The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Must be lunchtime

Today's crop of articles:

And now, back to coding.

How does one pack for this?

We have pretty normal autumn weather in Chicago right now, in that it's gray and cold with temperatures about 3°C below normal. Friday morning, when I fly out, temperatures will fall to 10°C below normal and then 13°C below normal when I get back Tuesday.

We have this ridiculous late-autumn chill because of climate change. Warm air over Greenland and the Grand Banks has distorted the circumpolar jet stream into an omega shape, bringing the Arctic to Canada and the central US and bringing California to Alaska. Check out the map.

I'll just have to drive to O'Hare and leave a winter coat in my car, I suppose.

Things to read on my flight Friday

I realized this morning that I've missed almost the entire season of The Good Place because I don't seem to have enough time to watch TV. I also don't have enough time until Friday to read all of these pieces that have crossed my desk only today:

And now, I must finish correlating two analyses of 1.48 million data points using similar but not identical algorithms. It's as much fun as it sounds.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle elected Speaker of the Commons

After a few rounds of voting, (now former) Labour MP the Rt Hon Sir Lindsay Hoyle has been elected the 158th Speaker of the House of Commons. As Harriet Harmon said in her speech just before the first round of voting, of the 158, only one was female.

In other news, Voyager 2 has become the second human spacecraft to check in from the other side of the heliosheath separating the solar system from interstellar space.

One of these stories is probably a lot more important than the other...

O'Hare's "interim fly quiet" plan

Chicago has the world's 6th busiest airport, with hundreds of thousands of aviation operations every year. Naturally the people who live nearby get an earful. I live about 16 km east of the approach end of runway 28C, the preferred landing runway from destinations south and west of Chicago. Even though the planes are about 4,000 feet up when they cross the lakefront, I can still hear them well enough to tell them apart by sound. (No machine in the world sounds like a 747, I assure you.)

Starting today, the airport will use a rotating arrangement of landing and departing runways for nighttime operations (10pm to 7am). Despite its name, the "interim fly quiet" plan won't actually reduce aggregate noise emissions. It'll just spread them around more evenly:

Currently, O’Hare uses just the parallel, east-west runways at night. The so-called “Interim Fly Quiet” plan will mix in diagonal runways, so an east-west runway will be used one week, then a diagonal runway the next, then back to east-west, with adjustments made depending on weather and other factors.

It will mean more noise for suburbs like Des Plaines, to the northwest of the airport, while areas more directly east or west, such as Bensenville and some North Side Chicago neighborhoods, will get less.

Note that this only applies to nighttime operations, when planes land about every 10 minutes. During peak hours, O'Hare brings them in on two parallel runways at 90-second intervals. When runway 9C/27C opens soon, it will be possible for O'Hare to land one plane a minute on 3 parallel runways.

Forty years ago today

On 4 November 1979, "students" stormed the American Embassy in Tehran:

After a three-hour struggle, the students took hostages, including 62 Americans, and demanded the extradition of the deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was receiving medical treatment in the United States for the cancer that ultimately would kill him. Some hostages would later be released amid the crisis, but it would take over a year for all to be freed.

It would take 444 days—until the last day of President Jimmy Carter's term—for Iran to release the hostages.

NPR this morning had an interview with Ambassador John Limbert, one of the hostages.

Music in the Neighborhood

It was a lovely afternoon for a concert. We performed selections from Händel's Messiah, Rachmaninoff's Aleko, and Bach's St John Passion in the gorgeous St Michael Catholic Church in Old Town, Chicago:

Inside, just before the concert:

Our next performances will be with Chicago Opera Theater on the 14th, 16th, and 17th. Then some of us will be back at St Michael for Messiah on December 6th.

It's going to be a hectic couple of months.

Fwoomp

On Wednesday night it snowed, and the temperature spent several hours below freezing. That caused this to happen:

Those leaves fell en masse from a linden tree in my neighborhood. Which means they won't fall in two weeks when they're bright yellow.

Most of the trees in my neighborhood, and the ivy covering my own building, dropped all their leaves the morning after the snowstorm. So we don't really get an autumn this year. And that makes me sad.

Nature, sometimes you suck.