The Daily Parker

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The New Mexico Supreme Court was unanimous:

New Mexico's highest court ruled on Thursday that the state must allow same-sex couples to marry.

"We conclude that the purpose of New Mexico marriage laws is to bring stability and order to the legal relationship of committed couples by defining their rights and responsibilities as to one another, their children if they choose to raise children together, and their property," the court's ruling read. "Prohibiting same-gender marriages is not substantially related to the government interests advanced by the parties opposing same-gender marriage or to the purposes we have identified."

With this ruling, New Mexico joins 15 other states and the District of Columbia in allowing same-sex marriages. That means 111 million people in the U.S.—36% of the population—live in marriage-equality jurisdictions.

The opinion is here.

The Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center (IDTWDC) will shortly be decommissioned. I first wrote about this in June 2012, when it looked like I could migrate all the apps running on my servers to Azure quickly. (It actually took until March.)

Now, however, I'm done. And now I have about 100 kg of equipment to remove from my apartment.

So: does anyone want some equipment? Here's the inventory:

• Two Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U servers with 1.6 GHz Xeon dual-core processors. One has 4GB of RAM, the other has 2GB. These were my Web and database servers.
• Another Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U server, but with a 1.8 GHz Xeon single-core processor and 4 GB of RAM. This was my Exchange server.
• A Dell PowerEdge 860 1U server with a 1.8 GHz Xeon single-core processor and 2 GB of RAM. This is my PDC.
• All four servers have SCSI PERC RAID controllers.
• A Netgear gigabit switch with 24 ports.
• A 42U steel rack, as pictured, with removable shelf.
• A 17" LCD screen, Dell keyboard, and 4-port KVM switch.
• Assorted network cables, power cables, and APC battery backup units, some of which may need new batteries.

Since I'm essentially giving these things away (except for the rack, for which I'm asking $50), they're conveyed as-is, no liability. And again, the servers will not have disk drives.

If you want these, or know anyone who might, let me know through Inner Drive feedback.

Shortly after my last trip to London I blogged that UK Prime Minister David Cameron's crowing about Britain's economic recovery entirely missed the point of how awfully and slowly that recovery was going. This morning Krugman freshens the evidence:

A couple of weeks ago I tried to get at what’s wrong with the latest tactic of the austerians in terms of a classic Three Stooges scene. Curly is seen banging his head against the wall; when Moe asks why, he replies, “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

As Simon Wren-Lewis tries to explain, this is exactly the basis of the Cameron government’s triumphalism now that UK GDP is growing again.

The basic fact of UK economic performance since the financial crisis is that it has been terrible — in fact, as the NIESR documents, GDP performance has been substantially worse than during the Great Depression.

It's tragic, really. The only question going into the May 2015 elections will be: do Britons understand how much better off they could have been?

The Chicago Transit Authority cleaned out its attic recently and put a bunch of artifacts up for auction. The auction just ended, and I'm sorry to say I did not win anything.

I bid on a couple of 1990s-era station signs, one from Main and one from Davis. I didn't want to risk getting both so I dropped off the Davis auction once it hit $50. Because, rusty 30 x 45 cm sign with the paint chipping? Yeah, $50 sounds right.

But I kept going on the Main St. sign, using the ancient eBay technique of waiting until the last few seconds to make my last bid.

So, the first day of bidding, I put in $25. Auto-bids pushed right past me. Then I waited. Just now, with the bidding at $95, I put in what I thought was a ridiculous (but still acceptable) number: $130. Bam! Bidder #37522 auto-bid right past me!

Now, I'm thinking, as attractive an artifact as the sign might be, is it really worth $150? Oh, the pain, the pain...yes. All right. It's a unique part of history, part of my history in fact, so it's worth $150 to me. Bid.

D'oh! Bidder #37522 thinks it's worth more than $150, and his auto-bid won.

Well, I'm glad the sign is going to a good home. I hope Bidder #37522 finds a nice place on his wall for it.

But I have no idea what Bidder #37961 is going to do with the rail car he bought for $13,150...

(Fun fact: the CTA Gift Store sells signs.)

Update: Looking through the closed lots, I discovered that someone bought two sticks of rail for $50. Let's do the math here. The sticks are each 11.8 m long, and the description says they're 115-lb rail. That means the rail weighs 115 lbs per foot, so the two sticks together contain 4,068 kg of steel. I don't know scrap prices, but it seems to me that 4 tons of steel scrap might be worth more than $50. So assuming the costs of removing the rails aren't too high, someone may have just made a tidy profit on the auction.

Update: It turns out, scrap steel goes for about $350 a ton. So that $50 investment could bring the buyer a tidy $1300 profit. But then one has to ask, why didn't the CTA just sell the surplus rail for scrap in the first place?

From The Atlantic Cities blog:

Over the past decade, 1,300 London pubs have emptied their cellars and wiped down their tables for the last time. It's not just obscure, unloved bars that are dying. This winter, two well-known historic pubs, both open for over a century apiece, will likely be turned into private housing. One is the Old White Bear, a red-brick building hidden away in village-like Hampstead, a former spa town swallowed up by Victorian London. The other, just down the hill, is The Star, an inn dating back to the 1820s with a wood-lined interior (featured in this 1980s pop video) that makes drinking there feel rather like sitting inside a whiskey-soaked violin.

Under the British system, the pub "landlord" (in British pub terminology, this actually means a manager that rents a premises, rather than an owner) must buy their booze from the company they rent the pub from. With no competition, the prices they pay are generally inflated, meaning that even if landlords trim their profit margins, beer still comes out pricier than it otherwise needs to be. While pub companies turn a profit, individual landlords are pushed to the wall. The pub companies then sell off under-performing premises, even though pubs wouldn't actually be unsustainable if landlords got a better deal.

There's a silver lining, and not just from pubs like Southampton Arms: The City of London has taken steps to preserve some landmark pubs.

Yes. And snowy:

Snowfall’s been quite relentless here. Flurries (or more) have fluttered to earth 8 of the past 9 days. And, with just under 250 mm on the books to date, the 2013-14 season has been accumulating snow at nearly twice the normal pace and ranks 33rd snowiest of the past 128 years. That places it among the top quarter of all Chicago snow seasons since records began here in 1884-85.

There’s been only one day with a temperature even briefly above freezing in the past 12. An eight day string of above freezing readings came to an end after a November 28 through December 5th run.

This coming week will see some warming, and possibly a few days above freezing starting tomorrow afternoon. Then Monday we'll see more frigid weather coming in behind either a snowstorm (according to European models) or a dusting (according to American models).

You know, I don't mind a few weeks of this every year, particularly if we don't see it until January, like last year. But this? Snow and sub-freezing temperatures for most of December? I'm not looking forward to three months of this crap.

At least the lake will be cooler come June, which should moderate our summer. Still: before Chicago's climate gets consistently warmer in a few decades, we'll keep having crushingly cold winters alternating with warm ones. I can't be sure this is an improvement.

Apparently, Chicago's Divvy is really popular with tourists—and tourists have trouble returning the bikes on time:

Chicago's Divvy bicycle-sharing program took in up to $2.5 million during its first five months, a figure driven by tourists and others who bought daily passes and racked up the majority of overtime fees, according to a trove of preliminary customer data provided by city transportation officials.

As much as $703,500 came from late charges, which kick in when bicycles aren't returned within 30 minutes. Just a sliver of that money was generated from Divvy's clock-conscious annual members, who checked out bikes for short trips instead of hopping into taxis or riding public transit, city officials concluded.

It's not clear whether the Divvy public-private partnership, supported by $25 million in federal funding and $6.25 million in local matches, is turning a profit.

The article goes on to suggest that tourists have trouble understanding the point of the 30-minute time limit. It's not to prevent you from riding Divvy bikes; it's to keep Divvy bikes moving. If the program didn't have a 30-minute window, people would ride to their destinations, park the bikes, and ride back, possibly tying up a bike all day.

So the problem seems to be user education.

Still, I'm glad the program is making revenue. I really hope it's profitable.

This weekend's cover story in New York Times Magazine looks in detail at Google's grand plan to map everything:

Street View cars have already mapped six million miles. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a quite a lot (equivalent to 12 trips to the moon and back) or not much at all (only one-tenth of the world’s estimated 60 million miles of road). Either way, Google’s huge investment in the camera-equipped cars — not to mention trikes, boats, snowmobiles and, yes, rafts — has yielded the most detailed street atlas on earth.

Early last year, Google’s United States market share for where-type queries topped 70 percent, and Google started to get serious about recouping the fortune it has been sinking into making its map, putting a tollbooth in front of its application programming interface. Henceforth, heavy users would be charged for the privilege.

Today, Google’s map includes the streets of every nation on earth, and Street View has so far collected imagery in a quarter of those countries. The total number of regular users: A billion people, or about half of the Internet-connected population worldwide. Google Maps underlies a million different websites, making its map A.P.I. among the most-used such interfaces on the Internet. At this point Google Maps is essentially what Tim O’Reilly predicted the map would become: part of the information infrastructure, a resource more complete and in many respects more accurate than what governments have. It’s better than MapQuest’s map, better than Microsoft’s, better than Apple’s.

The article also looks at Open Street Map, the Wikipedia of GIS, and wonders whether Google's proprietary database will ultimately win.

I posted a photo of the Korean Joint Security Area the night after visiting it, while still in Seoul. Finally, today, one of my colleagues had time to assemble a high-dynamic-range image from a set I took for that purpose. I think it's a much better photograph:

Not only did I get the colors closer to reality (always hard to do with a laptop), but combining three different exposures into this one HDRI brings out the details in the shadowy foreground as well as on the DPRK building we were facing.

Thanks, Matt.