The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Awed by the power of Craigslist

Less than 24 hours ago, I put my old camera on Craigslist: $500 for the body, two old lenses, the battery pack and charger, and a 32 GB CF card.

This afternoon, someone stopped by my office, played with the camera for five minutes, handed me $450 in cash, and that was it.

Thank you, Craig. That was remarkably painless.

More HDR fun with Lightroom

I'm not sure this produced a significantly different photo, but I've done another quick HDR image with Lightroom. First, the basic shot, posted the day after my visit to the Joint Security Area on the North-South Korean border:

Here's the first HDR attempt posted a week later:

And here's one with Lightroom 6:

The second HDRI used different source images, but only from a few seconds later. Are they significantly different? Maybe insignificantly? I must ponder...

How did Chicago get its street number system?

WBEZ's Curious City has the story:

Every town that folded into Chicago, from Lake View to Hyde Park, had its own system for naming and numbering streets. Some towns counted out addresses starting from the Chicago River, while others started from Lake Michigan. Some placed even numbers on the north side of the street, others put them on the south. Some even let developers choose their own street names or numbers if there wasn’t a lot of local opposition.

Edward Paul Brennan was a delivery boy for his father’s grocery store, and later a bill collector for the music company Lyon & Healy. He was so frustrated with the chaos of Chicago’s address system that in 1901 he came up with his own. But it would take him years to get it implemented.

Beginning in the 1890s he started a scrapbook, collecting newspaper articles about problems with city navigation or delays due to address confusion. Articles had headlines like “Streets in a Tangle. Visitors Lost.” One report tells about a doctor who couldn’t find a patient during a house call emergency.

Today, Chicago addresses increase by 100 per block, 800 per mile. (Miles are significant because of the way land is surveyed in Illinois.) It's an easily-understood system that makes it hard to get lost in the city.

It Bodes well

Upgrading my camera unfortunately meant I had to upgrade Adobe Lightroom as well. But I discovered that Lightroom 6 has a basic HDR feature, which I didn't expect. For a long time I've been taking bracketed images in order to make HDR images, and then forgetting about them. Images like this one:

For comparison, here's the non-HDR image I posted back in February:

In this case, the HDR imagery expanded the dynamic range of the image without making it look really bizarre. I think it's a stronger photograph as a result, though the bottom image is still pretty.

What a difference four years makes

I've just upgraded my main camera to the same model's Mark II. The first shot doesn't seem that impressive, as it's a daylight shot of a familiar view. (There are noticeable differences in Lightroom, however.) But check this out:

That was shot at ISO-51200, 1/60th second at f/5.6. I mean, holy crap.

To put this into perspective: in order to take that shot with the Tri-X Pan film I used as a kid, I'd need a 2-second exposure at the same aperture—a 7-stop difference. The mind reels. Yes, it's grainy, but it's still crisp and accurate. (It's B&W because the sodium vapor street lamps don't produce any red light, so there's no way to correct the colors.)

The 7D I got four years ago was the first digital camera that was as good as the film cameras I used to use. This is the first one that's better.

Here are the stats, updated from 2011:

Tyranny of the North

The Economist quotes a study finding that a quarter of American schoolchildren believe Canada is a dictatorship:

Most of the closed [Chicago Public School] district schools were in deprived areas. Nearly three-quarters of the children were black and more than 90% were poor. The report [from the Thomas Fordham Institute] concluded that “though fraught with controversy and political peril, shuttering bad schools might just be a saving grace for students who need the best education they can get.”

They do. And nationwide, many are not getting it. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which periodically tests sample-groups of America’s children on various subjects, this week released disappointing results for history, geography and civics for 13-year-olds. Pupils showed no improvement since 2010. Most know little about history: only 1% earned an “advanced” score in that subject. Geography scores are even worse. Most did not understand time zones, and a quarter thought Canada was a dictatorship. Results have been flat since 1994.

Speaking of Chicago public services, now that Illinois actually has to follow its constitution and pay the pensions it promised, the only way to make up the deficit is (obviously) to raise taxes. Crain's takes a look at what that would mean. Despite the newspaper's general right-wing slant, even they see the logic in it:

Gov. Bruce Rauner had proposed reducing state employee retirement payments to partly close a nearly $6.2 billion deficit in fiscal 2016. But there also are big pots of money to tap, if the governor and legislators can overcome their distaste for raising taxes.

For instance, raising income tax rates 1 percentage point would bring in nearly $4 billion, eliminating two-thirds of the deficit in one fell swoop, according to one estimate. Taxing services, such as those provided by lawyers and consultants, could yield more than $900 million annually, while taxing some retirement income could produce between $1.5 billion and $2.0 billion.

“Given the state's politics and short amount of time between now and the start of the state's fiscal year, it's hard to see how some sort of temporary tax increase or tax-base broadening could be avoided,” says Carol Portman, president of the Taxpayers' Federation of Illinois, a Springfield-based fiscal policy group.

We had a 5% income tax for a short while until the legislature allowed it to lapse. Now we're back to 3%, one of the smallest in the country (of states that have income taxes). Even though it would affect me directly, I'm not only in favor of increasing state taxes to 5%, but also of adding a 1% income tax for Chicago workers (not residents) that would work the same way New York's does.

Stop trying to destroy state and city services in order to make tax cuts seem reasonable. Well-funded public services, including pensions, make cities better to live in, as Europe has demonstrated for 60 years.

Sticky

A pile of Gulf moisture has arrived in Chicago making the otherwise-comfortable 22°C feel like a sauna. I'm using the day to do some planning for my next trip (11 days, 22 hours!) and move (28 days, 22 hours!), client work, and taking Parker to an interview of sorts at a new daycare facility. Yes, an interview: he has to play with the other dogs for two hours so they can decide whether to allow him to come back. I hope he passes.

Results from that, as well as a probably thunderstorm (unrelated), later today.