Monday
Adventure:
Not many adventures in tech outside of work this go around.
Today’s Awesome:
Traffic is tough. It’s one of the awful things about living in a city. The bigger the worse. How can folks fix it? We’ll look at a handful of technical innovations, but first of all, there are a bunch of situations around planning well.
Multimodal streets
Congestion pricing (that one sounds pretty controversial)
No street parking.
More transit options (buses, subways, etc.)
More pedestrian infrastructure.
For Your Consideration:
Tuesday
Adventure:
Alright, I did do a spot of working out via slashing Zombie Knights! We’re back at that!
Today’s Awesome:
Self-driving cars. There. I said it. In general, a fundamental problem is reaction times. Everybody starting and stopping at the time. A solution? Cars that coordinate. Is this fancy trains that can go right up to your doorstep?
For Your Consideration:
Wednesday
Adventure:
I did take the time to just take in a really cool experience in VR. An immersive, short video called “Lost” based on the Iron Giant. Done right, these things are pretty magical.
Today’s Awesome:
One of my favorite ways to end traffic is to not need a car at all. What if everything you needed was in walking distance? What is a large city was just a dense pack of a thousand villages? Enter mixed use development.
For Your Consideration:
Thursday
Today’s Awesome:
We gotta talk about tunnels. Can they end traffic jams? That’s part of the promise of The Boring Company, from Elon Musk. Fun to note that there was already a traffic jam in one of his tunnels. Here is a video on where those tunnels stand.
What I really liked about the video is that, it’s much less about the technology of boring tunnels and more about bureaucracy slowing things down. Environmental reviews, permits, etc. Outside the U.S., tunnel costs are cut in half.
For Your Consideration:
Friday
Today’s Awesome:
And flying cars? Will those fix traffic? Maybe. And maybe if they’re autonomous, they’ll combine the best of autonomous car’s speed and safety with fast voyages. But, dang, it sounds really scary to have just a ton of things flying around everywhere.
For Your Consideration:
Saturday
Today’s Awesome:
I’m hoping that work-from-home trends continue where possible. And apparently, it has already helped with traffic.
For Your Consideration:
Sunday
Adventure:
We did a Western shooter!
Today’s Awesome:
All of this here is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to dive way, way down, check out this Texas A&M website!
For Your Consideration:
Outro:
My fitness results this week were:
191.3, 190.3, 189.7, 189.7, 189.2, 188.6, 190.8.
That’s down more than a pound compared to last Sunday at 192!
The secret to losing weight so regularly this week? Actually. Doing. The. Diet.
I kept very close to my Weight Watchers plan. No splurge/cheat days. Only twice did I go over, and only by a little bit. I didn’t run out of all the weekly points like I have done every week for, oh, I don’t know, SIX MONTHS.
My hope is that, if I see regular progress, just a little bit every day, or every other day, I’ll keep losing a pound or half a pound a week and make it to another level.
It’s amazing what a diet can do when you stick with it. I don’t know where the resolve came from this week. Maybe I just got lucky, or finally fed up enough that the prospect of losing the weight feels better than a cheeseburger. Given my track record, that’s probably not a reliable setup, so I’ll need to get some safeguards in place for when things get tough.