Cassie and I survived our 20-minute, -8°C walk a few minutes ago. For some reason I feel like I need a nap. Meanwhile:
Finally, I want to end with Ross Douthat's latest (subscriber-only) newsletter, taking Vivek Ramaswamy to task for suggesting American kids need more intense competition in order for the US to stay ahead of its peers. I'll just focus on one paragraph, where he suggests Ramaswamy's end goal may not be a place we really want to go:
[T]he atmosphere he’s describing in South Korea, the frantic cycle of educational competition, isn’t just a seeming contributing factor to that country’s social misery; it’s almost certainly a contributing factor to the literal collapse of South Korea’s population, the steep economic rise that Munger describes giving way to an equally steep demographic decline. So for societies no less than individuals, it appears possible to basically burn out on competition, to cram-school your way to misery, pessimism and collapse — something that any advocate of intensified meritocratic competition would do well to keep in mind.
As I have more and more contact with kids born after 1995, I find so many of them who either have flat personalities, an inability to function independently, and an alarming lack of emotional resilience, or who have vitality, intelligence, and an ability to function in the world but no ambition. The last 30 years have crushed the elite-adjacent kids whose parents want them to enter the elite, whatever they think "elite" means. As a kid who traveled alone on public transit to Downtown Chicago at age 7, and managed to get from O'Hare security to LAX security without help by age 8, I feel sorry for these incompetent, despondent children.
The temperature yesterday got all the way up to 2°C at 2:30pm before plummeting overnight to -13°C just before dawn this morning. That means we had the highest and lowest temperatures of 2025 within a single 16-hour period. At least this far below freezing, we don't have all the slush and squish that leads to a towel looking like this after just one walk:
It gets better. The forecast for Tuesday night calls for even lower temperatures, with Wednesday morning being too cold to walk Cassie to day camp (-10°C is her lower limit for a 20-minute walk). But then it'll go back up to 4°C on Friday.
Of course, Wednesday is the mid-point of winter, and Chicago always gets cold in January. Plus, the conditions that lead to these really bracing temperatures bring clear skies along with them, which we do like this time of year. We take the good with the bad here.
I've just finished updating the Weather Now gazetteer, the database of geographical information that connects weather information to locations. This involved re-importing 283 countries and 4,494 administrative divisions from the National Geospatial Information Agency, plus 25,668 weather stations from the National Climate Data Center and 20,166 airports from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Most of these places already existed in the gazetteer, so they just got freshened up from the latest releases of the NCDC and FAA data. And, as I previously complained, the Country and Division records got their correct GEC identifiers.
Next up: a bunch of minor bugs and enhancements on the Place Info and Airport Info pages, so you can actually see the updated geographical data.
First, though, I'm going to take Cassie on a 30-minute walk. It's overcast and gloomy, but the temperature has held at just under 1°C for the past few hours. We won't have the chance to spend 30 minutes outside again until next Thursday if the forecast -18°C temperatures occur.
We've gotten about 4 cm of snow so far today, with more coming down until this evening. Cassie loves it; I have mixed feelings. At least the temperature has gone up a bit, getting up to -0.6°C for the first time since around this time on Monday.
Elsewhere:
- Federal Judge Aileen Cannon (R-SDFL) got overruled again, this time after her corrupt effort to block Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on January 6th.
- George Will bemoans Congress ceding so much of its authority to the office of the President, especially given who will take that office in ten days.
- Just three corrupt Chicago cops will cost the city almost $34 million in settlements, making me wonder why we don't pay those settlements out of the police pension fund.
- Pamela Paul objects to historians opining about politics, which is actually one of the things they've always done.
- Five years after the pandemic began, we still haven't gotten back in the habit of being out in public, according to Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.
Finally, Maplewood Brewing has started expanding its Logan Square taproom into the other half of the building it occupies. I don't get there often, but I enjoy going back. Can't wait to see what their restaurant looks like when it's done. I also need to get to Cherry Circle Room or the CAA Drawing Room soon, as it looks like the management transition from Land & Sea to Boka may change some things.
Once again, in the aftermath of the OAFPOTUS's demented press conference yesterday, I need to remind everyone to ignore what he says and watch what he does. He's not as harmless as the guy at the end of the bar who everyone avoids talking to, but he's just as idiotic.
Meanwhile, in the real world:
Finally, the temperature in Chicago dipped below freezing just before 2 am on January 1st and hasn't risen above freezing since then, with no relief in the forecast. Even though we don't expect any seriously cold weather in the next two weeks, it would be nice to have one day above freezing.
We have warm (10°C) windy (24 knot gusts) weather in Chicago right now, and even have some sun peeking out from the clouds, making it feel a lot more like late March than mid-December. Winds are blowing elsewhere in the world, too:
Finally, the Washington Post says I read 628 stories this year on 22 different topics. That's less than 2 a day. I really need to step up my game.
The temperature dropped below freezing Tuesday evening and stayed there until about half an hour ago. The forecast predicts it'll stay there until Wednesday night. And since we've got until about 3pm before the rain starts, it looks like Cassie will get a trip to the dog park at lunchtime.
Once it starts raining, I'll spend some time reading these:
Finally, a friend recently sent me a book I've wanted to read for a while: The Coddling of the American Mind, which civil-liberties lawyer Greg Lukianoff and psychologist Jonathan Haidt expanded from their September 2015 Atlantic article. I have noticed that people born after 1995 don't seem to have the same resilience or tolerance for nuance that even people born a few years earlier have. Lukianoff and Haidt make an interesting case for why this is. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I finish.
Before I link to anything else, I want to share Ray Delahanty's latest CityNerd video that explores "rural cosplaying." I'll skip directly to the punchline; you should watch the whole thing for more context:
Elsewhere,
There is some good news today, though. In the last 6½ hours, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters rose almost 9°C (15°F), to an almost-balmy -3.5°C. The forecast says it'll keep rising another 12°C or so through Sunday. So our first cold snap of the winter appears to be behind us.
The planet just had its second-warmest November in recorded history, just a hair under last year's record-warmest:
Last year was the hottest on record due to human-caused climate change coupled with the effects of an El Nino. But after this summer registered as the hottest on record — Phoenix sweltered through 113 consecutive days with a high temperature of at least 37.7°C — scientists were anticipating that 2024 would set a new annual record as well.
In November, global temperatures averaged 14.10°C. Last year's global average temperature was 14.98°C. Through November, this year's average global temperature is 0.14°C above the same period last year.
Barring something truly catastrophic in the next three weeks, 2024 will be the warmest year on record, worldwide. And still, Chicago's weather over the next 72 hours will not feel like warm:
Temps return closer to normal for early December on Tuesday and Wednesday, then the real cold air settles in overnight Wednesday into Thursday morning. By the Thursday morning commute, air temps are projected to be in the single digits [Fahrenheit], with wind chills dipping to around -30°C in some locations.
The forecast this close to Lake Michigan predicts slightly warmer temperatures than inland, if you consider that -14°C is, in fact, slightly warmer than -17°C. And yet the medium-range forecast stubbornly predicts a warm, dry week before Christmas:
Weird weather indeed.
We had our coldest morning since February 17th today, cold enough that Cassie didn't want to linger sniffing her favorite shrubberies. The temperature bottomed out at 7:45 am, hitting -8.6°C at IDTWHQ, a cold we haven't experienced since 8:25 am on February 17th. O'Hare hit -10°C at 8 am, also the first time since 8 am February 17th. Tonight, going into the first day of astronomical winter, the forecast predicts it'll get even colder before warming up a bit on Monday.
Unrelated to the weather are these two things I liked from the past week. Yesterday I went over to a friend's house to help her set up a new computer and back up her old one. It turned out she was fostering this little guy, Hayes:
She texted me last night to say thanks and also that she's going to fork over the $495 adoption fee for him. Because of course she will. He's a sweet Lab-something mix whose pregnant mom got rescued from the side of the road in Arkansas. He'll have a much better (and longer) life with my friend than he would have otherwise.
I also liked the way the sun played around with the Civic Opera Building and 110 North Wacker (the mirrored building behind the Civic Opera) on Tuesday afternoon:
My new office is farther west than my old one, but still facing north, so it won't get any direct sunlight, ever. That said, on Tuesday I discovered that the mirrored windows at 110 North Wacker will give me pretty intense reflected sunlight, which is almost as bright. I'm still only going in once a week, but it's a nice perk.