As seen on CSI

There were two items on last Thursdays CSI TV show.

1. The comment by Catherine that things get worse when the temperature gets above 110 (degrees Fahrenheit).
2. License plate cameras.

I have been driving up and down the same stretch of highway ever since I got to Oregon seventeen years ago. Recently I have been thinking that it would be interesting to see how many of the cars that I encounter on my daily commute have I encountered before. Occasionally I will recognize a car when I see it several days in a row at the same time, and it is something special like a red roadster. But most do not stick in my memory. One way to keep track would be to read the numbers off the plates into a tape recorder and then later transcribe them into computer file. After several days I would expect to see a few matches. But there is really no telling. Maybe every car is different every day. Maybe I won't encounter the same car more than once a year. Doing it this way would be way too much work for such a speculative venture. But then I thought about using a camera and maybe some image processing software to pick the license plates out of the images. Voila! Someone has already done it, and apparently it is in use by various police departments around the country. I saw a YouTube video demonstrating the system in British Columbia. Guy was not wearing his seat belt. Bad boy! The other deal, the comment about temperatures got me to thinking. Normal human body temperature is 98.6 (degrees Fahrenheit. Why don't we have a degree symbol on the keyboard?). People run fevers when they are ill and a temperature of 104 is serious. Now we have this comment from Catherine on CSI. And we have all those crazy people in Iraq. Temperatures in the desert get up to 140. How the heck can anyone survive in heat like that? No wonder they have so many apparent lunatics running around over there. This is also going to take some more research.