The hot, humid weather we've had for the past couple of weeks has finally broken. I'm in the Loop today, and spent a good 20 minutes outside reading, and would have stayed longer, except I got a little chilly. I dressed today more for the 24°C at home and less for the cooler, breezier air this close to the lake.
Elsewhere in the world:
- I was waiting for Russia expert Julia Ioffe to weigh in on last week's hostage release.
- The Chicago White Sox failed to set the all-time record for most consecutive losses in the American League yesterday by winning their first game in the last 23.
- Of the $1.2 trillion Carbon Reduction Program funds allocated to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, $130 billion has been spent so far: but only $26 billion on rail, and $70 billion on highways.
- Even though Deutsche Bahn has faster, timelier, more convenient, more comfortable, and just more trains than the US, Germans say their national railroad is on the wrong track.
- Deadhorse, Alaska, which lies at 70° north latitude, set an all-time record yesterday with a high temperature just below 32°C.
- After CrowdStrike told Delta Airlines to go pound sand a couple days ago, Microsoft told the carrier off yesterday.
- Be careful taking dogs to fresh-water swimming holes: warmer weather has made blue-green algae blooms more common.
Finally, today is the 60th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. If you don't know what that is, read up. It's probably the most direct cause of most of our military policy since then.
I had a burst of tasks at the end of the workday, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these:
Not to mention, this week we've had some of the stickiest weather I can remember, with dewpoints above 20°C for the past several days. And this sort of thing will only get worse:
Climate change is accumulating humidity in the region — between 1895 and 2019, average precipitation in Illinois increased by 15%. A moist atmosphere ramps up heat indexes, meaning the weather feels worse to the human body than it would during drier conditions.
In Chicago, overall summer average temperatures have warmed by 1.5 degrees between 1970 and 2022, but that’s not the whole story: Average lows on summer nights have increased by 2.2 degrees in that same time.
Warmer nights occur when the atmosphere is waterlogged. Clouds form and reflect incoming heat from the sun back into space during the day, but after the sun sets, clouds absorb heat from the surface and emit it back toward the ground.
Just like greenhouse gases trap heat, moisture holds onto heat in the atmosphere for longer and into the night. Rising temperatures, in turn, lead to rising humidity: For every 1°C increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water. It’s a never-ending loop.
Yeah, even walking Cassie from day care (less than 1.6 km) sucks in this weather. At least I got home before the thunderstorms hit.
Now that Cassie's poop no longer has Giardia cysts in it, she went back to day camp today, so that I could go to my downtown office for the first time in nearly two weeks. To celebrate, it looks like I'll get to walk home from her day care in a thunderstorm.
Before that happens, though:
Finally, the MLB's least-popular umpire, Ángel Hernández, has announced his retirement, to much rejoicing. The Post has a retrospective on his worst calls over the years.
The President arrived in Chicago a little while ago, but sadly I haven't seen either his airplane or his helicopter. Apparently he's just a couple of blocks from me. I'll wave if I see him.
Meanwhile:
Finally, London houseboats, which one could pick up for under £40,000 just a few years ago, now go for £500,000 plus thousands in costs, pricing out the lower-income folks who used to live on them. They seem pretty cool, but good luck finding a mooring.
We have a truly delightful mix of light rain and snow flurries right now that convinced me to shorten Cassie's lunchtime walk from 30 minutes to 15 minutes to just 9 minutes each time I came to a street corner. I don't even think I'll make 10,000 steps today, because neither of us really wants to go outside in this crap.
I'm also working on a feature improvement that requires fixing some code I've never liked, which I haven't ever fixed because it's very tricky. I know why I made those choices, but they were always the lesser of two evils.
Anyway, elsewhere in the world:
Finally, the cancellation of the UK's HS-2 project north of Birmingham has left more than 50 homes empty for two years. Can't think why the affected constituencies have flipped from Tory to Labour, can you?
Remember this XKCD from 2020? With a little help from what researchers think may be the Russian government, that little brick wobbled a bit in the past few days:
The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux.
It was an incredibly complex backdoor. Installing it was a multi-year process that seems to have involved social engineering the lone unpaid engineer in charge of the utility.
I simply don’t believe this was the only attempt to slip a backdoor into a critical piece of Internet software, either closed source or open source. Given how lucky we were to detect this one, I believe this kind of operation has been successful in the past. We simply have to stop building our critical national infrastructure on top of random software libraries managed by lone unpaid distracted—or worse—individuals.
The Economist has it in the King's English:
xz Utils is open-source software, which means that its code is public and can be inspected or modified by anyone. In 2022 Lasse Collin, the developer who maintained it, found that his “unpaid hobby project” was becoming more onerous amid long-term mental-health issues. A developer going by the name Jia Tan, who had created an account the previous year, offered to help. For more than two years they contributed helpful code on hundreds of occasions, building up trust. In February they smuggled in the malware.
Jia Tan’s patient approach, supported by several other accounts who urged Mr Collin to pass the baton, hints at a sophisticated human-intelligence operation by a state agency, suggests The Grugq.
Analysis by Rhea Karty and Simon Henniger suggests that the mysterious Jia Tan made an effort to falsify their time zone but that they were probably two to three hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time—suggesting they may have been in eastern Europe or western Russia—and avoided working on eastern European holidays. For now, however, the evidence is too weak to nail down a culprit.
Sleep well...
Getting ready for a work trip on Monday plus (probably) having to do a demo while on the work trip means I spent most of the day getting ready for the demo. In a bit of geography fun, because the participants in the demo will be in six different time zones from UTC-7 (me) to UTC+10 (the client), I got the short straw, and will (probably) attend the demo at 3:30 am PDT.
I say "probably" because the partners on the call may take mercy on me and let me brief them instead of monitoring the technology in the actual meeting. Probably not, though.
So in this afternoon's roundup of news and features, I'll start with:
- Teresa Carr's report in Undark explaining how people in "eccentric time localities" (i.e., on the western edges of time zones) experience negative effects that people east of them don't.
- President Biden's budget proposal includes a $350 million grant to extend the CTA Red Line.
- Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the country's most-senior Jewish official, gave a scathing speech in the Senate this morning calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) to resign and hold elections. Josh Marshall puts this in context. (tl;dr: it's a big deal, and Schumer is really the only one in Congress with the heft and history with Israel to make this speech.)
- US Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who faces 18 felony counts in Federal court, may run for re-election as an independent so that he can use his campaign funds to pay his legal bills. Why anyone would give him money to do this I cannot determine.
- Chevrolet and other car manufacturers routinely hand over data about how you drive to a company that then hands that data to your auto insurer, because the US does not yet have anything like the GDPR.
- Julia Ioffe outlines how Ukraine can (sort of) win against Russia if it can hold out until 2025.
- Hopewell Brewing and other Illinois craft brewers have started selling THC-infused beer, taking advantage of a loophole in both the state's brewing and cannabis laws.
I will now check the weather radar to see how wet I'm going to get on the way home...
My Garmin watch thinks I've had a relaxing day, with an average stress level of 21 (out of 100). My four-week average is 32, so this counts as a low-stress day in the Garmin universe.
At least, today was nothing like 13 March 2020, when the world ended. Hard to believe that was four years ago. So when I go to the polls on November 5th, and I ask myself, "Am I better off than 4 years ago?", I have a pretty easy answer.
I spent most of today either in meetings or having an interesting (i.e., not boring) production deployment, so I'm going to take the next 45 minutes or so to read everything I haven't had time to read yet:
- Cognitive psychologist Amber Wardell listened to US Senator Katie Britt's (R-A-87.63657988865225L) reply to President Biden's State of the Union address, and explains how Britt's "phony fundie voice" fits into the right-wing Christian Nationalist worldview she promotes. Hint: Britt wasn't talking to you or me.
- Fulton (Ga.) County Superior Court Judge has quashed three of the XPOTUS's charges because, essentially, Fani Willis's office didn't draft the indictment with enough detail.
- Tori Otten admires the way House Democrats deftly cornered special counsel Robert Hur, forcing him to admit the vast differences between the way President Biden and the XPOTUS handled classified documents.
- Yulia Navalnaya reminds the West that Russian president Vladimir Putin isn't actually a politician; he's really a gangster.
- The Illinois Supreme Court has declined to hear, and thus let stand, an appellate court ruling that keeps the Bring Chicago Home referendum on next Tuesday's ballot. Large real estate companies and some large businesses oppose the plan, which would tax them more and use the money to pay for affordable housing.
- Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson has ignored the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago's offer to house migrants for free, and I would like to know why.
- Los Angeles police warned residents that burglars have started using Wi-Fi jammers to bollix up wireless security systems.
- Michigan will start building its section of the Marquette Greenway Trail, a 93-kilometer bike path that will eventually (late 2027) connect New Buffalo, Mich., with Chicago.
- Chicago passed 21°C yesterday for the fifth time in 2024, the earliest we've ever had as many days above that temperature since records began.
All righty then. I'll wrap up here in a few minutes and head home, where I plan to pat Cassie a lot and read a book.
For Reasons, we have the dress rehearsal for our Saturday performance on Saturday. That means poor Cassie will likely go ten hours crossing her paws between the time I have to leave and when I'm likely to get back. Fortunately, she should be exhausted by then. Tonight's dress rehearsal for our Sunday performance won't put her out as much, thanks to Dog Delivery from my doggy day care. Still, I'd rather have a quiet evening at home than a 3-hour rehearsal and an hour-long car trip home...
Meanwhile, in the world of things that appear to matter more but actually will matter less in a year...
Finally, perhaps the reason the Chicago Transit Authority has so many problems is that its governing board has only one member who actually understands public transit? (Welcome to Chicago: where the head of the CTA has a chauffeured car, and the head of the Chicago Teacher's Union sends her kids to private school.)
New York Justice Arthur Engoron just handed the XPOTUS a $350 million fine and barred him and his two failsons from running a business in New York for years:
The decision by Justice Arthur F. Engoron caps a chaotic, yearslong case in which New York’s attorney general put Mr. Trump’s fantastical claims of wealth on trial. With no jury, the power was in Justice Engoron’s hands alone, and he came down hard: The judge delivered a sweeping array of punishments that threatens the former president’s business empire as he simultaneously contends with four criminal prosecutions and seeks to regain the White House.
Mr. Trump will appeal the financial penalty — which could climb to $400 million or more once interest is added — but will have to either come up with the money or secure a bond within 30 days. The ruling will not render him bankrupt, because most of his wealth is tied up in real estate.
Of course he'll appeal, but New York doesn't give him many grounds to do so. And given the scale of the fraud he perpetrated on the State, even this eye-watering sum will probably survive scrutiny from the appellate court.
In other news this afternoon:
Finally, the Tribune has a long retrospective on WGN-TV weather reporter Tom Skilling, who will retire after the 10pm newscast on the 28th.