The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Déjà vu all over again

You'll never guess where I am:

This is Chicago in December (though it looks and feels more like November). I tried flipping that photo between black & white and color a couple times, and I couldn't tell the difference.

Tonight I meet the nephews...

Another mild winter?

As I've reported before, Chicago's winter temperatures have more influence over summer temperatures than the reverse. The hypothesis is that if Lake Michigan can't give up its summer heat in the winter, it has less capacity to absorb the next summer's heat. But in the winter, cold air masses have more capacity to absorb the lake's heat than summer's warm air masses have to deposit it.

Well, if the weather so far is any indication, next summer will be brutal. We're not getting cold-enough air so far.

The last time the daytime high temperature was below freezing was February 25th, only the 12th day in 2012 to be as cold. Yesterday the temperature got up to freezing; today's, tomorrow's, and Tuesday's forecasts call for 1°C. The longer-range forecast calls for only three days with high temperatures below 0°C through the end of the year.

Through March, the Climate Prediction Center calls for normal temperatures:

River of snow, viewed from a bank

Downtown Chicago got the merest whisper of snowfall last night; O'Hare, our official station, got enough to set two records—in the negative.

Just 200 km away, however, people got a little more than we did:

The Madison, WI area was at the epicenter of this storm’s heaviest snows. Snowfalls as of 10:30PM Thursday included: 300 mm at Lena in western Stephenson Co, IL and up to 300 mm or more across Jo Davies County in far northwest Illinois where 33 km of US 20 were closed from Galena to Elizabeth due to snow and blowing snow.

Those wondering where the big snows occurred must check out these eye-catching snow tallies out of areas farther north and west Thursday including 495 mm at Middleton, WI—just west of Madison. Other totals included: Cross Plains WI 460 mm; Verona WI 400 mm; Hartford WI 380 mm; Madison WI & Dubuque, IA 360 mm; Portage and Taycheedah WI 355 mm; Grimes IA 341 mm; Des Moines 295 mm; Ankeny IA 267 mm, Ames IA 260 mm and Eldora IA 254 mm.

In Lincoln Park, I didn't get a chance to brush the one snowflake off Parker's fur that I saw because it melted right away.

I'm in no hurry for snow, though. No, I am not.

Two more broken records

Chicago has officially gotten measurable snowfall in the past couple of hours, ending the longest snow-free period in history. In the 291 days since March 4th, we haven't gotten more than a few flakes, less than the threshold 2.5 mm required to count as "measurable." The previous record, 280 days, was set in 1994.

This is also the latest day for our first snowfall; the previous record was set on 16 December 1965. (With only ten hours left until the solstice, you think it could have waited?)

Like so much of Chicago's weather, of course, when it changed today, it really changed:

The heaviest snow was expected to fall from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. with wind gusts of 80 to 95 km/h. Seventy-five to 175 mm is expected in the far northwest suburbs, 50 to 100 mm in Chicago and 25 to 75 mm in the south and southwest suburbs.

The weather service says the winds will be the real problem. "We may not get a whole lot of snow but the potential for snowing, drifting and poor visibility is very high," weather service meteorologist Mark Ratzer said.

In its storm warning, the weather service said the greatest chance of near white-out conditions is near the shoreline in Lake and Porter counties in Indiana. The storm warning is in effect from 3 p.m. until 3 a.m. Friday.

In western Illinois and Wisconsin, a blizzard warning is in effect with as much as a foot of snow forecast. Snow could fall 25 to 50 mm an hour around Rockford late in the afternoon, the weather service said.

But this is Illinois. We can handle it: "IDOT was mobilizing more than 550 snow plows responsible for roads in northern Illinois while the Illinois Tollway was preparing its full fleet of 182 snow plows to try and clear the 286-mile network of toll roads in 12 counties in northern Illinois." I believe that number represents more snow plows than exist in the United Kingdom, but I could be wrong.

Another reason to finish moving to Azure

As I've noted before, only one Web application still lives in my living room the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center: Weather Now. In the last few days, it's showing one more good reason that it needs to get to Windows Azure pronto.

Take a look at my Google Analytics view of incoming visitors:

What is going on? How do I go from 300 daily unique visitors to 1,800 in two days? Take a look at where they're coming from:

Yes, that's right. Close to 40% of Weather Now's traffic came from the Yukon Territory yesterday. And another 40% came from Alaska. And they're all going to this page for some reason. This might be why:

So how does Azure enter into it? Simply, if you have a Web application running on your own server, and you get a 750% increase in traffic, your server may not be able to handle it. Or, worse in a way, you might have been running the server capable of handling the peak load all the time, at great expense in electricity and hardware.

With Azure, you can simply bring another instance online, or increase the size of your running instance, or do any number of things to adapt quickly to the increased load, without having to buy or move the hardware. Then, when the load returns to normal, you can spin down the idle capacity. The trick is, you only pay for the capacity you're actually using.

I'm getting a lot closer to moving Weather Now, but a deadline looming at my paying job tomorrow has my attention at the moment. So more on this stuff later. Meanwhile, if you're in the Yukon or in central Alaska, stay warm, folks!

Completely foreseeable consequences

Florida's pathological "Stand Your Ground" law is working about as you'd expect:

Florida's controversial "stand your ground" law has been cited in hundreds of cases. People have used it to justify shooting, stabbing, killing and maiming would-be intruders, romantic competitors and rival gang members.

And on Sunday, at a pizza joint in St. Petersburg, a man tried to use it as justification for shooting another customer who was yelling at workers because he wasn't getting his order fast enough.

Police said the incident unfolded about 4 p.m. inside the Little Caesars, 3463 Fourth St. N, after Randall White, 49, got mad about his service.

Another man in line, Michael Jock, 52, of St. Petersburg admonished White. That "prompted them to exchange words and it became a shoving match," said police spokesman Mike Puetz.

White raised a fist. Jock, a concealed-weapons permit holder, pulled out a .38 Taurus Ultralight Special Revolver.

So obviously we need more guns around. And we need to pull them out any time someone gets uppity. That'll make for a safe, modern, civilized country.

At least this story ended reasonably: "Police arrested Jock on charges of aggravated battery with a weapon and shooting within a building. He was released from jail on $20,000 bail."

Ice, ice, baby

Coincident with last week's release of Chasing Ice, a documentary about how climate change is affecting the polar regions, this month's Scientific American looks at how sea ice loss causes extreme weather.

In the article—unfortunately behind a tall paywall—Charles Greene demonstrates how the loss of Arctic sea ice allows large loops in the mid-latitude jet stream to form, and to persist. Last winter, a negative Arctic oscillation combined with a positive North Atlantic oscillation (which controls weather in Europe) to keep most of the U.S. warm and most of Europe cold.

(If I can figure out how to connect my print subscription to their digital offer, I'll quote more extensively.)

The Times gets my attention this evening

Three unrelated stories drew my notice this evening:

PATH service has resumed to Hoboken. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—I lived in Hoboken, N.J., the birthplace of Frank Sinatra (really) and baseball (not really). I took the Port Authority Trans-Hudson train almost every day when I worked in SoHo, and about every third day when I worked in Midtown. Having experienced other ways of commuting to New York—in fact, the switch up to 53rd and Park finally got me to return to Chicago, after my commute stretched to an hour and 15 minutes and required three transit changes—I have a lot of sympathy for the people living in Hoboken and Jersey City who have had to make their ways across the Hudson without the PATH.

In the first days after 9/11, both the PATH and the MTA worried that the Twin Towers' collapse would breach the "bathtub" (the Towers' foundation) and flood both the PATH and the New York subway. No one knew how bad the damage would be, and were thankful when it didn't happen. Eleven years later, Hurricane Sandy showed everyone.

So reading today that the PATH Hoboken to 33rd St. line reopened after seven weeks made me smile. Not as much, I expect, as the thousands of people whose commutes can now return to tolerable lengths.

I'm visiting New York in a few weeks; I'll make sure to post a few photos in homage of the PATH.

Facebook's change to Instagram's terms of service has rightly outraged everyone paying attention. Instagram, a photo-sharing service that Facebook bought recently for $1 bn, this week published new terms of service that allow them to use posted photos any way they want, any time they want. Their goal, not surprisingly, is to make money. The people who use Instagram just want to share their photos with their friends.

The Times quoted Santa Clara University Law Professor Eric Goldman saying, "The interest of the site is never 100 percent aligned with the users, and the divergence inevitably leads to friction. It’s unavoidable." Well, yes, because Instagram's users are not Instagram's customers, as they are just discovering, because the customer is the one who pays you. If you use a service that is free to you, you are not the customer and therefore have nothing to say to the service's owners. I find the flap about Instagram's TOS so interesting because it seems as if none of their users has realized this key point yet.

Instagram swears up and down that the users continue to own their own photos. Of course they do. And of course you keep ownership. But if you post on Instagram, "you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channel...." So they don't own your photos, exactly, but they can act as if they do.

Under U.S. copyright law, the creator of a work owns it, unless he has signed away the creation right explicitly. (Example: I work for a great software company. I write software for them, under a work-for-hire agreement. Therefore, except for some explicit, written exceptions, all the software I produce that has commercial value is owned by my employer. If I write code in one of my employer's client's applications that makes 10th Magnitude a billion dollars, I don't own it, 10th Magnitude does. That's the deal I made when I took this job. I trust, however, that if I made my boss a billion dollars, he'd share.)

So if you take a photo on your phone, you own it. It's your photo. And Instagram's new TOS says, yes, of course you own it, but we can sell it if we want and pay you nothing.

Now, I've experienced a variety of contractual arrangements in my life as a creative person, so I'm not shocked when someone wants a piece of my income as a fee for finding the income-producing gig. As a software contractor, I've routinely signed away 25% or 30% of my earnings off the top, in exchange for someone else doing the legwork to find the income-producing gig on my behalf. (It's really hard to find gigs while you're working full time on one, it turns out.) And, as someone who hires software contractors now, I expect they'll agree, too. We call this a "commission," as have people in other professions for millennia.

Instagram, effectively, demands a 100% commission off your work. Not only that, but if Instagram finds that one of your photos makes Ansel Adams weep, they can market the crap out of it. You'll never see a dime. Why would someone license the rights from you, when Instagram is selling them cheap? And you can't stop Instagram from destroying the market for your work, because you consented to it by posting your photo.

Let me put it another way. Instagram is saying, "You own your car, of course. But if you park it in our garage, we get to use it as a taxi, without paying you a dime."

To sum up: the people railing against Instagram's new TOS are exactly right. It sucks. And I will never, ever post any of my intellectual property there, even if they change the TOS in response to the approbation they've received, because (repeat after me) I am not their customer.

Finally—and I assure you, this is not related to Instagram—I recoiled in horror at the latest religious stupidity, that the Taliban have started killing anti-polio workers in Afghanistan.

Full disclosure: I was a member of Rotary International for a few years, and I wholly support the organization's amazingly-successful efforts to destroy polio the way we destroyed smallpox. Polio is a sufficiently complex organism that it can't evolve as quickly as we can kill it, making it an ideal target for eradication (like smallpox). But you have to get immunized, and sufficient numbers of your neighbors do, too, or it will keep spreading.

So, these idiot religious fundies, who subscribe to any number of irrational fantasies already, have apparently decided that the people trying to keep their babies from dying of an entirely preventable disease are, in fact, American spies. As the Times reports, "the killings were a serious reversal for the multi-billion-dollar global polio immunization effort, which over the past quarter century has reduced the number of endemic countries from 120 to just three: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria."

Does anyone else see a coincidence between the three last outposts of a crippling, preventable disease and religious nuttery? Part of Rotary's success, by the way, has been in reassuring local populations that eradicating polio is no more and no less than it seems: a humanitarian effort to end a horrible disease forever. Wars have stopped to allow Rotary and the Gates Foundation to conduct immunizations. But the Taliban do not believe in reason. They would rather have hundreds of their children dead or crippled than accept the possibility that some American- (and British- and French- and Japanese- and South-African- and Namibian- and Saudi- and...) funded organization wants to prevent their children dying or becoming crippled.

Three countries still have polio. They also have air travel. Not everyone in the OECD has polio vaccinations today. So, if I can mention the self-interest of everyone able to read this blog post, who must therefore speak English and have an Internet connection, the religious nutters killing health workers who, but for being shot, would have eradicated a disease that has crippled millions, have made your life more perilous.

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All right. Time to walk the dog.

PS: You may need to subscribe to the New York Times to read the linked stories. I apologize if this inconveniences you, but I recommend subscribing anyway. For $15 a month you not only get the entire newspaper online (and on any tablets you own), but you get to feel good about yourself. You also get to live Kant's categorical imperative, by behaving in such a way that the behavior could be universal. Isn't $15 an incentive worth aligning?