I'm totally swamped today, so here are the things I haven't read yet:
Twenty minutes until my next meeting.
The CBC weighs in on one of this blog's perennial topics:
Going by the sun's position in the sky, Saskatchewan should be on mountain time, the same as Alberta. The border city of Lloydminster gets it right and uses mountain time but the rest of Saskatchewan is effectively on daylight time year round, while the province says it's on standard time.
Lots of places do the same, and some by more than an hour.
And Newfoundland, where the clocks are 30 minutes ahead of the ones in most of Labrador and the rest of the Atlantic time zone, can claim to be in minute-sync with all sorts of places.
The 30-minuters added another one to their list this year.
They also have a listicle of facts about daylight saving time, for those who are not already completely exhausted by this topic.
If you live in the parts of the U.S. and Canada that observe Daylight Saving Time, don't forget to move your clocks back an hour tonight. It couldn't come soon enough, though this is the soonest it can come under the 2007 changes to DST observance.
This morning's 7:22 sunrise in Chicago is the latest we'll have to endure until next November 1st, but tonight's 5:47 sunset is the latest we'll get to have until March 6th. Tomorrow the sun rises at 6:23 and sets at 4:45, as our available daylight shrinks from 10 hours, 24 minutes today down to 9 hours, 7 minutes on December 21st.
I'm not a fan of the 2007 changes. I like switching to DST in the spring and switching back in the fall, but I also believe that mid-October (or even the end of September as they do in Europe) makes a lot more sense. At least mornings aren't so gloomy in the fall. (Not a lot we can do about the post-7am sunrises from December 2nd through February 5th, but we expect those two months to be gloomy.)
Of course, I'm not in Chicago at the moment, and it's plenty sunny here...
No, not Thanksgiving; the time of day right now in Turkey. Even though I follow time zones pretty carefully, I really can't tell you what time it is right now in Ankara, and it seems no one else can, either:
Following a decree originating from the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s government has officially delayed the start of daylight saving by two weeks. Like the rest of Europe, the country was supposed to turn back its clocks in the early hours of Sunday, October 25. Elections coming up on November 1 prompted the move, as the government reckoned that more evening light might ensure a better turnout.
But even in a country with a tradition of occasionally delaying daylight saving a day or so, the two-week delay has come across as more than a little Pharaonic in its ambition. There’s another problem: no one seems to have informed the country’s automatically adjusting clocks. This means almost every cellphone and computer jumped out of sync on Sunday morning, causing minor chaos as Turks struggled to work out whether their clocks had changed automatically or not. On Twitter the hashtag #saatkac—“What’s the time?”—trended as people reveled in Erdoğan’s King Canute moment.
The IANA Time Zone Database pushed out a change on October 1st. While some sites, including this blog and Weather Now, updated our copies of the database immediately, apparently not everyone else has. Typically it takes a few weeks to get changes pushed to millions of cell phones.
This is a minor, but telling, example of how authoritarian governments encourage incompetence. If Donald Trump gets elected president, expect this sort of thing to happen here.
I forgot that I picked up my FitBit a year ago this week. So how am I doing since 24 October 2014?
- 4.76 million steps (13,000 per day)
- 4,081 km (11 km per day)
- 4,557 floors (12 per day)
By FitBit's reckoning, that puts me somewhere around the 90th percentile of FitBit users worldwide. It also means I've walked the entire length of Japan and climbed enough stairs to reach the normal cruising altitude of a commercial jet.
And Parker and I are about to get more steps in just a few minutes.
Politico has a long-form article describing Evanston's efforts to rid its downtown of cars:
With stops for Chicago Transit Authority buses and its “L” rail line, Metra suburban rail’s Union Pacific North line and the Pace suburban bus, Evanston always had great transit bones. For much of its history it had also been a relatively prosperous North Shore city, its growth initially spurred by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, as Chicagoans fled its chaotic density, and in the 20th century, its share of once-famous industrial names, from Rust-Oleum Corp. to Shure, the audio products company, to Bell & Howell, then best known for its film cameras and projectors.
The answer to the suburb’s economic woes, as it turned out, lay in embracing Lerner’s theory that “city is not the problem, city is solution.” Beginning in 1986, a new plan for Evanston embraced the idea of a “24/7” downtown, pouring resources into increasing the density of its downtown—a density that also meant decreasing residents’ reliance on automobiles. As a compact city, Evanston couldn’t compete with the vast sprawling parking spots of the Old Orchard Mall. It had to build a different sort of appeal.
Evanston’s approach mixed investments in mass transit—including building a new downtown transportation center—and relaxing its zoning restrictions along two designated corridors, Main and Central Streets, to permit increased residential density. “Nobody wanted a 20-story building in their downtown,” recalls Aiello-Fantus, the former assistant city manager. “There was this perception that we’re just a little town and having something 20 stories changes that character.”
I'm glad Evanston's planning is getting national press. I love the place, which is why I lived there for many years (and may do again). For many years before then, my mom lived along the Main Street corridor mentioned in the article—and then moved up to Central Street later on. And, of course, I was just there a couple weeks ago.
Interesting aside: 116 years ago today, the village of Austin ceased to exist as it was absorbed into the City of Chicago by legislative fiat. The city might have swallowed Evanston as well. How Evanston avoided that is a story in itself.
Hurricane Patricia, which will slam into the Mexican coastal villages of San Patricio and Barra de Navidad in just a few hours, is the strongest hurricane ever observed:
Packing 200 mph winds, the U.S. National Hurricane Center described Patricia as the "strongest hurricane on record" in the Atlantic and eastern North Pacific Basins.
At 8 a.m. ET, Patricia was about 230 km southwest of Manzanillo, and about 340 km south of Cabo Corrientes.
Hurricane warnings stretched from San Blas to Punta San Telmo, an area that includes Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo. CONAGUA, the Mexican national water commission, predicted waves about 40 feet at landfall.
Up to 20 inches of rain was predicted for the Mexican states of Jalisco, Colima, Michoacan and Guerrero through Saturday, the NHC said.
The NHC estimates landfall this evening.
As for the climate-change aspect of the story, the Washington Post has it covered:
Certainly, record-breaking hurricanes raise questions about longstanding predictions that global warming, by raising ocean temperatures, should also strengthen these storms. The issue, however, is beset by data-related difficulties, since storm measurement techniques are continually improving (creating a kind of apples-and-oranges problem when comparing past strong storms with present ones) and are also highly variable around the world — thus, hurricane hunter flights are far more common in the Atlantic than in the Northeast Pacific, where Patricia formed.
Still, there have been widespread predictions that hurricanes should become stronger, on average, in a warmer world. Summarizing the current research, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts it this way: “Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones globally to be more intense on average….This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size.”
Yes, because it turns out, when you put energy into a system at a constant rate but decrease the rate that the energy can leave the system, the system has more energy. And half a century of dithering on climate-change policy has caught up with us.
When the weather is like this (22°C and sunny) in the middle of October, I happily walk the kilometer and a half to the nearest Whole Foods to grab a salad. (When the weather isn't as good, I still walk, just not as happily.)
Today I had a slight delay:
The city raises the bridges most often in October and April to let sailboats through. The whole process takes about 10 minutes, and on a day like today, I'm happy to watch.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif., confirmed the phenomenon yesterday:
“The ocean has warmed up a little bit more. ... It’s certainly still a strong event,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center. Halpert said this El Niño still isn’t quite as strong as the current record holder, the El Niño that developed in 1997, but it’s “still respectable. Probably the second strongest we’ve seen at this time of year.”
“We certainly favor a wetter-than-average winter,” Halpert said. Though he cautioned that “when you’re dealing with climate predictions, you can never get a guarantee,” he added, “this could be one of the types of winters like in 1997-98.”
That winter was dramatic for California. Heavy rains came to Orange County in December 1997, dropping an astonishing 7 inches of rain in some parts of the region, flooding mobile home parks in Huntington Beach and forcing crews to use inflatable boats to make rescues, while mudslides destroyed hillside homes.
El Niño rains started in Los Angeles County in January 1998, and were the worst across the region in February. Downtown L.A. got about a year’s worth of rain in February alone.
California needs rain, sure; but they need rain over a long period of time so that they can capture it in reservoirs without it blowing away infrastructure.
Despite the likelihood of massive rainfalls this winter, California is still experiencing record drought. The "record," unfortunately, only goes back a few centuries, so we really don't know what "normal" is over several millennia. Regardless, this winter will not be normal by any measure, if the world's climatologists are correct.