The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

After 12 long years, we got to use the roof

This morning, for the first time since the inbound Ravenswood platform opened August 1st (and therefore since mid-2011), I actually got to shelter from the weather while waiting for the train:

Rain was falling, but for a few minutes, none of it fell on me. We could stand under a roof and wait for the train to arrive. Of course, since the platform was designed to accommodate a 3rd mainline track some day in the future, we still had to stand in the rain for a brief moment to get on the train, but still. I stood outside on the train platform not cursing Bruce Rauner and seven generations of his descendants.

Oh, and note to self: bring spare socks to the office.

No, there is no nude beach in Rogers Park

That's just one of the absurdities that I encountered over the course of the last 24 hours:

  • A prankster put up an official-looking sign declaring Loyola Beach on the north side of Chicago clothing-optional. Unfortunately no one was fooled.
  • For the 15th or 20th time since its founding, critics accuse the US Navy of adapting too slowly to emerging risks in order to preserve tradition and Mississippi jobs. (Really, this comes up about every 20 years.)
  • Of course, it doesn't help that we currently have no Chief of Naval Operations, Army Chief of Staff, or Marine Commandant, thanks to US Senator Tommy "Never Could Beat Alabama" Tuberville (R-AL).
  • A working group that didn't include historians has proposed how sweeping changes to Chicago-area transit can help it become more like 1960s Baltimore more quickly: concentrate on "financial viability" at the expense of fast, frequent service. Because we really have learned nothing in the last 75 years.
  • Illinois has become the third-largest home of data center space in part because we have a lot of office parks no one wants anymore.

Finally, Arizona continues to allow residential development as if the state has as much available water as Illinois. Because we really have learned nothing in the last 75 years.

Last hot weekend of 2023, I hope

The temperature has crept up towards 34°C all day after staying at a comfortable 28°C yesterday and 25°C Friday. It's officially 33°C at O'Hare but just a scoshe above 31°C at IDTWHQ. Also, I still feel...uncomfortable in certain places closely associated with walking. All of which explains why I'm jotting down a bunch of news stories to read instead of walking Cassie.

  • First, if you have tomorrow off for Labor Day, you can thank Chicago workers. (Of course, if you have May 1st off for Labor Day, you can also thank us on the actual day that they intended.)
  • A new study suggests 84% of the general population want to experience an orchestral concert, though it didn't get into how much they want to pay for such a thing. (You can hear Händel's complete Messiah on December 9th at Holy Name Cathedral or December 10th at Millar Chapel for just $50!)
  • An FBI whistleblower claims Russian intelligence co-opted Rudy Giuliani in the run-up to the 2020 election—not as a Russian agent, mind you, just as a "useful idiot."
  • Rapper Eminem has told Republican presidential (*cough*) candidate Vivek Ramaswamy—who Michelle Goldberg calls "very annoying"—to stop using his music in his political campaign.
  • The government of Chile has promised to investigate the 3000 or so disappearances that happened under dictator Agosto Pinochet, though they acknowledge that it might be hard to find the ones thrown out of helicopters into the sea, or dropped down mine shafts. And with most of the murderers already dead of old age, it's about time.
  • Julia Ioffe wonders when the next putsch attempt will get close to Moscow, now that Prigozhin seems to be dead.
  • About 70,000 people continue to squelch through ankle-deep mud at Black Rock City after torrential rains at Burning Man this weekend. (I can't wait to see the moop map...)
  • University of Michigan Law Professor Nicholas Bagley had a cogent explanation of why pharmaceutical companies don't want to negotiate drug prices with Medicare. (Hint: record profits.)
  • Switching Chicago's pre-World War II bungalows from gas to electric heating could cut the city's GHG emissions by 14%.
  • Molly White's weekly newsletter starts off with some truly clueless and entitled behavior from Sam Bankman-Fried and gets weirder.
  • Zoning laws, plus the inability of the Portland, Ore., government to allow variances in any useful fashion, has condemned an entire high school to send its kids an hour away by bus while the building gets repaired, rather than just across the street to the community college many of them attend in the evenings. (Guess what skin color the kids have. Go on, guess.)
  • A group of hackers compromised a Portuguese-language "stalkerware" company and deleted all the data the company's spyware had downloaded, as well as the keys to the compromised phones it came from, then posted the company's customer data online. "Because fuck stalkerware," they said.
  • Traffic engineers, please don't confuse people by turning their small-town streets into stroads. It causes accidents. Which you, not they, have caused.
  • Illinois had a mild and dry summer, ending just before our ferociously hot Labor Day weekend.
  • James Fallows talks about college rankings, "which are marginally more encouraging than the current chaos of College Football."

Finally, I'll just leave this Tweet from former labor secretary Robert Reich as its own little monument to the New Gilded Age we now inhabit:

Third marathon walk (in 4 attempts)

I did it again:

Of my three attempts to do this (2020, 2021, and 2022), this was 3rd best. Considering that last year I didn't even make it out of Evanston, it wasn't really that bad:

So even though yesterday's marathon time was 21 minutes longer than 2020 and 25 minutes longer than 2021, at least I finished. But why so slow (other than I'm getting older)?

Some clues: in 2020 and 2021, I got about 8¼ hours of sleep the night before; yesterday I woke up after only 7¼ hours of sleep. In 2020 and 2021, I started the day with Garmin Body Battery scores of 93 and 84 respectively; in 2022, it was 49, and yesterday, 67. More relevantly, as my walking partner (who does Ironman races and so never crested a heart rate of 125) pointed out, in 2020 and 2021 I actually trained for it.

Another trivium. I have a 3-year-old Garmin Venu 2, and my walking partner wore an newer Garmin Forerunner 265S and an older Forerunner 935. The 935 uses GPS only. The 265 has a dual-band chip that "intelligently" switches between GPS, Galileo, and GLONASS. My Venu 2 can use any of the three navigation satellite systems, but I had it set to GPS+GLONASS. We walked the same course at the same pace, and except for a few minutes when our watches were all paused, we were never more than 2 meters from each other, and we recorded total course times within a few seconds entirely attributable to imprecision in starting the timers.

Yet somehow, my Venu 2 logged 44.45 km (27.63 mi) for the entire walk, while hers got 43.80 km (27.22 mi) and 43.73 km (27.18 mi) respectively. There is no possibility that I walked 725 meters—almost four Chicago city blocks—farther than she did. So later this weekend, we're going to dig into the track files to figure out where I got the extra half-mile.

Regardless, the weather was about the same this year as in 2020, meaning really gorgeous:

Yes, I'm going to do it again next September. But I'll also do a few other walks next summer to prepare. And my walking partner and I plan a hike on the North Branch Trail in Ocotober that ends not with a brewery but with pizza.

Last day of summer

Meteorological autumn begins at midnight local time, even though today's autumn-like temperatures will give way to summer heat for a few days starting Saturday. Tomorrow I will once again attempt the 42-kilometer walk from Cassie's daycare to Lake Bluff. Will I go 3-for-4 or .500? Tune in Saturday morning to find out.

Meanwhile:

  1. Quinta Jurecic foresees some problems with the overlapping XPOTUS criminal trials next year, not least of which is looking for a judicial solution to a political problem.
  2. Even though I prefer them to rabbits, even I can see that Chicago has a rat problem.
  3. Pilot Patrick Smith laments the endless noise in most airport terminals, but praises Schiphol for its quiet. (Yet another reason to emigrate?)

Finally, it seems like anyone with a valid credit card number (their own or someone else's) can track the owner of that credit card on the New York City subway. I wonder how the MTA will plug that particular hole?

Drawing a bright line through the desert

Private railroad operator Brightline has started modestly-high-speed service in South Florida, and has agreements in place to start Los Angeles to Las Vegas service by the end of the decade:

Launching with no federal help, the modern debut of private passenger rail connecting two major metropolitan areas will come to fruition when Brightline riders arrive in Orlando from downtown Miami. The Federal Railroad Administration expects to sign off within days, triggering a three-week testing period before Brightline carries passengers. The company will then set its sights on a $12 billion high-speed railway from Las Vegas to Southern California, a massive undertaking that could put trains traveling at 300 km/h on America’s tracks by 2028.

After operating much like a commuter service through South Florida, the Orlando station will be the nation’s first non-Amtrak passenger train connection between two metro areas in four decades — a project with nearly $6 billion in private investment. Although not a true high-speed operation, the Brightline Florida service will surpass speeds of 200 km/h in some areas — the nation’s fastest train outside the D.C.-Boston region.

Five years after Brightline opened its 67-mile service between Miami and West Palm Beach, passengers fill the five-car trains for sporting events and festivals while commuters use it to get to jobs. Students receive discounted passes for educational excursions.

Brightline uses business tycoon Henry Flagler’s original Miami train station and his Florida East Coast Railway, built in the late 1880s. The station had fallen into disrepair and was surrounded by parking lots. The raised platform is now the hub of 1.5 million square feet of development, with office, commercial and residential spaces built by Brightline’s owner.

The 425 km electrified rail line from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga, where it would connect to downtown Los Angeles via commuter train, is estimated to cost $12 billion — three times the price tag envisioned in the mid-2000s. Brightline submitted a 4,000-page application in April for a $3.75 billion federal grant from the infrastructure law.

If you can get from LA to Vegas in 2 hours, you can charge more than the airlines charge, but you can also charge less. That's about the same distance as Paris to Lyon, which the TGV currently makes in about that time, for about €50 in second class. And an electric train over that distance produces a fraction of greenhouse gasses per passenger than a car or airplane.

Notice that this can only happen with massive Federal subsidies. But that's exactly how all major transportation projects work in the US. Remember the Interstate Highway System, that provided some $500 billion (2023 dollars) in subsidies over 35 years for cars? Not to mention all the other road projects that gave us the ugliest infrastructure in the history of the world.

I hope people use these trains. And I'm really waiting for my 40-minute Chicago-to-Milwaukee train.

Should I retire to the Netherlands?

Not Just Bikes celebrates 5 years living in the Netherlands by raving about how the Netherlands' anti-car development patterns make just about every city in the country nicer to live than just about anywhere in North America:

I'm about 3/4 the way through Nicholas Dagen Bloom's The Great American Transit Disaster, having just finished the chapter on how Detroit's combination of racism, suburban/urban hostility, lack of vision, and massive subsidies for car infrastructure while starving public transit gave us the hollowed-out hellscape the city has become. This, after reading the chapter on how Atlanta's combination of racism, suburban/urban hostility, lack of vision, and massive subsidies for car infrastructure while starving public transit gave us the depressing echo of its former glory the city has become. And the chapter on how Chicago's combination of racism, suburban/urban hostility, and massive subsidies for car infrastructure almost—but not quite—overcame the city's history as the country's largest railroad hub with rail-driven suburban development along the Chicago & North Western and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad lines.

Sigh.

I'm nowhere near retiring. And even though I work for an international company,  reporting up to the London office, my team are 100% Chicago-based for the time being. But when I'm old and decrepit 40 years from now, I imagine getting around a country that cares about its public transit might be easier than even one of the most transit-friendly cities in North America.

Worth the time

I tried something different yesterday after watching Uncle Roger's stab at adobo:

Ng's basic outline worked really well, and I got close to what I had hoped on the first attempt. Next time I'll use less liquid, a bit more sugar, a bit less vinegar, and a bit more time simmering. Still, dinner last night was pretty tasty.

Much of the news today, however, is not:

  • US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set the XPOTUS's Federal criminal trial for next March 4th, two years earlier than he wanted it.
  • Writing for The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan blasts Republican presidential wannabe Vivek Ramaswamy as "a demagogue in waiting," and a distressing preview of Millennial politicians.
  • The MiG pilot who ejected during an airshow on August 13th blamed the non-flying observer in the back seat for pulling the ejection cord on his own.
  • Chicago has struggled for 15 or more years to get critical repairs to our international dock on the South Side.
  • Elizabeth Spiers has a pretty good idea why Michael Oher, subject of Michael Lewis's 2006 book The Blind Side and the 2009 film of the same name, is pissed off at the white family that didn't actually adopt him.

Finally, via Bruce Schneier, a couple of kids with $30 worth of radio equipment managed to stop 20 trains in Poland by exploiting a mind-boggling weakness in Polish train dispatching equipment. Despite some media sources calling this a "cyber attack," it was nothing of the sort. The instructions for how to do this have existed for decades.

Big cats vs big dogs

This surprised me. One or more mountain lions in Washington state has decided that wolves taste good:

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) staff have documented cougars killing six collared wolves since 2013—almost 30 percent of the 21 documented natural wolf mortalities in the state. "That's huge if that trend holds and is representative of the entire population [in the state]," says Trent Roussin, a WDFW biologist. The kills involve multiple wolf packs in different areas of Washington.

Such kills are rare elsewhere in the U.S. West, where more wolves are on the landscape since their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park, which is mostly in Wyoming, and central Idaho in 1995. Today Montana and Idaho have over five times more wolves than Washington.

While a wolf pack tends to have an advantage over a single cougar—sometimes running it up into a tree or kicking it off a carcass to scavenge for themselves—a cougar excels in a one-on-one ambush. All but one of Washington's wolf kills involved lone wolves.

"Everyone always assumes wolves have the upper hand," says ecologist Mark Elbroch, the leader of Panthera's Puma Program. "But that's not always the case."

I don't expect my own wolf would do well in a fight against a cougar—or a Dachshund, for that matter—but I had no idea cougars hunted actual wolves. You know I'll always root for the dogs over the cats, though.

Incoming weather system

We get blizzards and heat waves in Chicago. Guess which one we get tomorrow? The forecast still calls for 36°C temperatures with heat indices around 42°C. But Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters is only 2.1 km from Lake Michigan. At Chicago's official weather station at O'Hare, which is 23.3 km from the Lake, it looks a bit grimmer: 37°C with a heat index of 43°C.

WGN's Tom Skilling and Bill Snyder admit that some of the models call for 38°C or 39°C, but they manually adjusted the forecast because the models don't all agree:

Temps at or above 100 in Chicago are rare. Since official records began in the city 153 years ago in 1871, there have only been 62 days with highs at or above 100 degrees. And at the Midway Airport site on the city’s South Side where weather observations have been archived since 1928, on only 92 occasions over that 95 year period has a reading of 100 degrees or higher occurred.

There’s a reason for the scarcity of such EXTREME HEAT. The fact is, nature finds ways to derail the development of such intense heat. That’s why as forecasters, we’re careful about predicting such readings and must ALWAYS MAKE IT CLEAR there are forces which have been around over the term of official weather observations which work to keep a 100-degree readings from happening. The best evidence currently available suggests a 99-degree high is a strong possibility Wednesday — a reading just one degree shy of a triple-digit reading and, if it occurs, a record breaker which would exceed the old August 23rd record Chicago high of 97 degrees. Thursday could see a 100-degree high, but the potential for a front to sag into the area and turn winds off the lake at some point in the afternoon isn’t completely off the table. ALSO, though not expected at the moment, the development of thunderstorms — even if close-by — can send a cooling outflow of air into the area aborting a 100-degree temperature.

What’s interesting is even if a cold front comes into the picture Thursday, the convergence of winds along that front can lead to heating which would be capable of sending Chicago-area highs to 100, which would tie the record for August 24 and become a windshift behind the front that would send temps falling.

(Note that WGN, unlike 95.6% of the world's population, still uses the obsolete Fahrenheit scale in its reports.)

In other words, 36°C is the low estimate for the heat we're about to get. If the temperature does get above 38°C, though, it will be the first time since July 2012 that we've experienced anything that hot here.

At least we have trees to shade our walks in my part of the city. Writer Tiffany Owens Reed lives in Waco, Texas, whose urban design she says better suits lizards than people:

Before the advent of air conditioners, hot weather was something that architects and city planners had to respond to with creativity. The weather was something to adapt to, to work with, to manage…not merely to escape. For example, in Bologna, architects responded to hot weather by building a network of covered walkways that allowed pedestrians to wander the city fully shaded except for the brief moments during which they crossed the street from one walkway to another. We can see a similar sentiment at play with the ornate covered passageways of Turin, Italy. In the U.S. when touring old cities like Charleston, South Carolina, we can see evidence of similar accommodations in the deep, wide porches circling old houses.

Seeing the city as a destination for humans to inhabit and explore, and as a conduit for experiencing nature would lead to different design priorities, similar to what we see with public splash pads, rivers cleaned up for public swimming, or railways turned into parks for lounging (as in the case of Manhattan’s Highline)

If the main assumption is that humans won’t be spending time outside, that discourages these kinds of weather-considerate features and what we get instead is what my husband and I have come to call “lizard architecture”: a homogenous style of design imported to cities by developers who lack regionally specific weather consciousness and that would probably be more conducive to designing for reptiles than for humans.

Lizard architecture might not be the most scientifically accurate name for this style of design, but it provides my husband and me much comic relief as we drive around, spotting massive, unshaded parking lots, exposed outdoor dining areas, and unshaded walkways…design features that make it extremely uncomfortable to be a human outside for extended periods of time. It’s the kind of design that indicates to me an overreliance on technology to solve our discomforts and an inability to imagine cities as spaces where folks might want to experience nature, even when it’s hot. More mindful, human-centric city designers would consider the possibility that humans actually want to be outside, not just as environments to move through as quickly and comfortably as possible.

Our heat wave should end Friday morning, with a cool front coming in from the north dropping temperatures as low as 16°C by Saturday night. Then we head into the last week of summer, with autumn officially beginning next Friday, when I plan once again to try walking a full 42.2 km.