The Daily Parker

A graduate student in New York has studied the genetic makeup of the city's rat populations, and discovered a divide between uptown and downtown:

Scientists have found a correlation (but, crucially, not a causation) between the earth's rotation slowing slightly and an increase in seismic activity:

Although such fluctuations in rotation are small – changing the length of the day by a millisecond – they could still be implicated in the release of vast amounts of underground energy, it is argued.

The link between Earth’s rotation and seismic activity was highlighted last month in a paper by Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Rebecca Bendick of the University of Montana in Missoula presented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

“The correlation between Earth’s rotation and earthquake activity is strong and suggests there is going to be an increase in numbers of intense earthquakes next year,” Bilham told the Observer last week.

Exactly why decreases in day length should be linked to earthquakes is unclear although scientists suspect that slight changes in the behaviour of Earth’s core could be causing both effects.

Energy has to go somewhere. And systems as large as the earth move a lot of energy around. Could get rumbly this year.

A new book by an English retiree compiles still classified Soviet maps of British and American cities:

On a business trip to Riga, Latvia’s capital, in the early 2000s, [John Davies] hit the mother lode. Davies happened upon a shop that held bundles of Cold War-era maps of British cities, created by the Soviet military. The maps were so detailed that they included such elements as the products factories made and bridges’ load-bearing capacity. “I was just amazed,” Davies said.  

Each time Davies went to Riga, he would bring back another armload of the maps. And it turned out the Soviet military hadn’t just made maps of British cities: Davies discovered similarly intricate maps of U.S. cities, as well as areas across the globe. He and Alexander Kent, a professor of cartography at Canterbury Christ Church University, worked together to figure out how the maps were made. Their research can be found in a new book, The Red Atlas.

It's published in the US on my home-town imprint, the University of Chicago Press—and is at this writing out of stock on Amazon. (And of course I just ordered it.)

Via CityLab's new newsletter "MapLab:"

“Vision Zero” supporters are tapping into big data in other ways. This month, Strava, the app that tracks users’ athletic activity, re-released a “Global Heatmap” tracing more than 1 billion jogs, hikes, and bike rides by millions of members around the world. (The running scene in London, in striking orange and black, is shown above.) Already, some public agencies are making use of the data to support and protect all that sweat. CityLab’s Benjamin Schneider recently wrote about how Utah’s DOT is changing road and intersection designs to be safer for cyclists, based on the map. “It’s replacing anecdote with data,” one local planner told him.

Here's the run map for Chicago's north lakefront:

This is total Daily Parker bait. But I actually have work to do today.

I have some free time coming up next Friday, but until then, there's a lot going on. So I have very little time to read, let alone write about, these stories from this week:

• Bans on interstate alcohol sales are hurting retailers. Funny how the wholesalers are the ones demanding it.
• Cranky Flyer sent a reporter on United's 747 farewell flight. Not many airlines still operate the airplane. Tant pis.
• Jeet Heer calls out how white supremacy underscores President Trump's foreign policy.
• Dana Milbank goggles at Donald Trump, Jr.'s, incredible stupidity.
• Google Maps has a new look.
• A downstate Illinois firm lost a $250m rail car contract after failing to deliver usable rail cars, and also laying off 90% of its workforce. Good thing the state gave the company lots of incentives.

Back to project planning...

I'm chilling in my hotel room on the second day of my trip, not sure how much longer I'll remain awake. (Waking up at 5am sucks, even more so when it's 4am back home.) This is a problem in that I need to write some code before tomorrow.

So I've spent a few minutes perusing the blog feeds and news reports that came in today, and I have a favorite. The favorite is not:

• Philip Bump explaining how President Trump made a bad night for his party even worse by being himself;
• Cook County (which contains Chicago) may de-criminalize marijuana very soon;
• Foreign policy guru Andrew Bacevich cutting Trump's Afghanistan policy into little ribbons;
• Paul Krugman taking apart the GOP's latest tax plan;
• Bruce Schneier testifying before Congress about the Equifax breach; nor
• Josh Marshal pointing out that Trump's numbers predicted last night's voter numbers.

No, though all of those brought little flutters of joy to my heart, the story that London is going to make Oxford Street a pedestrian utopia by 2020 really got my interest. Since I have never driven a car anywhere in Zone 1 and have no intention of ever doing so, I think blocking 800 meters of Oxford Street to cars is fookin' brilliant.

Because of a quirk in the calendar, today's sunrise in parts of the United States that observe daylight saving time was the latest it's been in many years. In Chicago, that was 7:27 this morning. The sunrise won't be that late again until 6 November 2021.

Plus, it was pissing with rain when the sun finally did come up today, making it especially gloomy.

I'm not really sure why we switched from the end of October to the beginning of November in 2007, but I really hate it.

It's hard to believe, but if you're trying to use public transit to get to an airport, you might want to use Bing Maps instead of Google:

Instead of advising you to take one of the “Airporter” buses from San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport, and San Jose International Airport to the north and south of the Bay Area, the app will propose a two- or three-step odyssey on Bay Area Rapid Transit rail and then local buses.

As Google describes things, putting those city-to-terminal routes into its mapping apps shouldn’t be that hard. A transit operator has to apply to be listed in Google Transit, publish its schedule in the standard General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format, and have Google run some quality tests on that feed before factoring it into directions.

Three Airporter services in the Bay Area, meanwhile, had not even gotten to that first step.

“Google has never reached out to us, but at the moment I don’t think we have our schedule in a compatible format,” David Hughes, charter manager at Marin Airporter, says via email. “We are currently working on a new website and we should have the formatting correct when it is published.”

By the way, Bing is not that bad in general. People use Google as their default (I do) but sometimes Bing has better results.

For Chicago, it's not as much of an issue, because the CTA Blue Line goes straight to O'Hare Terminals 1-2-3. But in this case, Google says I can take a bus to the Blue Line and be there in 58 minutes, while Bing doesn't seem to realize that my bus goes all the way to the Blue Line.

All of which suggests that you shouldn't rely entirely on one source of information.

While Catalonia starts a civil war in Spain, and glaciers in the Antarctic advance more and more rapidly each year, it's good to know that Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks can agree on something.

Sullivan: "This is what the Trump abyss looks like."

Brooks: "This is the week Trump won."

It's not really that bad. But it sure feels like it.

A succession of cold fronts has started traversing the Chicago area, so after an absolutely gorgeous Saturday we're now in the second day of cold, wet, gray weather. In other words, autumn in Chicago.

So here's what I'd like to read today but probably won't have time:

• Having been caught out in a bald-faced lie, the White House has been sending condolence letters by overnight mail to Gold-Star families since Wednesday.
• E.J. Dionne says, "What Trump did to Kelly shows how far we have fallen."
• Microsoft is adding Cray supercomputers to Azure. That, I have to say, is cool.
• Deeply Trivial reviews the grant review process.
• Chicago is apparently offering Amazon incentives worth $2.25 bn, including $100m in free land. I'm skeptical.
• A company called What3Words has divided the world up into tiny squares and give every one of them a unique three-word address. (Interactive map here.) For example, my favorite pub in London is at ages.mats.medium; but my favorite pub in the world is at spot.lung.scarf.)
• Economist Raj Chetty says opportunity in the U.S. is basically a coin-toss, depending on your ZIP Code.

Meeting time. Yay.