The Daily Parker

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...

I learned this morning that I have a meeting at 6am Wednesday, because the participants will be in four time zones across four continents. Since I'm traveling to Munich later that day, I'll just comfort myself by remembering it's 1pm Central Europe time.

I'm already queuing up some things to read on the flights. I'll probably finish all of these later today, though:

• Jennifer Rubin highlights four ways in which the XPOTUS has demonstrated his electoral weakness in the past few weeks.
• Republican pollster Frank Luntz agrees, warning the MAGA Republican extremists to stop screwing around lest the party suffer an historic ass-kicking in November. (For my part, I don't think they will stop, and the ass-kicking is long overdue.)
• Sean Wilentz warns that the Supreme Court abdicating its responsibility to evaluate the XPOTUS in light of the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause will lead to worse problems later on.
• James Fallows chastises the Times in particular for creating the controversy about President Biden's age they claimed simply to report on.
• Ian Bogost moans about the ever-deepening problems of carrying baggage onto planes. (I will be checking my bag through to Munich, for what it's worth, but I may carry it on for the return flight to avoid customs delays changing planes at Charlotte.)

Finally, John Scalzi erupts at the 2023 Hugo Awards administrators for outright fraud and unforgivable cowardice following a report on Chinese political interference in the awards selection process last summer.

A weather pattern has set up shop near Chicago that threatens to occlude the sun for the next week, in exchange for temperatures approaching 15°C the first weekend of February. We've already had 43 days with above-normal temperatures this winter, and just 12 below normal during the cold snap from January 13th through the 22nd. By February 2nd, 84% of our days will have had above-normal temperatures since December 1st.

Thank you, El Niño. Though I'm not sure the gloominess is a fair exchange for it.

Elsewhere:

• President Biden, whose name didn't even appear on the ballot, won the New Hampshire Democratic primary by a larger margin than the XPOTUS won the Republican primary.
• The Washington State legislature has debated scrapping Daylight Saving Time entirely, a move that does not require USDOT sign-off, as the simplest path to avoiding the cognitive challenge of moving clocks twice a year. That this would cause 4am sunrises and 8pm sunsets in Seattle in June has not gone without notice.
• Speaking of Washington, aviation reporter Bill Saporito picks up the Atlantic's theme from 2019 and blames Boeing's problems on its cultural takeover by McDonnel-Douglas in 1997.
• New research finds that companies' return-to-office ("return to the past") mandates have no effect on profits or stock price, which everyone below the executive level already knew.
• My religious group has become the largest single denomination in the US. (We already took over most of Europe in the last century.)

Finally, Minnesota-based wildlife photographer Benjamin Olson discovered that a mouse had moved into his car. So naturally, he set up a photo trap. And naturally, it's totes adorbs.

Yeah, I know I've posted this nonsense before. Kiritimati atoll (pronounced "Christmas" because the missionary who named the place had a broken typewriter) and Kiribati changed their time zone to UTC+14 in 1994 so that they could be the first place in the world to enter the 21st Century. So while the wall-clock time on Kiritimati is the same as the wall-clock time in Hawai'i, Kiritimati and Kiribati are a full day ahead.

Anyway, it's now 2024 in the Pacific/Kiritimati time zone. Happy new year!

Lebanon has one of the most chaotic political systems in the world. The previous government presided over a massive ammonium nitrate explosion they could have prevented had any one person in government taken responsibility for removing a derelict Russian freighter.

Once again, the Lebanese government has displayed head-shaking incompetence, this time on what seems like a minor matter but could lead to more religious unrest as hot weather combines with people not eating or drinking water during the day. Always a good combination.

So what did the good burghers of Beirut do this time? They decided on Thursday not to change to daylight saving time this weekend, most likely so that people can make Iftar "an hour earlier." Of course, changing the clock time of sunset doesn't actually change the duration of daylight; Earth spins on its axis all the same, indifferent to how we measure it. So observant Muslims in Lebanon will still fast for a little over 12 hours today, just as they did yesterday.

I found out about this idiocy right away from the Time Zone Committee email list, but some Lebanese just found out about it this morning. It hasn't gone well:

Daylight Saving will be introduced from midnight on April 20 rather than from midnight on March 25.

No official explanation has been given for the move although local media suggested it was introduced to coincide with Ramadan.

But the decision is facing widespread revolt, with two TV channels going ahead with the clock changes in protest.

MTV Lebanon and LBCI Lebanon say they will refuse to cooperate with the adjustment, announcing they will go ahead with switching to Daylight Saving Time on Saturday.

CNN also reports, "Adding to the confusion, the government is yet to say whether it has informed officials responsible for synchronizing times on mobile phones, laptops and other electronic devices of the change." This is true; the Government of Lebanon has not officially informed IANA of the change. Fortunately—or unfortunately—for them, someone sent us a link to a reliable Tweet, so we went ahead with a patch, and some guidance on how to use the new rule by changing your phone to the Libyan time zone until April 20th.

The problem with authoritarian governments, of course, is that they believe they control everything within their domains, without having the first clue how things actually get done. Add some religion and it gets even stupider.

Democracy is messy; democracy is frustrating; but democracy doesn't usually get such basic technical decisions so maddeningly wrong.

We had four completely-overcast days in a row, including one with some blowing snow, so I'm happy today has been completely clear. Tomorrow might even get above 10°C—which would at least get into normal March temperatures. This whole winter has been weird, as the next few will likely be until temperature increases start leveling out.

In other news:

• ICANN's blog has a brief post from Kim Davies, who regularly contributes to the Time Zone Database, on how the TZDB actually works.
• US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) squarely blames the XPOTUS for repealing parts of the Dodd-Frank Act that she says would have prevented the Silicon Valley Bank collapse this past weekend.
• Lia Russell outlines how the nightmare "Silicon Valley economy" makes just getting by harder for more people every day.
• In yet another instance of former Chicago mayor Richard J Daley negotiating a really bad contract for the city (but probably a great one for his pals), we still have to pay tens of millions of dollars per year in interest on the 2003 destruction renovation of Soldier Field.
• Helaine Olen bemoans the disappearance of human beings in customer service.

Finally, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders explain how AI could write our laws in the future.

For once, instead of using clever blog tricks to wish Niue all the best in the new year ten hours after our own, I thought to use the same clever blog trick to mark 2023 right here in Chicago.

So, let's pause for 12 months before the 2024 election cycle kicks off and we all get crazy again. Here's to a boring new year!

This moment in the January 6th committee proceedings was total Daily Parker bait (h/t George Conway). It came as the committee interviewed Max Miller, former senior adviser to the XPOTUS and as of next Tuesday the US Representative for Ohio's 7th district. He wanted to establish that no one called his White House office for hours after the insurrection began, pointing to the phone logs as evidence.

I'll let the J6 lawyer explain it:

MILLER (p 120 line 15): I want you to pull up the time from when I left the White House, there's a period of time, there was about 4 or 5 hours, of no phone calls.

J6 LAWYER: And I think what you're referring to is, if we look here...you have a call from Mr. Caporale at 10:40 am.

A: Uh huh.

Q: And the next call that's reflected on your records is 6:40 p.m. on January 6th, so, as you said.

A: So I wanted you to to bring that up is to show you, look, no one called me, right, when things were going wrong....

Q (p 121 line 8): No, I appreciate your perspective, and actually my colleague just corrected me. I need to point something out about how the phone records is—

A: —it's 5 minutes, isn't it?

Q: No, no, no, no. So what that is, is a sign of Greenwich Mean Time. I don't know if in the military you know what that is. So each line reflects whether the time is either Greenwich Mean Time or off of Greenwich Mean Time by some amount. And, at that time of year, the East Coast is 5 hours off Greenwich Mean Time. So, when you see the 6:40 calls on January 6th, the one after Mr. Caporale, you have to take 5 hours off. So that would be...1:40 pm.

A: ...Time is not important...

Congratulations to the anonymous committee lawyer understanding that "18:40Z" is actually 13:40 -0500. Although, now that you mention it, maybe the phone log actually said "18:40 -0500" which would be the time Miller said it was? Too bad we can't see the exhibit.

I always find it interesting when a literary magazine takes on technology. In that spirit, the New Yorker does its best to explain the Network Time Protocol:

Today, we take global time synchronization for granted. It is critical to the Internet, and therefore to civilization. Vital systems—power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks—rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. N.T.P. works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (G.P.S.), and other technologies to synchronize time on our many online devices. The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via G.P.S. to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to N.T.P. servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet, almost all of which run N.T.P. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to N.T.P. servers.) The protocol operates on billions of devices, coördinating the time on every continent. Society has never been more synchronized.

In N.T.P., [David] Mills built a system that allowed for endless tinkering, and he found joy in optimization. “The actual use of the time information was not of central interest,” he recalled. The fledgling Internet had few clocks to synchronize. But during the nineteen-eighties the network grew quickly, and by the nineties the widespread adoption of personal computers required the Internet to incorporate millions more devices than its first designers had envisioned. Coders created versions of N.T.P. that worked on Unix and Windows machines. Others wrote “reference implementations” of N.T.P.—open-source codebases that exemplified how the protocol should be run, and which were freely available for users to adapt. Government agencies, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist) and the U.S. Naval Observatory, started distributing the time kept by their master clocks using N.T.P.

A loose community of people across the world set up their own servers to provide time through the protocol. In 2000, N.T.P. servers fielded eighteen billion time-synchronization requests from several million computers—and in the following few years, as broadband proliferated, requests to the busiest N.T.P. servers increased tenfold. The time servers had once been “well lit in the US and Europe but dark elsewhere in South America, Africa and the Pacific Rim,” Mills wrote, in a 2003 paper. “Today, the Sun never sets or even gets close to the horizon on NTP.” Programmers began to treat the protocol like an assumption—it seemed natural to them that synchronized time was dependably and easily available. Mills’s little fief was everywhere.

This being the New Yorker, one could describe the article as the author explaining how he met this programmer Mills and the politics around Mills' retirement from computing. It's better-written than the Wikipedia article, anyway.

I've gotten two solid nights of sleep in a row, and I've got a clean desk for the first time in weeks. I hope that this becomes the norm, at least until November, when I'll have a packed musical schedule for six weeks as the Apollo Chorus rehearses or performs about 30 times. But that's seven months off.

That gives me plenty of time to listen to or read these:

• Time Zone Database coordinator Paul Eggert explains the TZDB, its history, and how it works.
• David Sedaris discusses how the US changed between his 2019 and 2021 tours.
• Why have work days gotten so long for many people? Meetings.
• The recent revelation that before taking over the 2016 election campaign Steve Bannon favorably compared the XPOTUS to the German Chancellor who ruled from 1933 to 1945, led Timothy Noah to the conclusion: "We used to call people who think like Bannon sociopaths. Now we just call them Republicans."
• Paul Krugman reviews the situation and finds that declining immigration seems to have the largest effect on our labor shortage right now.
• Programmer Andrew Schmelyun connected a grocery-store receipt printer to his GitHub issues stream so he could get actual tickets in one of the most brilliant reverse-skeumorphs I have seen in years.

And finally, in compiling geographic source data for Weather Now, I discovered that the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) assigned an official designator the location where the Ingenuity helicopter landed on Mars: JZRO, for Jezero Crater.