at about the same time each year in a given location, regardless whether temperatures are cooler or warmer than normal." However, drought stress during the growing season can cause leaves to fall before they have a chance to develop fall coloration, and that will be the likely effect of our drought: bland fall colors.

The one, single benefit related to all this heat and drought: we're having the third-sunniest July in history.

Via Krugman, Ezra Klein reminds us of the differences between the President's and Romney's tax plans:

Note that the Tax Policy Center could only conduct a partial analysis of Romney’s tax plan. That’s because Romney’s proposal itself is incomplete. He’s said that he wants to scrap various deductions in the tax code, particularly for high earners, in order to broaden the tax base. But he hasn’t offered any details about which deductions he’d scrap or how, so there wasn’t anything for the Tax Policy Center to analyze.

As Krugman says, "[T]he next time someone tut-tuts about 'class warfare,' remember that the class war is already happening, in real policy—with the top .01 percent on offense."

The aurora borealis could be visible as far south as Chicago, Belfast, and Seattle tonight and tomorrow:

A significant event located on the Sun facing Earth took place on July 12. The effects of this event will begin to reach Earth early on the 14th of July GMT.

Observers in North America should watch for aurora on the nights of the 14th and 15th local time. Depending on the configuration of the disturbance, auroras may be visible as far south as the middle tier of states.

Activity may remain high also on the 16th. Auroras should be visible Southern New Zealand, Tasmania, and of course, Antarctica.

I've only seen aurorae from airplanes in flight over the polar regions. Obviously they're invisible from within the city of Chicago, but if I had a boat, tonight would be great for going out on the lake and looking for them.

(Cross-posted to my company's blog.)

If you’ve looked at Microsoft’s Azure pricing model, you’ve no doubt had some difficulty figuring out what makes the most economic sense. What size instances do I need? How many roles? How much storage? What will my monthly bill actually be?

Since June 7th, Microsoft has had one price for an entry-level offering that is completely comprehensible: free. You can now run up to 10 web sites on a shared instance for free. (Well, you have to pay for data output over 165 MB per month at 12c per gigabyte, and if the site needs a SQL Database, that’s at least $5 a month, etc.)

At 10th Magnitude, we’ve switched to free Azure websites for our dev and staging instances of some internal applications and for our brochure site. And it’s saving us real money.

There are limitations, which I’ll get to, but c’mon: free. A shared-instance Azure website is perfect if you have a small, low-bandwidth, compute-light web application that only needs, maybe, a small MySQL database or some XML files. They even have a quick-start gallery that includes DotNetNuke, dasBlog, WordPress, and a few other open source packages—also free.

So here’s how those limitations hit: Free Azure web sites run on a shared virtual machine with who-knows-how-many other people, and you get an “extra-small” VM to boot (1 GHz processor, 768 MB of RAM). You can’t use Azure tables or blobs with it, and “free” only includes 5 hours of compute time and 165 MB of data going out per month. Most important, you can’t use a custom host header, so your site URL will be “something.azurewebsites.net” instead of “www.something.com”. You can get more, better, faster, and your own domain name by going to a Reserved web site instance—but that is decidedly not free.

Take a look at the pricing model. Our official brochure site runs in an extra-small Azure web role, but doesn’t use a SQL database, nor does it use much storage, compute power, or data egress. The bill comes to about $30 per month. That’s not bad at all, considering how much dedicated hosting costs generally (really, Rackspace? $150 per month is your cheapest deal?).

Let’s say we double that $30 because we’re not going to slap our chief marketing website up there without a private staging instance. So now our $30 site costs $60, and remember, we aren’t even using a database.

Or, in fact, go ahead and triple it to $90, because we need a dedicated dev instance as well. Our CMO, Jen, needs room to experiment, try new designs, and test-drive new marketing approaches, which we don’t want on our staging instance in case we accidentally promote it to production.

Why not use a virtual machine, then? Here’s where Microsoft’s pricing gets tricky. An extra-small VM is less than $10 per month during the “preview period” going on right now, but you’ll need storage to hold the VM, and you’ll still have to pay for bandwidth. That puts the real price around $30 a month.

We could, in theory, run all three environments (production, staging, preview) on the single VM. But who in his right mind would run all three environments on one VM? So we’re back to two VMs—or three—so $90 a month.

By the way, reserved instances have another limitation, which may have something to do with Microsoft’s own capacity constraints as they build out new datacenters. Extra-small reserved instances aren’t available right now, so you’re stuck getting a small instance at $60 per month. I’ll have more on reserved instances in a subsequent post, because they’re great if you have an existing, complex Web application you want to move to the Cloud but don’t want to refactor it to use Azure cloud services.

In short, we’re saving about $60 per month—67%—by using free Azure web sites instead of Web roles or VMs. And that’s just for our corporate brochure. Add what we’re saving for our internal applications, and now we’re talking about more pizza and beer for the developers real savings.

More next post on solving challenges with staging on an Azure web site and hosting the production version in a Web role.

Despite the obviousness of USAirways acquiring it as American Airlines' only hope for survival, apparently some AMR executives are having a Walter Mitty moment:

A source familiar with the situation said AMR sees itself as an acquirer in potential mergers and at least five airlines -- US Airways Group Inc., JetBlue Airways Corp, Alaska Air Group, Republic Airways' Frontier Airlines, and Virgin America -- will be considered.

American has faced mounting pressure from vocal members of its creditors committee, led by its largest labor unions, who have argued that a merger with US Airways would give the combined carrier a strong network to compete with rivals beefed up by their own mergers. US Airways has expressed interest in a merger and has been courting AMR's creditors.

The problem, one will see immediately, is that AMR doesn't have the resources to take over another airline. And the ones they listed are regional, medium-sized, or discount airlines, not at all likely to help American get out of bankruptcy. Virgin just has to be a joke, of course. Not that there haven't been mergers between Americans and Virgins in the past—I just don't think Richard Branson will put out for Tom Horton in the near future.

Possibly this is just posturing by AMR executives. I hope so. Because if not, USAirways won't buy American, and American will die, and I'll have to fly United. And that would really suck.

Even though Chicago has had completely tolerable weather the last three days, June and the first few days of July took their toll. Since the beginning of meterological summer on June 1st, Chicago has had the hottest summer ever, with only 26% of normal rainfall:

Its 24.7°C average temperatures is running 3.8°C above the long term (142-year) average and 2.9°C above the same period a year ago. Wednesday is to bring the metro area's 14th consecutive day of above normal temperatures.

July's abundant sunshine has month on track to end up one of the area's three or four sunniest.

It's not surprising at all to learn that not only is the summer season is the warmest on the books, it also ranks among the three or four sunniest Julys on record here with 86 percent of the area's possible sun--well above the 68 percent considered normal.

It's just over 30°C now, and forecast to hit 32°C at the lakefront by Saturday (and today, inland).

Brief respite over, I suppose. I even had the windows open the last couple of mornings.