The Daily Parker

Well, if you're a climatologist, it's a calculated value based on a 30-year period, updated every 10 years. And the 19991-2020 climate normals for the US will come out this May. Meanwhile, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has released some teaser images:

NOAA senior science writer Rebecca Lindsey explains:

These images are a sneak peak at how the new normals for winter temperature (top) and precipitation (bottom) are different from the current normals, which cover 1981-2010. Consistent with the long-term warming trend, winter is warmer across most of the contiguous United States, but the amount of warming ranges from nearly 0.0 (light pink) to 1.5 degrees [Fahrenheit] (darker pink) Fahrenheit depending on the location. There are even a few small areas of the Northern Plains where the normal winter temperature for 1991-2020 is slightly cooler than the 1981-2010 normal (light blue).

There’s a lot more variation in the changes in winter precipitation, which includes both rain and snow. The map shows the percent difference in normal winter precipitation in the new normal versus the old normals. The Northern Plains and Upper Midwest have seen the biggest percent increases in normal winter precipitation, while the biggest percent decreases occurred in the Southwest and Southern Plains, including Colorado’s Eastern Plains. (In absolute terms, these changes are equivalent to only fractions of an inch of liquid water because these locations are normally quite dry during the winter.)

Having seen other preliminary data, I expect that the December temperature normals will be the most surprising. Also, NCEI will prepare a second full set of 15-year normals covering 2006-2020 as well. It wasn't reported whether NCEI will produce 15-year normals on a 5-year schedule, however.

This week in 2011 had a lot going on. Illinois governor Pat Quinn (D) signed legislation that abolished the death penalty in the state on March 9th, for starters. But the biggest story of 2011 happened just before midnight Chicago time on March 10th:

On March 11, 2011, Japan experienced the strongest earthquake in its recorded history. The earthquake struck below the North Pacific Ocean, 130 kilometers (81 miles) east of Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region, a northern part of the island of Honshu.

The Tohoku earthquake caused a tsunami. A tsunami—Japanese for “harbor wave”—is a series of powerful waves caused by the displacement of a large body of water. Most tsunamis, like the one that formed off Tohoku, are triggered by underwater tectonic activity, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The Tohoku tsunami produced waves up to 40 meters (132 feet) high,

More than 450,000 people became homeless as a result of the tsunami. More than 15,500 people died.

Of somewhat lesser importance, on this day in 1997, Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on The WB.

It does not seem like 10 (or 24) years ago.

I read three things to reinforce this today. First, National Geographic acknowledges the global mental health crisis, and how we're procrastinating more as a result:

People don’t necessarily procrastinate because they are lazy. Procrastination has roots in our evolutionary development, with two key parts of the brain vying for control.

“Procrastination is an emotion-focused coping strategy,” says Tim Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, and author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle. “It is not a time-management problem; it is an emotion-management problem.”

Experts who study procrastination define it as the voluntary delay of an intended act despite the fact that you can expect to be worse off in the long run by putting off the task. We know the task doesn’t go away, but sometimes we let our emotions get the best of us. Our “present self” calls the shots, and our “future self” suffers because of it.

Neuroscientists have found that procrastination is a battle between an ancient part of the brain called the limbic system and a relatively younger part known as the prefrontal cortex.

However, when strong emotions such as anxiety and fear become overwhelming, the impulsive limbic system can still win out.

Paul Krugman today describes another form of insanity, in which the states of Texas and Mississippi (34th and 46th in public education rankings, respectively) have consigned a non-zero number of people to death because of the politics of masks:

Wearing a mask in public, like holding it in for a few minutes, is slightly inconvenient, but hardly a major burden. And the case for imposing that mild burden in a pandemic is overwhelming. The coronavirus variants that cause Covid-19 are spread largely by airborne droplets, and wearing masks drastically reduces the variants’ spread.

So not wearing a mask is an act of reckless endangerment, not so much of yourself — although masks appear to provide some protection to the wearer — as of other people. Covering our faces while the pandemic lasts would appear to be simple good citizenship, not to mention an act of basic human decency.

Refusing to wear a mask has become a badge of political identity, a barefaced declaration that you reject liberal values like civic responsibility and belief in science. (Those didn’t used to be liberal values, but that’s what they are in America 2021.)

I don’t know how many people will die unnecessarily because the governor of Texas has decided that ignoring the science and ending the mask requirement is a good way to own the libs. But the number won’t be zero.

Finally, I got a lengthy email today that someone sent through Weather Now, for some reason, warning me of the dangers of vaccination:

I was praying and fasting, regarding the Covid-19 vaccine during the time I’ve received this dream:

In my dream, God took me into the near future of America. I was overlooking America (like a birds eye view), and I looked to my right of America (the Eastside) and was overlooking New York State as well.. And I saw millions of people in America, had received the Covid-19 vaccine.

And also throughout America, I could see 5G towers monitoring VERY closely the covid-19 vaccinated individuals (victims).

When I saw this, I immediately asked God, “How are they completely connected to these 5G towers and the towers to them?” Right after I asked God this, He took me to a hospital in New York. There, I saw a doctor giving a patient, the covid-19 vaccine. (The doctor and patient couldn’t see me.)

But while the doctor was injecting into the patient’s arm, the covid-19 vaccine shot.. I saw hundreds/thousands of little specs of microchips, [nanobots] INSIDE the covid-19 vaccine, flowing through the shot, and into that individual.

The email went on like this for five pages. I selected only the most coherent bits for this message. I should point out, however, that the IP address from which the message originated is in Vietnam, so I'm not too worried there's an unhinged fundamentalist trying to save my soul through a weather application's feedback page. I am worried that fear leads to stupidity (a crucial step Yoda forgot to mention) and stupidity leads to people believing crazy things.

Craziness usually follows plagues. Let's hope we get through our crazy period as rationally as we can.

It's every other Tuesday today, so I'm just waiting for the last continuous-integration (CI) build to finish before deploying the latest software to our production environment. So far, so boring, just the way I like it. Meanwhile, in the real world:

• In a symbolic but meaningless vote, all but 5 Republican members of the US Senate voted to let the XPOTUS off the hook for inciting an insurrection against, well, them, as this way they believe they get to keep his followers at no cost to themselves. If this past year were a novel, the next sentence might begin with "Little did they know..." Which, you know, describes those 45 Republicans to a T.
• Dutch police arrested more than 180 people in Amsterdam and Rotterdam for rioting against Covid-19 lockdowns: "A leading Dutch criminologist, Henk Ferwerda, said the riots involved 'virus deniers, political protesters and kids who just saw the chance to go completely wild – all three groups came together.'"
• Air travelers across the US can rejoice that CNN Airport News will go away on March 31st.
• Over 1 teratonne of ice melted over each of the past few years, increasing concerns about global sea level rises.
• Two mathematicians argue that time-travel paradoxes don't exist, because the universe routes around them.

Finally, snow continues to fall in Chicago, so far accumulating to about 100 mm by my house and as of noon about 125 mm at O'Hare. Calling this a "snowstorm" seems a bit over the top as it's coming down at under 10 mm per hour and forecast to stop before too long. Plus it's barely below freezing for now—but forecast to cool down to -11°C by Wednesday night before creeping above freezing Friday and Saturday. So we might have a blanket of snow for a bit. Still, it's the most snow we've gotten all season, with less than 5 weeks to go before meteorological spring starts March 1st. I'm OK with this mild winter, though it might presage a very hot summer.

Just an hour or so into the first business day of 2021, and morning news had a few stories that grabbed my attention:

• All 10 living former defense secretaries joined in an op-ed yesterday condemning the idea of involving the military in election disputes.
• After repeated warnings, the FAA are proposing $182,000 in fines against an unlicensed drone pilot for 26 violations of FAR Part 107 rules.
• The BBC rolls its eyes, sighs in exasperation, and takes apart a number of PM Boris Johnson's claims about Brexit.
• A new points-based immigration system took effect in the UK on Friday.
• Illinois has converted hundreds of kilometers of railroad rights-of-way into trails over the years; the Tribune has a list.

Finally, don't eat icicles. They're basically frozen bird poop.

A couple of articles piqued my interest over the last day:

• Via IFL Science, a team of graduate students from three European universities studied how long humans would survive the emergence of a vampire population. (It depends a lot on how effective your slayers are.) They even built a calculator.
• Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe, writing in the Financial Times, argues the STBXPOTUS should face prosecution for using the pardon power to obstruct justice.
• Emma Goldberg describes some coronavirus-era neologisms.

Finally, with only a few days left in December, we have now had 5 days this month with more Americans dead from Covid-19 than died on 9/11, and the STBXPOTUS won't sign even the miserly, half-assed recovery bill that Republicans in the Senate would agree to. January 20th can't come soon enough.

How did I miss this Times article from November?

Lab tests can tell how old a human is just from the pattern of methylation. Thanks to this research, the same can be done for dogs. The results will help researchers studying aging in dogs to translate findings to humans. None of this research was done on dogs kept in a laboratory. All of the dogs in the aging comparison study were pet Labrador retrievers and the owners gave permission for blood samples.

Scientists are unsure about whether the physical decline seen in aging in dogs and humans, in fact in all mammals, is related to the process of development in earlier life, or whether the decline is a different process altogether. The researchers found that the pattern of methylation suggested that the same genes may be involved in both processes.

Good methods of comparing dog and human ages are important. Dogs are increasingly seen as good models for human aging because they suffer from it in many of the same ways humans do. As the Dog Aging Project, which is collecting genetic and other information from a vast number of pet dogs, puts it on its website, the goal of the research is “Longer, healthier lives for all dogs … and their humans.”

I miss my aging dog. And the day this article was published, Parker was old indeed.

My company gives us the usual American holidays off, and adds two "floating holidays" you can take whenever you want. I took my first one in January and just remembered last week that I hadn't taken the second one. So I took it today. Which gave me some time to read a bunch of things:

• The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wishes politicians in both parties understood how Covid-19 spreads.
• Paul Krugman wonders whether the president's efforts to kill Covid relief come from ignorance or cynicism. (I'd imagine both.)
• The Texas Attorney General and the attorneys general of 17 other states have sued four states where Joe Biden won to try overthrowing the election. Several Republicans in Congress have signed on as amici curiae, essentially calling their own elections illegitimate.
• National Geographic explains how the French Revolution led to the metric system.
• John Maguire, writing for the BBC's Culture column, really did not like the clichéd portrayal of Irish people in Wild Mountain Thyme.
• The next president of my alma mater will be from Chicago. They just keep getting us Chicagoans to run things over there.

Finally, the list I posted Wednesday needs an update. In October 1918, influenza killed 195,000 Americans, or an average of 6,290 per day. So clearly most of that month set records well above the records we set this week.

Today's news stories comprise a mixed bag:

• Famed test pilot and Air Force General Chuck Yeager died yesterday, on the 4th anniversary of astronaut John Glenn's death and the day before the 40th anniversary of John Lennon's.
• Michael Gerson takes Evangelical Christian leaders to task for supporting the president's attempted autogolpe.
• Chef Edward Lee, writing in Bon Appétit, frets that Covid-19 could end the renaissance of independent restaurants we experienced in the last 20 years.
• Chicago alderman Tom Tunney, former chair of the Illinois Restaurant Association and owner of Ann Sather, received well-deserved criticism and now faces a $10,000 fine for serving customers illegally at his restaurant after the city-wide emergency order prohibiting in-person dining.
• Former ER physician Dr Elisabeth Rosenthal argues "it's time to scare people about Covid" to get people to take the disease seriously.

Finally, a little sweetness for a cold December day: Whisky Advocate has a recipe for bourbon balls that I hope someone will try and share with me. I'll even supply the bourbon.

Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying the latest Star Trek series immensely. But the third season's handling of its pretty stark historical implications bug me to death.

Warning: spoilers possible ahead.

Star Trek: Discovery's third season begins with the series protagonist, Cdr Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), having jumped from the year 2259 to 3187, more than 900 years after the events of season 2. The eponymous starship shows up a year later. Now, even though Discovery has a unique propulsion system that enables it to travel to any point in space instantaneously, it's still a 900-year-old ship. And yet somehow it and its crew can function in its new era without too much friction.

Let me try to paint a picture of our world 900 years ago and see if the multitudes of problems with this scenario make you scratch your head too.

In 1100, the most powerful military vessels were Viking longboats, made of wood, using square sails, and projecting force 200 meters or so with iron-tipped arrows delivered by longbow. Today, the most powerful military ships (measured by deliverable ordnance) are ballistic-missile submarines, made of high-strength steel and titanium alloys, using nuclear reactors powering silent, computer-designed screws, and projecting force to any part of the planet with hydrogen-bomb-tipped rockets. A 17,000-tonne Ohio-class submarine could destroy a fleet of longboats merely by surfacing from directly beneath them. And you don't even have to think of how the Vikings would fare against a submarine or even an aircraft carrier to get a sense of what 900 years of technological advancement has accomplished: a Coast Guard Medium Endurance Cutter could lay waste to the entire Viking navy without even removing the safeties on its 62mm cannons simply by swamping the Viking ships with its 30-knot wake. Or forget military vessels: how well do you think a Viking fleet would do against a Panamax container ship? Or how about a 16th-century man-o'-war, which can sail almost directly upwind while firing guns?

In 1100, advanced non-military technology included windmills (10th century) and the number zero (8th century, just getting to Europe around 1100). The Chinese had just invented moveable type a few years earlier, and the Arabs were about to invent al-Jabr (algebra), but neither of these ideas would penetrate Europe for centuries. People would have to wait 200 years to button their clothes or wear eyeglasses, and 700 years before getting a vaccine for anything. I mention the first vaccine because the disease it prevented (smallpox) no longer exists in the wild, but neither does the vaccine. An average Roman from 1100 suddenly popping up in Rome in 2020 could kill thousands just by breathing—but social distancing wouldn't be a problem, because the 12th-century Roman probably never bathed in his life.

In 1100, nobody in Europe spoke a language that is spoken today, except possibly the Basques. Communication might be possible with a 12th-century Chinese person in Mandarin, but even then, I expect pronunciation might have drifted a bit. The Star Trek universe has universal translators, but personal-size UTs didn't exist during Discovery's era, and wouldn't for another 70 years. Maybe everyone in the 32nd century has one? Maybe all the UTs in 3188 also come with a package of historical languages that died out hundreds of years ago, like English may have, just in case? Before you say "people spoke Latin both in 1100 and today," I assure you that the Latin "spoken" in 1100 wasn't actual, spoken Latin, because that died out in the 5th-7th centuries after Rome fell. By the 1100s, the Catholic Church's "Latin" had devolved into a unique, bizarre, ahistorical form that no citizen of the Roman Empire would have understood even without the vowel drifts that occurred over time. Perhaps some scholars in the Vatican today might be able to speak with their 12th-century counterparts, but that is kind of my point. I'm sure someone in some university on Earth could speak and understand English in 3188, but that wouldn't help Burnham when she first met Book, now would it?

In 1100, traveling from London to Canterbury took about a week; traveling to Paris took about two; and traveling to Rome took about four. Today, all three destinations are about two hours away, by car, train, and airplane, respectively. Traveling to North America in 1100 would have taken just under 400 years, because even though people had known the diameter of the planet since Eratosthenes calculated it 1200 years earlier, no one in Europe knew anything lay between there and India heading west, and anyway ship technology wouldn't allow it save for that one time Leiv Erikson got blown off course trying to bring Christianity to Greenland. Erikson barely made it back, remember. Since 1969, if you have a whole week you can go to the moon and back. If you merely want to reach any other point on Earth, there are four commercial air-transport airplane models (A350, A380, B777, B787) that can get you there in under 20 hours with one fuel stop. (In theory, a ballistic missile could get you there in 40 minutes or less, but they haven't quite worked out how to land one safely.)

In 1100, political philosophy tended towards systems of government we generally find unacceptable today: feudalism, theocracy, absolute monarchy. Superstition and violently-enforced tradition mixed religion and politics to a level only seen today in groups we call "extreme right" like the Taliban. Think, for a moment, how representative democracy with universal suffrage would have seemed to even a well-educated person living 115 years before the Magna Carta gave limited rights to an hereditary aristocracy. His head would explode. And I do mean his, as European women weren't generally allowed formal education until the 18th Century. Women couldn't even own property in most places before then. Several things we consider horrible crimes in the 21st century wouldn't even raise an eyebrow in 1100. Beating your wife or child? Your family, your business. Torturing a prisoner to death? Expected. Killing your neighbor for taking a deer on your land? Well, if it's "your land," that means you own land, which means you're the local political power, which gives you all manner of rights over people living on it. Raping the newlywed bride of one of your neighbors is one of those rights, for instance.

I was going to write that "In 1100, the average naval officer wouldn't even understand the concepts of suffrage or democracy," but I realized that in 1100 they wouldn't even understand the concept of "naval officer." In 1100, the concept of "admiral" (in Arabic, "amir-al-bahr:" "lord of the seas") had just reached Europe, and ships had captains as a job but not as a grade. The idea of a formal, dedicated officer corps with fixed grades was still centuries off. The United States Navy had only the ranks of Admiral, Captain, and Lieutenant as late as 1860 when they introduced the rank that eventually became Commander. The 10-grade system we use in NATO countries today is from the 1980s.

In 1100, every government that existed eventually changed form or disappeared. Only one European quasi-governmental institution that existed then still exists in a similar form today: the Catholic Church. Not only have all the other governments that existed in Europe back then vanished, most of the political units have disappeared or changed unrecognizably as well. England arguably has the oldest continuous system of government in Europe, which goes all the way back to...the Act of Settlement in 1707. In the Star Trek universe, the United Federation of Planets was only 100 years old when Discovery slipped into the future, and it was founded only 80 years after most existing Earth governments blew themselves out of existence. So why would any of Discovery's crew, to whom First Contact with the Vulcans was more recent for them than the American Revolution is to us, find it at all surprising that the Federation has all but vanished 900 years later?

So the gulf between 1100 and 2020 is huge. But the gulf between 2259 and 3189 would be far, far larger, because we only recently learned how to innovate on purpose.

In 1100, technology advanced slowly. Pick a European country: 1100 looked almost identical to 900 and 1200. Even fashions remained the same decade after decade. The pace of technological change we live with today started gaining speed with the Enlightenment of the mid-18th century. The ideas that drive modern technology have surprisingly recent origins. Mass-produced books? Johannes Gutenberg, 1452. Modern written English? Mid 1600s. Steam-powered vehicles? James Watt, 1776. Permanent republican form of government? New Hampshire, 1776. Modern patent law? United States Congress, 1790. Light-speed communications? Samuel Morse's telegraph, 1836. First modern sewerage system? James Newlands in Liverpool, 1848. Voice communications? Alexander Bell, 1876. Formal industrial R&D and the electric light bulb? Thomas Edison, 1880s. Universal adult suffrage? New Zealand, 1893. Line-of-sight wireless communications? Enrico Marconi's radio, 1901. Airplanes? Orville and Wilbur Wright, 1903. Synthetic plastic? Leo Baekeland, 1907. Television? John Baird, 1925. Antibiotics? Alexander Fleming, 1928. Controlled nuclear reactions? Enrico Fermi, 1942. Digital computers? ENIAC, 1946. Integrated circuits and microchips? Jack Kilby, 1958. Computer-aided design? Ivan Sutherland, 1963. Geostationary communication satellites? Syncom 3, 1964. The Internet? US Defense Department, 1971. The World Wide Web? Tim Berners-Lee, 1990. The Daily Parker? May 1998. Google? August 1998.

All of those technologies accelerated the development of newer technologies. In some cases, technologies led to the discovery of principles that couldn't be imagined without practical experience with them—for example, how synthesizing a polymer in 1907 and creating a working radio in 1901 are both required before you can understand that an integrated circuit is even possible, let alone how to mass-produce a billion-transistor microchip.

The worlds of 1100 and 1800 would have been mutually comprehensible (though starting around 1700, politics, religion, and hair styles would seem stranger by the year), but the worlds of 1800 and 1900 would not. Someone from 1900 would probably understand the world of 2020, but that's because by the late 19th century people started to intuit Clarke's Three Laws (1962), so they would universally attribute modern technologies to artifice rather than magic.

That's on Earth. In the Star Trek universe, technological advances happened across hundreds of civilizations, with trade between them bringing everyone up to higher levels even faster. Humans independently invented warp drive in 2063; but the Vulcans who landed in Montana after detecting Zefram Cochrane's warp signature eventually shared technologies that humans had only imagined before. (Peaceful) trade and communication between cultures accelerates development in both.

So to sum up: Discovery popping into the late 32nd century should have even less success integrating into its new surroundings than a Viking longboat popping into 2020. They should find themselves in a universe with not just advanced technology, but totally incomprehensible technology; a universe protected by armaments that consider Discovery's weapons practically harmless—including its photon torpedoes, which can sterilize entire planets; a universe where no one save a few academics understands a word they're saying; a universe where all but fringe extremists find their views on politics and social norms not just embarrassing, but horrifying and immoral; and a universe where childhood diseases from either culture could kill millions in the other.

That said, it's not a bad show. Episode 7 drops tonight.