We had to make a rush trip to Cherry Hill, NJ earlier today. Google’s new maps program says the round trip was about 354 miles. That seems right. It’s about the limit for driving and getting anything accomplished before heading home.
Luckily for us traffic wasn’t too bad. We missed morning rush going into New York City and afternoon drive coming home. The only real snag on the trip was here in Connecticut, around 6:30 PM, traveling through Fairfield County.
I have no idea why went went slowly… but it did. It was worse than anything we saw on the Cross Bronx Expressway, if you can believe that.
I would guess a large park of our traffic free passage had to do with the advent of E-ZPass. Having this RFID tag in your car eliminates making the trip unnoticed, but it sure does speed things along.
The toll booths near Meadowlands Stadium were always a choke point. With E-ZPass we breezed through at highway speed. Same thing for the George Washington Bridge.
My only concern was a cryptic message at NJ Turnpike exit 4, when we saw a sign that told us to go – though our tag hadn’t been read. Honest officer, it was on the windshield.
It will be a surprise to find out what the toll actually is. I have no idea. It wasn’t posted anywhere.
This is a trip we used to make all the time while Helaine’s parents were alive.
I remember stopping on the Jersey Turnpike, driving our Mazda 929. When Steffie was an infant, the 929’s trunk made the perfect open air changing table.
The rest areas are still named after famous New Jersey residents like Joyce Kilmer, Vince Lombardi, Grover Cleveland and Thomas A. Edison.
Is Grover Cleveland’s family proud to know that this former president’s most conspicuous achievement in the 21st century is having people mention his name when they need to make a pit stop¹? It would probably be defensible if he were still on the $1000 bill.
Speaking of the rest areas, it looks like they’ve been rebuilt, adding additional outward ugliness to what were ugly buildings to begin with. There are flowers near the sink (and loud music) in the mens room. The restaurant section is a medley of your favorite fast food joints in a food court arrangement.
New Jersey continues to lead the nation in “Full Service” gas stations. From a National Review commentary:
It is illegal to self-pump in New Jersey. You must have a gas-station professional pump your gas and ring up your purchase. This might have made some sense in 1949 when the law was passed and when most of the population still smoked and stupidity could conceivably kill at the gas station. But times have changed and pumping gas is a safe activity that almost everyone but the handicapped can perform with the greatest of ease. Pay-at-the-pump technology is standard at gas stations coast to coast. Motorists fly through stations with the breathtaking efficiency only Americans can take for granted. That is, except in New Jersey and Oregon
I got an email this morning from a mailing list at Sky and Telescope Magazine run by Cary Oler:
It is remarkable how often the news media take scattered facts, throw
them together incorrectly and then claim authenticity. Such was the case in
abundance for the space weather storm of 24 October. Media reports that this
storm would be a “perfect storm” or the “once in a 100 year event” were
shamefully inaccurate.
I guess I was one of those taken in. But why? I’m usually pretty cynical of these things, even when the Drudge headline said ‘Perfect space storm’ coming to Earth… ” I still did loads of research on-line trying to understand what was going on.
If this wasn’t big, then NASA’s website wasn’t helping:
This week researchers have been observing an enormous sunspot the size of Jupiter. As a result of associated flares, NOAA predicts strong geomagnetic storms to hit Earth on Friday with the potential to affect electrical grids and satellite communications. Aurora may be visible as far south as Oregon and Illinois. Meanwhile, scientists are watching another large sunspot rotate toward us with potential for even more powerful and prevalent explosions.
And, from another NASA site:
Earlier this week, a large sunspot region caught the attention of many sungazers around the world. Sunspot region 10484 was associated with several powerful solar flares, including one X-class event (the most powerful category). The sunspots in the region covers more than 1700 millionths of the visible solar surface, or 10 times the surface of the entire Earth!
But hold on! Another region, number 10486, has rotated onto the solar disk, showing even more signs of activity. And this particular region caught the attention of solar physicists while it was still on the far side of the Sun! In the MDI instrument’s far side imaging pictures, it showed considerable development over a short period of time. The rapid growth was noted by KehCheng Chu of Stanford University, but the fact was not widely publicized. “The data were a bit scarce, and there was a chance that the images were influenced by this,” says Phil Scherrer, Principal Investigator for MDI.
The speculations have been vindicated by a lot of activity (including an even stronger X flare) coming from this new region. Although not quite as large in sunspot area (1160 millionths of the visible surface), it is still considered somewhat more likely to produce the most powerful flares.
I’m not upset that I got to talk about the flares and sunspots. There’s great supporting video and hopefully people got a little more understanding of what’s going on in space. I’m more worried that people in the scientific community are willing to exaggerate.
Science is the last place that should happen.
This afternoon, a friend called and said I needed to look at the website of Gambler’s Anonymous. If you’ll click on the image on the right, you’ll see the full sized screen capture.
What a screw-up – it was plastered with ads for online casinos!
But it’s not a screw-up and though the site looks like it should be GA’s, it isn’t. These ads are here by design in what I consider one of the biggest displays of bad taste on the Internet.
Who owns the site:
Registrant:
Big Silver Box, LLC
PO Box 2529
Klamath Falls, Oregon 97601
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: GAMBLERS-ANONYMOUS.COM
Created on: 17-May-03
Expires on: 17-May-04
Last Updated on: 17-May-03
Administrative Contact:
Box, LLC, Big Silver admin@online-casinos-and-gambling.com
PO Box 2529
Klamath Falls, Oregon 97601
United States
(503) 708-6927
Technical Contact:
Box, LLC, Big Silver admin@online-casinos-and-gambling.com
PO Box 2529
Klamath Falls, Oregon 97601
United States
(503) 708-6927
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.ONLINE-CASINO-WINNER.COM
NS2.ONLINE-CASINO-WINNER.COM
So, it seems, these folks have put a site up to sell gambling to people looking for Gambler’s Anonymous. Is there no limit? This is despicable.