The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Candlelight service in Winnetka

Combine a full moon, a really good camera, and a beautiful church on Christmas Eve:

(The grain is from shooting a HDR photo at ISO-12800.)

Did I mention the candlelight part?

The final piece of the service is the entire congregation singing "Silent Night" holding candles. Even as an atheist, I found it moving. And the Winnetka Congregational Church, while still a Christian church, doesn't beat people over the head with religion. I'm certain I wasn't the only atheist in the congregation.

Nice April weather

Yesterday, Chicago got up to 15°C, not a record but also not what one would expect in December. Our forecast for the next week has the temperature drifting just below freezing Sunday night but otherwise staying above 0°C, which feels a lot more like late March than New Year's Eve.

It's a little unnerving. Don't forget, warm winter means warm lake means warm summer—even without the driving force of El Niño, which may not dissipate before June.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm just...nervous.

Another reading list

Too many things showed up in my RSS feeds this morning. Fortunately, I've got a few days off this weekend and next.

And now, a conference call.

The library

People just starting out in software often ask me what they should learn. I submit for discussion the contents of my desk:

Some of these books are more valuable than others. I leave the ranking of those books as an exercise for the reader.

Actually, that's not true. Anyone who wants to be a professional software developer (as loaded a phrase as has ever appeared on this blog) needs to read all of these books. Every one of them.

Do Fitbits make you sad?

Duke University business professor Jordan Etkin found evidence they might:

"In general, tracking activity can increase how much people do," Etkin said. "But at the same time, measurement has these pernicious effects. Enjoyable activities can became almost like a job, by focusing on the outcomes of things that used to be fun."

In another study, researchers had 310 participants read for eight minutes. One group read additional text that described reading as fun an enjoyable; for another group it was described as useful and educational — more like work. A third group received no additional information. In all three groups, some readers were told how many pages they had read as they went, others were not.

The readers who could see how many pages they had read reported that reading felt more like work and less enjoyable than those who could not — but not among participants who were told the project was more work-like at the start.

"This doesn't mean we should stop measuring our daily activity," she said, "but we need to balance that increased productivity against our underlying enjoyment. For activities people do for fun, it may be better not to know."

Finding out that my Fitbit might make me sad makes me sad.

Of course, this could just be a horrible example of bad science reporting, which Deeply Trivial just blogged about yesterday.

Messiah #3 and #4

The Apollo Chorus performed Händel's Messiah yesterday and Saturday both, which explains the radio silence here. This is my second year with the Chorus. Though last year's performances were really good, this year's were better.

Here's the view from the stage to our sold-out crowd yesterday afternoon:

And those who have followed The Daily Parker for a while know that I have had a troubled relationship with bow ties. For this weekend's performances, I might have gotten it right:

Chickenhawk nation by the numbers

Via Fallows, whose series on our "Chickenhawk Nation" should be required reading before talking about U.S. defense policy, comes a recent poll showing that 60% of young Americans believe we should send troops to fight ISIL, but only 15% say they, personally, would enlist:

The disconnect in joining the fight comes down to how millennials feel about the government writ large, according to Harvard IOP Polling Director John Della Volpe.

"I'm reminded of the significant degree of distrust that this generation has about all things related to government," said Della Volpe. "And I believe if young people had a better relationship with government ... they'd be more open to serving."

Della Volpe does caution, though, that this poll doesn't dig into the size or the scope of the military campaign that young folks would be willing to theoretically support.

"I can't tell you that young people support 5,000 troops or 50,000 troops," he said.

So kids "support the troops" as long as they don't have to be one. And this is consistent with other age groups. And with the late Roman Empire.

Wired is unhappy with the GOP

Last night, the GOP candidates for president debated technology a little, and they just had no idea what they were talking about—or they dissembled. Take your pick:

It’s not exactly clear what Trump means by “closing areas where we are at war with somebody,” and we’re not exactly sure Trump knows what he means, either. Our best guess is that he’s saying it’s possible for the US to shut down Internet access in countries like Syria. That’s problematic, not only because it would shut off millions of innocent people from the Internet, but also because the US simply doesn’t control the Internet in countries like Syria, and neither do US companies.

There were other missteps throughout the night, like Governor John Kasich’s claim that the San Bernardino shooters’ communications couldn’t be monitored “because their phone was encrypted.” He’s right that their phones contained encryption, but so does mine, and yours, and, in all likelihood, so does Kasich’s, because most smartphones today are encrypted.

And don't even get me started on that clown Fiorina...

Categorically unqualified but still the master persuader

Scott Adams and James Fallows have some overlapping thoughts on Donald Trump after the GOP debate last night.

First Adams, who has a pretty good outline of how to detect a lack of thinking about the election:

1. If you are comparing Plan A to Plan B, you might be doing a good job of thinking. But if you are comparing Plan A to an imaginary situation in which there are no tradeoffs in life, you are not thinking.

2. If you see quotes taken out of context, and you form an opinion anyway, that’s probably not thinking. If you believe you need no further context because there is only one imaginable explanation for the meaning of the quotes, you might have a poor imagination. Sometimes a poor imagination feels a lot like knowledge, but it’s closer to the opposite.

He posits another six tests before summarizing his hypothesis about why Trump is doing so well.

Fallows believes Trump "fundamentally disqualif[ied]" to be president, of course, but he was more concerned that CNN deliberately fed into the fears the GOP are trying to whip up:

[T]he GOP’s overall goal was to replicate the tone on Fox News, and vice versa, which in both cases is essentially: risk, risk, risk; fear, fear, fear; ISIS, ISIS, ISIS; alien, alien, alien. All of this is toward the end of demonstrating Obama’s weakness and failure. Unfortunately, it is also at direct odds with U.S. strategic interests. A resilient nation seeks to minimize the effects of such terrorist attacks that, in a society that retains any liberties, still lamentably occur. A nation that wants to magnify the effects of terrorism yells “The attackers are everywhere!” “We’re all going to die!!!” Because they consider it useful against the “feckless” Obama, the latter has been the 2016 GOP approach (as Jeet Heer wrote on Tuesday night). It could box them into strategically foolish policies if they took office.

Ramp-up-the-fear was also the result of CNN’s approach tonight. Much more than half of the show was about ISIS / ISIL, Syria, and refugees. Here’s a promise: whoever becomes the next president will and should spend much less than half of his or her time on ISIS and Syria. The presidential topics that are not directly about ISIS—China, Russia, Mexico, the economic and political tensions in Europe, the entirety of Latin America and Africa, Iran, India, Pakistan, Japan, the South China Sea—any one of these, on its own, has a chance to occupy more of the next president’s time and attention than ISIS. Together they very certainly will. Not to mention: trade deals, the economy, job creation, budgets and deficits, medical care, and a thousand other issues.

But ISIS-centrism, which at the moment is shorthand for fear, is the way Wolf Blitzer set up the meat of the debate.

CNN ceased being relevant years ago, which is sad, because for a decade or longer they were the most relevant network.

We're not well-served by most of the big networks anymore. (NPR is a notable exception, but they have perhaps two million listeners out of 70 million eligible voters.) On the one hand, saying people disagree with you because they have lousy data is an adolescent mindset most of the time; but on the other hand, in some cases, like those whose only information about the Republican party came from CNN last night, it may be true.

I'm not looking forward to the 2016 election.