The Daily Parker

The Federal Aviation Administration halted all takeoffs from US airports for about an hour this morning after the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system failed. Planes have resumed flying, but the ripples from this morning's ground stop could take a day or two to resolve. Good thing I'm not flying until Saturday.

Also this morning, Chicago's transit agencies released a new real-time train tracker that finally allows commuters to see where (many) of Metra's trains actually think they are. I tested the site on the Metra line I use most frequently only to find that it appeared stuck—until I discovered that, no, the trains had stopped, because one of them hit a pedestrian in Lakeview, just south of me.

I'm glad Metra finally discovered the Global Positioning System just in time for the service's 45th birthday. If only we funded our transit systems the way we fund highways...if only...

New York City has a huge online map of every tree they manage, and they just updated their UI:

Near the Tennis House in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park grows a magnificent white oak that stands out for its impressive stature, with a trunk that’s nearly four feet wide. But the massive tree does more than leave visitors in awe. It also provides a slew of ecological benefits, absorbing some 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide and intercepting nearly 9,000 gallons of stormwater each year, according to city data. It also removes pollutants from the air and help the the city conserve enough energy to power a one- or two-bedroom apartment for roughly two months.

In economic terms, just that one tree contributes more than $550 each year.

Such fine-grained information is now available for more than 150,000 trees in parks managed by NYC Parks and Recreation via a new living tree guide from the agency. The New York City Tree Map, launched Thursday, is an expansion of the city’s existing street tree map, which since 2016 has enabled New Yorkers to get up close and personal with the 650,000-some trees that line their neighborhood sidewalks.

Hey, Chicago: when do we get one of these?

James Fallows loves the new data visualizations from the Census Bureau:

Through its existence the Census has been an irreplaceable trove of data. A minor illustration: this past April it released a searchable database of individual records from the 1950 Census, rendered in touchingly precise hand-written form. You can look up the name of anyone included in that Census here — as I did for my mother and father.1 Why the 1950 Census? Because by law personally identifiable Census records are kept private for 72 years after the Census date. Thus the 2020 Census details are scheduled for release in 2092.

A few days ago the Census Bureau put some of its data to work in a very different fashion. This was in a fascinating “Story Map” about the shift in American settlement patterns since the late 1700s.

Story Maps are a narrative and explanatory tool for “geo-journalism,” which we’ve mentioned many times, including here. The technology was developed by our long-time friends at the digital mapping company Esri. A few weeks ago Deb Fallows and Michelle Ellia did a story map about the sea-turtle hatchlings of the Florida coastline—tiny creatures scrambling out of their nests in beachfront sand, along the very same coastline that has been pounded by Hurricane Ian this week.

The new story map from the Census Bureau uses a combination of historical narrative, map-based data, and overlays of economic, ethnic, and other information. Its purpose is to demonstrate how America’s population centers have changed, as the population has steadily grown.

I'll be playing with this a bit today. Because maps! and history!

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.

In just a few minutes I will take Cassie to boarding, then head up to Northwestern for a rehearsal (I'm in the chorus at Ravinia's upcoming performances of La Clemenza di Tito.) I'll then have to pack when I get home from rehearsal, then head to a hotel by O'Hare. Ah, how much fun is an 8:30 international flight!

As I'll have some time at the airport in the morning, and no time now, I want to queue these up for myself:

• Jonathan Chait says Senator Joe Manchin (D?-WV) didn't kill President Biden's agenda all on his own. And Paul Kane says we should listen to what Manchin says in public, not what people think he said.
• Writing for the Post back in March, KK Olsen discusses how civil wars start with UCSD political scientist Barbara F. Walter.
• Josh Marshall sums up how the Democratic Party can regain power. Hint: we win by winning.
• Julia Ioffe and Tara Palmeri discuss the XPOTUS's upcoming campaign and Mark Meadows' "willies."
• Robert Wright says Obama may not have gotten it right about Russia and Ukraine.
• Commercial office buildings in Chicago's Loop have started thinking about converting to apartments, as everyone predicted.
• The Post has a series of maps showing just how bad the heat got this week in the US and Europe.
• National Geographic explains "The Knowledge" in a 2017 article on London cabbies.

All right, I'm off. After I pack.

It's mid-July today, at least until around 8pm, when late April should return. The Tribune reported this morning that our spring has had nearly three times the rain as last spring, but actually hasn't gotten much wetter than normal.

Meanwhile:

• Millennial writer Marisa Kabas boggles at George W Bush's volte-face on the Iraq war this week.
• Josh Marshall shakes his head at the Republican Party's acceptance of a particular nasty and racist theory of immigration.
• Andrew Sullivan says this is because white people are acting like an embattled minority, thanks in part to the left crowing about driving them out of power: "If you demonize an entire race, you may at some point get the compliment returned. The more you raise racial consciousness among non-whites, the more you risk the same among whites. As Thomas Chatterton Williams warned: 'so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes.' "
• Slate wonders why news reports about drivers hitting pedestrians so often reflect the car's point of view.
• Yesterday, WGN Radio turned 100.
• And tonight, I'll be watching season 3 of Love Death + Robots, featuring a new story by John Scalzi.

Finally, via The Onion, Google Maps now shows you shortcuts through people's houses when they're not home.

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.

Before heading into three Zoom meetings that will round out my day, I have a minute to flip through these:

• US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made a bold grab for the Dumbest Person in Congress award yesterday when she warned OAN viewers about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "gazpacho police." Let the memes begin.
• The Economist has an update to the Democratic Freedoms Map, and things do not look good—unless you live in Norway.
• Along similar lines, WBEZ reports on the Urban Institute's findings that Cook County, Illinois, which contains Chicago, has some extraordinary wealth gaps.
• 99% Invisible explains how the "future" office historically looks a lot like the past.
• Arthur C Brooks advises singles to look for complementary, rather than similar, characteristics in potential mates.
• The Pullman House Project here in Chicago will soon offer tours of the Thomas Dunbar House in the Pullman National Historic Site.

Finally, Tesla has some impressive software in its cars, but it still has a few (very frightening) bugs.

Today is the 50th anniversary of DB Cooper jumping out of a hijacked airplane into the wilds of Washington State. It's also the day I will try to get a Covid-19 booster shot, since I have nothing scheduled for tomorrow that I'd have to cancel if I wind up sleeping all day while my immune system tries to beat the crap out of some spike proteins in my arm.

Meanwhile, for reasons passing understanding (at least if you have a good grasp of economics), President Biden's approval ratings have declined even though last week had fewer new unemployment claims than any week in my lifetime. (He's still more popular than the last guy, though.)

In other news:

• Federal Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter ordered two Colorado lawyers to pay $187,000 in fees and penalties for filing their frivolous election-fraud lawsuit.
• The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has added the United States to its list of "backsliding democracies" thanks to the antics of the Republican Party since 2019.
• Governing magazine interviews historian Richard White about his book examining the "greed, ineptitude, and economic cost" of our 19th-century railroad expansion.
• Chris Stokel-Walker channels your annoyance at the proliferation of streaming services and how casual viewers can't find the latest Star Trek series.
• New Buffalo, Mich., which depends almost entirely on tourist money, has sharply curtailed where they will allow short-term rentals going forward.
• The Salt Lake Tribune has re-drawn its maps of the Great Salt Lake to reflect its historically-low water levels.

Any moment now, my third DevOps build in the last hour will complete. I've had to run all three builds with full tests because I don't always write perfect code the first time. But this is exactly why I have a DevOps build pipeline with lots of tests.

So many things to read at lunchtime today:

• Philip Bump calls a video the soon-to-be-ex-president posted yesterday "the most petulant 46 minutes in American history."
• But whatever, because as David Graham points out, the STBXPOTUS is becoming irrelevant.
• As for voter fraud, and for accusing opponents of what you're actually the one doing, Georgia authorities have begun an investigation of a (Republican) Florida attorney who recommended to people that they illegally register to vote in Georgia ahead of the US Senate runoffs on January 5th, and even provided instructions.
• And speaking of lying about your opponents for political gain, the BBC calls bullshit on UK government claims that the EU would not have allowed the UK to approve the Pfizer vaccine as quickly as it did.
• If you live near Chicago, check out the Tribune's interactive map showing how every precinct in the six counties voted for president, US Senate, and the Fair Tax Amendment. As one of my friends pointed out, the line demarcating the Fair Tax vote between Evanston and Wilmette and the absence of such a demarcation on the Biden vote suggests that rich liberals say they're for fair taxes but don't actually vote for fair taxes.
• The National Science Foundation has released video from the Aricebo Observatory control tower showing its final collapse yesterday.
• Speaking of collapses, when you really think about it, Mount Rainier is actually the most dangerous volcano in the US. (Think: billions of liters of water locked up in its glaciers.)
• A shop in Kyoto has been selling mochi (grilled rice flour cakes) for over 1,000 years. And it's not even the oldest business in Kyoto.
• Google has made it easier for anyone, anywhere, to contribute to their Street View feature.

Finally, a year ago today I made some predictions about what could happen in the 2020 election. Turns out, "Option C" is true, and we're still waiting to see on a few others.