The Daily Parker

Yesterday's temperature at O'Hare got up to 21°C, which we last hit on November 5th, and is the normal temperature for May 15th. It was quite a lovely day, in fact. Tom Skilling pointed out that this was the earliest 21°C day in 16 years, and was 3 weeks earlier than the average date of its first occurrence based on 145 years of data.

I tried, I really tried, to hit 30,000 steps, but...well:

Crap. I missed 30,000 by 225 steps, and missed my record by only 721:

Note that on September 5th I also missed a goal by almost the same amount. Quite irritating. Still, yesterday's step count was fully 4.86 standard deviations above my mean daily count of 12,660, so it was a pretty good effort. (At this point today I'm already up to 9,534, so the week is looking pretty good.)

And Parker got over 90 minutes of walkies.

The all-time Daily Parker posting average has inched up from 1.24 to 1.34 over the past five years, due to a pretty consistent pattern since February 2011 of posting around 42 entries a month. But in 2015, for a variety of reasons (mostly because I've been pretty busy), I slacked off, such that last month the 12-month moving average came within 0.005 of the all-time average, and would have dipped below it for the first time since July 2011 had I not posted yesterday:

The blue line is average posts per day per month; red is the all-time average; and green is the past 12 months moving average.

There are a couple of blogging milestones coming up in the next few days, so more on this later.

While I'm going through a boring cycle of NuGet updates, unit tests, and inexplicable app-publishing failures related to the above, I'm piling up a crapload of articles to read on my flight tomorrow:

• Lifehacker explains how to see everything on your home network. (It's not that hard.)
• The Chicago Tribune takes you inside Underwriters Laboratories in Northbrook, Ill., where my grandfather worked for 30 years.
• A group of physicists and mathematicians has listed the 15 most-complex subway maps in the world. (We're #12! We're #12!)
• Illinois got a metric shit-ton (i.e., a shite-tonne) of snow yesterday, but not as much as Indiana.
• The French Academy got rid of the circonflexe 20 years ago, but the French people are just now outraged that textbooks are starting to reflect the change.
• The infamous Lincoln Park Pirates (officially known as Lincoln Towing) could be shut down after decades of violating state law. They're across the street from a cemetery, so dancing on their grave will not be difficult.

Back to work. At least my build is succeeding now.

A medium-length list this time:

• A Megabus exploded outside Chicago yesterday, but that shouldn't scare you away from intercity buses.
• Let's not forget that Antonin Scalia tried to take the country backwards, and was an intellectual phony on top of it.
• BBC Radio 4 has just released a new adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, featuring James McAvoy and Natalie Dormer.
• While Flint, Mich., has bad things in its municipal water supply, Chicago's isn't much better.
• California tax offices have had to adapt to taking in large amounts of (herbal-scented) cash, because Federal banking regulations make it nearly impossible for marijuana sellers to open bank accounts.
• Paul Krugman is not shilling for Hilary Clinton, so stop accusing him of corruption. We Democrats are better than that.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has floated a plan to buy $2-3 billion in new rail cars, but there's a little more to the deal than meets the eye.
• Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee made Jewish humor mainstream.

And this brings me to lunch.

It's odd that I haven't posted on a Saturday since January 23rd, and I haven't posted on both weekend days since December 5th-6th. I'm not sure why, really.

This time, it's because last night I had a big party, so I didn't have any time to post. Today I have no creativity. But I still wonder at the pattern.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. was founded only a couple years after the Chicago fire (and the Apollo Chorus). For decades people equated the Sears brand with mail-order retail. They could deliver anything, anywhere, and people in rural 19th- and early-20th-century America depended on them. Their success and business acumen culminated in them commissioning the tallest building in the world just over 40 years ago.

Their current chairman, Eddie Lampert, took over in 2004, and immediately applied the teachings and wisdom of the sociopathic author Ayn Rand to running the august company. He set managers against each other, extracted cash without reinvesting, merged with bankrupt K-Mart, and in the process squandered two-thirds of the company's value—$6 billion just since 2012.

The company took another step to total collapse this week when they announced that they planned to write down the value of the name "Sears" by $200 million. This came in its official report that included dry but painful descriptions of its unbelievably bad Christmas season and its continuing hemorrhaging of cash and people.

The slow death of Sears by Lampert's hands is just sad. Lampert's ideology, and probably his narcissism, have killed one of America's biggest names. I don't think we've ever seen a better example of what happens when Ayn Rand's beliefs go up against reality.

In the last 40 years, astronomers have gathered more and more evidence that our moon came out of a scarcely-imaginable collision between a baby (100-million-year-old) Earth and another proto-planet named Theia. (Watch this video for a good explanation.) Just two weeks ago, astronomers at UCLA announced a clarification: Theia didn't hit Earth in a glancing blow, as previously thought. Instead, the two planets hit head-on:

“We don’t see any difference between the Earth’s and the moon’s oxygen isotopes; they’re indistinguishable,” said Edward Young, lead author of the new study and a UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry.

The fact that oxygen in rocks on the Earth and our moon share chemical signatures was very telling, Young said. Had Earth and Theia collided in a glancing side blow, the vast majority of the moon would have been made mainly of Theia, and the Earth and moon should have different oxygen isotopes. A head-on collision, however, likely would have resulted in similar chemical composition of both Earth and the moon.

“Theia was thoroughly mixed into both the Earth and the moon, and evenly dispersed between them,” Young said. “This explains why we don’t see a different signature of Theia in the moon versus the Earth.”

So why am I reviewing catastrophic astronomical events? I'm reading Neal Stephenson's latest novel, Seveneaves, which posits (in its opening paragraph) the collision between our moon and what is probably a small black hole. Stephenson imagines what would happen from a serious, scientific perspective. 

Seveneves isn't what you would call a character piece. I'm 45% through it, according to my Kindle, and thoroughly fascinated. But Stephenson is almost the anti-Ishiguro.

Another aside: I have to see the tidal bore in the Bay of Fundy someday. It just sounds so cool—especially in context.

I have three books in the works and two on deck (imminently, not just in my to-be-read stack) right now. Reading:

• Neal Stephenson, Seveneves.
• Christopher Dickey, Our Man In Charleston.
• Gene Kim, et al., The Phoenix Project.

On deck:

• Kevin Hearne, "Iron Druid Chronicles" book 8: Staked.
• Kim Stanley Robinson, "Mars" trilogy book 2: Green Mars.

Meanwhile, I have these articles and blog posts to read, some for work, some because they're interesting:

• Deeply Trivial dissects the bogus claim that six coin tosses going the same way (a) decided the Iowa caucuses and (b) is improbable.
• Speaking of statistics, meteorologist Tom Skilling simultaneously describes our very mild winter and the coming Arctic blast next week, noting that the cold weather will be caused by significantly warmer-than-normal weather in Western North America.
• Bruce Schneier calls attention to the growing planet-sized robot we're creating. (No kidding; it's not even a little bit sci-fi.)
• The Chicago Public Schools have just borrowed $875 million at a penalty interest rate 75 bps over what they expected and something like 700 bps over prime, meaning the loan might be worse than not borrowing the money.
• Illinois State Senator Daniel Bliss (D-Evanston) points out that the dispute between Gov. Rauner and the State Legislature is philosophical, and the governor is flat wrong.
• Chicago has mixed politics with snow removal basically forever.
• L.A.'s iconic Sixth St. Viaduct is going away, as is the concrete river under it.
• Ted Cruz might have gone farther if he weren't such an asshole.
• Microsoft Azure Stack is a thing I need to learn about.
• So is ReSharper 10.1.

Time to read.

Meanwhile, I seem to have a cold. Yuck.

Stuff:

• Deeply Trivial explains a haunting using Occam's Razor.
• Delta Airlines apologized for a fistfight between two flight attendants.
• The Chicago Public Schools have been in trouble for a while, but it just got worse.
• Krugman predicted two horrible people would top the GOP results in Iowa last night, and he was right.
• New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority will roll out new "open gangway" subway cars by 2020.
• Hey, brewers, stop these horrible craft brewing trends. Please.

Someone call lunch...

I've meant to post this for a while. Here's a photo looking south-west from a point just southwest of the intersection of Wacker and Michigan, here in Chicago, in April 1986:

And here's a similar view today. Note that you can no longer see the Thompson Center, City Hall, or anything else beyond the row of skyscrapers erected on Wacker between Wabash and Clark since then:

The photos aren't from the same vantage point, because this afternoon I only had my phone and not my SLR. I will try to get a photo from approximately the same location and using the same focal length (probably 210mm) soon.