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.
I've been working on a long-overdue update to Weather Now's gazetteer, the database of places that allows people to find their weather. The app uses mainly US government data for geographic names and locations, but also some international sources. This matters because the US government has a thing called "Geopolitical Entities and Codes (GEC)," which superseded Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) publication 10-4. Everyone else in the world use International Standards Organization publication ISO-3166 for country codes, which also doesn't have any of the same identifiers for places smaller than countries that the FIPS and GEC standards to.
Unfortunately, even though the US adopted an updated standard (FIPS 104-1), it doesn't exactly match ISO-3166.
This has caused a bit of extra work to refactor my import code to use both GEC and ISO identifiers for countries—plus the old FIPS 10-4 codes. The geographic data sets I'm going to add to Weather Now in the next couple of weeks use random assortments of the three standards.
All this just means that I have to do several hours more work than I anticipated before I can start importing other sources. But first up, when I do, will be the United States Geological Survey list of about a million places. That will make searching for weather in the US a lot more effective.
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.
A friend pointed out that, as of this morning, we've passed the darkest 36-day period of the year: December 3rd to January 8th. On December 3rd at Inner Drive Technology World HQ, the sun rose at 7:02 and set at 16:20, with 9 hours 18 minutes of daylight. Today it rose at 7:18 and will set at 16:38, for 9 hours 20 minutes of daylight. By the end of January we'll have 10 hours of daylight and the sun will set after 5pm for the first time since November 3rd.
It helps that we've had nothing but sun today. And for now, at least, we can forget about the special weather statement that just came out warning of snow and winds starting later tonight.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:
Finally, National Geographic explains how the two cups of tea I drink every day (three in the summer) will help me live to 107 years old.
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.
Somehow it's the 3rd day of 2025, and I still don't have my flying car. Or my reliable high-speed regional trains. Only a few of these stories help:
I'm also spending some time looking over the Gazetteer that underpins Weather Now. In trying to solve one problem, I discovered another problem, which suggests I may need to re-import the whole thing. At the moment it has fewer than 100,000 rows, and the import code upserts (attempts to update before inserting) by default. More details as the situation warrants.
Item the first: Weather Now got an update today. Under the hood, it got its annual .NET version refresh (to .NET 9), and some code-quality improvements. But I also added a fun new feature called "Weather Score." This gives a 0-to-100 point value to each weather report, showing at a glance where the best and worst weather is. A perfect day (by my definition) is 22°C with a 10°C dewpoint, light winds, mostly-clear skies, and no precipitation. The weather at O'Hare right now is not, however, perfect, and only rates a score of 56.
Item the second: The Daily WTF has a really good, long summary of how the Y2K problem actually got solved. It's worth a read:
25 years on, it's really hard to capture the vibe at the close of the 90s. We'll focus on the US, because that's the only region I can speak to first hand. The decade had a "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," aspect to it. The economy was up, lifted in part by a tech bubble which had yet to pop. The AIDS epidemic was still raging (thanks, in part, to the disastrous policies of the Reagan administration). Crime was down. The Columbine Shooting was hitting the national consciousness, but was only a vague hint of the future of mass shootings (and the past, as mass shootings in the US have never actually been rare). The Soviet Union was at this point long dead and buried, and an eternal hegemony of the US seemed to be the "end of history". On the flip side, Eastern Europe was falling apart and there was war in Kosovo. Napster launches, and anti-globalization protests disrupt cities across the country.
When you add the Y2K bug into the mix, people lost their goddamn minds.
Enjoy both.
It's New Years Eve, so it's time for the Chicago Sunrise Chart for 2025. Other end-of-year and beginning-of-year posts will dribble out today and tomorrow.