When traveling by car, I look around at the scenery and sometimes my mind wanders and wonders about some of the things I see. When something is unusual or doesn’t quite make sense, I’ll investigate once the trip is over. Today, four things I’ve noticed when on the road.
#1: When driving east on U.S. 20 in Iowa, they have mile marker signs. Along one stretch, I was watching them, calculating in my mind what time we might get home, and the signs read 193, 194, 195, 209 (?!), 210, and increasing normally after that. Any thoughts on what was going on? Check at the end of the article for the explanation.
#2: Once again, traveling along U.S. 20 in Iowa, were the following signs:
What, if anything is off kilter about these? Once again, see below for the answer.
#3: Another sign I have seen is this one:
What state were we in when we saw this sign? See below.
#4: Our old Toyota had an outside temperature gauge. One day as it was warming up outside during a trip, I noticed the readings were increasing as follows: 41, 43, 45, 46, and finally 48. It wasn’t that the temp was rising so fast that some numbers were skipped, as over the following weeks the missing numbers never showed up. What was the reason? As before, see below.
And here are the explanations/answers.
#1: The mile markers skipped ahead 14 miles because originally the road, which normally goes east/west, had a jog north, continued east, then jogged back down south to roughly the same latitude as before. The current U.S. 20:
Before 2005, when traveling east the route turned north through Iowa Falls, sharing the road with U.S. 65, went east through Ackley, Austinville, Applington, and Parkersburg, where it turned south along with state highway 14 through Fern until it joined up with the current route just south of Fern. The old route was of course longer, and rather than renumber everything east (or west) of Fern, they just used the old numbers on the eastern section, leading to a skip from 195 to 209 near Fern.
#2: Normally east-west U.S. highways are even numbered, and north-south ones odd, so a U.S. 52 north is nonstandard. In fact, U.S. 52 goes diagonally from Portal, North Dakota, to Charleston, South Carolina, and the compass direction assigned to it changes according to the prevailing direction locally. In fact, U.S. 52 crosses more than half the other U.S. highways with numbers below 84.
#3: No, it’s not in Texas. This sign was seen in Missouri. It is near the intersection of U.S. 54 and U.S. 61 at the Bowling Green, MO, exit from U.S. 61. Mexico, MO is about 45 miles to the west and Louisiana, MO about 12 miles to the east.
#4: I deduced that the temperature gauge on the Toyota that model year initially reads the temp as an integer in Celsius, then converts to the nearest integer in Fahrenheit. Therefore, 5 C = 41 F, 6 C = 42.8 F (rounds to 43, skipping 42), 7 C = 44.6 F (rounds to 45, skipping 44), 8 C = 46.4 F (rounds to 46), etc. Our current Toyota doesn’t do this and uses the native Fahrenheit, as no numbers are skipped; either that, or it initially reads Celsius to better precision, then converts.
I have a dream of Firsting in all 50 states.
I have a map where I live First residue on each one I’ve done it in.
You might want to try firsting once before thinking of firsting everywhere.
I’ve missed Oregon and West Virginia. Probably ain’t gonna see them.
I like WV.
WV is pretty great.
I hear it’s almost heaven.
Written by the same guy who wrote “Afternoon Delight”.
Fun fact: When my late BIL was working in Japan repairing nuclear reactors, he could drink for free all evening in the karaoke bars because he could sing it without a Japanese accent.
WV is not for lovers.
I thought WV was for loving your sibling.
When I was a traveling man I hardly had time to look around. Now I often am a rider, it’s kind of fun to look out the side windows and see what’s going on in the neighborhood.
I’ve been looking at my phone less and less, and like you, when I’m a passenger I just look out the window. It’s interesting that I’ve had to re-discover something I did most of my life.
I’m not sure if I can look at the phone much in the car without getting car sick. A little bit I have to tap out at least until the next stop.
a traveling man
You were a Mason?
#1’s easy, you were obviously dozing off.
I want to die peacefully in my sleep like Grandpa, not screaming like the passengers in his car.
I was always too focused on looking out for cops to admire the scenery.
Perhaps if you tried driving sober.
#4 – I would have guessed that the outside temperature gauge was only polling the sensor every X minutes, and the actual outside temperature is changing faster than the polling interval.
But that would make sense.
“It passed the test. Ship It!”
wrong spot. oh well.
Customer: Your product doesn’t work right.
Eng: It works per its design.
Customer: Your design sucks; fix it.
This paraphrases an actual conversation with a real life customer that I got to sit in on. 😉
initially reads the temp as an integer in Celsius, then converts to the nearest integer in Fahrenheit.
As a former software engineer, I may have been guilty of causing similar problems in similar systems.
So, yeah, that’s totally possible to be the reason.
I kinda doubt that the system is reading ‘degrees Celsius’ from the sensor. The sensor is probably passing a voltage level through an ADC, yielding an 8-bit integer that the display system converts to the human-readable temperature, in Fahrenheit or Celsius or whatever.
Or maybe I’m out of date.
My thought is – you are correct about the initial sensor value, and they have it set up for most of world sales where they convert to degrees C. They then applied the most basic of software patches on top of that to convert C to F for the markets which don’t use C.
I have noticed that our 2013 Toyota does the same thing, and I came to the same conclusion. It wasn’t so much that certain numbers never appeared. It was that the temperature only went up or down by 2 degrees, with only a handful of exceptions.
Evil, I wasn’t necessarily confirming a hardware limitation as much as confirming that it absolutely smells like “a feature of the software” and failure in writing complete and correct requirements.
SW eng: “you told me what to do, not how to do it. what did you expect?”
Really I was just curious if there was a CANBUS thermometer that spit out a real human-readable temperature.
Define human readable.
I don’t know about CANBUS themometers, but the i2c ones I’ve dealt with do the “this resistance is this temp” conversion and spat a temp out on the wire.
To expand – I’ve never seen a sensor module which integrated the display element unless it was a retail product that was nothing but a thermometer. For sensors that feed computers, it just gave me the data and I had to figure out what to do with that information and where/how to display it. I had assumed the CANBUS modules were set up the same way since there is a blasted computer in the middle these days.
From what I have seen with CANBUS modules in the wild is that they will send both the raw voltage reading of the sensor, and in a separate code the human readable data in the module’s preferred units. Most of them in degC and pressure in Kpa.. etc. (euro/bosch modules on the land rovers) This makes it easy for the diagnostic person to see the temp directly and not have to convert everything, or rely on the diag tool to correctly scale every single sensor.
So if the UI person just reads the Celsius field.. it will have that limited resolution. If they read the voltage field and do the conversion in the display then they can have good resolution in either scale.
Highway 20 (East of I-35) is literally one of my least favorite roads anywhere – out son attended Wartburg so many miles on that leg. I believe the 20 expansion went on for decades so perhaps explains the crazy mile markers.
Highway 20 in Idaho is much the same. Pretty empty. You can haul ass though because it’s in the middle of nowhere.
Unintended consequences
The Iran war is giving fresh life to Somali pirates who prey on commercial ships laden with fuel and goods – a threat that had lain dormant for years.
Earlier this week, a group of pirates seized a cargo ship off the coast of Somalia – at least the fifth such attack since April, according to Windward, a global maritime intelligence firm. Windward concluded that the pirates are likely resurgent in part because nations have shifted naval resources to the Middle East because of the war.
In addition to the hit this week, Somali pirates have seized at least three tankers carrying oil and fertilizer – two commodities that have seen the highest price spikes due to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. In July, pirates seized a ship carrying chemicals off the coast of Yemen. The seized tankers are now being held off the coast of Somalia and dozens of crew members are hostages.
Pirates gotta eat.
How the hell does that happen? Those ships should have snipers aimed outwards and shooting anything that moves if they are traveling anywhere near that shithole.
Having armed security aboard commercial cargo ships is an enormous pain in the ass under international maritime law.
That’s completely nuts.
Then we really should use some gunboat diplomacy to change the minds of other countries about armed merchantmen.
Your average mercantile vessel should be able to annihilate any shithole country pirate flotilla.
Yes, yes it is.
Much of the issue, as I understand it, is that sovereign nations don’t want armed men on foreign-flag vessels showing up in their ports. I understand this objection, but I also suggest that the people so worried should take their objection, fold it into a mass of sharp corners, and insert it in whatever orifice they’d enjoy the least.
Oddly enough, if you want to own a modern handgun in England, being involved in maritime security is an acceptable reason.
Alsotoo, I have an acquaintance who is a first mate in the merchant marine, and is required to be proficient with an M14, Mossberg pump and Beretta 9mm.
The United States Merchant Marine is a wartime auxiliary of the U.S. Navy, and retains some of the U.S. Navy training and procedures. It’s cool that your friend gets some small arms training as part of his duties, but I’d bet you a mid-priced bottle of booze that he’s never gone armed at sea while aboard a commercial vessel.
Interesting about the Brits though. I didn’t know that was a carve-out under their law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIPDJIAIpG4
DAY IN THE LIFE MARITIME SECURITY
ES, because he is an officer, and works specifically for US Sealift, he goes armed at all times on a vessel.
Nobody tell them the money is better pirating from Minnesota voters.
Some of that Somali fraud money was going to Al Shabaab. In turn some of that money that went to them is probably used to fund piracy. As Obama said, government is just things that we all do together. So in a way, all US taxpayers robbed those boats. As a community.
A White House official said the U.S. is the largest contributor to Somalia’s security and suggested it is “false” to “blame localized piracy attacks on recent regional conflicts with Iran.”
“The United States maintains robust, highly capable maritime security forces in the region that are fully equipped to protect critical shipping lanes, including oil transport, while simultaneously addressing broader regional threats,” the official said.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Honest.
We can walk and thread properly at the same time, too.
Yet somehow they don’t actually protect critical shipping lanes.
So, do you stop when you see these things? And you obviously call doing this Wizzing, right?
So, you stop and take a Wizz?
Right now Shpip’s eye is twitching
Hopefully he didn’t get in the way of The Wizz!
Nobody Beats the Wizz
There it is.
Tell me you’re from the tri-state area without telling me you’re from the tri-state area…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc0LZGOoFSA
Just got back from the doctor, so couldn’t answer right away.
I didn’t stop to take the picture — I remembered it and took the picture from Google Maps street view 🙂
Spending like a drunken Republican
You could pin the US’s staggering $40tn in government debt to Donald Trump’s Keystone Cops-style governance. Tariffs he sold as a new source of revenue were struck down by the supreme court, forcing the government to return tens of billions of dollars to importers. Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), ostensibly created to stop wasteful government spending, decimated federal programs and probably killed millions of children, but did nothing to close the budget deficit. The burst of inflation following Trump’s misguided adventure in Iran sharply raised the cost of serving the government’s obligations.
——-
What remained unsaid, over nearly half a century worth of tax cuts, was that the ultimate goal of the plan was not really to cure the “extravagance” and fix the government’s finances. It was, instead, to cement the Republicans’ hold on power.
Despite Republicans’ sloganeering, their tax cuts never “paid for themselves” by generating a burst of economic growth. Instead, they borrowed the money to keep up spending. That invariably left Democrats in a budgetary mess to clean up every time they came into office.
Bruce Bartlett, a former Republican policy adviser who worked on a precursor to Reagan’s 1981 tax cut plan, explained the strategy thus: “It’s all part of Republican plan going on for quite a long time to tie the hands of Democratic presidents.” The huge tax cuts in Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will “make sure the next Democratic president is a complete and total failure”.
Those dastardly bastards, intentionally sabotaging the Democrats’ social welfare paradise.
Yeah, just ignore the spending side of things.
Names and addresses. Then after that, find me a reason I should care.
“Emergency” covid spending, or the 2008 bump, had nothing to do with it.
Everything was going great until the most recent Republican administration.
Yes, Trump sucks on the debt. So has every other president. Whoever wrote those first three sentences belongs in an asylum.
Clinton rode the peace dividend to popularity.
Every president after that drove up the debt with each subsequent president saying: here, hold my beer.
The debt increased every year of Clinton’s administration, as well.
I didn’t say he rode the peace dividend to prosperity.
Because we had zero debt when he took office?
What a maroon. I do appreciate them leading with that so I can stop reading immediately and go on with my day, confident that I am missing nothing of value.
Paul Krugman and other court jesters such as himself refused to admit there was ANY relation to government spending until well into Covid. For like a decade and a half they said the wackiest stupidest shit like inflation was a thing of the past and that the old rules no longer applied.
Obama pretended to care about the debt when George the Lesser was in power. Didn’t last a day into office. And from that point forward until 2024 the left didn’t give one single fuck about the debt. Even during Trump 1.0.
You still see plenty of leftie foot soldier hack types who haven’t gotten the memo that the debt is a talking point again and they can blame it on Trump. They still operate under the old delusion that government can spend limitlessly with no real consequences, but we still need to tax the rich because fuck the rich. And the rich are obviously anyone that makes more money than they do.
As one antifa type put it to me online, it’s about social hygiene.
Don’t know who wrote this pile of slop, but I’m fairly certain if I go back far enough I can find them ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth over Republican induced “austerity” under Obama.
Regarding mile markers, I’ve seen mile 68.99 and 419.99 in some states. It’s to prevent people from stealing the mile 69 and mile 420 signs.
A lot of Route 666 (https://highways.dot.gov/highway-history/general-highway-history/us-666-beast-highway) signs ended up on southwestern dorm room walls, before the killjoys in the FHA changed the highway designation…
And don’t get me started on the signs for the Bong Recreational Area in Wisconsin . . .
I’ve been past there. Also Big Bone Lick in Kentucky.
I stopped reading at that point.
The 420 mile marker on US 12 in Washington is a sticker wrapped around a 6 or 8” hunk of pipe filled with concrete.
same goes for I75 Exit 69 Big Beaver in Michigan – welded to the posts because too many dudebros stealing it.
https://live.staticflickr.com/1/1251385_b699b838cf_b.jpg
What if the temperature readings are dictated by an arbitrarily “meaningful” change in the sensor voltage? It’s not as if your car needs to track the outside air temp in 100ths of a degree (C or F).
It has been a very long time since I worked at the sensor level, but from past experience:
1) An analog sensor puts out an analog signal that correlates to the ratio of the sensed temperature relative to the full range of the device. It doesn’t compute an actual temperature value. The device reading the analog sensor scales and maps the analog signal the units that will be displayed to the user.
2) A digital sensor puts out a digital value on a serial bus of some sort (I can’t remember seeing a parallel bus other that a printer cable in the last 50 years). The manufacturer of the device will publish the spec that says how to interpret digit value. Most likely, this is just a digitized value of the analog value that would have been transmitted in the past. So again, the device reading the digital sensor scales and maps the digital signal the units that will be displayed to the user.
3) A smart digital sensor will do the scaling and mapping internally, and the transmit a digital value that represent the scaled/mapped temperature. If this is transmitting on a shared bus (like CANBUS) the transmitted value is going to be a complex structure that provides data source, data parameter, and data value formatted to fit into the structure. The device reading the data needs to unpack the structure, extract the data value, and then format if for the display device.
Nothing is simple, and modern engineer continue to make things worse. I know, cause I are one.
Put it on the CANbus they said. It’ll be awesome they said. It will save us money they said.
.
.
.
What they didn’t say is that one faulty sensor can fuck up the entire CANbus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr54g6k1E80
I knew what that link was before I opened it up.
I love that video.
I used to keep a photo of the Challenger at my desk with a caption: Decisions have consequences.
CANBUS was designed to F over the end user is what I have determined.
Since run time equalls money, Industrial bus networks are much more fault tolerant.
Here’s an interesting take over at Brownstone.
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-did-fauci-mean-by-game-on/
tl;dr: Fauci’s Plan A was to cover up the Wuhan leak by passing it of as a bad flu season. When the sequence of COVID got out, he moved to Plan B: Become the hero by giving everyone the vax. The lockdowns were needed to prevent natural immunity and virus mutations so the vax would work when it was ready. Which didn’t pan out because the spread was faster than he thought, and mutations already appeared as soon as the vax came out.
Milepost jumps may be due to straightening/shortening of a road.
Yup, see answers at the bottom.
Fauci’s Plan A was to cover up the Wuhan leak by passing it of as a bad flu season.
My assumption, based on the global shrieking panic of the initial response, was Big Global Health knew goddam good and well it was a lab leak from day one.
The emails we got way back at the time pretty much confirmed this.
I am ashamed of the scientific community for this one.
Ethics is *huge* in the research community.
And they have signed off on this fraud, publishing several entirely political papers claiming there is no evidence for the lab leak and that it is a scientific certainty that it came from the wet market. The evidence the cite is… questionable at best.
Having been through a PhD program in the field, the idea that *anyone* would promulgate false findings is absolutely stunning. This is more shocking than the Beatles selling out and their songs becoming a Nike ad.
To be fair, Lennon and McCartney lost ownership of their song catalog late in the band’s run. At one point it was owned by Michael Jackson and due to his massive debt essentially controlled by Sony.
That’s my take, too, Brooks. They knew a bioweapon had escaped containment.
It turned out to be a bioweapon that was only a little worse than a bad flu, but they didn’t know that until a little later.
Seattle times writer turns in article about two young female athletes who dont want to compete with biological males.
Predictably, they decline to run it.
Not the first time.
So he quit.
https://mattycee.substack.com/p/i-was-a-sports-columnist-at-the-seattle?
“To be honest, I’m scared shitless right now. I have no idea how the next few months or years are going to play out. But that fear beats the indignity of being muzzled.”
Being a reporter is roughly tge same pay scale as grocery store stocker. So that person can find other meaningful employment.
Stocker > Reporter in practical value
Too local news – the beavers are attacking!
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/3rd-beaver-attack-maryland-prompts-closures-seneca-creek-state-park
I grew up on Berryville Road.
I knew about the Mexico/Louisiana one. I haven’t been there personally, but I have family in Louisiana MO.
I’ve noticed that my digital bathroom scale reads out funny. There are certain numbers it’ll never hit, and then it’ll vary between two non-adjacent numbers, skipping over some numbers I know it’ll hit, while it’s settling out. I’ve always been curious, but not curious enough to take it apart.
Probably an averaging window filter settling out
It turned out to be a bioweapon that was only a little worse than a bad flu
oops. Back to the drawing board.
Patent office cartoon: man leaning out window with ray gun. “Death ray!? Hell, it doesn’t even slow them down “
That was awesome, Plinker.
I drove Colorado and back last week for work. On the back of a tractor trailer was:
“If you hate trucks, just stop buying things” I chuckled a bit.
A couple hours later and west of Missoula on I 90, three stupid truckers played 1 mph drag race as they swerved all over the lanes because the road wasn’t straight.
Blame their fleet operations.
I couldn’t imagine driving a governed truck.
Some of the older ones were set at 62.
Most of the new ones are set at 68.
I bumper sticker had to have been on an owner operators rig. Bet he was speeding.
Just think of the payback when gas is $12/gal
Regulators maintain that the more efficient tires will eventually save drivers at the pump by making their tires more fuel efficient and leading to better gas mileage. “The additional cost of meeting the minimum standards is low: only a few dollars per tire, which is fully paid back by fuel savings in a matter of months,” Reilly explained.
The regulation received broad support from tire manufacturers, notably from Michelin and Bridgestone, who testified during the rulemaking. The measure was also backed by Discount Tire, the leading tire retailer in California.
If those guys like it, it has to be a good idea. They should require tires to be inflated to 55psi.