Capturing a morning

This morning was one of the most spectacular I can remember in a long time, for no other reason than the temperature and the clarity of the air and sky were at some perfect harmonious synchronicity with each other. Like the strings on a viola that vibrate, at a certain frequency and only at that frequency - not a hair too high or too low, or the effect is ruined - in such a way as to sound utterly perfect, resonating with the wood and the air and the other strings and stroking the aural cortex of our brains so effortlessly and harmoniously that the sound is Angelic.

The temperature was in the upper 60s, after a long hot spell, and something about everything felt like fall, but not just fall - fall pregnant with possibility, fall promising a future, the fall of a decade ago for me - getting on a bus to go to class in college, going to work on a campaign, going off to build something I didn't know the future of yet.

The crisp air and the sun made me remember how fantastic it is to be alive.

RIP, Douglas Engelbart

Watch this video of the aptly-named Mother of All Demos and see how clearly Doug Engelbart saw the future coming, and then went out and built it for us:

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.