I did this for a few months. I had a 40-mile commute that typically took 90-100 minutes outbound and 2 hours back. It wasn’t so bad on the days when I could catch the train halfway there, but usually the lot was full by the time I arrived.
It was horrible, and I moved.
Megacommuters: 600,000 in U.S. Travel 90 Minutes and 50 Miles to Work, and 10.8 Million Travel an Hour Each Way, Census Bureau Reports – American Community Survey (ACS)
After a failed attempt yesterday, I was even more determined to try to spot comet Pan-STARRS tonight when it would appear near the moon. Naturally, the morning was fogged in, and the fog bank remained on the western horizon all day. I looked on Google Earth for a nearby hill with a western view and public access, and I found Fred Hesse, Jr. Park in Rancho Palos Verdes.
I arrived just minutes before sunset, and found thirty or so people lined up along the western edge of the hill with telescopes, binoculars, and cameras on tripods. It reminded me a lot of the eclipse I watched last May (also in Palos Verdes, though at a different park).
Hesse Park has a clear view to the west and southwest, with open space below, then houses, then the tops of the clouds. (I’m not sure what’s usually visible below the cloud layer). Off to the southwest you can see the northwestern section of Catalina Island. To the north you can see Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains. Way off to the northwest you can see some of the channel islands.
You’ve got to love this headline: Giant goat-cheese fire closes Norwegian roadway for six days. Apparently, brunost burns really well, and when a truck carrying it caught fire in a tunnel, responders were unable to get to it for days.
(Incidentally, the stuff is also really good. My family discovered it on a vacation to Disney World, of all places, where they served it in the smorgasbord at the Norwegian restaurant in Epcot.)
This is even weirder than the truck full of meat that caught fire on the 5 near Camp Pendleton a few years back, blocking the entire freeway in an area with no alternate routes for most of the day and stranding all of the Orange County & Los Angeles people trying to get to the first day of Comic-Con.
I’m going to have to start using “flaming goat cheese on a truck!” as a pseudo-curse.
I walked out to get the laundry tonight, looked up and saw the moon and Jupiter practically next to each other. I took a quick shot with the phone, then went back in to get a better camera. (Unfortunately, the best camera I have is in the shop right now.) The phone picture is at upper left, the camera picture at lower right.
Nothing makes you appreciate how bright the moon really is like trying to avoid overexposing it without making the second brightest planet disappear.
A few interesting links that I’ve been meaning to post for a while now.
Geography and History
Using and Building the Internet
Comics
If your political position is worth defending, it’s worth taking 5 minutes to check your facts before you post. Your argument will be stronger for it, and you’ll look like less of an idiot for spreading misrepresentations, satire presented as fact, or outright falsehoods.
Allergic Living reports on a peanut allergy treatment study that shows a great deal of promise. Called sublingual immunotherapy, or SLIT, it’s surprisingly simple: Introduce a small amount of peanut protein in drops beneath the tongue each day, slowly ramping it up over time.
After 44 weeks of the daily doses, 70 percent of those getting the peanut powder could tolerate at least 10 times more peanut in an oral food challenge before showing symptoms than they could have at the outset of the study. In a follow-up challenge at 68 weeks, they could tolerate about twice as much again.
It’s a similar premise to allergy shots, which work well for airborne allergens but not for food. And while I’m creeped out by the idea of deliberately ingesting something that I’m used to avoiding because it could kill me (this has to be done under medical supervision!), like so many other things it’s all about dosage. It makes sense that it could work.
The main drawback is that 30% of the participants didn’t show improvement, though the people running the study suspect that it’s a matter of finding the right dosage for each patient.
The article mentions another problem being that the amount tolerated is relatively small: they could eat the equivalent of two peanuts before experiencing allergy symptoms.
I say: Two peanuts? Are you kidding me? I would LOVE to be able to safely eat that much!
So it’s not enough to eat Thai food or PBJ. It would mean I can stop worrying so much about cross-contamination! I’d still carry my epi-pen around, but I’d feel a lot safer about, say, drinking a milkshake at a restaurant that also serves peanut butter shakes, or eating an eggroll at a place that also has kung pao, or eating a chocolate chip cookie that’s been stored on the same shelf as the peanut butter cookies.
One question I do have is how effective it is at reducing sensitivity to similar allergens. Would taking the peanut treatment help someone tolerate legumes better, or are they different enough to require a separate course of treatment?
