The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

A 102-year lawsuit changed a Chicago neighborhood

On this day 180 years ago (28 January 1836), John L. Wilson purchased 33 hectares of land about 16 km from the city, by what is now 83rd and Cottage Grove. At the time it was a swath of prairie two hours outside Chicago. But through a series of missteps, slow City workers, and a very long-lived lawsuit, no one developed the land until 1940, by which time the city had grown to surround the lot on all sides:

The property was so remote—and the value so depressed—that nobody paid much attention to it for nearly 40 years. Then, in 1875, Isaac Palmer discovered that the original land patent had been issued in his name by mistake. He decided to cash in on it.

So now the matter went to the Superior Court of Cook County. By the time the Illinois Supreme Court got the case, the City of Chicago was involved, as well as the successors to Wilson and Palmer. In 1887 the Supreme Court ruled that the Wilson successors had legal title to the property. The City of Chicago also had a valid mortgage of $1,500 against it, with 10% annual interest dating back to the unpaid October 1836 mortgage.

Except there was  yet another complication—most land records had been lost in the 1871 Chicago Fire. The further details of the dispute don’t need to be elaborated here, except to say that many lawyers were kept busy over the next fifty years, with the 80-acre plot remaining vacant while the rest of the area was built up.

On August 4, 1939 the drama ended. Compound interest over 102 years had ballooned the defaulted $1,500 mortgage to $34,755,000. Because of all the mistakes various governments had made over the years, Janet Fairbank—the last holder in the chain of title from original patentee John L. Wilson—was allowed to settle the debt and have clear title to the property on payment of $30,000.

For what it's worth, $1,500 in 1837 is about $38,000 today, and $34.8m in 1939 is around $590m today.

Hard to believe it's been 30 years

On this day in 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean:

A little more than a minute after launch and high above Kennedy Space Center, shuttle Challenger was ripped apart after failure of a rubber seal allowed a spurt of rocket flame to ignite the spacecraft's giant fuel tank.

The roiling plume of Challenger's disintegration would sear an image in the nation's psyche that spoke of a particular sorrow; among seven astronauts killed 30 years ago [today] was teacher Christa McAuliffe.

"We will never forget them," said President Ronald Reagan in a broadcast hours later evoking triumph from tragedy. "The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them."

Studying the decisions that led to Challenger launching that day uncovered serious cultural problems within NASA. It also led to groupthink about groupthink as people continually mis-applied the lessons from the disaster after not actually understanding them.

I remember exactly when I heard about the disaster: I was taking a final exam in high school when the PA broke in to tell everyone it had happened. (We still had to finish the exam.)

Rauner wins either way

Republican Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner believes in smaller government and lower taxes, so much so that he's blocked the state budget process since the last budget ended in June 2015. Since the state has no budget, we haven't paid our bills, so our IOUs just keep getting bigger:

Moody's Investors Service says the state's backlog of unpaid bills and other obligations now is rising roughly $450 million a month, hitting $6.6 billion as of Dec. 31.

Projections from Rauner's budget are that the total will hit $9 billion by the end of the fiscal year on June 30 and keep rising from there, assuming no budget deal is reached, Moody's says—almost what it was after [former Democratic governor Pat] Quinn took over and pushed through a 66 percent income tax hike that gradually reduced the list of IOUs.

State taxes dropped again on January 1st as earlier, "temporary" tax hikes declined; as a result, Illinois will have $3.6 billion less to spend even if we can pass a budget before June 30th.

So, as a Grover Norquist-inspired plutocrat, Rauner wins if the Democratic legislature passes his budget proposal, and he wins if the state's government remains hobbled. Meanwhile, we residents and taxpayers of Illinois would really like essential government services to resume.

Rauner gives the State of the State address in just a few minutes. It should be interesting.

The President's gadget

President Obama and I have the same fitness tracker. His, however, has some customizations:

What counts as must-have features for many people — high-definition cameras, powerful microphones, cloud-connected wireless radios and precise GPS location transmitters — are potential threats when the leader of the free world wants to carry them around.

And so using the latest devices means more than merely ordering one on Amazon for delivery to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It means accepting the compromises imposed by White House technology experts, whose mission is to secure the president’s communications, and by the Secret Service agents who protect him.

He has not given up, though. Mr. Obama is the first commander in chief to regularly carry a specially secured BlackBerry. He reads briefings and checks scores from ESPN on an iPad (the first of which was given to him by Steve Jobs before its public release). And recently he has been seen wearing the Fitbit Surge, a fitness band packed with all the latest technology, on his left wrist.

The article goes on to speculate (because neither the Secret Service nor Fitbit will comment on presidential security) just which features, exactly, they've removed. And my friend request has so far gone unanswered...

How England beat France at Agincourt

Via Schneier, it may be that England's political system was stable:

For over a century the longbow reigned as undisputed king of medieval European missile weapons. Yet only England used the longbow as a mainstay in its military arsenal; France and Scotland clung to the technologically inferior crossbow. This longbow puzzle has perplexed historians for decades. We resolve it by developing a theory of institutionally constrained technology adoption. Unlike the crossbow, the longbow was cheap and easy to make and required rulers who adopted the weapon to train large numbers of citizens in its use. These features enabled usurping nobles whose rulers adopted the longbow to potentially organize effective rebellions against them. Rulers choosing between missile technologies thus confronted a trade-off with respect to internal and external security. England alone in late medieval Europe was sufficiently politically stable to allow its rulers the first-best technology option. In France and Scotland political instability prevailed, constraining rulers in these nations to the crossbow.

I wonder, though, what that says about the United States allowing its citizens to own the deadliest weapons on earth...

Hottest year ever

Even though the U.S. only had its second-hottest year on record, NASA and NOAA reported today that worldwide temperatures were the hottest since records began in 1880:

Globally-averaged temperatures in 2015 shattered the previous mark set in 2014 by 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 Celsius). Only once before, in 1998, has the new record been greater than the old record by this much.

The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1.0 degree Celsius) since the late-19th century, a change largely driven by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.

Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with 15 of the 16 warmest years on record occurring since 2001. Last year was the first time the global average temperatures were 1 degree Celsius or more above the 1880-1899 average.

The Times analysis:

Politicians attempting to claim that greenhouse gases are not a problem seized on that slow period to argue that “global warming stopped in 1998” and similar statements, with these claims reappearing recently on the Republican presidential campaign trail.

Statistical analysis suggested all along that the claims were false, and the slowdown was, at most, a minor blip in an inexorable trend, perhaps caused by a temporary increase in the absorption of heat by the Pacific Ocean.

“Is there any evidence for a pause in the long-term global warming rate?” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s climate-science unit, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan. “The answer is no. That was true before last year, but it’s much more obvious now.”

How was the U.S. not hottest-ever last year? If you look at NASA's map, you can see why. Almost the entire world was significantly hotter than normal, except for the Antarctic Circle, bits of the North Atlantic, and the eastern U.S.:

They've even got a nifty video showing the progression over time:

Chicago's Internet tax

I've just spent a few minutes going through all my company's technology expenses to figure out which ones are subject to the completely daft rental tax that Chicago has extended to cover computing services. The City theorizes that rental tax is payable whenever you pay to use a piece of equipment that belongs to someone else for a period of time. This makes a lot of sense when you go to Hertz, but less when you use Microsoft Azure.

My understanding of the tax and the City's might not be completely orthogonal, but here are some examples of things that I've flagged for my company.

Salesforce.com: This clearly falls within the tax ruling. You pay for an online service that runs on someone else's computers. This is exactly what the city was after when they extended the rental tax.

Microsoft Azure: The tax only seems to cover Azure Compute fees, and specifically exempts Storage charges. So how are database hours taxed, then? With Azure, you pay for Database compute and storage together. Clearly Azure Storage is exempt, though. So now we've got a recordkeeping burden that Microsoft can't help us with yet. Great.

LinkedIn Professional: This may be subject to the tax, if you interpret the tax very broadly. But a LinkedIn subscription isn't so much for the use of its computers (which is free), but for enhanced features of the product that seem more like consulting services than compute time. I think we'll see some litigation over services like this one.

JetBrains ReSharper software license: This does not seem subject to the tax, because we're only paying for a license to run the software on our own computers.

Basically, the City is trying to raise revenue any way it can, but they don't have the technical wherewithal to understand why the tax as constituted makes no sense. Some people in my company feel this makes Chicago unattractive to business, but that's true only if you don't count the difficulty getting talented people to move away from all the city has to offer. It's a frustrating new tax, though, and one the City probably wouldn't have to impose if the rest of the state would pay for its share of the services that Chicago provides to it.

News tuff to read

I may or may not have a letterspacing error in the headline...

Short list today, so I may do it after work before rehearsal:

Not to mention, I still haven't finished the Economist's special Christmas issue. Maybe I need a long flight or two?

Skipping an ice age

The Earth has global cool periods periodically, the last one ending around 10,000 years ago, which gave us humans the push we needed to invent complex civilizations. Even though global temperatures were higher about 8,000 years ago than they are today, they were dropping gradually until about 200 years ago. (Any guesses why?)

In short, we're due for another glaciation. But it looks like that won't happen:

[S]cientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that the relation of insolation and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere explains the last eight glacial cycles in Earth history. At the same time, their results illustrate that even moderate human interference with the planet's natural carbon balance might postpone the next glacial inception by 100,000 years.

"Even without man-made climate change, we would expect the beginning of a new ice age no earlier than in 50,000 years from now—which makes the Holocene as the present geological epoch an unusually long period between ice ages," explains lead author Andrey Ganopolski. "However, our study also shows that relatively moderate additional anthropogenic CO2 emissions from burning oil, coal and gas are already sufficient to postpone the next ice age for another 50,000 years. The bottom line is that we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented. It is mind-boggling that humankind is able to interfere with a mechanism that shaped the world as we know it."

Yes, we've probably prevented another ice age, even as we've killed off more species than any other force in the last 66 million years.

And if anyone tells me that tomorrow night's -19°C low temperature somehow means we're not warming the planet on our own, I will become verbally violent.

It's Friday, I think

This means I have some time to digest this over the weekend:

I might have a chance to read this weekend. Perhaps.