Electric Josh

I went outside to look at the aurora borealis, rumored to be working well lately, but then realized that I live in a major metropolitan area and there's a ton of light pollution, so it probably would have been pretty hopeless even without the low spotty clouds. Alas.
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Chris Mooney: Blinded By Science: How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality. A cleverer (and less coarse) way of saying that if something is obviously bullshit then reporters should say so, even if it means doing some hard research, and even if it means choosing a side. It essentially boils down to this, that "...the journalistic norm of balance has no corollary in the world of science." Which sounds a lot like what Richard Feynman said about the (first) space shuttle explosion, that, "...reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Both true.
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So this space has periodically noodled on traffic related projects, be they silly simulations of cars that can be coerced into traffic jams or plans to telecommute and avoid the headache altogether, but now we see how a real hacker deals with sitting in traffic—by mapping the crap out of it:

First, I’ve got a system working for automatically downloading new GPS data from my truck to my home system every time I pull into my driveway. Seeing that GPS data contains spiffy information like location and speed, it’s pretty simple to know when I’ve arrived at home. Once home, the computer in the truck connects to the computer in the house over the wireless network, does an rsync of the data directory, then shuts itself down. The big machine in the house then parses the data, loads it into the database, and compresses and archives the raw data files for possible future use.

Included is a link to the Washington DOT's excellent road conditions web page, which I wish the MassDOT would copy.

This is what's supposed to happen when nerds sit in slow-moving cars.
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