The Daily Parker

It happens every September in the mid-latitudes: one day you've got over 13 hours of daylight and sunsets around 7:30, and two weeks later you wake up in twilight and the sun sets before dinnertime. In fact, Chicago loses 50 minutes of evening daylight and an hour-twenty overall from the 1st to the 30th. We get it all back in March, though. Can't wait.

Speaking of waiting:

• Buckingham Palace just warned people that the queue to see Queen Elizabeth's coffin has a 24-hour wait at the moment, so...dress warmly!
• Drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike will have to wait even longer to get into the Holland Tunnel after a planned $4.7-billion project adds even more induced demand.
• Via Bruce Schneier, Uber has had a data breach. No, scratch that—Uber lost control of its entire computing universe, because the company culture of cheapness and bullshittery extends to their IT security as well.
• Ronald Brownstein finds this year's election...really weird.
• David Brooks asks, why do we not have a strategy to defeat the XPOTUS?
• Matt Ford points to Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) as the future of Republican campaigning: trolling the libs.
• The Cook County State's Attorney has charged two Chicago cops with multiple felonies after they shot an unarmed man in Pilsen and lied about it.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria visited Kyiv, Ukraine, to learn the secret of the country's success against Russia.

We have some intense aurora activity this week:

The Northern Lights may be visible in the mainland U.S. this week due to a strong geomagnetic storm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The phenomenon, known scientifically as the aurora borealis, typically occurs closer to the North Pole, near Alaska and Canada.

But the storm could push the aurora lights farther south Thursday and Friday, and if weather conditions permit, could be seen in regions of Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon.

Aurora activity hit level 7 (of 10) between 0300 and 0600 UTC (22:00-01:00 CDT) overnight, with activity expected to hit level 6 between 0000 and 0300 UTC (19:00-22:00 CDT) tonight.

The forecast expects level-6 activity over Labor Day weekend.

I will definitely make time this weekend to drool over the recent photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's kind of sad that no living human will ever see anything outside our solar system, but we can dream, right?

Closer to home than the edge of the visible universe:

• Josh Marshall highlight's a reader's note explaining how the historic conservatism of the Executive Branch legal team won't work any more.
• The President's conservatism doesn't work either, as recent polls and Democratic-party frustration will show you.
• Eugene Robinson says Republican candidate for US Senate from Georgia,  former football player Herschel Walker, has a "combination of utter ignorance and total confidence, which challenges even that of the former president."
• David French declares flatly that our Constitution isn't working.
• Julia Ioffe explains how the Russian penal system (don't call it a "justice system") means bad news for everyone who enters it, especially people with political value like Brittney Griner.

Finally, an F/A-18 slid right off the deck of the USS Harry S Truman and into the Mediterranean, which will probably result in a short Navy career for at least one weather forecaster or helmsman.

Chicago's two baseball teams gave up a combined 36 runs yesterday, with the Cubs losing to the Reds 20-5 and the Sox losing to the Red Sox 16-7. Perhaps the bullpens could use a little work, hmm?

In other news:

• US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has taken more money from gun lobbyists since taking office than anyone else in the Senate, and did not like a British reporter asking him about it yesterday.
• The local police in Uvalde, Texas, bungled basic policing during the school shooting Tuesday in ways that just keep looking worse for them.
• It turns out, even the XPOTUS argued for common-sense gun laws after the Parkland shooting.
• The US Secret Service teamed up with mental-health experts after the assassination of John Lennon to figure out how to stop shootings, an endeavor one can only call a "work in progress."
• The British Broadcasting Company plans to take much of its service online after culture secretary Nadine Dorries (Cons.-Mid Bedfordshire) held the annual license fee at £159 for the next two years. (The BBC receives much of its funding from the fee, which is charged per television set in the UK.)

Finally, astronomers have produced a photo of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, and were surprised to see it looks nothing like Ted Cruz's head.

In a strange confluence of lunar calendars, today is Easter, and also the second day of Passover, and also the 17th day of Ramadan.

So...Pesach Mubarak, He is Risen?

I've gotten two solid nights of sleep in a row, and I've got a clean desk for the first time in weeks. I hope that this becomes the norm, at least until November, when I'll have a packed musical schedule for six weeks as the Apollo Chorus rehearses or performs about 30 times. But that's seven months off.

That gives me plenty of time to listen to or read these:

• Time Zone Database coordinator Paul Eggert explains the TZDB, its history, and how it works.
• David Sedaris discusses how the US changed between his 2019 and 2021 tours.
• Why have work days gotten so long for many people? Meetings.
• The recent revelation that before taking over the 2016 election campaign Steve Bannon favorably compared the XPOTUS to the German Chancellor who ruled from 1933 to 1945, led Timothy Noah to the conclusion: "We used to call people who think like Bannon sociopaths. Now we just call them Republicans."
• Paul Krugman reviews the situation and finds that declining immigration seems to have the largest effect on our labor shortage right now.
• Programmer Andrew Schmelyun connected a grocery-store receipt printer to his GitHub issues stream so he could get actual tickets in one of the most brilliant reverse-skeumorphs I have seen in years.

And finally, in compiling geographic source data for Weather Now, I discovered that the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) assigned an official designator the location where the Ingenuity helicopter landed on Mars: JZRO, for Jezero Crater.

Josh Barro and Saray Fay get to the heart of the time-change issue:

The first thing I want to note is something I’m amazed many participants in this debate don’t seem to know: We have tried this policy before. In January 1974, the US entered what was supposed to be a two-year “experiment” with permanent daylight saving time. Unfortunately, daylight saving time does not add daylight to the day, it only shifts the daylight into the afternoon from the morning. And once people realized that — that daylight saving time in January means doing everything in the dark in the morning — they hated it.

There are a number of large and mid-size metropolitan areas where the sun would not rise until around 9am for weeks on end in the winter.

On average, a person who tells a pollster they want permanent daylight saving time is really just saying they would like the sun to shine more. Well, so would I. But the government only controls the clocks, not the axial tilt of the earth. If you actually enact permanent daylight saving time, it will exit the realm of daydreaming about how the sun is nice and turn into actually forcing Americans to drag themselves and their children out of bed in the dark for much more of the winter. Once you have inflicted this upon them, they will think deeply about the issue. They’ll hate it (and possibly hate you) and they’ll demand a reversal, as I will remind you they sought and promptly received the last time we tried this.

Perhaps the best solution would be to harmonize clock changes with Europe, switching to Daylight Saving Time on the last Sunday in March, and returning to Standard Time on the last Sunday in October. But then it'll get dark earlier on Hallowe'en, so...think of the children!

Update: The House has decided to proceed with all deliberate speed on this issue, ensuring the bill a quiet death sometime this summer.

I just finished upgrading an old, old, old Windows service to .NET 6 and a completely different back end. It took 6.4 hours, soup to nuts, and now the .NET 6 service is happily communicating with Azure and the old .NET Framework 4.6 service is off.

Meanwhile, the Post published a map (using a pretty lazy algorithm) describing county-by-county what sunrise times will look like in January 2024 if daylight saving time becomes permanent. I'd have actually used a curve tool but, hey, the jagged edges look much more "data-driven." (They used the center point of each county.)

Now it's 22:45 (daylight saving time), and I need to empty Cassie and go to bed. But I'm pretty jazzed by how I spent a rainy afternoon on PTO. It was definitely more rewarding than tramping out in the rain to a couple of breweries for the Brews & Choos project, which had been Plan A.

As if from nowhere, the US Senate yesterday unanimously voted to pass S.623 (the "Sunshine Protection Act of 2021"), which would end daylight saving time by making that the new standard time, effective 5 November 2023. This blew up the Time Zone Committee mailing list, mostly with the implementation problems around time zone abbreviations. One of the maintainers listed four separate options, in fact, including moving everyone to a new time zone (Chicago on EST? New York on AST?), or possibly just redefining what CST and EST mean. Canada has a law that essentially lets the US set standard time zones for Canada, so it gets even more complicated the farther down the rabbit hole you go.

Fun fact: most time zone software running on most computers requires 3-character time zone abbreviations to work correctly. That rules out changing CST to, simply, CT. One maintainer suggested P for Permanent; another suggested A for Always (CAT, EAT, MAT?).

You might think this is funny, but we TZDB maintainers have the power to make your brain hurt this way.

By the way, if you think year-round DST is a good idea within our current time zone boundaries, you may want to consider when the latest sunrise will happen in 2024 if the law passes, in ascending order of orneriness:

The easternmost point in the U.S., Eastport, will have darker mornings, but still perhaps tolerable. Menominee, which actually lies a little west of Chicago, would not be a fun place to live in January.

To review: There is a reason we change the clocks twice a year, which everyone forgets until it's dark at 8:30 am.

Moreover, wall-clock time is arbitrary. We can get up earlier or later if we choose to. Cassie, for instance, gets up at sunrise, and expects me to do the same, so I actually liked the change last weekend.

We also had a bunch of messages today about Iran, which has decreed that they will no longer change their clocks twice a year, with immediate effect. Now someone in Iran has to tell the authoritarian, anti-technology mullahs why it might take up to a year for their cell phones to reflect the change.

Eighty years ago today, the US imposed daylight saving time as a wartime energy-saving measure. It took until April 1966 for Congress to enact a permanent regime of changing the clock twice a year. But that's all ancient history.

More recent history:

• Peter Wehner examines how the loser XPOTUS really hates that he's a loser.
• Meanwhile, Michelle Cottle wonders when the Republican Party turned "into a bunch of snowflakes?"
• The City of Chicago has (finally!) started cracking down on "dibs," the practice of leaving household junk in the street to claim parking spaces in winter.

Finally, Chicago brewery Hop Butcher to the World will delay opening up its new space in the old Half Acre property in North Center. The Brews & Choos Project will stop by as soon as it opens.