The Daily Parker

All works published before 1 January 1926 have now entered the public domain:

1925 was the year of heralded novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, seminal works by Sinclair Lewis, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Agatha Christie, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley ... and a banner year for musicians, too. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, among hundreds of others, made important recordings. And 1925 marked the release of canonical movies from silent film comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

As of today, every single one of those works has entered the public domain. "That means that copyright has expired," explains Jennifer Jenkins, a law professor at Duke University who directs its Center for the Study of the Public Domain. "And all of the works are free for anyone to use, reuse, build upon for anyone — without paying a fee."

On January 1 every year, a new batch of published works is liberated from the constraints of copyright. (For a long time, copyright expired after 75 years, but in 1998, Congress extended the date of copyright expiration for works published between 1923 and 1977 to 95 years.) It's difficult to overstate the importance of having work in the public domain. For example, can you imagine the holidays without It's A Wonderful Life? That movie happened to be unprotected by copyright, so it was able to be shown — a lot — for free, contributing to its establishment as an American Christmas classic.

In an article about this year's Public Domain Day, Jenkins discusses everything from the changes in length of copyright to a fascinating story about the copyright of Hitler's Mein Kampf, which also enters the public domain this year. (A dizzyingly exhaustive list of works from 1925 now in the public domain can be found here.)

I will once again raise my objections to the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act of 1998. The Constitution allows for "limited" protections; 75 years is quite enough, thank you.

Just an hour or so into the first business day of 2021, and morning news had a few stories that grabbed my attention:

• All 10 living former defense secretaries joined in an op-ed yesterday condemning the idea of involving the military in election disputes.
• After repeated warnings, the FAA are proposing $182,000 in fines against an unlicensed drone pilot for 26 violations of FAR Part 107 rules.
• The BBC rolls its eyes, sighs in exasperation, and takes apart a number of PM Boris Johnson's claims about Brexit.
• A new points-based immigration system took effect in the UK on Friday.
• Illinois has converted hundreds of kilometers of railroad rights-of-way into trails over the years; the Tribune has a list.

Finally, don't eat icicles. They're basically frozen bird poop.

Sony-made GPS chipsets failed all over the world this weekend when a GPS cheat-sheet of sorts expired:

In general, the pattern of your route is correct, but it may be displaced to one side or the other. However, in many cases by the completion of the workout, it sorts itself out. In other words, it’s mostly a one-time issue.

The issue has to do with the ephemeris data file, also called the EPO file (Extended Prediction Orbit) or Connected Predictive Ephemeris (CPE). Or simply the satellite pre-cache file. That’s the file that’s delivered to your device on a frequent basis (usually every few days). This file is what makes your watch near-instantly find GPS satellites when you go outside. It’s basically a cheat-sheet of where the satellites are for the next few days, or up to a week or so.

I experienced this failure as well. I recorded two walks on my Garmin Venu, one Friday and one yesterday. In both cases, the recorded GPS tracks appeared about 400 m to the west of where I actually walked.

Because the issue started between 22:30 UTC on December 31st and 15:00 UTC on January 1st, I (and others) suspect this may have been bad date handling. Last year not only had 366 days, but also 53 weeks, depending on how the engineers configured the calendar. So what probably happened is that an automatic CPE update failed or appeared to expire because the calendar handling was off.

Dates are hard.

Revisiting the numbers of people killed in one day by a single disaster, we find that Covid-19 now occupies 10 of the top 15 spots:

If we only look at the last 100 years, it gets even starker:

And the band played on.

I've timed this post to hit just after midnight January 1st in the Pacific island nation of Niue, the westernmost inhabited place on earth—as far as time zones go. When Niue ticked past midnight way out there at UTC-11, it meant everyone on earth had gotten a full year past 2020.

So, roll on 2022. I hope that as 2020 recedes even further into the past, so do its horrors.

What a bizarre year. Just looking at last year's numbers, it almost doesn't make sense to compare, but what the hell:

• Last year I flew the fewest air-miles in 20 years; this year, I flew the fewest since the first time I got on a commercial airplane, which was during the Nixon Administration. In January I flew to Raleigh-Durham and back, and didn't even go to the airport for the rest of the year. That's 1,292 air miles, fewer than the very first flight I took (Chicago to Los Angeles, 1,745 air miles). I did, however, make an overnight trip to Wisconsin in November, easily breaking the record for my longest travel drought but making it shorter than never. 
• This is my 609th post on the Daily Parker in 2020—an average of more than 50 per month. This new record blows away the one I set just last year by 10.5%. (Imagine how much I'd have written had anything newsworthy actually happened in 2020.)
• The pandemic let me spend Parker's last eight months with him nearly every day. Despite his age and discomfort, we managed to go for almost 241 hours of walks (274 annualized), a whopping 29% (46% annualized) more than in 2019.
• Including today, I got 4,848,171 steps, averaging 13,246 per day. This is 5.7% fewer than last year. I missed 10,000 steps on seven occasions—five this month. Without a daily commute or a dog, not to mention the cold weather, I have struggled since Thanksgiving to get motivated enough to get longer walks in. That said, I hit a new record of 312 consecutive days over 10,000 steps, a record I don't anticipate ever breaking. I also got 56,562 steps on September 4th—another record I don't expect to break soon.
• I once again read more than the year before, with 39 books started and 37 completed. (I'm still working on The Power Broker, which I started 18 months ago...) On the other hand, I watched 59 movies and 79 TV series, compared with 56 and 38 respectively in 2019. Of course, almost all of that was streaming on my home computer while programming on my work computer, but it's a lot.

I can't even predict what will happen in 2021. I expect fewer steps, more books, and actually to start traveling again. Here's hoping for a speedy vaccination.

We're so close to ending 2020 that I can almost taste it. (I hope to be tasting tacos in a few minutes, however.) True to form, 2020 has apparently decided not to leave quietly:

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has blocked a vote on $2,000 relief checks so that he can add a poison-pill amendment the STBXPOTUS has asked for.
• Writing in The Atlantic, Dani Alexis Ryskamp points out that the life depicted in The Simpsons is no longer attainable.
• New Republic has named Florida governor Ron Desantis (R) "Scoundrel of the Year."
• Michael Benson reviews some satellite photos of Earth this year and comes away horrified.
• Wired looks at the state and evolution of ransomware and also comes away horrified.
• The United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries (yes, there is such a thing) came away horrified from the STBXPOTUS pardoning the Blackwater guys who murdered Iraqi civilians.

Finally, the Washington Post's Michael Rosenwald reports that Bloom asked 28 historians to determine whether 2020 was the worst year ever. It wasn't even close.

The New Yorker next week has Lawrence Wright's excellent long-form history of "the mistakes and the struggles behind America's coronavirus tragedy:"

There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the covid-19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently. The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was modelled on the American institution. Redfield had just received a report about an unexplained respiratory virus emerging in the city of Wuhan.

Redfield is convinced that, had C.D.C. specialists visited China in early January, they would have learned exactly what the world was facing. The new pathogen was a coronavirus, and as such it was thought to be only modestly contagious, like its cousin the sars virus. This assumption was wrong. The virus in Wuhan turned out to be far more infectious, and it spread largely by asymptomatic transmission. “That whole idea that you were going to diagnose cases based on symptoms, isolate them, and contact-trace around them was not going to work,” Redfield told me recently. “You’re going to be missing fifty per cent of the cases. We didn’t appreciate that until late February.” The first mistake had been made, and the second was soon to happen.

What are the odds that we can avoid a cock-up this bad in future? I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Just a housekeeping note: this is my 7,500th post since re-launching braverman.org as a pure blog in November 2005. On average, I've posted 41.2 times per month, though this year that has gone up somewhat:

For whatever reason, the average (so far) in 2020 is 50.5 times per month. I'll know the exact stats and have more to say about this on Friday.

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart. (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx.)

An interesting thing happens in 2021: on November 6th at 7:30:11, we'll have one of the latest sunrises possible—indeed, the latest sunrise in 47 years. I found only one occasion from 1975 to 2040 when the sun rises later: at 7:30:35 on 6 November 2032.

The last time the sun rose after 7:30 was at 7:31:26 on 26 February 1974, after Chicago started daylight saving time on 6 January 1974, due to the oil crisis. Chicago also observed year-round daylight saving time during World War II, from 9 February 1942 until 30 September 1945. Chicago's latest-ever sunrise occurred at 8:19:17 on 4 January 1943.

Anyway, here's the chart for the next 12 months:

You can get sunrise information for your location at wx-now.com.