The Daily Parker

Video from yesterday in Syria California:

Fallows says:

Let's stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful protest against other people's rights to go about their normal lives, and the rights of institutions to have some control over their property and public spaces. Without knowing the whole background, I'll even assume for purposes of argument that the UC Davis authorities had legitimate reason to clear protestors from an area of campus -- and that if protestors wanted to stage a civil-disobedience resistance to that effort, they should have been prepared for the consequence of civil disobedience, which is arrest.

I can't see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we'd react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population.

It makes me proud to be an American.

The Atlantic's James Fallows is justly exercised about the Orwellian "Stop Online Piracy Act" making its way through Congress:

The Vimeo clip below does a very clear and concise job of explaining the commercial, technical, and political issues at stake. Short description of the problem: in the name of blocking copyright-infringing piracy sites mainly outside the United States, the bill would make U.S.-based Internet companies legally liable for links to or publication of any pirated material. This would be technically cumbersome, economically and commercially dampening, and potentially politically repressive. The video tells you more.

Every developed society has had to work out the right balance of how far it will go to ensure that inventors and creators will get a reasonable return for their discoveries. If it does too little -- as in modern China, where you can buy a DVD of any movie for $1.50 from a street vendor -- it throttles the growth of creative industries. (China both over-controls political expression and under-controls commercial copying.) If it does too much -- encouraging "patent troll" lawsuits, arresting people for file-sharing music or video streams -- it can throttle growth and creativity in other ways. There is no perfect answer, but this bill would tip the balance way too far in one direction, to defend incumbents in the entertainment industry.

Write your representative. And then write a few other reps.

Last night, Penn State students rioted in support of disgraced football coach Joe Paterno:

Jimmy Gallagher, raised on the shoulders of students at the top of the Old Main staircase, shouted from a megaphone.

"We stand united as students. We don't care what anyone else has to say. We want Joe and we want him back," Gallagher (freshman-energy business and finance) said.

Jimmy, your football coach—a grandfather, if one can believe—failed to take action for nine years after he learned that one of his subordinates reported witnessing another subordinate raping a 10-year-old boy in a locker room shower. And there's evidence that Paterno had received other allegations against Sandusky going back to the mid-1990s.

The legal process must take its course before we can actually call former coach Jerry Sandusky a child rapist. But that doesn't matter to the appalling lack of moral intelligence Penn State students, staff, and administrators have displayed in the last few days.

Jerry Sandusky may not have done anything he's accused of doing. But if someone witnessed him having sex with a 10-year-old boy in the showers, for that person at the very least not to run to the nearest phone and call 911, or (given the witness was a former football player) not to beat the snot out of the (alleged) child rapist on the spot and then call 911, beggars the imagination.

So, Penn State students who rioted yesterday, you are voicing your support for a man who did nothing to investigate a credible report of child rape for 9 years after he learned of the incident. You're mad he won't get to coach a football game, but not mad he (allegedly) covered up a horrible crime? Wow.

The damage that Paterno, Sandusky, and everyone who failed to act even with the morality of a professional tobacco lobbyist did to Penn State's reputation will take a generation to fix. Who cares about the next three football games.

Updated to correct grammar, dates.

Barry Ritholtz at the Washington Post explodes the big lie about why we're in a recession:

A Big Lie is so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. There are many examples: Claims that Earth is not warming, or that evolution is not the best thesis we have for how humans developed. Those opposed to stimulus spending have gone so far as to claim that the infrastructure of the United States is just fine, Grade A (not D, as the we discussed last month), and needs little repair.

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash.

[New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg was partially correct [when he blamed the crisis on Congress]: Congress did radically deregulate the financial sector, doing away with many of the protections that had worked for decades. Congress allowed Wall Street to self-regulate, and the Fed the turned a blind eye to bank abuses.

The previous Big Lie — the discredited belief that free markets require no adult supervision — is the reason people have created a new false narrative.

The entire column is worth reading.

Apparently Herman Cain's foreign-policy experience needs an update—to 1964:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you view China as a potential military threat to the United States?

HERMAN CAIN: I do view China as a potential military threat to the United States.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And what could you do as president to head that off?

HERMAN CAIN: My China strategy is quite simply outgrow China. It gets back to economics. China has a $6 trillion economy and they're growing at approximately 10 percent. We have a $14 trillion economy -- much bigger -- but we're growing at an anemic 1.5, 1.6 percent. When we get our economy growing back at the rate of 5 or 6 percent that it has the ability to do, we will outgrow China.

And secondly, we already have superiority in terms of our military capability, and I plan to get away from making cutting our defense a priority and make investing in our military capability a priority, going back to my statement: peace through strength and clarity. So yes they're a military threat. They've indicated that they're trying to develop nuclear capability and they want to develop more aircraft carriers like we have. So yes, we have to consider them a military threat.

Emphasis mine. Note that China detonated its first nuclear bomb in 1964, and launched an aircraft carrier earlier this year.

It seems more and more obvious this guy is running for President solely as a business plan and not because, you know, he wants to be President.

Today the city of Chicago finally got around to building emergency turnarounds on Lake Shore Drive, on which hundreds of cars got stranded last Feburary:

Both escape routes are on the near North Side - one will be at Armitage; the other at Schiller. Chicago Department of Transportation officials say those spots were chosen because they're prone to snow drifts.

They will create turnaround access to north and southbound lanes during emergency situations, like last February's 20 inches of snow blizzard. Drivers and vehicles were stranded on the Drive for hours.

It's not clear how these two turnarounds would have helped in February, though I suppose more cars would have gotten off the road before it became completely impassable.

Here's another look at the gorgeous weather that shut the Drive. Can't wait for more this winter!

Two tangentially-related stories this afternoon. First, from HuffPo, President Obama did not sic the FBI on medical-marijuana dispensaries in California; the U.S. attorneys did it on their own:

Obama as a candidate promised to maintain a hands-off approach toward pot clinics that adhered to state law, with Attorney General Eric Holder publicly asserting that federal prosecutors would not initiate enforcement actions against any patients or providers in compliance with state law, deeming it an inefficient use of scarce government resources.

Such language didn't stop federal prosecutors from launching an attack on medical marijuana shop owners earlier this month, vowing to shutter state-licensed marijuana dispensaries regulated by local governments and threatening landlords with property seizures.

Still, why are California's U.S. attorneys doing this? Does Agent Van Aldren work for them?

And next week, the Chicago city council will start looking at an ordinance to decriminalize small amounts of pot:

Under a proposal [25th Ward] Ald. Daniel Solis...will introduce at next week's City Council meeting, people caught in Chicago with 10 grams or less of marijuana would get a $200 ticket, and up to 10 hours of community service.

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy has mentioned the possibility of issuing tickets for marijuana possession as a way to keep his officers on the streets rather than tying them up processing people.

Excellent. Let's have the cops go after actual criminals instead of harmless pot-smokers.

Via Atlantic Cities, the recession may help move developers away from the 19 standard building types identified in a report from UC Berkeley in 2005:

[T]he Grocery Anchored Neighborhood Center...is generally about 5 or 6 hectares in size on a plot of land that’s 80 percent covered in asphalt. It’s located on the going-home side of a major four-to-eight lane arterial road, where it catches people when they’re most likely to be thinking about what to buy for dinner.

It has a major, 4,600 to 6,500 square-meter supermarket on one end and a drug store with drive-through on the other, with national and regional chain stores, maybe a Hallmark and a Starbucks in between. The parking lot contains four or five spaces per thousand square-feet of retail. There is, in theory, a sidewalk, although no one is expected to use it. Every shop is designed to be seen by potential customers passing by at 45 mph. And – with the exception of a few last-minute regionally specific touches for art-deco paint schemes or Mediterranean roof tiles – this L-shaped shopping center looks the same whether you’re pulling into it from Denver or Orlando.

Seventeen of the 19 types create what one of my friends has called "Suburbistan," a landscape oriented towards cars and tract homes. But:

In Washington, D.C., one of the few U.S. cities largely immune to the real estate downturn, construction has continued, and Leinberger estimates that a good 90 percent of new development in the area has lately been planned for walkable, high-density living (see the makeover of Tyson’s Corner and the new Navy Yard development around the Nationals’ ballpark). These are the real estate products [Christopher] Leinberger believes we’ll need going forward: ground-floor retail with rental apartments on top, hotel/convention centers with condos above and a subway corridor below. These models may very well become standardized, too.

One can hope. Walkable cities, with good transit, are good for almost everyone.

The U.S. government is an insurance company with an army:

The vast bulk of its spending goes to the big five: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, and interest on the debt.

But what about recent deficits? They’re caused mainly by a fall in revenue and a mostly automatic increase in spending on safety-net programs. Oh, and the federal government has been providing aid to state and local governments, largely to limit layoffs of schoolteachers.

And if you want smaller government, either you’re talking about cuts in the big five, or you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I disagree with Krugman here, a bit, because I see a third possibility. You could be advocating smaller government without cuts to the big five because you're trying to mislead people.

To better understand the facts behind Astrolabe’s stupid trolling quixotic lawsuit against the guys who coordinated the worldwide time-zone database (tzinfo), I bought copies of the Shanks Amercian and International atlases that Astrolabe claims to own. (I went through the secondary market, so I didn’t actually give Astrolabe any money.)

First, an update. According to Thomas Eubanks of the IETF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken over Arthur Olson’s legal defense. Mazel tov. I expect to see a response to the complaint against him in a few weeks that includes a motion to dismiss which, I think, may be granted. (I’m thinking about drafting a response myself, just to exercise my legal muscles properly. Watch this space.)

Now to the main post. The Shanks books, rather than containing maps, contain pages and pages of tabular data showing three things:

1. Names of first- and second-order administrative districts (e.g., states and counties);
2. Latitudes and longitudes of cities and other named places within countries or states;
3. Lists of the dates and times of time-zone changes for those named places.

The atlases dump this data to paper using a monospace typeface at 6-point size in what can be nothing other than 1990s-era printouts to some kind of publishing compositing software. This offers a clue to the “original works” claim that Astrolabe makes about the products.

Shanks certainly put a lot of work into these books, especially considering he first published them in 1978 and 1985. He must have spent hundreds of hours looking up and entering data on the thousands of locations in the tables.

For example, the American Atlas contains rows upon rows of data like this:

Chicago 16      1 41N51'00 87W39'00 5:50:36
Chicago Heights 16
                1 41N30'22 87W38'08 5:50:33
Chicago Lawn 16 1 41N47    87W43    5:50:52

I imagine Shanks looked up this data in reference books, then entered it into a home-grown flat-field database through a Vax terminal or on his Apple ][+. I hope he at least let the computer calculate the last column (the location’s offset from GMT), since it’s derived directly from the location’s longitude (the next-to-last column).

I imagine this because, in the early 1990s, I did something similar to study climate data. (Do you know how long it takes to enter 30 years of daily climate data by hand? No? You’re lucky.)

Back to Astrolabe’s complaint. In Count 4, Astrolabe claims ownership of “certain copyright-protected computer software programs and information contained therein…known as the ‘ACS Atlas,’ consisting of both the ‘ACS International Atlas,’ and the ‘ACS American Atlas,’ in the form of computer software program(s) and/or data bases, and in the form of electronic output and future electronic media from said programs....’ ” I infer from the complaint that the software reproduces the books in computer-searchable form, or perhaps contains the raw data that Shanks himself used to produce the books.

I’ll defer my main argument for a moment to speculate further on what parts of the tzinfo database could have copied the Shanks database.

In the tzinfo database, one of the files (zone.tab) contains latitudes and longitudes of locations in this form:

US	+415100-0873900	America/Chicago	Central Time
US	+375711-0864541	America/Indiana/Tell_City	Central Time - Indiana - Perry County
US	+411745-0863730	America/Indiana/Knox	Central Time - Indiana - Starke County

Nothing else in the tzinfo database comes as close to looking like data in the Shanks atlases. I don’t know where the tzinfo list came from, but I suspect it came from public sources like the Census Bureau.

The other possible copying comes from the lists of dates Shanks put together that look like this:

IL # 1
Before 11/18/1883  LMT
11/18/1883  12:00  CST
 3/31/1918  02:00  CWT
10/27/1918  02:00  CST

Here’s how the tzinfo database shows the same information:

# Rule	NAME	FROM	TO	TYPE	IN	ON	AT	SAVE	LETTER
Rule	Chicago	1920	only	-	Jun	13	2:00	1:00	D
Rule	Chicago	1920	1921	-	Oct	lastSun	2:00	0	S
Rule	Chicago	1921	only	-	Mar	lastSun	2:00	1:00	D
Rule	Chicago	1922	1966	-	Apr	lastSun	2:00	1:00	D
Rule	Chicago	1922	1954	-	Sep	lastSun	2:00	0	S
Rule	Chicago	1955	1966	-	Oct	lastSun	2:00	0	S
# Zone	NAME		GMTOFF	RULES	FORMAT	[UNTIL]
Zone America/Chicago	-5:50:36 -	LMT	1883 Nov 18 12:09:24
			-6:00	US	C%sT	1920
			-6:00	Chicago	C%sT	1936 Mar  1 2:00
			-5:00	-	EST	1936 Nov 15 2:00
			-6:00	Chicago	C%sT	1942
			-6:00	US	C%sT	1946
			-6:00	Chicago	C%sT	1967
			-6:00	US	C%sT

That hot mess establishes the specific rules Chicago used to change its clocks in the 1920s and 1950s where the rules differed from the general U.S. rules, then it sets out the dates and times that Chicago’s wall-clock rule sets changed from the beginning of standard time in 1883 through the last change in 1967. (The current rule set for Chicago are the “US” rules, defined elsewhere in the database.)

Shanks has a list, and the tzinfo database has the rules to create the list. Shanks also has an error that the tzinfo database corrects: the tzinfo database establishes that Chicago switched from local mean time (LMT) to standard time at 12:09:24, because Chicago is 9 minutes and 24 seconds ahead of the standard meridian for the time zone. Shanks puts the time at 12 noon, because his list shows the target time, not the trigger time, for the rule change.

Did the tzinfo project use Shanks to determine the rules for time changes? Yes, explicitly, though for highly-documented locations like Chicago the project participants cross-referenced Shanks with original sources, often correcting his errors. But "use" does not mean "copy;" I can use all the baseball statistics I want out of the newspaper without ever copying the newspaper. Data is not protected by copyright.

The tzinfo didn’t infringe on anyone’s copyright because Shanks created very little to protect. As I’ve previously explained, facts and data do not enjoy copyright protection in the United States. Only the expression of facts does. So if the tzinfo project had photocopied Shanks’ atlases, or republished the ACS software wholesale, then perhaps there would be an infringement. But I think I’ve shown a bit of why the tzinfo project hasn’t done anything actionable.

The Shanks atlases are like meticulously hand-copied illuminated codices from the 16th century, years after Gutenberg made his Bible and made hand-copying obsolete. I’m glad Shanks did the work; I’m sure he felt like he’d accomplished something huge. I really admire the work that went into it, while at the same time shaking my head at the wasted effort. Because since the late 1990s, all that data—latitudes, longitudes, place names—has been available for free from the Census Bureau and the CIA.[1] Before around 1998, you couldn’t just download the data through FTP for free; you had to write a letter to the appropriate agency and pay for it. But being U.S. government data, it was in the public domain, so once you’d paid for it, you could republish it in an easier-to-use form and recoup royalties.

In an era before the Census Bureau started dumping terabytes of data to the Internet, Shanks’ atlases would have been incredibly convenient sources of geographic and time-zone data. Today, they’re curiosities, monuments to exactly the kind of mental effort obviated by fast, cheap computers and the Internet.

Poor Shanks, all those data, thousands of rows of it, standing nakedly, and often erroneously, on page after page of tables in two massive volumes, apparently not knowing that he could have gotten it from the U.S. government—you have to admire that work ethic.

Astrolabe, for its part, has degenerated into exactly the kind of mental deficiency reviled by those of us who actually create software for a living. I eagerly await their much-deserved legal defeat in the next few months.

[1] Yes, the CIA publishes tons of free data, from their World Factbook to entire databases of geospatial information.

Edited at 20:58 UTC: Clarified the difference between "use" and "copying."