Humorist and writer Jamie Allen has counted all the squirrels in Central Park:
“We kind of know other animal populations, like rats, in cities,” he says. (The conservative estimate is one for every New Yorker.) “It immediately became comical to me. Squirrels are an animal that we interact with on a daily basis, they’re disease-carrying, and they’re so common that we don’t even pay attention to them.” (It’s worth noting that most of the diseases squirrels carry don’t transmit to humans. Still, don’t go petting them.)
With that, Allen assembled a team of scientists, wildlife experts, and graphic designers and began counting the squirrels in Inman Park in Atlanta. After two counts, the team set their eyes on a more ambitious location: Central Park, which measures more than five times the size of his neighborhood park.
Overall, the volunteers documented 3,023 squirrel sightings (this number includes squirrels that were likely counted more than once). Of that, 2,472 sightings (about 81 percent) were of gray squirrels, with various mixes of black, white, and cinnamon highlights. Another 393 were primarily cinnamon-colored, and 103 were black. All in all, they recorded 21 variations in fur color.
Don't confuse this work with earlier work to map all the incidents of squirrel-on-power line mayhem in the US.
So I wonder if Dug helped?
He buries the lede a bit, but he isn't wrong:
When “The Cider House Rules” was published, some of my younger friends and fellow feminists thought it was quaint that I’d written a historical novel about abortion. They meant: now that abortion rights were secure, now that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. At the time, I tried to say this nicely: “If you think Roe v. Wade is safe, you’re one of the reasons it isn’t.” Not surprisingly, my older women friends — women who were old enough to have had sex before 1973 — knew better than to imagine that Roe v. Wade would ever be safe. Men and women have to keep making the case for women’s reproductive rights; women have been making the case for years, but more men need to speak up.
Of an unmarried woman or girl who got pregnant, people of my grandparents’ generation used to say: “She is paying the piper.” Meaning, she deserves what she gets — namely, to give birth to a child. That cruelty is the abiding impetus behind the dishonestly named right-to-life movement. Pro-life always was (and remains) a marketing term. Whatever the anti-abortion crusaders call themselves, they don’t care what happens to an unwanted child — not after the child is born — and they’ve never cared about the mother.
Which is why I'm not going to Georgia this year.
I have a dilemma.
Under the rules I set up for the 30-Park Geas back in 2008, if a park got torn down before I completed the Geas, I would have to go to the replacement park in order to call it "done." Call it an acceptance criterion.
Two years ago, Atlanta repurposed Turner Field and opened SunTrust Park well outside their public transit service area.
Then, after Brian Kemp created a very real fear that his election may have been illegitimate, he signed an abortion law that clearly runs afoul of Roe v Wade and reminded us why it's hard to think of the state as a modern democracy.
So, I really don't want to give any money to Georgia, now or in the foreseeable future. Maybe if the white male establishment there accepts they're in the minority and stops trying to steal elections, kill women, and put baseball parks so far away from the cities they "serve" that only rich white people can even get to them.
Obviously none of this will matter to anyone in Georgia's white-supremacist government. They're not going to repeal onerous legislation because a blogger from Chicago doesn't want to go to their new ballpark.
But to me, I'm going to strike SunTrust from the Geas. Call it a moral exception to the rules of the Geas. This coming Friday, I'll go to my penultimate park in Toronto, and then at the end of September, I'll see the Cubs play the Cardinals in what was always going to be the last park on the tour.
The North and South branches of the river have distinct personalities:
Multiple canoe and kayak rental outfitters operate from the river’s north branch, downtown and in Chinatown, just south of downtown. And enthusiasts are even planning a competitive swim in the river. In these areas, people worry not about pollution but rather the risk of collision between water taxis, tour boats, kayakers and pleasure boats.
In the dirtier water downstream, barges filled with limestone, sand or other heavy material dominate the river, and most residents keep their distance.
Both Little Village and the Calumet River corridor are designated industrial zones, and residents would like to see green industrial development such as solar farms and light manufacturing. They’d also love to have riverside cafes or parks, [resident Olga] Bautista said, but that dream feels far off.
Of course, the Potomac is so much cleaner, isn't it? Never mind the Anacostia...
Today I released a new version of the Inner Drive Technology brochure/demo site. The release includes:
Now that I've got that out of the way, I'm going to start working on the next full version of the site, using (probably) a commercially-available design. The Inner Drive website last got refreshed visually sometime in 2011, or possibly earlier, so it's due.
The last update was 497 days ago, on 9 February 2018. Updating the IDEA took most of the intervening months. (That, and everything else in my life.)
A religious group has petitioned Netflix to cancel Amazon Prime's miniseries Good Omens:
The six-part series was released last month, starring David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale, who collaborate to prevent the coming of the antichrist and an imminent apocalypse. Pratchett’s last request to Gaiman before he died was that he adapt the novel they wrote together; Gaiman wrote the screenplay andworked as showrunner on the BBC/Amazon co-production, which the Radio Times called “a devilishly funny love letter to the book”.
But Christians marshalled by the Return to Order campaign, an offshoot of the US Foundation for a Christian Civilisation, disagree. More than 20,000 supporters have signed a petition in which they say that Good Omens is “another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable”, and “mocks God’s wisdom”. God, they complain, is “voiced by a woman” – Frances McDormand – the antichrist is a “normal kid” and, most importantly, “this type of video makes light of Truth, Error, Good and Evil, and destroys the barriers of horror that society still has for the devil”. They are calling on Netflix to cancel the show.
Actually, McDormand is technically not God but the voice of God, otherwise known as the Metatron. Pity Alan Rickman wasn't around to reprise his role from Dogma.
Also a pity none of the religious nutters involved watched the show. On Amazon. Because it's a much better adaptation than I thought possible, probably because the novel's co-author Neil Gaiman wrote the screenplay and is one of the executive producers.
But the crazies will crazy, even if they haven't figured out how to stream video online.
An alarming number of executive agencies have no Senate-confirmed leadership right now:
The president’s nominees to lead federal agencies must be confirmed by the Senate before they can exercise the duties of the office. There’s an exception, however: The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (FVRA) gives the president a certain amount of leeway to install other top federal officials into posts on a temporary basis.
Perhaps the most glaring example of Trump circumventing the Senate’s constitutional duty came earlier this month. In May, White House officials confirmed that Trump intended to pick Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general, to lead U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). But the prospect quickly faced strong opposition from Senate Republicans, many of whom Cuccinelli targeted from the right as president of the Senate Conservatives Fund. Facing near-certain defeat, Trump didn’t formally nominate Cuccinelli, naming him to the post in an acting capacity instead.
The Constitution’s framers saw the danger in letting the president staff the executive branch without oversight and gave the Senate the power to advise and consent to nominations. But the FVRA short-circuits this process. Generally speaking, it allows the president to name an acting replacement if a Senate-confirmed official “dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to perform the functions and duties of the office.” There are limits, including a restriction that an acting head can only serve for 210 days, but there are also exceptions that can extend that length of time.
Once again, a perfectly reasonable statute has allowed perfectly unreasonable results under this president. A law exists to solve a specific problem; this administration sees how to abuse it; they abuse it; a future Congress will have to curtail it.
Woe to thee, o land, when thy king is a child.
Via Bruce Schneier, San Francisco-based "computer guy" Maciej Cegłowski put up a cogent, clear blog post last week showing how we might better regulate privacy:
Until recently, ambient privacy was a simple fact of life. Recording something for posterity required making special arrangements, and most of our shared experience of the past was filtered through the attenuating haze of human memory. Even police states like East Germany, where one in seven citizens was an informer, were not able to keep tabs on their entire population. Today computers have given us that power. Authoritarian states like China and Saudi Arabia are using this newfound capacity as a tool of social control. Here in the United States, we’re using it to show ads. But the infrastructure of total surveillance is everywhere the same, and everywhere being deployed at scale.
Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Just like you can’t drop out of the oil economy by refusing to drive a car, you can’t opt out of the surveillance economy by forswearing technology (and for many people, that choice is not an option). While there may be worthy reasons to take your life off the grid, the infrastructure will go up around you whether you use it or not.
All of this leads me to see a parallel between privacy law and environmental law, another area where a technological shift forced us to protect a dwindling resource that earlier generations could take for granted.
The idea of passing laws to protect the natural world was not one that came naturally to early Americans. In their experience, the wilderness was something that hungry bears came out of, not an endangered resource that required lawyers to defend. Our mastery over nature was the very measure of our civilization.
But as the balance of power between humans and nature shifted, it became clear that wild spaces could not survive without some kind of protection.
Read the whole thing. He makes a compelling case for regulating privacy the same way we regulated the environment.
In a move one can bet the President Trump himself doesn't really understand, he will later today confer the Presidential Medal of Freedom—our nation's highest civilian honor—on fraud economist Art Laffer:
Laffer's journey to this moment began 45 years ago with a round of drinks in a Washington cocktail lounge. At the time, Laffer was a young economist at the University of Chicago, trying to persuade President Ford's deputy chief of staff — a guy named Dick Cheney — that lowering taxes could actually boost government revenue.
"Art was trying to explain to Cheney how the Laffer Curve works," recalls Grace-Marie Turner, a journalist who later went to work on Ford's reelection campaign.
Cheney was struggling with the idea, so Laffer resorted to a visual aid.
"He sketched out this Laffer Curve on a paper cocktail napkin at the Hotel Washington, just across the street from the White House," Turner said.
Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman has had a lot to say about Laffer over the years. For example:
Back in 1980 George H. W. Bush famously described supply-side economics — the claim that cutting taxes on rich people will conjure up an economic miracle, so much so that revenues will actually rise — as “voodoo economic policy.” Yet it soon became the official doctrine of the Republican Party, and still is. That shows an impressive level of commitment. But what makes this commitment even more impressive is that it’s a doctrine that has been tested again and again — and has failed every time.
Yes, the U.S. economy rebounded quickly from the slump of 1979-82. But was that the result of the Reagan tax cuts, or was it, as most economists think, the result of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve? Bill Clinton provided a clear test, by raising taxes on the rich. Republicans predicted disaster, but instead the economy boomed, creating more jobs than under Reagan.
Then George W. Bush cut taxes again, with the usual suspects predicting a “Bush boom”; what we actually got was lackluster growth followed by a severe financial crisis. Barack Obama reversed many of the Bush tax cuts and added new taxes to pay for Obamacare — and oversaw a far better jobs record, at least in the private sector, than his predecessor.
So history offers not a shred of support for faith in the pro-growth effects of tax cuts.
The recent history of Kansas also provides just the evidence you need to conclude the Laffer curve is laughable.
Essentially, then, the president is handing out a medal to a party stalwart, much as previous authoritarian rulers would have handed out the Order of Lenin. We can no doubt expect more of this over the next two years.
Lakes Michigan and Huron (hydrologically one lake) are on course to have record water levels this month:
After late snowstorms and record-setting rainfall this spring, Lake Michigan’s water levels are projected to rise to a record level this month.
The rising water, which could swell more than 635 mm above its long-term monthly average, is expected to tie the previous June peak set in 1986.
May’s record-setting torrential rainfall was a catalyst for Lake Michigan’s surge in water levels, said Keith Kompoltowicz chief of watershed hydrology with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ district office in Detroit.
The National Weather Service’s Chicago office on Friday tweeted that water levels already had hit a record — but the service was referring to a daily measurement, and the Army Corps only counts a full month’s average levels for record purposes.
Here's the official chart as of yesterday:
Meanwhile, Lake Ontario has broken its record already, and by a lot:
And all that fresh water just goes down the St Lawrence right into the Gulf Stream...