The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Future heat

James Fallows highlights a new US government website that maps how bad the climate will get in your town:

Let me give just a few illustrations from the first such climate-based public map the White House has released, HEAT.gov. The main points about all this and related “digital dashboards” (like the one for Covid) and maps:

  • They are customizable. You can see your immediate neighborhood, or the entire world.
  • They are configurable. You can see the “real” weather as of 2020, and the projected weather as of many decades from now.
  • They can be combined. You can overlay a map of likely future flood zones, with areas of greatest economic and social vulnerabilities.

First, a map showing the priority list of communities most at risk from heat stress some decades from now. This is based on an overlay of likely future temperatures, with current resources and vulnerabilities, and other factors and trends.

Number one on this future vulnerability list is in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Number ten is in Arkansas. In between, at number seven, is my own home county in California. You can tune the map to your own interests here. It is meant to serve as a guide for preparation, avoidance, and resilience.

Pretty cool stuff. At the moment, Chicago's weather seems pretty reasonable for July, but the forecast calls for hot and awful weather later this week. And that will keep happening as climate change keeps pushing more energy into the atmosphere.

I did not win the lottery

But someone did after buying a ticket at a Speedway gas station in nearby Des Plaines, Ill.:

Someone in a Chicago suburb beat the odds and won the $1.28 billion Mega Millions jackpot.

According to megamillions.com, there was one jackpot-winning ticket in the draw Friday night, and it was bought at a Speedway gas station and convenience store in Des Plaines.

The jackpot was the nation’s third-largest lottery prize. It grew so large because no one had matched the game’s six selected numbers since April 15. That’s 29 consecutive draws without a jackpot winner.

The $1.28 billion prize is for winners who choose the annuity option, paid annually over 29 years. Most winners opt for the cash option, which for Friday night’s drawing was an estimated $747.2 million.

The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 302.5 million.

Because each ticket costs $2, the break-even jackpot for Mega Millions is $605.2 million. That is, $2 is 1/302,575,350 of $605,150,700; therefore, a single $2 ticket is a reasonable bet for any jackpot larger than that. At $1.3 billion, two tickets give you an optimum risk-reward curve.

So, yes, I bought 3 tickets (thus wasting $2). Yet I did not win. Which is too bad, because I had planned to use the winnings to set up a fund for K-12 math education throughout Illinois, emphasizing those areas of the state with the highest per-capita lottery purchasing.

I sincerely hope that whoever won last night gets good legal and financial advice.

Wait, Monday is August?

Somehow we got to the end of July, though I could swear March happened 30 seconds ago. If only I were right, these things would be four months in my future:

I will now go out into this gorgeous weather and come back to my office...in August.

Sure Happy It's Thursday

So, what's going on today?

Finally, I meant to post this earlier: Cassie, plotzed, after getting home from boarding Sunday night.

Friday night, Saturday afternoon

More photos from last weekend. I mentioned The Samuel Palmer in Shoreham, Kent, where I stopped after my hike through the Kentish Downs. I didn't mention that I had a delightful cheese plate for dinner, because cheese:

Then I got to experience four Chicago blocks' worth of an English country road at 10:30pm getting to the railway station:

On Saturday, I walked along the Regent's Canal on my way to the Southampton Arms:

Which remains, as ever, one of my favorite pubs in the world:

I will return to all of these places in due course.

Tuesday morning...uh, afternoon reading

It's a lovely day in Chicago, which I'm not enjoying as much as I could because I'm (a) in my Loop office and (b) busy as hell. So I'll have to read these later:

Finally, Mick Jagger turns 79 today, which surprised me because I thought he was closer to 130.

Friday's hike (and pubs)

I started Friday by having lunch with a colleague in the picture-perfect Hare & Billet in Greenwich:

After lunch I hopped a Southeast service to Otford, Kent, where I embarked on the 6.5 km hike I mentioned Saturday morning. Otford looks like something out of a Brontë novel (either sister), surrounded by farms and walking paths. And sheep:

The village also sits in what I believe is a washout valley bisecting a long moraine known as the Kentish Downs. After a 75-meter climb, I got to this vista:

About 3 km of the walk looked like that. At the end of the ridge the trail sloped into the village of Shoreham, which made by brain hurt. I think I want to retire there:

I ended my journey at The Samuel Palmer, which opened in 2019 in a building continuously operated as a pub since the 15th century. Somehow, this village of 2,000 people supports three pubs, but I only stopped in this one. I might have to try all of them next time I visit the UK.

More photos later this week. Meanwhile, I've got to figure out a tricky security configuration and rehearse Mozart for the rest of the day.

Practical advice on getting narcissists out of politics

This evening I finished psychologist Bill Eddy's Why we elect narcissists and sociopaths and how we can stop. It turns out, we just need to be rational!

OK, so, that's not likely. But Eddy does lay out the obvious: we need to stop electing narcissists and sociopaths. We also need to watch out for sick politicians dividing us into 4 groups that could work together but don't: Loyalists, Resisters, Moderates, and dropouts. The three groups who don't have automatic loyalty to the narcissist in question always outnumber the Loyalists.

In other words, when a politician says "I alone can fix it," the correct response is to ensure he (it's always "he") never holds any power. Because he will always try to increase his power to the detriment of everyone around him. And he will never fix it.