59 degrees this morning, thunder and lightning, no walk.
Last night the weather said “100% chance of rain’ at 10 p.m. However, I walked outside and it wasn’t raining!
Actually the forecast was for heaving rain and flooding yesterday afternoon and last night. By this morning there was thunder and lightning, but really just a trace of rain.
I’m not complaining, but I am surprised that the forecast was so far off. I am beginning to wonder if where we currently live is mis-coded somehow in the weather maps.
However, the current weather map is certainly correct, shows a lot of lighting and that is definitely happening.
Hopefully I’ll get this done and posted before the electricity goes out or something!
For some reason, the first part of this week seemed like the week was taking forever. I kept putting the wrong day down, and on Monday and Tuesday, it felt like it should be Thursday or Friday. By Wednesday, I finally felt like it was Wednesday.
I’m not sure what causes “time confusion” like that. However, now that Friday is here, it seems like the week has flown.
Reading more and more about how “driverless” cars and less driving will affect future cities etc. Currently reading “Smart Cities” by Anthony Townsend.
I was surprised to read (perhaps I shouldn’t have been) that the “kook brothers” were spending billions of dollars to fight the development of public transportation in cities including cities nationwide, apparently to discourage development that would reduce our dependence on oil and gas! Talk about a company that is living in the past century!
Anyway, the more I read the more I note that the overall thinking is that we will need fewer and fewer roads (meaning less construction, which of course all of the construction lobby will continue throwing their money at politicians to continue building more roads, needed or not).
They are saying we need more “smarter” roads and streets to encourage better management of traffic Congestion pricing etc. for both parking and driving in certain areas.
It kind of goes along with the “Algorithm” book. Another subject, the Algorithm mentioned that if you had ten pairs of socks and and tried to “match” the socks by pulling out one sock and then pulling out another sock, it would take “19 pulls” to match them and to match the ten pair (using the same method) would take 120 pulls!
For some reason, that really surprised me, that such a method was so inefficient.
He also discussed “merge-sort” mentioned that you could completely “merge sort” a group of items in 29 “merge-sorts” while using the “random” method of sorting would take 300 MILLION “sorts”.
I may not be explaining it right, I will need to get the book. He was basically explaining the reason computers were developed and why, even before a “computer” was actually developed, “computing machines” could sort items so much faster, in fact the 1880 census actually took 8 years!
Not sure what all this has to do with traffic and “smart cities”, but I am am searching for the connection!
That’s it for now, Friday, April 21, 2017.
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