Ted's Blog – Page 86 – Can't tell you more than I told you already?

Speeding Cameras

In an online discussion group recently, one guy commented about needing to keep an eye on his speedometer because they had installed a lot more speeding cameras lately. He is in the UK, but I thought that was interesting that they were giving speeding tickets automatically in other countries. Here we have red light cameras that send a ticket if you run a red light, but I didn’t think there had been any speeding cameras installed yet. So I looked into it and it turns out that Arizona has been installing them lately. People really don’t like these cameras and I found news stories about how people had sprayed silly string over the camera lens or stuck post-it notes on them to block their view. In Arizona, only 38% of the people who get tickets actually pay them. Instead a lot of people are protesting the tickets so, their court system is now clogged. They are booked through 2011 if you want to protest. Meanwhile you don’t have to pay the ticket, so why wouldn’t you protest? It’s like 0% financing. An article in the LA Times says one guy has been caught 40 times in Arizona, most of the time wearing a mask. He plans on saying there is no way they can prove it is him driving the car. So far he has had 4 cases dismissed and had to pay on 7 others.

In the United Kingdom, the cameras have been in place for years, but they have tripled the number of cameras in six years according to this article. It says they are generating 100 million pounds in fines per year. As a result, a number of websites and databases have sprung up locating where the cameras are installed. This can then be put into a GPS navigation system which can warn you that one is coming up.

I was talking about red light cameras with some people at work and we figured that the cameras probably result in a lot more rear-end collisions since people will slam on their brakes when the light turns yellow. Sure enough, a Wikipedia article says a Virginia study showed that right-angle collisions dropped, but rear-end collisions increased, with overall accidents and accidents with injuries both increasing at intersections with red light cameras.

Undeterred, California is proposing to install speeding enforcement at intersections that already have red light cameras. Even if you go through a green light, if you are moving too fast, you would be photographed and sent a ticket. It’s a pretty good idea because the equipment is all in place except maybe for the radar gun.

X2000 Flood to Throw Flashlight

Some lights are good for general purposes, some are really bright, some have a really good user interface, and lights like this one are more of a gimmick. They do one trick, in this case, it is able to go from a fairly faint flood of even light to a tiny beam of light that can be thrown at least a hundred yards by using an aspherical lens that can be moved with respect to the LED. At the tightest spot, you are actually seeing a representation of the LED itself, including the 3 strips of a XR-E LED (picture below is of the beam projected onto the ceiling; in real life you can see more detail including some of the bonding wires).

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Perpetuum Mobile and the Ecstasy of Gold

For years, I would hear this one song in commercials and never knew what it was. But it would show up from time to time, usually somehow technology related. It sounds a little like Philip Glass. If you heard it you would recognize it right away. So tonight I was watching TV and a commercial came on for the restaurant Carrabbas and there was the music! I hoped it wasn’t too new to Google and searched the internet, knowing there are sites where people identify music in commercials. The answer popped up in no time! And from the responses this post got, I wasn’t the only one that had been looking for the name of this for a long time. Anyway, I’d never heard of the song or the group. The song is “Perpetuum Mobile” and it is by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra. You can see them playing it on YouTube. That led me to a YouTube video that makes a movie out 200 pictures that a pretty woman (girl? she can’t be that old) has taken of herself each day, set to Perpetuum Mobile. Penguin Cafe Orchestra has some other videos here and here. They made this one using a dial tone (not my favorite).

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Wash Sale

I’ve known about wash sales for a while and what I always thought it meant was when you sell a stock at a loss and then buy it back within 30 days. The IRS sees this as just a way to harvest some losses without actually changing what you invest in, a move done solely for tax purposes. So what they do is say you have to defer that loss until you sell the shares permanently. But when I have shares bought at different times and then sell some of those shares, I would rather show a gain than hassle with deferred losses from a wash sale.

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Snow Showers

Today we were forecast to get snow showers. I don’t know how or if snow showers are any different than just getting snow. But eventually we did get some pretty good snow. Downtown we watched as it snowed more and more and even started to build up. At about 4:30 our boss came through and said he hadn’t gotten the message that we had been dismissed at 3:00. In the city, the snow was nice, but not that impressive. But as I rode the train home I started seeing how it had built up in the trees. Here is a picture I took from my front yard looking across the street. It was really pretty.