I heard that the Post Office is considering going to 5 day delivery to reduce costs and is thinking of dropping Saturday delivery.
What are they thinking? If you want 5 day delivery, drop Wednesday, not Saturday. I really don’t want to go 2 days in a row without delivery.
It’s been snowing here all day. I just went out to check the mail and the snow is up to the soles of my shoes.
It it very hard to describe the difference in scale between East and West. Back East, time is the critical factor; out West, it is space. The balance of the time-space continuum defines how we allocate resources. In the East it may take 10 minutes to go a mile, just popping down to the grocery store. Out West, I’ve gone 10 miles in 10 minutes and I still haven’t got to the grocery store.
When trying to solve the problems of traffic, pollution, and public transportation, please remember that one size does not fit all.
I was doodling around, as I sometimes do, thinking about the differences between East Coast Travel and Western Travel. What brought this up is an upcoming trip to NYC and I realized I do not know the relationship of the area airports to the city. When I lived back in the DC area, I would usually drive to NYC, or take a train. I never really thought about flying unless there were extraordinary circumstances.
But I worked out some charts to compare a drive from DC to Boston with a drive from Albuquerque to Denver. Both routes by Interstate A-D on I-25 and D-B on I-95, I-84,and I-90 (I could have taken I-95 all the way but the distance would be different.) Both routes are about 445 miles.
To give some context to the routes, I noted the population of the different MSAs (Metro Statistical Area) each route went through or by.
| Interstate | Distance | Cities | MSA Pop |
| DC | 446 | Washington | 5,358,000 |
| I-95 | Baltimore | 2,667,000 | |
| Philadelphia | 5,838,000 | ||
| Trenton | 367,000 | ||
| New York City | 19,000,000 | ||
| I-84 | Bridgeport | 900,000 | |
| I-90 | New Haven | 845,000 | |
| Hartford | 1,190,000 | ||
| BOS | Boston | 4,523,000 | |
| Total | 40,688,000 |
There are more than 40 million people living along the DC-Boston route.That is a mind-numbingly lot of people.
Out here:
| Interstate | Distance | Cities | MSA Pop |
| Albuquerque | 448 | Albuquerque | 846,000 |
| Santa Fe | 144,000 | ||
| I-25 | Pueblo | 157,000 | |
| Colorado Springs | 617,000 | ||
| Denver | Denver | 2,506,000 | |
| Total | 4,270,000 |
The total number of people living along the Albuquerque-Denver route is less that the population of the Boston MSA. More than half of Colorado lives in the Denver MSA. About half of New Mexico lives in the ABQ and Santa Fe MSAs.
And the Western route is only in 2 states. The Eastern route passes through 7 states and districts.
I feel like such a ninny this evening. Here I am rushing home to see the new Ken Burns The National Parks film, not even trying to get the picture of the sunrise from Fishing Bridge since the sun wasn’t going to be rising at Fishing Bridge – thanks to Arnica – and when I get home at 6:30, I found out I needn’t have rushed. See, I figured that Mystery comes on at 9 PM, so that 2-hour National Parks episode would have to start at 7. And I made it home with half an hour to spare. Then I find out that they aren’t showing Mystery tonight and that they were showing Burns’ film at 8, repeating at 10. I am such a ninny. Even if the sun wasn’t going to rise this morning, I may have been able to get some pictures of early morning in the Grand Canyon. But Arnica probably was going to bollix that too.
I hope to have some pictures of my vacation on-line shortly. I downloaded them to Elaine’s laptop and haven’t retrieved them yet. (What did you do on your vacation? I spent 5 days traipsing around in the caldera of the world’s largest active volcano! It’s really cool!)
We have been invaded. And they are quite annoying. as they are swarming in the house.
I am having some difficulty identifying the species. It may be a bombus frigidus, but the abdomen band coloring isn’t quite right. Mine is yellow, black, Orange,yellow, black. The thorax colors seem to match the picture. It has a black face and four wings. But the description says it is found at high elevations and we are only at 7200 feet.
| Thank you! |
| World Community Grid is pleased to announce the completion of the first phase of the “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together” project. It took only two years to complete, even though the project was halted for 17 weeks due to the destruction of the University of Texas Medical Branch research facilities as a result of Hurricane Ike.
In total, members provided nearly 12,000 years of computer processing time to this project. Your computer run time contribution was 6 days of processing time to “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together”. Completing this phase of the project is a significant contribution to the research of not only Dengue Fever but also Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever and other diseases caused by the Flaviviridea family of viruses. |
Or being in the newsprint business. It was the name that caught my attention though.
Just heard that 2007 Healthcare costs were 2.2 Trillion $. Let’s see. 300 Million People. That’s $2200000/300 = $22000/3 = $7,333.33 per person.
You know, I think this is a manageable amount to provide a national HMO-type health plan.
I decided to try cataloging my home library on the PC. I really like Readerware, I first looked at them about 8 years ago, but didn’t have the energy to do a serious inventory. One of the neat things with Readerware is that you can use a bar-code scanner to read in the ISBN from a book and the app will go out into the internet and get all the relevant details for you. I downloaded their latest version for Linux and tried it out. It has promise.
But, Elaine has convinced me to use Alexandria, an open-source Linux app available through Ubuntu, so I have been spending the weekend getting started entering books. Being able to enter an ISBN number and then get all the title, author info entered automatically is certainly helpful. Still slow going. Alexandria also can use a bar code scanner, I just wish I could find that CueCat I got eight years ago when I first contemplated a catalog.
I need to see how the system works under load. I have entered a couple of hundred books so far and Alexandria seems to bog down a bit at startup but runs OK once the database is all loaded.
Readerware seemed to work well under a load, I got about 160 books into Readerware before copying the ISBNs to Alexandria. I did notice that Readerware accessed better source databases than Alexandria. RW uses the Library of Congress and Powell’s, which Alexandria doesn’t. They both use Amazon and B&N
It is nice to get the cover art downloaded as well
I did download one ISBN for “Time Future” by Maxine McArthur. The publishing date was 1954, the author was born in 1962. I doublechecked the frontpiece and found it was published in 1999. I just thought it was interesting the the dates were so off for the time story.
Onward