The Daily Parker

Crain's reported yesterday on the latest business-school rankings from US News and World Report. University of Chicago tied with Harvard at the top spot and Northwestern landed at #6:

The magazine labels its ranking a year in advance, so this is the 2019 list. While it started the rankings in 1990, it has historical data reaching back only to 1994, but it was confident this was the first No. 1 showing for Booth.

“The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business tied for No. 1 this year due to its strong placement data, meaning it had the highest percentage of employed students at graduation and, among the very top ranked schools, the highest percentage of graduates employed three months after graduation,” Robert Morse, the magazine’s chief data strategist, said in a statement. “The mean starting salary and bonus of Booth graduates was one of the highest among top schools.”

Duke dropped to #11 in the full-time rankings, but stayed at #5 in the Executive MBA list.

I expect they care more about this in Durham than I do here in Chicago.

Late afternoon on Tuesday, with so much to do before the end of the week, I can only hope actually to read these articles that have passed through my inbox today:

• New Republic's Josephine Livingstone praises the latest "Tomb Raider" movie for humanizing Lara Croft.
• James Fallows takes a look at the 15-year history of the Iraq War and shakes his head. Which is a lot gentler a commentary than Iraqi native Sinan Antoon has in the Times under the title "Fifteen years ago, America destroyed my country."
• Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd thinks the West doesn't get Xi Jinping, to our peril.
• In nerd news, JetBrains' next release of ReSharper will handle non-trailing named arguments better. If you don't know what that means, that's OK; it's beyond even what I'll be writing about for the Blogging A-to-Z challenge.
• For a cringe-slash-laugh, the Daily WTF has a wonderful description of bank security that will make you wonder how secure banks are.

And now for something completely different tonight: Improv and Arias. Which is why I wonder whether I'll actually get to read all of the articles I just posted about.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, The Daily Parker will participate in this year's Blogging A-to-Z Challenge. Today's the official Theme Reveal day. My topic will be: Programming Concepts using Microsoft C# .NET.

My topics will include:

• Compilers vs Interpreters
• Generics
• Human factors (and errors)
• LINQ
• Polymorphism

...and will finish with a real-world practical example on April 30th.

I will also keep up my annoying political and Parker posts through April. And, full disclosure, many of the 26 A-to-Z posts will be technical and more involved than just linking to a Washington Post article. Because of that, and because I want a consistent publication cadence, I'm going to write them ahead of time, even if it's just the night before.

A-to-Z posts will start at noon UTC (7am Chicago time) on April 1st and continue through the 30th, with Sundays off. You can find them directly through their A-to-Z Tag. Enjoy!

The New York Times last week suggested that people who sleep with their dogs sleep just as well as those whose dogs sleep elsewhere:

The dogs wore a device called a Fitbark, an activity tracker that attaches to the collar and records whether an animal is at rest and sleeping or active and at play. The people wore an Actiwatch 2, an activity monitor that records people’s movements and whether they are sleeping soundly or not. Both monitors were set to sample movement every minute, while the humans also kept a sleep diary.

Over seven days of testing, the researchers found that with a dog in the bedroom, both the humans and the dogs slept reasonably well. Humans had a mean sleep efficiency, or the percentage of time spent asleep while in bed, of 81 percent, while dogs had a sleep efficiency of 85 percent. Levels over 80 percent are generally considered satisfactory. People slept slightly better when the dog was off the bed; dogs slept the same whether they were on the bed or in another location in the bedroom.

Dr. Carlo Siracusa, a veterinarian and the director of animal behavioral science at Penn Vet in Philadelphia, added that a dog sleeping in the same room or bed with humans won’t make Sparky think he’s top dog. “Dogs can distinguish between the relationship with its human fellows and other dogs, and the way in which they regulate their interactions with humans in the house is not trying to establish a hierarchy,” he said.

First, don't think for a moment that I haven't considered getting a Fitbark for Parker. I've always been curious what he does at day camp; I suspect he sleeps about 90% of the time.

Second, no matter how well Parker sleeps, there are sometimes days like last Thursday when he woke up with an urgent matter that he immediately discussed with the bedroom floor, even though I could have gotten him outside in seconds had he asked.

Dogs.

An article in this month's Atlantic points out that we humans can wonder how we got here only because we got here:

After all, there are 100-mile impact craters on our planet’s surface from the past billion years, but no 600-mile craters. But of course, there couldn’t be scars this big. On worlds where such craters exist, there is no one around afterward to ponder them. In a strange way, truly gigantic craters don’t appear on the planet’s surface because we’re here to look for them. Just as the wounds of the returning planes could reflect only the merely survivable, so too for our entire planet’s history. It could be that we’ve been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence.

“Observer selection effects are really the kind of effects where the data you get is going to be dependent, in some sense, on survival, or that you as an observer exist,” [Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute] says. “Now this gets really interesting and scary when we apply it to our own survival.”

“Maybe the universe is super dangerous and Earth-like planets are destroyed at a very high rate,” Sandberg says. “But if the universe is big enough, then when observers do show up on some very, very rare planets, they’ll look at the record of meteor impacts and disasters and say, ‘The universe looks pretty safe!’ But the problem is, of course, that their existence depends on them being very, very lucky. They’re actually living in an unsafe universe and next Tuesday they might get a very nasty surprise.”

If this is true, it might explain why our radio telescopes have reported only a stark silence from our cosmic neighborhood. Perhaps we’re truly extreme oddballs, held aloft by a near-impossible history—one free from lifeless water world.

We see this on smaller scales when, for example, extremely lucky people start to think they succeeded entirely because of their own efforts. But that's a different topic. Sort of.

In the last seven days, these things have happened:

• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (the worst Secretary of State in modern history?) got kicked out in typical Trump Administration fashion (i.e., without notice and on Twitter). This may have had something to do with him stating firmly that...
• ...Russian operatives attempted to assassinate a former Russian spy in Salisbury, England, resulting in...
• ...the UK government expelled 23 Russian diplomats after determining that the assassination attempt involved a Soviet-era nerve agent that...
• ...could have contaminated hundreds of people near the attack in Salisbury.
• All of this has contributed to yet another personnel reshuffling, increasing the lead President Trump has over everyone else in the past century for the record number of people leaving an Administration in its first term.

Meanwhile:

• In the Pennsylvania 18th Congressional District, Democratic candidate Conor Lamb has claimed victory over Republican Rick Saccone by 641 votes, which isn't bad considering the district went to Trump by 20 points. (Disclosure: I contributed money to the Lamb campaign.)
• To commemorate the gun murders of 17 students in Florida one month ago today, students throughout the country are staging walkouts today.
• United Airlines apologized after a flight attended stuffed a dog in an overhead bin, with unfortunate and predictable results.
• Physicist Stephen Hawking has died, on Pi Day no less—which, it turns out, was Einstein's birthday making today an oddly Jefferson-Adams-Monroe kind of day.
• Finally, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago exceeded our audience projections by 20% for our Saturday performance of Verdi's Requiem. Music Director Stephen Alltop gave a lecture about the history of the piece that the Chorus have made public here.

Can't wait to see what the next week will bring...

Saturday and Sunday, the Apollo Chorus sang Verdi's "Requiem" three times in its entirety (one dress rehearsal, two performances), not including going back over specific passages before Sunday's performance to clean up some bits. So I'm a little tired.

Here are some of the things I haven't had time to read yet:

• I always read Andrew Sullivan's weekly column but I haven't had a chance yet.
• Democratic candidate Conor Lamb might win in a heavily-Republican district in Pennsylvania. (Disclosure: I have contributed to Lamb's campaign.)
• The Telegraph UK reports that there is now a genetic test for intelligence.
• Jeet Heer returns to political reporting, suggesting that the President's ideas aren't as bad as his execution of them.
• Now that we're back on Daylight Saving Time in North America, The Daily WTF reminds us how much fun it is to debug software implementations of time zones.
• Microsoft's Raymond Chen started a series of blog posts on advanced Git management.
• Cranky Flier says American's most recent changes to its scheduling practices are good for customers.
• Closer to home, the city of Chicago and the Chicago Transit Authority have started construction aimed to fix one of the biggest bottlenecks on the El.
• Crain's Chicago Business reports that, for the first time in its existence, Groupon has had a profitable quarter.
• Chicago History Today has side-by-side photos of Dearborn and Jackson from 1936 and 2017.
• And finally, NASA has launched two new weather satellites that will significantly advance weather forecasting.

Other stuff is going on, which I'll report when I have confirmation.

Florida's legislature has voted overwhelmingly to change the state's clocks:

The Florida Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday, three weeks after the state’s House of Representatives, and sent it to Gov. Rick Scott for his signature or veto. (Asked on Wednesday whether Mr. Scott would sign it, and why or why not, his press secretary, Lauren Schenone, said only, “The governor will review the bill.”) The margins of victory in both chambers were overwhelming — 33 to 2 in the Senate and 103 to 11 in the House — and the measure has considerable public support.

The problem? Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round.

15 USC 260a allows states to adopt year-round standard time, but not year-round daylight saving time. The Department of Transportation is in charge of what states go in what time zones.

In any event, what the bill's sponsors really want, but didn't know how to ask for, is to move Florida from the Eastern time zone (UTC-5 standard and -4 DST) to the Atlantic time zone (UTC-4 standard), and then exempt the state from DST. The intent is simply to put Florida on UTC-4 year-round.

What would that look like, though? From mid-March to early-November, it would look exactly the same, since they're on UTC-4 when on Eastern Daylight Time. Sunrises in would occur between 7:30am mid-March and 6:30am mid-June, sunsets between 7:30pm mid-March and 8:15pm mid-June.

In the winter, mornings would be pretty dark, but there'd be a lot of evening light. The sun would rise just after 8am on December 21st, but set around 6:30pm. In Jacksonville, way up north, the sun would rise about 20 minutes later. But farther west, in Pensacola, the sun wouldn't come up until 8:45am on December 21st, potentially obviating any benefit of the sun setting close to 7pm.

Note that Pensacola, at 87°11' W, is almost due south of Chicago. Miami (80°17' W) is nearly due south of Pittsburgh. But Florida's latitude reduces the differences between summer and winter daylight hours, compared with what we experience farther north.

Should Florida move to UTC-4? It might not be a bad move, if having daylight extend later in the evening makes up for the later sunrises. It would not, however, actually change the astronomical reality of how many hours of daylight they get.

We'll see if the Department of Transportation or the U.S. Congress gives them the authority to hop.

From Josh Marshall:

[D]ecoupling the United States from the major states and economies of Western Europe has been the central foreign policy goal of Russia for about 70 years.

We defeated the Soviet Union by allying ourselves with most of the world. Now the President of the United States is undoing 70 years of work and handing Russia their own sphere of influence.

Great work, Mr President.

Via Deeply Trivial, a video that claims to be the most detailed map of the universe to date: