Society

I'm listening to a radio commercial about the shuttle bus to Newark Airport. They want to claim 184 passenger miles per gallon. My minivan is not particularly fuel efficient, getting about 22-23 miles per gallon (note the missing "passenger" qualifier). On short trips around town, like a run out to Home Depot, I'm the only one in the car and that becomes 22 passenger miles per gallon.

The April 24, 2010 issue of Science News has an interesting article entitled "Gambling on Experience" which reports on research into how we (people) guestimate risk in real life. I call it interesting both because it is an interesting social question, but also because of a recent dialogue about the topic of cell phones and brain cancer risk reported in a popular magazine.

Missouri is my home state.  I grew up in what was then a rural area south of St. Louis, in Arnold.  Seeing the stars at night was no big deal, and something I took for granted. Arnold can longer be considered rural and in the intervening 40 years has gone through the typical suburban sprawl growth pattern along with major increases in bad night-time lighting.  During our family visit last summer (2009), it was apparent that the skies are only slightly better than here in Brooklyn, NY despite the lower population density of Arnold.  I'll come back to that in a minute.