The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Two more senior Navy jobs blocked by Coach Tuberville

Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville, now a United States Senator grâce a the wisdom and good sense of the fine people of Alabama, continues to degrade the United States military by preventing the US Senate from confirming 301 (and counting) general and flag officers from formally taking the jobs they're already doing. Earlier this month, the commanders of the Naval Air Forces and Naval Sea Systems Command retired, passing their responsibilities—but, crucially, not their policy-setting powers—to their putative successors. US Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired US Navy Captain and 4-time Space Shuttle astronaut, stopped just short of calling Tuberville an idiot on today's NPR Morning Edition.

In other news:

Finally, John Scalzi's blog turned 25 today, making the Hugo-winning author a relative new arrival to the blogging scene, at least when compared with The Daily Parker.

Lovely autumn day

IDTWHQ got all the way up to 16.9°C this afternoon under clear skies, a nearly perfect early-autumn day ahead to start a week-long string of them. Fortunately the landscaping company comes to my complex on Fridays, so I didn't have to rearrange my meeting schedule to work around their leaf blowers. This coming Friday, though, I expect they'll be back. As they will next spring, unless I can finally convince my HOA to ban them, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the technology:

Fifty years ago, in yards and parks across the United States, the sound of this season would have been the whoosh and scrape of people with their rakes, gathering leaves into piles. Followed by the sounds of children jumping into the piles, which I’m sure is what happened soon after the Denver Post photographer took the picture above, in 1974.

Then, thanks in part to a man named Aldo Vandermolen, over these past fifty years the autumn soundscape dramatically changed. By many accounts Vandermolen, who died six years ago at age 79, invented (or was one of the pioneers in creating) the device whose sound now characterizes this season and so much of the rest of the year.

Why is this worth thinking about, even for a minute? As a summary of the many previous posts on this theme, and of the evidence and testimony that persuaded the Washington DC City Council five years ago to vote unanimously in favor of a ban on gas-powered blowers:

  1. Public health and environmental justice. The primitive two-stroke gas engines in these machines, already outlawed for most uses except lawn care, are direct health threats to the people who use them. In big cities this typically means hired crews, whose members are typically low-wage, in many cases recent immigrants, and rarely with long-term health coverage. They are exposed all day to PM 2.5 particulate pollution and carcinogenic emissions. By the time they are in their 30s or 40s, many will have significant, permanent hearing loss and other health problems. (See expert discussion here.)

So many other reasons, too. In fact, leaf blowers may have caused the rapid decline in lightning bugs I and my neighbors have noticed over the past few years.

Perfect early-autumn weather

Inner Drive Technology WHQ cooled down to 14°C overnight and has started to climb up into the low-20s this morning, with a low dewpoint and mostly-clear skies. Perfect sleeping weather, and almost-perfect walking weather! In a few minutes I'm going to take Cassie out for a good, long walk, but first I want to queue up some stuff to read when it's pissing with rain tomorrow:

Finally, my indoor Netatmo base station has picked up a funny mid-September thing: cicadas. The annual dog-day cicadas have only a few more days to get the next generation planted in the ground, so the remaining singletons have come out this morning instead of waiting for dusk. As you can see, the ones in the tree right outside the window closest to the Netatmo have been going at it since dawn:

The predominant species in my yard right now are neotibicen pruinosus, or "scissor-grinder" cicadas. But we also have our share of other species in Northern Illinois. And, of course, next May: Brood XIII comes out. That'll be fun (especially for Cassie)!

No, there is no nude beach in Rogers Park

That's just one of the absurdities that I encountered over the course of the last 24 hours:

  • A prankster put up an official-looking sign declaring Loyola Beach on the north side of Chicago clothing-optional. Unfortunately no one was fooled.
  • For the 15th or 20th time since its founding, critics accuse the US Navy of adapting too slowly to emerging risks in order to preserve tradition and Mississippi jobs. (Really, this comes up about every 20 years.)
  • Of course, it doesn't help that we currently have no Chief of Naval Operations, Army Chief of Staff, or Marine Commandant, thanks to US Senator Tommy "Never Could Beat Alabama" Tuberville (R-AL).
  • A working group that didn't include historians has proposed how sweeping changes to Chicago-area transit can help it become more like 1960s Baltimore more quickly: concentrate on "financial viability" at the expense of fast, frequent service. Because we really have learned nothing in the last 75 years.
  • Illinois has become the third-largest home of data center space in part because we have a lot of office parks no one wants anymore.

Finally, Arizona continues to allow residential development as if the state has as much available water as Illinois. Because we really have learned nothing in the last 75 years.

Big cats vs big dogs

This surprised me. One or more mountain lions in Washington state has decided that wolves taste good:

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) staff have documented cougars killing six collared wolves since 2013—almost 30 percent of the 21 documented natural wolf mortalities in the state. "That's huge if that trend holds and is representative of the entire population [in the state]," says Trent Roussin, a WDFW biologist. The kills involve multiple wolf packs in different areas of Washington.

Such kills are rare elsewhere in the U.S. West, where more wolves are on the landscape since their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park, which is mostly in Wyoming, and central Idaho in 1995. Today Montana and Idaho have over five times more wolves than Washington.

While a wolf pack tends to have an advantage over a single cougar—sometimes running it up into a tree or kicking it off a carcass to scavenge for themselves—a cougar excels in a one-on-one ambush. All but one of Washington's wolf kills involved lone wolves.

"Everyone always assumes wolves have the upper hand," says ecologist Mark Elbroch, the leader of Panthera's Puma Program. "But that's not always the case."

I don't expect my own wolf would do well in a fight against a cougar—or a Dachshund, for that matter—but I had no idea cougars hunted actual wolves. You know I'll always root for the dogs over the cats, though.

Why am I inside?

I'm in my downtown office today, with its floor-to-ceiling window that one could only open with a sledgehammer. The weather right now makes that approach pretty tempting. However, as that would be a career-limiting move, I'm trying to get as much done as possible to leave downtown on the 4:32 train instead of the 5:32. I can read these tomorrow in my home office, with the window open and the roofers on the farthest part of my complex from it:

Finally, does day drinking cause more harm than drinking at night? (Asking for a friend.)

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Some stories to read at lunch today:

Finally, our air quality has improved slightly (now showing 168 at IDTWHQ), but the Canadian smoke may linger for another couple of days.

Still hazy

The AQI at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters has prompted me to put my air conditioning on:

Nice that the ozone has also popped out of the healthy range, too. And this is what it looks like from 25 meters up:

I'm really hoping this 1970s-style air blows away overnight. It's really unpleasant, even if the sunset was pretty.

The 2023 Canadian Smoke-Out continues

As the smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to spread through the American Midwest, I want to mention that the effective use of government regulation of industry has made this week's air quality that much more surprising. Just take a look at Evanston, Ill., yesterday around 7pm:

The fact that this looks really weird says a lot about what the government can do when people are behind it.

No, really: the air-quality alerts from Minnesota to West Virginia look bizarre right now because we hardly ever see AQIs above 150 these days. In my lifetime, even 35 years ago, Chicago looked like this all the time.

The Chicago Tribune reported on this incredible change in 2015:

As early as 1874, as the city rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871, the Tribune warned that the huge increase in factories and hotels, and the new skyscrapers with their steam-powered elevators, was a serious problem. "So dense is this volume of smoke that, unless there is a brisk, stirring breeze, the whole of it settles down in the central part of the city and leaves its dirty imprint," the editorial said.

Civic leaders, including the editors of the Tribune, crusaded tirelessly against the "smoke horror."

It is hard to know how often the sun lost its battle to shine — though it happened regularly into the 1950s — because the Tribune wrote stories only when it was unusually bad. On Jan. 18, 1925, the newspaper reported the pall that turned day into night was "the densest, thickest and darkest smoke screen which has been thrown over the city this season." The "plague of darkness" on Dec. 7, 1929, was caused by low-hanging clouds, fog and "the customary smoke screen."

And the power needed to light the day meant Commonwealth Edison had to burn even more coal.

By the late 1960s people had had enough. So finally, in 1970, Congress unanimously (except for one demon from the 3rd Circle of Hell) passed the Clean Air Act, starting a decades-long process of cutting emissions and switching from dirty power sources that continues today.

In 1980, ten years after the Clean Air Act passed, Los Angeles had only 6 days with AQIs below 50 but 206 above 150. (I know, because I was there for many of them.) In 2021, LA had 41 days below 50 and only 27 above 150.

This week we have unhealthy air due to natural pollution from an unusual combination of record wildfires in Canada and a weather system blowing the smoke south. Air quality should return to normal (or even healthy) by the weekend. But absent bipartisan regulation 53 years ago, it would look like this (or worse) more than half the year.

So when I say I want a real opposition party and not the whackadoodle nihilists currently destroying their constituents' faith in government, this is why.

What a great car

I filled up my car this afternoon, which doesn't sound like anything special until you see the numbers:

  • Last filled up: August 21st, 292 days ago
  • Total distance: 3,115.6 km
  • Total fuel used: 32.8 L
  • Fuel efficiency: 1.1 L/100 km
  • Operating cost per kilometer: 5.9c

Good going, car. You're getting the extra-tasty electricity tonight!