Somehow it's the 3rd day of 2025, and I still don't have my flying car. Or my reliable high-speed regional trains. Only a few of these stories help:
I'm also spending some time looking over the Gazetteer that underpins Weather Now. In trying to solve one problem, I discovered another problem, which suggests I may need to re-import the whole thing. At the moment it has fewer than 100,000 rows, and the import code upserts (attempts to update before inserting) by default. More details as the situation warrants.
After my general statistics for 2024, here are the books and media I consumed since 2023.
Books
I didn't read as many books in 2024 as in 2023, mainly because they were longer. Any one of the Culture novels is the equivalent of 3 or 4 times The Outsiders, for example. The 30 books I started (and 26 I finished) included:
- Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. An excellent handbook for the kakistocratic country we now live in.
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. I hope this does not become a handbook for the kakistocratic country we now live in. (Still reading this. It's not something one just breezes through.)
- Iain Banks, Raw Spirit, his hilarious travelogue of Scottish distilleries, plus the Culture novels Excession, Inversions, Look to Windward, Matter, Surface Detail, and The Hydrogen Sonata. I also finally read The Crow Road.
- Christopher Buehlman, The Daughters' War. Prequel to his previous novel The Black-Tongued Thief.
- Peter Carey, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, which I first read in 2001 and wanted to read again.
- Cory Doctorow, The Lost Cause. Imagine what the world will look like when today's alt-right go to nursing homes and the yet-to-be-born generation has to take care of them.
- David Farley, Modern Software Engineering. Decent recapitulation of stuff I've known for years, but updated.
- Scott Farris, Almost President, short biographies of the men (it's from 2008) who lost presidential elections and still influenced politics for years after.
- William Gibson, The Peripheral. Quite different than the TV series, but both were great.
- Charles King, Every Valley. The history of Händel's Messiah. (Not finished yet.)
- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. Absolutely essential reading if you want even to try understanding the horribly damaged generation born after 1995.
- John Scalzi, Fuzzy Nation and Agent to the Stars. I absolutely love Scalzi's writing.
- John R. Schmidt, Authentic Chicago, a collection of historical vignettes from an authentic Chicago historian.
- Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies. A quick read that helped me understand how my new boss looks at software team management.
- Andrew Weir, The Martian. Another one that I have meant to read for a while.
Other Media
In 2024, I watched 24 films, a bit more TV than usual, two concerts, and one comedy show:
- Films I would recommend: American Sniper (2014), The Beekeeper (2024), Constantine (2005), Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), Dune Part 2 (2024), Furiosa (2024), The Gentlemen (2019), The Intern (2015), The Martian (2015), The Menu (2022), Sicario (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), and the entire John Wick series (2014 to present).
- Films you can skip: The Good Shepherd (2006) and Maestro (2023).
- TV shows: The 100 (first two episodes, 2014), The Bear season 1 (2022), The Boys season 4 (2024), The Decameron (2024), Designated Survivor (2016, first two episodes), Fallout (2024), Ghosts (first season of the UK version, first two episodes of the inferior US version), House of the Dragon (both seasons, 2023-2024), Justified season 1 (2010), KAOS (2024), Killing Eve season 1 (2018), Once Upon a Time season 1 (2011), The Peripheral (2023), Rome season 1 and some of season 2 (2005), Silo season 2 (2024), Slow Horses season 4 (2024), Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 (2024), Tales from the Apocalypse (2023), Three Body (2024), and The Umbrella Academy season 4 (2024).
- I saw two live performances at Ravinia Festival: a live orchestra version of The Princess Bride (1987) and the CSO doing Holst's The Planets.
- I also saw Liz Miele when she visited Chicago, and Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! in December.
A lot of good things in there, and a couple of dogs. Actually, only one dog, who very much enjoyed all the time I spent on the couch with her.
The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime.
Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these:
Finally, a friend recently sent me a book I've wanted to read for a while: The Coddling of the American Mind, which civil-liberties lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt expanded from their September 2015 Atlantic article. I have noticed that people born after 1995 don't seem to have the same resilience or tolerance for nuance that even people born a few years earlier have. Lukianoff and Haidt make an interesting case for why this is. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I finish.
The US Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow provides me with a long-awaited opportunity to clean out the closet under my stairs so an orphan kid more boxes will have room to stay there. I also may finish the Iain Banks novel I started two weeks ago, thereby finishing The Culture. (Don't worry, I have over 100 books on my to-be-read bookshelf; I'll find something else to read.)
Meanwhile:
- Even though I, personally, haven't got the time to get exercised about the OAFPOTUS's ridiculous threat to impose crippling (to us) tariffs on our three biggest trading partners, Mexico's president Claudia Sheinbaum used our own government's data to call bullshit on his claim that Mexico hasn't done enough to stop the flow of drugs into the US: "Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours."
- The UK will start requiring all visitors (even in transit) to register with their new Electronic Travel Authorisation scheme as of January 8th—similar to how the US ESTA program has worked for the last 16 years.
- Evanston, Ill., my home town, wants to protect bicyclists on one of its busiest streets, which of course has a bunch of stores panicking. (Note to the merchants: bike lanes don't hurt business, and in fact they encourage more foot traffic.)
- John Scalzi mourns the loss of Schwan's Home Delivery and it's bagel dogs.
Finally, as I mentioned nearly five years ago, today's date is a palindrome if you happen to study astronomy. The Julian Day number as of 6am CDT/12:00 UTC today is 2460642. Happy nerdy palindrome day!
Yesterday I posted a short video from Robert Wright reminding everyone that the OAFPOTUS and his hangers-on thrive on negative energy. The moral: don't waste your own energy on his bullshit.
For example, I haven't agonized at all about his kakistocratic nominations for top cabinet posts, for the simple reason that I think they're distractions from the Republican Party's principal goals of increasing the wealth of billionaires and stealing as much as they can rake in from the American People. I mean, the only person in Congress more hated than Ted Cruz is Matt Gaetz; I have little doubt that the Senate will bounce his ass to a bottom-feeding lobby firm.
But nominating Gaetz and having him fail miserably doesn't bother the OAFPOTUS at all. Because when Gaetz fails to get confirmed, the OAFPOTUS will nominate someone even worse. He did this sort of thing more than once during his first term.
The United States has just re-elected Zaphod Beeblebrox to the presidency. We should really care more about the six guys with the black ships, and not worry about the idiot with two heads and three arms. (I'm just waiting for some Fox News guest to finally declare, "Donald's just zis guy, you know?")
Again: let's don't let the flim-flam distract us. Oppose the policies, not the pronouncements. We'll have enough to do for the next few years without wasting our breath on every trolling utterance that comes from the Administration.
I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)
Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:
- Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
- Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
- Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
- James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
- Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
- Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
- Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
- American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
- SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.
Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently ruled in Hachette v Internet Archive that the Internet Archive's Open Library violated copyright law. Molly White today published the best response I have seen so far:
My beliefs are simple, and hardly radical: Libraries are critical infrastructure. Access to information is a human right. When you buy a book you should truly own it. When a library buys a book, they should be able to lend it. Readers should be able to read without any third parties spying over their shoulders, or preventing them from accessing the materials they have legally obtained.
Hachette and the other plaintiff publishers have argued that, by lending out one-to-one digital copies of books they have legally purchased, the Internet Archive’s Open Library is infringing upon the publishers’ copyright and damaging their sales. And, without any evidence of actual harm to the publishers, the Second Circuit went right along with it. They also went a step further, again without evidence, to suggest that libraries are inherently detrimental to society.
[B]y fighting [Controlled Digital Lending], publishers are seeking to overstep the established boundaries of intellectual property law to exert continued control over an item that has already been purchased from them. And they are seeking to diminish the critical rights of readers to read the books they want without being subjected to censorship and surveillance. This is part and parcel with other attempts by digital publishers — of books, but also of films, video games, and other media — to turn media purchases into rentals, so as to extract endless money and private data from their customers.
In other words: even though libraries have been around far longer than the Copyright Act itself, libraries are now a threat to authors. The true meaning is clear: publishers’ abilities to extract exorbitant rents and exert control over readers outweigh the incredible benefits of increased public access to books.
US law protects rentiers better than most of our peer countries' laws do. Yet another reason to get the plutocratic Republicans out of Congress.
So far this autumn, we've had ridiculous amounts of sunshine in Chicago, with 99% of our rapidly-declining minutes of daylight delightfully cloud-free. We haven't had such a sunny first week of September since 1955, it turns out.
For that reason I ate lunch outside today, and unless something truly bizarre happens in the next few hours, I'll have dinner outside as well. Not a bad Thursday.
As for the title of this post, when you multiply six by nine, you get 42 base 13, in fact: the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Any other meaning would be purely coincidental.
I just popped out for lunch. It's 17°C in the Loop with lots of sun, the kind of day when I wonder why I went back to the office. Summer begins Saturday. Ah, to be French and take an entire month off...
This time of year has other features, many of which popped up in my various RSS feeds this morning:
And finally, Block Club Chicago sent a reporter to the Duke of Perth yesterday to surveille the packing. Other than giving GM Mike Miller a completely new last name, he generally got the story right, and even included some photos guaranteed to make anyone who loved the place hold back a tear.
The older I get, the less human beings surprise me. Oh, individual people surprise me all the time, mainly because I have smart and creative friends. But groups of people? They're going to be unsurprising and kind of dumb almost always.
Cases in point:
- The Arizona Supreme Court's decision allowing enforcement of a pre-statehood, Civil War-era abortion law looks even worse when you learn what else is in the 1864 Howell Code.
- Chicago's Loop neighborhood has 6,000 unsold luxury condos, with no more new projects underway, in part because developers failed to predict that 3% interest rates wouldn't last forever. This, to me, looks like failing to predict it will rain in Seattle eventually, because it hasn't rained in a week.
- Forget Detroit and Houston; even ultra-wealthy municipalities like Santa Clara, Calif., have obstinately failed to predict that they would ever have to pay ruinous costs to maintain all the infrastructure they built last century.
- Young women embracing the role of "tradwife" (i.e., becoming a 1950s-style woman of leisure or "stay-at-home-girlfriend") seem destined to unhappy long-term consequences of becoming someone's accessory.
- Author John Scalzi provides advice which even he thinks aspiring authors should already know: don't fabricate quotes by living authors to sell your new manuscript because you will get caught.
Finally, author Gary Shteyngart floats off on the maiden voyage of Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever built, and finds what can only be described as a very specific slice of humanity that would make the Golgafrinchans proud.