This crash test is a 1959 bel-air vs. a 2009 malibu. The most amazing thing about this to me is how much more the bel-air weighs. It shows you how much safer vehicles are today, yet the speed limits are the same!?

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Reading an article about reducing the mutations in virus I found this interesting fact:
"As the viruses reassemble themselves, they can mix and match segments. Out will come virus particles with segment one from the first virus and segments two through eight from the second virus. Or segments one and two from the first virus and segments three through eight from the second. There are 256 possibilities."

The new imagery for Nome Alaska is covered by a large cloud bank. I know the imagery for this area used to be half way decent, but now you can see anything.
A perfect time to use the historical imagery tool to view the old image.

For about 5 years I have trying to find a piece of software that allows me to check VHF/UHF propagation in google earth/maps. At last I have found an applet here. It is actually made for panoramic viewing, but works very will for line of sight communication.

TIME magazine has a number of interesting geographic polls. They can be found here. For some reason Iowa seems to always go against the grain.

Why is this State 21 billion dollars in the red? People like this cant help.

Just finished reading Magnificent Desolation by Buzz Aldrin. For me the book was a look into the NASA program. What they are good at and what they are not good at. It makes you realize NASA needs more public relations and marketing people.

Using a program that logs gps coordinates with WiFi information I have been working on a map of current wireless sites in the area. You can find it here. The majority of the coding cant be appreciated since it has to do with parsing a writing the kml and updating the database. Nonetheless it is pretty cool. I hope to add more data as I drive around in the future.

Went up mount Mansfield about a week ago. We climbed the Hells brook path. You know youre in northern Vt when you climb about 100 yards before you see people smoking something questionable. We hiked about 2700 feet in about 2 hours. If you include up and down the ridgeline at the top it works out to about 20-25 feet per minute. It was quite cold at the top prolly about 40-45, but with a 40 mph wind you needed a windbreaker. There were a few bits of snow at the top. A week later I had climbed Pitchoff mountain in the Adirondacks an had been able to see quite a bit of snow in the high peaks. At the top of Mansfield I met the summit ranger, who was from CT interestingly enough. I took some deepzoom super high resolution images which I have on the new page here.
Here are some pics:

"He noticed that if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as the third largest, and so on. In other words, the population of a city is, to a good approximation, inversely proportional to its rank."..... Read on