The Daily Parker

Amsterdam is building a new subway line directly beneath the Amstel River, so they drained it, as one does. Then they let a team of archaeologists go wild:

The excavations in the Amstel yielded a deluge of finds, some 700,000 in all: a vast array of objects, some broken, some whole, all jumbled together. Damrak and Rokin proved to be extremely rich sites on account of the waste that had been dumped in the river for centuries and the objects accidentally lost in the water. The enormous quantity, great variety and everyday nature of these material remains make them rare sources of urban history. The richly assorted collection covers a vast stretch of time, from long before the emergence of the city right up to the present day. The objects paint a multi-facetted picture of daily life in the city of Amsterdam.

The city has published an online catalog that you can view chronologically or alphabetically.

Governor Jerry Brown approved AB 807, which would put to the voters in November an initiative to go to "year round Daylight Saving Time:"

Wrote Brown in a signing message: "Fiat Lux!" (Let there be light.)

Assemblyman Kansen Chu, D-San Jose, who authored Assembly Bill 807, has called the practice of changing clocks twice a year, in the fall and the spring, "outdated." He argues altering the time by an hour has adverse health affects, increasing chances for heart attacks, workplace injuries and traffic accidents.

The ballot measure would overturn a 1949 voter-approved initiative called the Daylight Savings Time Act, which established Standard Pacific Time in California.

Should voters approve the ballot measure, the Legislature would then decide how the state's time should be set. Congress would have to sign off on Chu's main goal of establishing year-round daylight saving time.

If it passes, L.A. and San Francisco would see sunrises at 7:44 and 8:09, respectively. But sunsets would be 17:44 and 17:51. So...if you live in California, how would you vote?

Forget the news for a moment. This video is just so cool—especially if you're from Evanston in the 1970s:

Now that ICE and CBP feel like they have carte blanche to "do their jobs," stories like this will only become more frequent:

The coast of White Rock, British Columbia, in western Canada looks to be an ideal place for a run, with its sweeping views of the Semiahmoo Bay to the west and scores of waterfront homes and seafood restaurants to the east. That's what 19-year-old Cedella Roman thought when she went jogging along the area's smooth beaches — in a southbound direction, notably — on May 21.

Roman, who lives in France, had been visiting her mother in nearby North Delta, British Columbia. During Roman's run, she was admiring the scenery when she unwittingly crossed the border from Canada into the United States, Roman told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

On May 22, Roman was taken to ICE's Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., about 140 miles south of the border point where she had been arrested. She remained detained until June 5 when, after two weeks of paperwork and processing, Roman was taken back to the border “and removed to Canada,” Cutrell said.

Two weeks in detention—basically, a kidnapping—because she didn't have her French passport with her while jogging. CBP commented:

If an individual enters the United States at a location other than an official port of entry and without inspection by a Customs and Border Protection officer, they have illegally entered the United States and will be processed accordingly. It is the responsibility of an individual traveling in the vicinity of an international border to maintain awareness of their surroundings and their location at all times to ensure they do not illegally cross the border.

Here's what the border looks like just 4 kilometers from where Roman was arrested:

That's what almost our entire border with Canada looks like. That's because, since its founding in July 1867, Canada has remained the United States' closest friend and ally.

Arresting visitors to Canada who accidentally jog across an invisible line and holding them for two weeks is not how you treat a friend. But this was a discretionary arrest and detention; the CBP agents had the authority to shoo her back across the border without an incident.

This is what happens when the guy at the top gives people at the bottom permission to behave like assholes: some of them will.

This past weekend included the Chicago Gay Pride Parade and helping a friend prepare for hosing a brunch beforehand. Blogging fell a bit on the priority list.

Meanwhile, here are some of the things I'm reading today:

• From last week, the Times discusses whether Earth's 23.4° axis tilt was actually a necessary precursor to life.
• New Republic's Josephine Huetlin asks, "Why do populists get away with corruption?"
• One of Chicago's last remaining over-the-tollway oases is slated for demolition.
• Josh Marshall points out why President Trump treating international diplomatic negotiations like flea-market haggling is a huge, long-term problem for the US.
• Writing for JetBrains' blog, developer Dino Esposito looks at how special string handling can be a code smell.
• The owner of the Lexington, Va., restaurant that kicked out Press Secretary Sarah Sanders talked to the Washington Post.

Back to debugging service bus queues...

Meetings and testing all day have put these on my list for reading tomorrow:

• The Atlantic's Carl Zimmer on epigenetics.
• New Republic's David Dayen saying AT&T has proved its critics right in only a week.
• London plans to spend £1.5 bn ($2 bn) to get enough trains on its four most-crowded lines just to keep up with demand.
• Jennifer Rubin says, contra the President, America is strong and he is weak.
• Andrew Sullivan says, fuck it, give Trump his wall.
• And pity the poor Trump Administration staffers who can't get dates in DC.

And with that, it's the weekend.

To almost everyone's frustration, the Supreme Court rendered two unanimous decisions today in which they declined to rule on the constitutionality of two gerrymandering cases. This means both Wisconsin and Maryland will keep their district maps through the November election:

In the Wisconsin case, the court said that the challenges must be brought district by district, with voters in each proving that their rights had been violated. The challengers asked the court to consider the state map as a whole.

The Maryland case was still at a preliminary stage, and the court in an unsigned opinion said the lower court had not been wrong when it decided not to make the state redraw the maps in time for the 2018 election.

The justices sent the [Wisconsin] case back to a panel of three federal judges to see if the challengers could modify their suit to show they have plaintiffs in the individual districts.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the plaintiffs should be able to do so.

“Courts—and in particular this court—will again be called on to redress extreme partisan gerrymanders,” she wrote. “I am hopeful we will then step up to our responsibility to vindicate the Constitution against a contrary law.”

I totally understand why SCOTUS punted, because they really do not want to weigh in on such a politicized issue. But wow, given that a majority of Wisconsin voters are Democrats, it's obvious that the current Wisconsin map is a power-grab by Republicans who fear they're losing power against urban Democrats.

We're not going to be done with this in my lifetime.

Elon Musk's Boring Co. has gotten approval to start work on a high-speed underground connection between O'Hare and downtown Chicago:

The promised project: A closed-loop pair of tunnels from Block 37 in the central Loop to the airport that would whisk passengers to their flights in 12 minutes, using autonomous pod-like vehicles, or electric skates, that would depart as frequently as every 30 seconds and carry up to 16 passengers and their luggage.

If all goes as it should, [Deputy Mayor Robert] Rivkin said, construction work could begin next year with actual service in operation around 2022.

The Chicago project generally would use already existing "electric skate" technology, though it would link them together in a form and length that is unique to this country. The direct connection via a dedicated tunnel would allow those vehicles to accelerate to over 100 miles per hour, according to the city and Boring, slashing the time on the 27 km O'Hare run. And the project would-use the long mothballed CTA "superstation" under Block 37 as a terminal, with the end point located near the CTA's Blue Line terminus close to O'Hare terminals but outside of the airport's security perimeter.

I really, really hope the project succeeds. It will be nice to get from O'Hare to downtown that quickly, though I doubt the $25 fare will last long. For comparison to other under-20-minute express trains, the Heathrow Express costs $29 while the Schiphol Fyra (to Amsterdam) only costs $6.25. If you want to take an hour, the El costs $5 and the Tube $4.10 (off-peak).

Total Daily Parker bait:

At the start of the last ice age, 2.6 million years ago, a sheet of frozen water formed atop North America that kept expanding and thickening until it reached a maximum depth of roughly two miles.

At its southern edge, the vast body deposited tons of rocky debris — from sand and pebbles to boulders the size of school buses. Then, some 18,000 years ago, the planet began to warm and the gargantuan sheet of ice began to melt and retreat.

Today, the southernmost edge of that frozen expanse is marked by a line of rubble that extends across the northern United States for thousands of miles. The largest deposits form what geologists call a terminal moraine.

The intermittent ridge runs from Puget Sound to the Missouri River to Montauk Point on Long Island, forming the prominence that supports its old lighthouse. The ancient sheet of ice also left its mark on a very modern phenomenon: New York City.

It's a clear explanation of how the terminal moraine formed the New York metro area, and where in the area you can see direct evidence of glaciation.

Stuff that landed in my inbox today:

• Illinois has secured a $132 m grant to fix one of the worst rail bottlenecks in the state.
• Crain's Greg Hinz sort-of compliments Illinois governor Bruce Rauner for finally making a budget deal...in his 4th year as governor. Meanwhile, the administration's trade war will hurt Illinois harder than most—a feature, one suspects, and not a bug.
• WaPo's Amber Phillips lists the winners and losers from yesterday's primary elections in California and other states.
• New Republic's Ioan Grillo investigates why Latin American countries have such a hard time being democratic.
• The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand wonders what Paul Manafort is doing.
• Politico's Michael Statford wonders why Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is convening a panel on school safety that won't talk about guns. (To quote a Tweet I saw over the weekend, "I love little cultural differences, like how Americans are super offended by the word cunt but here in Australia we're super offended by school children being slaughtered with automatic weapons.")
• Uncle Bob praises the given/when/then triptych that revolutionized software development.
• And finally, Scott Hanselman warns that carriage returns and line feeds will bite you in the Git if you're not careful.

Also, while we're on the subject of the C-word, I love Minnie Driver's response: "That was the wrong word for Samantha Bee to have used. But mostly because (to paraphrase the French) Ivanka has neither the warmth nor the depth."