Winning isn't everything

Maybe Rick Reilly's right that the Cubs haven't won a World Series in over a century because Wrigley Field is so great. He's almost certainly wrong about that, but let's grant him the point. Does that mean the Cubs should allow billboards along the outer walls of the stadium, blocking the view from nearby rooftops?

Hell the fuck no, Rick. That's a terrible idea. I'm a fair-weather Cubs fan, I'll admit, but I'd like to see them win a Series in my lifetime. But I don't give a damn about the profit margins the Ricketts family gets from owning the Cubs (and if my current employer, the Tribune, still owned them, I still wouldn't care), and I don't think being a Cubs fan obligates me to. And as a resident of the city of Chicago, I care a great deal about the beauty and, yes, horror of horrors, tradition of Wrigley.

Look, it's a beautiful stadium and a great place to see a game, and the city north side entire benefits from that to some degree. It's not like I care about the rooftop owners either, but more billboards around the stadium - or anywhere else in the city - is hardly a desirable outcome.

I'm sure the facilities could be upgraded, and that would be a worthwhile improvement. By all means, build a better clubhouse and weight room and all the rest, as Reilly recommends. But let the improvements stop at the invisible stuff that the players need and maybe makes the fan experience better - we don't need more ads anywhere, let alone in one of the last great public spaces in America uncluttered with advertising.

The Ricketts family didn't buy any random baseball team with a generic corporately-named stadium. They knew what they were buying when they bought it, and they're extremely wealthy in spite of all the minor inconveniences leveled upon them by owning one of the greatest franchises in American sports. They can afford to pay players enough to win a World Series without making Wrigley just like every other ballpark in the country, so they should do it, and if they wanted a better deal on a stadium with no soul they should have bought the Sox.

Reggie Rose is right, kinda

Having watched the Bulls get destroyed by the Heat last night, it's not hard to understand where Reggie Rose is coming from: even with a healthy Derrick Rose in the lineup, these Bulls don't really seem like they can beat the Heat, and that won't change until Bulls management adds a couple more pieces, or one legitimate all-star, to the roster.

It's not surprising, but it's still gratifying, to see some fire in the bellies of those closest to Chicago's most beloved athlete: Derrick Rose's window of greatness, like all superstars, is finite and closing, and wasting even a single season is tempting fate. So you want Derrick's older brother and manager to be itching for him to play, surrounded by the best lineup money can buy.

But you've also got to look at the big picture, in order to understand how that lineup can possibly come together. And for that, there are two key pieces of data to observe: first, that Derrick Rose - his game, his story, his personality, everything about him - is a once-in-a-generation Chicagoan. Somebody like him may never come again to this city or this league, and that means that as important as it is to have a sense of urgency, it's equally important to think about the arc of his entire career. The Bulls franchise is now built exclusively around him, and if he's not going to be at full capacity, there's no point in trying to make a run for a title this season. So it made sense to trade Omer Asik, and to not make any rash decisions before the trade deadline, and every decision John Paxson and Gar Forman make should be oriented to building a long-term championship team around their superstar.

The second interesting piece of data is the fact that the Bulls, for the first time in franchise history, are going to pay the luxury tax this season. Why now, why this lost season? I don't know quite what to make of this, though I suspect it's not entirely intentional - their biggest stars are playing on contracts probably too big to make them easily tradeable - but whatever the reason, if it indicates that the Bulls have gotten serious about paying for players, that plus the long view they're taking on Rose is ultimately a very good sign for the future. So calm down, Reggie.

A new mobile app that gets it right

Mobile apps should do one of two things: present a convenient interface to a certain service, or take advantage of supercomputing power inside a user's pocket. Most existing mobile apps - the ones that make sense, at least - do the former. But it wasn't until I installed the excellent new Sitegeist app from the Sunlight Foundation today that I realized how few succeed at the latter.

The app shows you interesting data about whatever physical location you're in - age and demographic data, house price data, cool nearby places on Yelp, etc. Plenty of existing services do something like this, and this is hardly the first location-aware mobile info app (though it may be the most beautiful).

But once you use it, you realize how few apps really get it right: this little piece of glass in your hand is telling about your physical surroundings in an utterly useful, simple, charming, pleasant way. It's incredibly powerful and sophisticated, but it conceals that power and sophistication effortlessly, only revealing to the user simple, interesting, contextually-relevant facts.

I love that this came from the Sunlight Foundation, too, since they're all about government transparency. This app reveals that they're approaching the concept of transparency in a much more user-focused way than I realized: what's important for an individual person to know doesn't just come from a FOIA request. Walking around a neighborhood and effortlessly revealing how much the houses cost, how rich or young the people living around you are, tells you something civically-important. Democracy isn't just about government, it's about people.

Fracking geopolitical foundations

Photo: REUTERS

What to make of the findings in the recent International Energy Agency report that the US will become the largest energy producer in the world in 5 years? As Kelly McParland suggests, at once it completely rearranges the global power structure.

Leaving aside for others the fairly important question of "is it true?", since I'm ill-equipped to fact-check the IEA and NYT on this, I feel like this kind of solidifies the timeline we're working with before the planet becomes too disastrously hot. We don't have to worry about "peak oil" ever again, but thanks to environmentally-problematic hydraulic fracturing, we now we have to worry that "no more than one-third of already proven reserves of fossil fuels can be burned by 2050 if the world is to prevent global warming exceeding the danger point of 2C".

So, ok, we have a target date about 40 years in the future - is that enough time to prevent the worst effects of global warming, and can we even do it? I'm inclined to believe we've passed a tipping point and the rise of the middle class in India, China and Brazil means we're going to have a really hard time stopping carbon emission increases for the foreseeable future - those nations are going to be legitimately angry to be denied the use of cheap fuel and plastics we've had for decades, because we used it all up - so we'd better get working on some good mitigation strategies.

Ultimately, I'm not that confident we're going to be able to mitigate our way out of the coming climactic disaster, so we're going to just have to adapt and suffer. We as a society will have to come to terms with the guilt unleashed by watching millions of people around the world die from the effects of the pollution we released into the atmosphere. If history is any guide, the people who suffer the most will most likely be poor, since the rich can afford to move away from unsafe coastlines and ensure a steady supply of fresh water. And the karmic injustice will be doubled, as those who pay the highest price will have been those who used the fewest resources.

That will hopefully turn out to be overly pessimistic, and if we're lucky, we'll make enough progress on mitigation strategies fast enough to avert the worst catastrophes. But if Sandy is going to keep happening to coastline after coastline, and we have more droughts like we had this summer (the worst in 25 years!), and the freaking coffee bean is going to be extinct soon - well, I don't know how much faith I have in engineers who aren't able to rely on the juice of nature's sweetest fruit.

Benton Harbor

It's a rainy morning in Benton Harbor, the city that Wikipedia tells us has the lowest per-capita income in the state of Michigan. I feel bad leading with that fact - I suspect that the narrative of a place like this is dominated by such ledes - but the boarded-up buildings in the gray rainy morning really are the most immediately-striking visual fact of this city.

The signs on one building are a mixture of black-and-white stencils ("city is changing but ignoring black men invest in us" with the non-bolded words merely outlined in white pencil against the white sign, almost invisible) and a professionally-printed call for "honest investor(s)" willing to put money into the local black community. A magnificent church retains the stained-glass and announcement board outside, but looks abandoned from within - I can't tell if it's still in use or not.

Young black men in black hoodies are the only signs of life outside. They're not, as far as I can tell, acting in solidarity with Trayvon Martin (though I certainly didn't ask, and can you imagine that conversation? "Why would you say you're wearing a hoodie today?" "Because it's 55 and raining!" "Sure, but why the specific choice of this politically-charged garment? You can be honest with me - I'm a well-meaning white guy with an audio recorder!") Inside the (good Yelp-reviewed, free-wifi-offering, Pride-flag-out-front) Phoenix cafe in the arts district downtown, the clientele and staff are almost exclusively white, all the more salient an observation in a town that (again, wikipedia) is 89% black. Really solid tracks from Mos Def and Lupe Fiasco play against a backdrop of beautiful black-and-white x-ray-looking images of plants hung on the wall, part of an exhibit called "Found Botany".

Across the river from the poorest town in Michigan with an 89% black population is St. Joseph, 88% white with nearly 3 times the household income ($49,982 vs a staggering $17,301).

We've only been in town since last night, a brief stay at the Red Roof Inn meant to keep us dry from the rain pelting the 94, sheets of water exploding out from beneath the wheels of semis that threaten to run us off the road every few minutes. It's hard to know what else to say about a place that surely hosts so many different storylines; but rather than let the moment go unrecorded (increasingly a rarity on this trip, and in our lives generally) I felt like pointing this out.

Reflections in the morning light

The hot caffeine makes me feel better. More psychological than physical, it reassures me that things are OK and I'm able to do whatever my day will demand. It gives me energy to press forward; when I wake up, I'm awake and may even be brightly so, but almost always lack the extra reserves of energy that anything beyond reading require of me.

Four years of Berkeley mornings have not warped me, but they have given me a glimpse of what tranquility can be: perfect sunshine, a gentle easy light that brings out the greens of leaves and grasses, the browns of wood fences and houses and treetrunks; a clearness to the air, lacking excessive heat or humidity; the fresh, clean, organic smells of plantlife awakening to the morning and disseminating their pollen for bees to find. Sure, there are cars and horns (though not too many of the latter); traffic and chores and strollers and people on phones. And of course it's easy to ignore the gentle pleasantness and focus on the podcast, or the day ahead, or a thousand other distractions. But Berkeley is always here, ready for the morning commuter to open his eyes and nose and perceive it.

It's the light that really makes our kitchen something special - the sunlight as it rises, giving the surprisingly elegant linoleum tiles a character far outstripping their simple black-and-whiteness. The morning gray sky (though not today; perhaps that's a relic of the winter months; I certainly remember many brilliant blue mornings) filling in the gaps between the tops of houses, as different from each other as their collective whole is from the suburban sameness that shamefully dominates so much of this brilliantly beautiful country. The shabbily-pale green of the hills off to the right (East) and the much richer greens and browns and whites of the leaves that block us from the Bay to the West (left).

Sunlight is not all the same. A clear February morning in Chicago, and a clear May morning in Berkeley: both are blue skies with a dominant sun just out of reach, but to look at them is to know instinctively the bitter cold or blissful warmth that awaits outside. How much of this is a trick of context, I'm not sure; I know that clear May mornings in Berkeley are typically not cold and so I see things that are not there, perhaps; indications of a temperature that isn't actually conveyed by anything more than the calendar. I know a clear February morning in Chicago is going to be ass-bitingly cold, and so I see that in the light on rooftops and sidewalks. Yet I feel certain that if I saw a photograph of a sunlit street in February and July, the light alone would help me know which was which.

It's the everyday pleasantness of life in Berkeley that I worry about missing the most, and that I'm not sure Chicago will replace. Of course there are those glorious spring days, coming out of the cold, where the energy and optimism of the imminent summer infects every activity with joy. But the November afternoons - will enough of those be quietly pleasant enough to make up for the lack of the everyday niceness of Berkeley? I suppose I shouldn't worry; plenty of people even in my own family have left here for there and never looked back. They must have experienced this same general pleasantness (the weather is changing, but not by that much in the last 30 years that they wouldn't have had such days as these), so maybe I should just ask them.

A new kind of literacy

Today I hacked my camera, taking it back from the limitations its programmers imposed on it out of a desire to sell more expensive models. I didn't write a single line of code, only used the command-line twice, and yet the process would have been bewildering for most computer users. I was able to do it because I've spent a short lifetime using tech and writing code; both the concepts and the computer-DIY skills I've picked up along the way helped me do something entirely outside my normal domain of experience.

This, I think, is what constitutes the sort of fundamental technical building blocks we should be giving every citizen - though we need to come up with a better name than "technical building blocks", since that metaphor isn't really domain-appropriate. This is an important type of literacy, increasingly relevant in the 21st century and kind of nonexistent for most of human history into the 20th century. The language of computing devices requires some training to understand, and Turing machines being what they are, and their programmers being who they are, a lot of that knowledge is transferrable. I learned about partitioning disks when I was first trying to install Linux on my desktops in high school, and since I was already familiar with the concept, I found it easier to install a hack on my camera today.

So what kinds of things should we be teaching people, in order to give them this basic skillset? Here are a few proposals (that perhaps betray a mindset already a few years out of date):

1. Scripting - most people don't really ever need to know how to program, but would benefit from knowing how to make a computer do something automatically. Both the process of learning how a computer thinks about things like "commands", and the actual ability to issue those commands in an automated way, are an important part of computer literacy.
2. Assembling a desktop - this is increasingly an unnecessary skill for most people's lived experience - laptops and smartphones don't really permit any real kind of hardware hackery. But understanding how a computer's parts fit together, how to take them apart and assemble them, and what those basic parts even are, is as useful as knowing the basic geography of a car's hood.
3. Using a command line - not only is it helpful for future job prospects (command-line familiarity, in my experience, is surprisingly rare outside of coders and sysadmins); learning how to phrase questions in a language a computer speaks teaches you a lot about how it thinks and what its capable of. In many ways, this is a skillset very similar to scripting, and a lot of what you learn on the command-line is helpful when programming (and vice-versa).
4. Learning how to learn - the most important skill I ever learned in the Internet age was how to learn how to do something I don't already know. In my previous jobs, I've been the lone technical person on non-technical teams; and the questions I got asked were often not ones I knew the answers to. But I knew how to teach myself what our team needed in order to get the job done; and in my day-to-day life, I use these skills all the time. This goes far beyond just Googling a question (although that's very important, and there are subtle tricks to know); it's about how to approach a problem so as to make it comprehensible; how to break it down into component parts and solve those; knowing what types of things computers are good and bad at, and what places on the Internet are good gateways for the former.