I'm troubled not only that it's already November but also that it's already 5pm. I've been heads-down coding all day and I've got a dress rehearsal tonight. I did, at least, flag these for later:
OK, 30 minutes more coding, then off to the Kehrein Center for our final rehearsal before Sunday's performance.
Sixty years ago yesterday, on 30 October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the most destructive bomb ever designed:
The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around 58 Mt (243 PJ),[13] which was the accepted yield in technical literature until 1991, when Soviet scientists revealed that their instruments indicated a yield of 50 Mt (209 PJ).[4] As they had the instrumental data and access to the test site, their yield figure has been accepted as more accurate.[4][12] In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of 100 Mt (418 PJ) if it had included the uranium-238[14] fusion tamper which figured in the design but which was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout.[14][15] Because only one bomb was built to completion, that capability has never been demonstrated.[14] The remaining bomb casings are located at the Russian Atomic Weapon Museum in Sarov and the Museum of Nuclear Weapons, All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics, in Snezhinsk.
In the summer of 2020, Russia declassified a 40-minute documentary film about the explosion, which you can watch here:
It's fascinating, not only for its direct content, but also for the historical fun of trying to figure out which parts are total lies and which parts are merely whitewashing. (When they start talking about the lack of significant explosion effects on nearby settlements, that game gets more interesting.)
I had to pause the really tricky refactoring I worked on yesterday because we discovered a new performance issue that obscured an old throttling issue. It took me most of the morning to find the performance bottleneck, but after removing it a process went from 270 seconds to 80. Then I started looking into getting the 80 down to, say, 0.8, and discovered that because we're using an API limit with a request limit (180 requests in 15 minutes), I put in a 5-second delay between requests.
Sigh.
So now I've got all this to read...someday:
Finally, the economics of workers vs employers has taken an odd turn as job applicants have started simply ghosting interviewers. But, as Slate says, "employers have been doing this to workers for years, and their hand-wringing didn’t start until the tables were turned."
On this day in 1767, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed their survey of the disputed Maryland-Pennsylvania border, which became even more contentious in 1780 when Pennsylvania aboolished slavery. A group of surveyors started re-surveying the border in 2019; I can't find out whether they finished.
Meanwhile, 255 years later, politics is still mostly local:
Finally, Chicago has perfectly clear skies for only the third time this month after yesterday and the 4th, getting only 39% of possible sunshine for almost the past three weeks.
In June 1943, a group of white American MPs attacked a company of Black American soldiers in the town of Bamber Bridge, England (near Blackpool). The English took the side of the Black soldiers:
During the war, American soldiers accounted for the vast majority of black people in Britain. Britain’s population was overwhelmingly white, most of the country almost entirely so. Black Britons numbered around eight thousand in total, and were clustered in London, Liverpool and a few other ports. For the residents of most towns and villages near US bases, the proximity of black people was wholly novel.
Given that most Britons had seen black people only in films or books, you might have expected them to distrust or fear the new arrivals. Instead, as the historian David Olusoga remarks, the natives were “extraordinarily welcoming” to their black visitors. In fact, black GIs were offered a warmer reception than their white counterparts. In the letters and diaries of British inhabitants, White GIs are portrayed as arrogant, flashy, and unruly, while Black GIs, by contrast, are described as courteous, self-disciplined, and charming.
For black GIs, the warm and respectful treatment they received in Britain’s shops, pubs, and church halls threw their relationship with fellow countrymen into sharp relief. At home, black Americans from Southern states were strictly segregated from whites and systematically oppressed. Jim Crow laws ensured that they were politically disenfranchised and economically marginalised, eighty years after the abolition of slavery. The oppression was cultural too: black Americans were routinely and openly treated as contemptible by their white counterparts.
For many black soldiers, the experience of Britain renewed and sharpened a sense of injustice over how they were treated in the United States. As one put it, “we are treated better in England than we are in a country that is supposed to be our home.” Naturally enough, it led some of them to question why they were fighting. Another GI wrote: “I am an American negro, doing my part for the American government to make the world safe for a democracy I have never known.”
I recently watched the Channel 4 miniseries Traitors, in which American race relations right after World War II in London mattered a great deal to the plot. Learning about Bamber Bridge added more depth to my understanding of the show.
Oh boy:
Cassie has bugged me for the last hour, even though we went out two hours ago. I assume she wants dinner. I will take care of that presently.
Former Chicago Fraternal Order of Police president Dean Angelo died yesterday of Covid-19. And yet the current FOP president, John Catanzara, has promised to sue the City over the requirement that police officers either show proof of vaccination by Friday or go on a twice-a-week testing regimen if they want to keep getting paid:
"It literally has been like everything else with this mayor the last two and a half years," said FOP President John Catanzara. "Do it or else because I said so."
In a social media post Tuesday, Catanzara urged his members to not comply with the vaccine mandate.
"We're notifying the city the demand for expedited arbitration along with filing unfair labor practice with the labor board," he said Tuesday. "Tomorrow we'll be filing court paperwork for a temporary restraining order."
The dispute comes as a new report from the National Law Enforcement Museum reveals that a full 62% of all line-of-duty law enforcement deaths across the country last year were from COVID-19.
(Emphasis mine.)
In related news, I'm about a quarter through Ruth Ben-Ghiat's Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, in which she details the patterns of authoritarians throughout the last century. In almost every case, the authoritarian leader demands his followers show loyalty by embracing lies, even when those lies kill them.
Ben-Ghiat's book, like the story today of Angelo's death, frustrate the hell out of me. We make the same mistakes over and over and over. Ultimately, though, we haven't had enough time away from the savannahs of Africa to stop acting like frightened apes half the time.
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, which burned for two days and left 100,000 people homeless. But only for a short time; by 1874, when the city had a second big fire, our population had already grown by about that number.
Flash forward to now:
Finally, last night I attended an actual live theater performance for the first time in 19 months, and it was amazeballs. If you live in Chicago, right now you need to go to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater website and buy tickets to As You Like It, which plays through November 21st.
So many things this morning, including a report not yet up on WBEZ's website about the last Sears store in Chicago. (I'll find it tomorrow.)
- Jennifer Rubin advises XPOTUS "critics and democracy lovers" to leave the Republican Party.
- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) completely caved against a unified Democratic Party and will vote to extend the (probably-unconstitutional) debt limit another three months.
- An abolitionist's house from 1869 may get landmark approval today from the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. (It's already in the National Register of Historic Places).
- Could interurban trains come back?
- Arts critic Jo Livingstone has a mixed review of No Time to Die, but I still plan to see it this weekend.
- 18 retired NBA players face wire-fraud and insurance-fraud charges for allegedly scamming the NBA's Health and Welfare Benefit Plan out of $4 million.
- Even though we've had early-September temperatures the past week, we've also had only 19% of possible sunlight, and only 8% in the past six days. We have not seen the sun since Monday, in fact, making the steady 19°C temperature feel really depressing.
- Two new Black-owned breweries will go on the Brews and Choos list soon.
- Condé Nast has named Chicago the best big city in the US for the fifth year running.
Finally, President Biden is in Chicago today, promoting vaccine mandates. But because of the aforementioned clouds, I have no practical way of watching Air Force One flying around the city.
Update, 12:38 CDT: The sun is out!
Update, 12:39 CDT: Well, we had a minute of it, anyway.
The Great Chicago Fire started 150 years ago this coming Thursday. It not only destroyed almost every building in the city, but also it burned up official property records. Even today the consequences linger:
Official property deeds stored in the Cook County Courthouse were destroyed when the building went up in flames in October 1871, as were many private records kept at home.
Stored on microfilm in filing cabinets at the Cook County Court Archives and in boxes at the archives’ warehouse is a set of documents, some dating back nearly 150 years and often handwritten, called the “burnt records.” These are records of some of the attempts to reestablish property ownership after the Great Chicago Fire.
The archives estimate there were at least 1,767 burnt records cases in the decades after the fire. But details about the documents are scarce, and the exact number of cases is unknown. Many may be missing entirely.
Other property owners turned to private records. Decades before the fire, firms had begun keeping their own indexes and abstracts of land transactions. These records were saved from the fire — often dramatically, according to legends passed down through generations of abstract and title companies — and they were given legal status in Illinois courts when state legislators passed the Burnt Records Act.
The story also explains why a single grave sticks out of an industrial site on the south side.