Speed limits and other things

Just home from work on the first day of my week. My week runs from Tuesday through Saturday. The Interstate was so wide open tonight I decided to turn down the dial a bit and set the cruise on 60. I only had one anxious moment when a car was over taking me in the left lane and a tractor trailer was pacing him/her in the right lane and didn’t appear to be slowing enough to miss me. But miss me he/she did.

From that point on I had no issues. I like the lower speed because I am aware of more reaction latitude. I feel I have a lot more ability to avoid possible close encounters at 60 than I do at 70. Of course when I drive 70 I am still passed by what would seem to be 75 percent of the vehicles on the road. Possibly more. But I sure like being able to stay in the right lane and not overtake anyone. I did speed up to 65 for perhaps 10 miles or so, but when I realized the traffic was just not there I dropped back. There is always an idiot or two that wants to make an impression on you that you are going too slow. But if you haven’t noticed there are no minimum speed limits posted any more.

I did have a Virginia State Trooper tell me that if a driver is impeding traffic at any speed they can be written a ticket. I have also looked extensively on the Internet for minimum speed limits and found nothing. I did find this following blurb at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dr-gridlock/2010/10/vdot_recommends_higher_speed_l.html :

The old 55 mpg as the "most fuel efficient speed" is a myth. It was simply based on averages. The most fuel efficient speed is when the car is stays at 2000 rpm in its top gear. So, it depends on the car, the driver, and the conditions.

So at what speed is my truck when the tach is sitting on 2K? I don’t know, but I’ll know tomorrow on my way to work. I would like to put in a set of fuel economy gauges, or at least a vacuum gauge. The less vacuum your engine pulls the less fuel it is using.

I am getting between 18 and 20 mpg driving at or near 70. Would really like to kick that up some. Be nice to make three complete round trips to work on 15 gallons of gas. I can normally make about 5 ½ trips one way as it is. Can’t quite make that last leg of three round trips.

Work was busy tonight until about 9:30 when it seemed like the phones became very quiet. By 10 they had pretty much stopped ringing. I think I answered one phone call the last hour and it was very short. Sometimes when it gets real quiet I’ll read a book or launch a tool we have called Slingbox. Slingbox allows us to look at the head ends where our CATV signal is distributed. I don’t know how many head ends we have, perhaps hundreds, but we can only “see” perhaps 20 of them. And not all 20 are viewable at our level of permissions. But we do have a number we can look at. The purpose of the tool is to look at the head end channels to see how the channels look and compare that with what a customer is describing their picture looks like at their TV. Helps in making decisions on where problems lie.

I launched Slingbox about 9:30 or so tonight and caught part of a History Channel presentation on the scientific plausibility of the parting of the Red (or Reed) Sea as told in the Bible. The program was titled “Proving God.” I watched a few minutes of it and found it to be pretty much the same rhetoric as most apologetic processes about the validity of the Bible. Somehow a lot of people who won’t give up their literalist views of the Bible can feel better if scientific research and processes claim to provide substantiation for events described in the Bible. Like if the scientist can prove it was possible then it might have, or surely did happen.

But the serious error in all that is trying to get the Bible to be a scientific or historical document. It is neither. The Bible is a book about a spiritual relationship between creatures and the creator. To make it anything else is blasphemous. It was not inspired or written to record historical events and sequences. Nor was it meant to be guidelines for science. Scientific research and thought did not appear until a book written in 1021 AD by a Muslim named Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham.

http://www.firstscientist.net/ has this to say about him: “A devout Muslim, Ibn al-Haitham believed that human beings are flawed and only God is perfect. To discover the truth about nature, Ibn a-Haitham reasoned, one had to eliminate human opinion and allow the universe to speak for itself through physical experiments. "The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them," the first scientist wrote, "but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration."

I watched the program a few minutes and switched to a senatorial caucus on child abuse. More interesting, and in my thinking, more important in today’s world than proving creation. Proving creation is superfluous at any rate. We are here, and our getting here isn’t nearly as important as what we are going to do while we are here.

On a more personal note our kitchen is nearly done. I believe I purchased the very last piece of hardware today which I will install sometime after taking a nap of hopefully about 8 hours. If I can be up in 8 hours it will only be 9:45 am and I may be able to accomplish something. We are expecting the final piece of our counter top tomorrow. We had all of it together and the sink in place when we discovered the stove would not go back into the gap. Then we found our counter top provider had cut the return on the top one half inch longer than we had asked for it to be. We simply could not squeeze the range into the gap, so our provider is re-cutting it. I am presuming it will be free. I will certainly ask for it to be if it isn’t.

This project turned out to be not too expensive or time consuming, but by being out of work and income for 5 months it stretched the project by at least that long. It looks wonderful and the chief, make that the only, cook is very pleased with it. And that is what really counts.

If my perusing and out loud thinking cause you consternation please don’t fret. I am sure there are more noble and erudite things to read.

Blessings.