The Daily Parker

One of my neighbors sent this to the HOA mailing list this morning:

Since the guy didn't have a box marked "Acme," and since the rabbit he seems to have under his paw looks quite dead, he's welcome to stay on our block.

We'll see a lot more of them in the next few weeks, it turns out. It's coyote cuffing season:

Late winter is coyote mating season, which reaches its peak toward the end of February. And that’s leading to more sightings than usual by humans — even in downtown Chicago — as the animals are a bit bolder and on the move in their search for a soulmate. (Yes, coyotes mate for life.)

“Just because you see a coyote isn’t a cause for alarm,” said Dan Thompson, ecologist with the DuPage County Forest Preserve District. “The more we can understand they’re just trying to live their lives, the more we can safely share our neighborhoods.”

Cities like Chicago have developed management plans that emphasize coexistence with coyotes, not their removal.

The Urban Coyote Research Project has been tracking coyotes in the Chicago metropolitan area since 2000. The project’s studies show that the animals are highly adapted to urban areas, except for collisions with cars, and they generally go about their business without attracting attention. Coyotes also provide benefits like helping to control the populations of rats, white-tailed deer and even Canada geese by eating their eggs.

Welcome to the neighborhood, Mr Latrans! And I hope you find the Mrs Latrans of your dreams. Just keep culling the rabbits, yes?

Here we have a typical mid-March temperature profile for Chicago:

Of course, that's not from mid-March, that's today. It got up to 9.1°C at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters, without a cloud in the sky, and it looks likely to do the same tomorrow. Cassie got a 5 km walk earlier today and I plan to do 7 km tomorrow.

Consequently I won't spend a lot of time banging away at my keyboard this afternoon. Probably not much tomorrow, either.

I've got an open research problem that's a bit hard to define, so I'm exploring a few different avenues of it. I hope reading these count:

• Dara Massicot performs an autopsy on Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
• Walter Kirn worries about AIs inadvertently training themselves, and the mushy content that will result.
• Bruce Schneier describes hacking the tax code, which I hope he goes more into in his latest book, currently on my bedside table.
• The Texas DOT seems to be at war with urbanism, which makes a certain sense, but something about their shenanigans in Houston recently seems unusually corrupt.
• The less said about toilet plumes, the better. But please put the lid down before flushing.

Since none of these has anything at all to do with my research project, I should get back to work.

Yeah, I know President Biden gave the State of the Union address on Tuesday night (while I had a rehearsal, it turns out). But I didn't get to hear it until yesterday afternoon, and I didn't get to read it until today. I'm sorry; it was a great Biden speech.

Some reactions. First, from one of President Carter's speechwriters, James Fallows:

Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night was effective—for him, for his policies, for his party, and I think for the country.

Biden’s whole presentation last night seemed rushed, as if hurrying through the speech. It led to several mis-reads from the prompter, and some hard-to-understand slurred-together words.

I think that in context this was fine rather than a problem. Anyone open-minded knows that Biden has had a life-long stutter. Maybe this was one of his ways of coping. Everyone knows these addresses are long, and would not want him to draw it out. I think he gained more in “getting to the point” than he lost in “pausing for dramatic emphasis.” I note some of those moments below.

He has the entire speech, annotated. He notes the key moment for those who enjoy watching children finally get scolded by their parents, but he left the exegesis of that moment to others. Charlie Pierce summarizes how the President let the foamy-mouthers heckle themselves into a trap:

President Joe Biden freight-trained his whackadoo Republican opposition in his State of the Union address. He also flipped the very idea of the State of the Union address on its head by turning it into an American equivalent of the prime minister's Question Time in the British Parliament. He wrapped them in a bear hug so warm that they didn't realize they were being smothered. He took on hecklers like a veteran of a Catskills resort. He smiled, he laughed, he bellowed when it was called for. He had the only microphone in the room, and he used it like a hammer.

The real party piece came when he dared to mention that the Republicans want to gut Social Security and Medicare—which in the case of Social Security has been a Republican goal since “The Shadow” was on the radio. He baited them and baited them, and they went for it like starving carp.

Then, right on cue, the Republicans launched into a tantrum. The president has not been in politics since god was a boy to miss an opportunity like that one.

The Post fact-checked the speech (mostly favorably), while columnist Eugene Robinson praised the President's "vigor, humor, and command:"

The president took advantage of the national television audience the speech always draws to make the case that his worldview has been proved correct: Even at a time of extreme polarization, bipartisanship is not only possible but also necessary. He said there is “no reason we can’t work together and find consensus in this Congress.”

The president’s point was that despite all the hyperpartisan, apocalyptic rhetoric, the federal government has been functioning. Progress is messy, halting and incremental, but it does happen — inch by inch, step by step, mile by mile.

There have been times the past two years when Biden looked and acted his age — moments in which he seemed tired, lost his place in a speech or went off on some obscure tangent. But not on Tuesday night. Biden is 80, and it is legitimate to ask whether he is too old to seek another term. With this speech, he gave an answer. He sure sounded like a man who’s running.

You know, if he continues like this, he might stay President until he's 88.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare for a polar vortex.

With everything else going on in the world, the Chinese balloon that the US shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Monday has gotten a lot of attention.

First, Spencer at Legal Eagle takes on the legalities of us shooting it down:

Julia Ioffe too:

The local photography buff raced to get his camera and used it to snap a photo that quickly went viral. “I had posted a couple of photos just to social media, just joking, like I thought I saw a UFO,” the photographer, Chase Doak, told the local news station. “It was just right here. I was literally just right here in the vicinity of my driveway.” 

Well, it seemed that Chase Doak and his camera forced the Biden administration to go public earlier than it wanted—if it wanted to at all. It also didn’t help that the Pentagon scrambled fighter jets to try to shoot the balloon down that afternoon while closing the civilian airport in Billings, only to determine that the debris radius—the undercarriage, the Pentagon later said, was the size of three buses—would be massive. Moreover, the Defense Department wondered, what if, in shooting at the balloon, it merely blew a hole in it, causing it to slowly drift down to the ground for hundreds of miles, landing god knows where? So the generals recommended against shooting at the thing while it was still over land and the jets were called back, but by this point the Chinese balloon was out of the proverbial bag, and held the entire nation in its thrall.

It was the perfect story for this nation of ours. Both parties now agree that China is a threat to U.S. interests and the balloon became a brilliant image and political foil. It allowed Republicans to paint Joe Biden as weak on China for not immediately blasting the thing out of the sky (though they would, I’m sure, have blasted him as reckless for any resulting damage on the ground). And when the Sidewinder did hit its target, shattering the spy balloon over the Carolina coast, it allowed Democrats to show their boss as cool and in control. 

For national security types in D.C., however, it was a deeply weird and somewhat frustrating event. “I really would like fewer news cycles about the balloon,” one Congressional aide who works on intelligence matters groaned. “It’s like this was a TV episode written by Hollywood,” added one former senior national security official. “It’s not the most significant intrusion by the Chinese. They got, like, 5 million Americans’ personal data when they hacked the Office of Personnel Management and they got the SF86’s of everyone who served in the Obama administration,” the official continued, referring to the form one has to fill out to get a security clearance.

Boy, was it. “It’s the length of a narrative arc that Americans can pay attention to,” the official said. “The Ukrainians are coming up on a year of fighting. That’s too long for Americans.” Sad but true.

Meanwhile, the US says the balloon was part of a larger surveillance program:

The surveillance balloon effort, which has operated for several years partly out of Hainan province off China’s south coast, has collected information on military assets in countries and areas of emerging strategic interest to China including Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines, according to several U.S. officials, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

While most of China’s long-range surveillance efforts are conducted by its expanding military satellite array, PLA planners have identified what they consider to be an opportunity to conduct surveillance from the upper atmosphere at altitudes above where commercial jets fly, using balloons that fly between 60,000 and 80,000 feet or higher, officials said.

In recent years, at least four balloons have been spotted over Hawaii, Florida, Texas and Guam — in addition to the one tracked last week. Three of the four instances took place during the Trump administration but were only recently identified as Chinese surveillance airships. Other balloons have been spotted in Latin America and allied countries in the Pacific, officials have said.

And, of course, Weekend Update led with it:

I made a note to myself a while ago that as of today I've had a fitness tracker for 3,000 days. Sadly, my past self got it wrong: I got my first FitBit 3,029 days ago. Oopsi.

But it did give me a moment to check my lifetime stats. They don't suck. As of yesterday:

• Total days: 3,028
• Total steps: 40,490, 400
• Total distance: 34,076.1 km
• Goal hit (10,000 steps): 2,771
• Minimum hit (5,000 steps): 3,025
• Mean daily steps & distance: 13,372, 11.3 km
• Median daily steps: 12,770, 10.6 km
• Best 7-day period: 171,122 (7-13 July 2018)
• Best 30-day period: 537,798 (2-31 July 2018)

Not bad. And I'm still getting about 12,000 a day on average, even into my decrepitude.

My burn-up chart for the current sprint has a "completed" line that nicely intersects the sprint guideline, so I can take a moment this Monday morning to eat lunch and read some news stories:

• James Fallows has some insight into the near-miss in Austin, Texas, that came uncomfortably close to killing over 100 people. AVWeb has a comment as well.
• Bruce Schneier lays out how adversaries can attack AIs—by corrupting their training data, among other things.
• Alex Shepard argues that the English Premier League has turned itself into the very thing its fans feared.

And closer to home—like, less than a kilometer away—the City of Chicago has made some recommendations to improve a stretch of Clark Street that could be a model for other streets in the city.

Molly White would like major news outlets to treat the accused fraudster like the grown-ass adult he is:

[R]eading headlines and news stories, you would be forgiven if up until now you had thought he was a teenager still driving around on a learner’s permit, who picked up cryptocurrency trading to avoid the types of high school summer jobs that might force him to go outside.

SBF is being extended the benefit of the doubt that many are not so lucky to get. He is affluent, white, male, and accused of white-collar crimes, and so he is granted the charitable characterization of a naive boy. Meanwhile, the perception that Black children, particularly those accused of violent crimes, are adult criminals has earned its own term: adultification bias. The same term is used when abuse of Black children is ignored or even rationalized based on the perception that they are older than they are.

It’s jarring to read a story about a neighbor calling the police on a nine-year-old Black girl spraying for invasive lanternflies, describing the girl to a dispatcher as a “little Black woman walking, spraying stuff”, and then switch over to another tab with a story on the 30-year old “crypto kid” who might’ve just made an oopsie with billions of dollars of customer funds. On one hand, literal children are portrayed in the media as adults, and treated as such in the prison system; on the other, a man who’s been old enough to vote for over a decade is being described as “a young man in need of both defense and a friend” offering refreshments to a reporter “as if we were there for a playdate”.

Sam Bankman-Fried is continuing to cultivate this persona, hanging his head and slumping his shoulders to portray boyish shame, repeating “I made a lot of mistakes”. If he can keep it up, and if news outlets continue to fall for his narrative, perhaps he can sway not just some of the general public, but members of a jury.

As an aging Gen-Xer who couldn't wait to grow up, I have to wonder, is this a late-Millennial thing? Or just, as White says, a carefully-cultivated image that Boomer reporters are buying at a discount?

Eli Dourado takes a deep dive into the engineering and economics that could raise a fleet of 25,000 autonomous cargo airships, each two Chicago city blocks long floating just 1,500 meters over your head while carrying 500 tons of cargo:

Let’s say airships captured half of the 13 trillion ton-km currently served by container ships at a price of 10¢ per ton-km. That would equal $650 billion in annual revenue for cargo airships, notably much bigger than the $106 billion Boeing reports for the entire global air freight market. If one company owned the cargo airship market, taking only half of only the container market, it would be the biggest company in the world by revenue.

How many airships would we need to fill that demand? A lot. If each airship can carry 500 tons, cruises at 90 km/h, and is utilized two-thirds of the time, that adds up to around 260 million ton-km per year per airship. To produce 6.5 trillion ton-km per year would require 25,000 such airships. This is about the number of airliners in the world today.

Cargo airships would probably be among the easiest vehicles to make unmanned. The sky is big and empty, but it’s especially empty over the ocean at the lowish altitudes, below airliners’ Class A airspace, where airships would fly. Even when you get over land and near landing facilities, airships are slow moving relative to other aircraft, so there is time for a remote pilot to take over if any off-nominal condition occurs.

In my experience, once you start thinking about giant cargo airships, it’s hard to stop.

Try to actually picture it in your mind—an object the size of the Empire State Building floating across the sky a thousand feet above your head. They would be so common that you would see them daily, driving commerce and extending the gains from trade further than ever before. They would, of course, obey every law of physics, but to our minds trained on today’s mundane reality, they would appear to defy gravity.

For me, they would carry symbolic value. Every time I saw one, I’d remember that great things are possible.

I think the economics make sense, especially his math on using hydrogen instead of helium as the lifting gas. I hope I live long enough to see these things above Chicago.

Just in time for spring, the City of Chicago has just announced the winning names for seven of our beloved snowplows:

• Da Plow
• Holy Plow!
• Jean Baptiste Point du Shovel
• Mrs O'Leary's Plow
• Salter Payton
• Sears Plower
• Sleet Home Chicago

From the Chicago Tribune:

Nearly 7,000 potential names were submitted in 17,000 suggestions from Chicago residents. Initially, the city planned to name six snowplows — one for each snow district — in its fleet of almost 300 baby-blue “Snow Fighting Trucks.” (During a major snowfall in Chicago, a pool of up to 675 motor-truck drivers can be dispatched.) Another was added due to a close vote.

Each of the snowplows will be trackable in real-time on the city’s plow tracker — and the name will be added to the vehicles too.

Since we've gotten less than half of our normal snowfall this year, we haven't seen the plows much. The Climate Prediction Center mid-term forecast doesn't look good for snow, either:

Not that anyone's complaining!

Next year, though, I'll watch out for Da Plow.

Update: Mount Washington, N.H., had some weather last night, too. The weather station there may have recorded the lowest wind chill temperature in US history shortly before 11pm. With sustained 167 km/h winds gusting to 189 km/h and an ambient air temperature of -43°C, the weather station had a wind chill of -76.6°C (-106°F)—colder than the surface of Mars. At this writing the station has a much more moderate wind chill of -61.4°C (-78.6°F). Bundle up.