Jackson School Road Project

Jackson School Road Visualization Video - October 2017
Our neighborhood is adjacent to Jackson School Road. This road is basically one and half miles of two lane asphalt with drainage ditches on either side. It was a typical rural road for motor vehicles, no allowances for pedestrians or bicycles. A few years ago they widened the asphalt by a couple of feet on each side to make room for people and or bikes or something. Now there're going burn $20 million to turn it into a suburban utopia. I suppose it's a good thing. There aren't many pedestrians, but the ones there are tend to make me nervous because of their proximity to the traffic lanes and because they are often women and children.

Right-of-Way Section

They say this road sees 7,000 cars a day. $20 million divided by (7,000 cars times 20 years) works out to about $140 for each car. Washington county just added a $60 license plate surcharge for road improvements. It's semi-annual, so it's only $30 a year, which is only about one fifth of what this road improvement project will cost.

I posted the video above not because it was particularly interesting, but because it shows what kinds of software tools are available to designers these days. A similar video could have been made 20 years ago, but it would have been a major engineering project. Now the software has been developed so it's just a matter of point and click. Okay, it's still a bunch of work, but it's a standard thing now, not some Computer-Aided-Fantasy.

Death & Sleep

(Pseudo) Peanuts Life & Death

I started reading Fall by Neal Stephenson a few weeks ago. A big part of the story is what constitutes consciousness. When you are awake, you are conscious, when you are asleep, you are not. Dead to the world is a common way of describing sleep. I feel like my life has been continuous, but every time I fall asleep, I lose a bit of continuity.

It's only really a problem if you are trying emulate a mind with a computer. Theoretically, if you could create a digital mind, you could replace memories and the digital person would never now. Problem is could you really model a human mind with a computer? Maybe, but I think it is still a long way off. I suspect there may be thousands of layers of complexity and we have only scratched the surface. We may understand what we have found so far, but our understanding has now revealed another layer of complexity underlying what we have found. We will keep digging, but it's going to take some serious effort for a long time before we are able to accurately model a human mind.

Ingobernable

Ingobernable | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Another foreign language soap opera on Netflix. Full of tears and agonizing, the basics of any soap opera, but it also has a slightly different take on the War On Drugs. It also takes you on a tour of of life in Mexico City, which is pretty cool. There is some action and intrigue which is great, but for every 30 seconds of something happening there is ten minutes of crying and agonizing. Alcohol helps.

The President is trying curtail the number of people being killed in the drug wars. He asserts that the Mexican drug cartels are pawns of the Americans. That's a new angle. It's kind of funny, we hear about all the people being killed in Baltimore and Chicago and I assume it is because of turf wars being fought by low level drug distribution gangs. And we hear about the thousands of people being killed in Mexico in inter-cartel conflicts. But we never hear anything about the big drug distribution networks in the USA, probably because they have a well disciplined army of publicists and lobbyists who make sure that nobody breathes a word. Or maybe it's just rigid discipline, i.e. anyone who opens their mouth quickly ends up dead.

The government buildings in the show have sort of an old, decadent ambiance about them, but looking for the real buildings, I didn't find anything comparable. Also, who is the President of Mexico right now? I don't even know. Is it because my memory is bad, or is it because our media is so USA centric he never gets mentioned?

The title - Ingobernable - translates as Ungovernable. I don't know to pronounce it so I say Ingo-bern-able which is undoubtedly wrong, but it helps me remember how to spell it.

P.S. I tried to post a question about the buildings on Reddit, but evidently my account there was hacked, as was my account on Twitter. And lately my computer has taken to claiming that my network connection has gone down, even when other tabs on my browser are still working. Me thinks the internet needs a security overhaul.

The New Religion

Roman Emperor Constantine

Borepatch puts up a post about music, science and logic and it got me to thinking. Remember when the destruction of the ozone layer was the big boogeyman? Now we have climate change and we're all going to die. How do these ideas become political movements? It occurs to me they start with a scientist who becomes enthusiastic about an idea and he starts telling people about it and one of the people he tells is a politician who is impressed with this scientist's enthusiasm and becomes convinced that "something needs to be done", and it grows from there.

Western Civilization is inexorably entwined with the Christian Religion, but the Christian religion has been been flagging lately, partly due to the whole mystical nonsense bit. The Ten Commandments were a good start, but somehow we got this whole celestial fantasy with angels and devils and heaven and hell and all that is having a hard time with our evidence based science.

Some (most?) people seem to need to believe in something outside of their miserable little lives, and if their religion doesn't pass the smell test anymore, well, they'll look around for something else, and hey, what do we have here? Looks like Global Warming might be the new religion. For some people anyway. For some people it might be cricket.*

* Apologies to Brian for implying that his affection for cricket might be a form of insanity, but his post on the subject warmed my heart.

Eddie Rickenbacker's Raft

Eddie Rickenbacker's Raft, an Updated History Guy Episode
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Back during WW2, Eddie and his posse were heading out from Hawaii on their way to check out the military situation in the South Pacific. Their first stop was supposed to be Canton Island. Haven't I heard of that place before? Yes indeedy, it was a refueling stop for the China Clipper.

This story has some similarities to the plot of Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon.

Update April 2022 replaced missing video.

Straight to the Top

Epistolaries at Dawn

Wily female, clever girl.

1945 New Guinea Rescue

1945 New Guinea Rescue
The History Guy is borderline too cheerful,  but the intro is over in a few seconds and then you get right into the story, and quite a story it is.

New Guinea & New Britain
Click the link to see the map and read the labels on the placemarks.

Southeast Asia, especially the islands between the mainland and Australia is complicated mess. It covers a large area, so distances are vast, but then you find out things like New Guinea is a stones throw from Australia. (Yes, that's Australia sticking up from the bottom of the map.)

The whole WW2 New Guinea campaign was kind of weird. There were a whole bunch of battles fought there, but they were just so we could build up enough clout so that we could attack the ginormous Japanese base at Rabaul on the neighboring island of New Britain, and then we didn't. By the time we had enough clout in the area we were able to blockade Rabaul, which made attacking it superfluous.

Three volcanoes are simultaneously erupting on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea.
Two, on opposite ends of the island, are indicated by red markers. The third is marked by the stream of ash flying south.

Links, if you want more.

• Ray T. Elsmore
• Battle of Hollandia
• Dani people
• 1945 New Guinea Gremlin Special rescue
• Wewak