I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 4½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page almost two years ago, so it's time for a quick update. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
The Daily Parker is about:
- Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
- Politics. I'm a moderate-leftie by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
- Software. I work for Avanade (a company that has no editorial control over this blog and which wants me to make it clear I'm not speaking for them), and I continue to own a micro-sized software company in Chicago. I have some experience writing software, which explains why Avanade continue to tolerate me. I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.
- The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
- Chicago, the greatest city in North America, and the other ones I visit whenever I can.
I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first blog twenty years ago.
If you like what you see here, you'll probably also like Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, Josh Marshall, and Bruce Schneier. Even if you don't like my politics, you probably agree that everyone ought to read Strunk and White, and you probably have an opinion about the Oxford comma (de rigeur in my opinion).
Another, non-trivial point. Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed, so many people reading this may think I'm just posting notes on Facebook. They would like you to believe this, too. Now, I've reconnected with tons of old friends and classmates through Facebook, I play Scrabble on Facebook, and I eagerly read every advertisement that appears next to its relevant content. But Facebook's terms of use assert ownership of everything that appears on their site, regardless of prior assertions, and despite nearly three centuries of legal precedents. They want you to believe that, too.
Everything that shows up on my Facebook profile gets published on The Daily Paker first, and I own the copyrights to all of it. All the photos I post are completely protected: send me an email if you want to republish one. I publish the blog's text under a Creative Commons attribution-nonderivative-noncommercial license; republication is usually OK for non-commercial purposes, as long as you don't change what I write and you attribute it to me. With apologies to King James and Yaishua ben Miriam, render to Facebook the things that are Facebook's; and to the original authors what is not.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.
When I left for New York last Saturday morning, my car still lay under a snowdrift. A few days of unseasonably warm weather later, and voilà:
When I left Chicago on Saturday morning, we had half a meter of snow on the ground. I hear most of it is gone:
Thursday's 13°C high temperature at O'Hare, a reading 11°C above normal and more typical of late April than February, fell just 2°C shy of a 130-year old record of 16°C. But, at Midway Airport, the home of an uninterrupted 82 year observational record which began in 1928, Thursday's 14°C temperature was a record-breaker. The reading replaced a 1981 record high of 13°C at the South Side site.
That wasn't the only new Chicago temperature record established in Thursday's unseasonably mild air. The morning low of 8°C easily beat a previous record-high minimum of 6°C set 121-years earlier in 1890. The unseasonable warmth finished a 10-day, 53 cm melt-off of one of the area's heaviest February snowcovers in three decades.
I wonder if I'll be able to move my car?
And in unrelated news, Republican Wisconsin governor Scott Walker wants to destroy worker's rights in the state, causing the entire Democratic caucus to pull a Texas and flee the state. It's always fun when hubris meets farce, isn't it?
Apparently, Chicago has had above-freezing temperatures for more than 24 hours. Anyone want to lay odds on whether I can drive my car when I get home?
It's snowing again in Chicago. Not a lot. But definitely flurries.
The Tribune predicts our snow cover may melt within two weeks. They also report that 49 states have snow on the ground today; only Florida seems to have missed it. (Hawai'i, don't forget, has a 4,200 m volcano that gets snow occasionally.) And they report that Oklahoma will experience a 55°C swing in temperatures over the next few days, from yesterday morning's -34°C to next week's expected 22°C.
But it's snowing again. Crap.
The good news: today we've probably had the coldest day we'll have all year.
The bad news: it's just now gotten above -10°C, after hitting -23°C this morning.
I've been really Zen about winter, but I'm losing patience.
At least I don't have the problems our local squirrel population has. Poor dudes.
Checking up on my car this morning I found this:
Yeah, no way I'm getting it out without a backhoe or a serious thaw. This shot doesn't make it obvious that the city pushed my car into contact with the SUV to its front. And given the massive glacier at its back, I don't think my little VW can push its way back, either.
Three cheers—albeit half-hearted ones—for the CTA.
Nobel-laureate economist Paul Krugman lays out a simple demonstration of how an increase in the global average temperature necessarily leads to more extreme weather events without eliminating other effects:
Now suppose that a warming trend shifts the whole probability distribution to the right — which is what we mean when we talk about climate change. Then the result looks like this:
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What happens is that the right tail gets fatter: the probability, and hence the frequency, of extreme events goes up.
Two immediate implications. First, there will still be cold stretches: global warming shifts the distribution, it doesn’t eliminate the left side of the distribution. So there will still be cold spells; that proves nothing.
Second, no individual weather event can properly be said to have been "caused" by global warming. Heat waves happened 30 years ago; there’s no way to prove that any individual heat wave now might not have happened even if we hadn’t emitted all that CO2.
But the pattern should have changed: we should be getting lots of record highs, and not as many record lows — which is exactly what we do see. And we should be seeing 100-year heat waves and similar events much more often than history would have suggested likely; again, that’s what we actually do see.
The point is that the usual casual denier arguments — it's cold outside; you can’t prove that climate change did it — miss the point. What you’re looking for is a pattern. And that pattern is obvious.
Shortly later Krugman pointed out that China, historically a net food exporter, has to import food this year because of record droughts.
The Tribune reported this morning that the 66 mm of snow we got yesterday set a record, by pushing this winter's total snowfall above 125 cm for the 4th winter in a row. We've never had four consecutive 125 cm winters before. Mazel tov, Chicago.
In the same blog the Tribune also explained why wind chills seem warmer than 10 years ago: the formula changed in 2001. So a wind chill of -40° in 2000 might only be -20° now. Doesn't that make you feel better?
Looks like my exertions yesterday were nearly pointless:
For a lagniappe, they gave the snow behind my car an extra push, making me wonder how I will be able to get out of the spot at all:
At least there's Zipcar if I need it.