I spend time every day looking at GOES images and animations. This is something I have not seen before but I am going to start watching closer. I never really appreciated just how interesting and dynamic the atmosphere was until I started looking loser. To just watch the clouds go by is nice but I really enjoy seeing the recurring patterns and trying to find a reason (mostly landscape but a few man made things as well).
As a slightly older person (mid 50s) who just started wearing glasses I will say that multi focal lenses have not been very important driving. I am mostly looking outside the car and can read the dash fine (with my prescription). I actually have more trouble using a laptop and referring to something written or closer than the laptop screen.
My eye doctor asked, during my last visit, if I wanted a prescription for reading glasses and then asked if I wanted them to read close up (book, phone, etc) or for a laptop.
So, to make a guess at an answer to your question: Maybe different people have different needs.
ZeroGPT, declared the U.S. Constitution to be AI-written;
I had no idea. This was before Babbage and Lovelace even. To work all that out on paper must have been a tremendous undertaking and it still turned out pretty good.
Yes, I would like to see a phone that is almost nothing but a phone and the ability to lock unused feature from easy access. My mother cannot use a smart phone (the all screen and no buttons is too much). The dumb phone she has is almost too much. She keeps pushing the wrong buttons and ending up with an unusable web browser, camera mode, or some other state that keeps her from making the phone call she would like to make.
This one has big buttons and their own OS. [1] No idea how good it is. Not many reviews. T9 texting would be painful. All the good phones that slide open and have a full qwerty keyboard are gone AFAIK. My favorite was the SideKick II. Good phones will never make a come-back as the distraction is what they want people to have. That and the ability to run tracking software.
If she does not leave the house much a landline phone with big buttons might be easier if voice calls are an option along with a big pad of paper with names and numbers.
Trump may add another notch to his belt on Tuesday in Texas, when Republicans will go to the polls in the runoff of the U.S. Senate primary between incumbent John Cornyn and state attorney general Ken Paxton, whom Trump just endorsed.
The Democrats only need to rerun the opposing ads for who ever wins the primary and say "this is what his own party says about him". Cornyn and Patxton are not being very nice to each other right now.
First I would question why anyone has to drive 20 miles to reach basic needs like grocery stores and employers. Isn’t that already a failure of urban and suburban planning?
I live in central TX and until recently it has been fairly rural. It is now very suburban and it is very common to have to drive 20 miles or so for groceries. There are also lots of traffic lights. For most there is almost no practical way to get to any consumer business on foot and no public transport. Twenty years ago it was "living in the country" and travailing for anything was just part of the deal to live here. It is about the same but with the added joys of traffic, less privacy, and higher taxes.
Your area was rural very recently. Obviously in rural areas people are driving, but the fact that your area developed recently means they had the luxury of hindsight and a clean slate. The fact that you can’t walk or bike to stuff was an active choice, not an unforeseen inevitability.
They could have chosen to build out developments where even people in single family homes could reach some or all of their daily destinations without vehicles.
The fact that it recently urbanized means they have even less of an excuse than other parts of the country that built car-focused infrastructure for the first time as a mid-century project that was never done before.
Your town is like the millennial who now should know better not to post funny drunk pictures on Facebook or any other social media, but back in 2008 nobody knew what social media would become.
I.e., I fully understand and accept that undoing a bunch of 1950s-1970s infrastructure and property lines is impractical. When highways were first built through towns we didn’t know the impact back then. But we do know that now and your local planners ignored those lessons when they more recently developed your area.
Your municipality doesn’t really have an excuse. They already had the knowledge available of the negative impacts of car-centric development. They already have the case studies of the Netherlands building out car-focused suburbs in the 70s and then reversing and correcting that pattern. They just didn’t have the imagination to go look, they just figured it’s fine to build exactly like everyone else and toss up yet another big box store parking lot.
They could have done things like making sure split up farm parcels developed into neighborhoods follow a consistent grid, implement traffic calming and other measures that make walking and biking attractive, avoiding stroads by separating the use cases of streets and roads and designing accordingly, and zoning new development to make sure storefronts put parking lots in the back instead of in front where they lengthen walking distances.
There are a number of Google Maps examples of suburbs where people live less than a half a mile from grocery stores but the legal walking distance without cutting through private property or winding through non-grid subdevelopments takes multiple uncomfortable miles that include crossing multi-lane high-speed limit roads.
Not going to disagree with your post. A little foresight would have been nice. Most of the development though is in the county outside any municipality and the counties do not have much authority for zoning or really anything like that.
I live in central TX and until recently it has been fairly rural. It is now very suburban and it is very common to have to drive 20 miles or so for groceries.
That makes no sense. How far did you have to drive for groceries before your area became "very suburban?" If you have to drive 20 miles for groceries, then you're not in the suburbs, you're still very rural.
In any case, if you don't like it in the suburbs, move. I'm sure there's at least one other family in the city who'd love to swap places with you. At least they would if they weren't required, likely unnecessarily, to commute to work every weekday.
The houses came first. The infrastructure is starting to catch up. The closest stores were still about twenty miles (nearest town).
In any case, if you don't like it in the suburbs, move.
Sure, but I am being asked to make (and pay for) changes that I did not ask for (and am not fond of). I know it is all just part of "the way things are" and I am not expecting anything to change back.
I have mixed feelings about this. I would really like to see health active space activity. On the other hand I have been less and less impressed with Musk. There are other players in the sector but they have little further to go and if this launch fails it might dampen the enthusiasm for the industry.
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/index.php?src=nav
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