This information is too interesting not to share, especially with Tesla rolling out the AutoPilot beta software to its cars.

The Factors That Cause Car Crashes and Traffic Accidents. What Are The Causes Of Car Crashes and Traffic Accidents

Source: The Factors That Cause Car Crashes and Traffic Accidents

I haven’t been there, but isn’t it already awfully hot? Isn’t that partly why everyone’s so cranky over there?

Areas of the Persian Gulf could be hit by waves of heat and humidity so severe that simply being outside for several hours could threaten human life, a study says.

Source: ‘Intolerable’ Heat May Hit the Middle East by the End of the Century

OpenStreetMap is in the upper left. Google, Bing, and MapQuest are all represented by comparison.

Here’s the link to the above map so you can compare for yourself! Who knows, by the time you check it out, Google may have caught up! :)

By the way, I’m the one who first modified the McCaslin DDI interchange on OSM. It has subsequently been refined by others.

Fascinating; I did not know this:

Billions of years ago, the moon rotated around its axis faster than it does today. But early in the moon’s history, the drag of Earth’s gravity caused the moon’s rotation to slow to what appears to be a halt from an Earth perspective. One hemisphere of the moon always faces the Earth, and the other always faces away, with Earth’s gravity acting as a tether. In other words, the moon revolves once around the Earth in the same time it takes to rotate on its own axis—a phenomenon known as tidal locking. Because of this, in 1959, although humankind had been staring up at the moon for our entire existence, we had only ever seen about half of the moon’s surface. Owing to various view angles from different parts of the Earth, the most ambitious jet-setting astronomer could have seen a maximum of 59 percent of the surface of our planetary companion. The other 41 percent was a complete mystery, hence the phrase “the dark side of the moon.”

Westminster led the metro area for the second month with a 13.8 percent gain in average rents.

Source: Average metro Denver apartment rent drops as downtown vacancies rise - The Denver Post

Okay, folks, here’s what it boils down to (pun intended): the next few decades will see more intense and frequent droughts, flooding, crop failures, food insecurity, mass migrations (Europe’s current refugee “crisis” is mild by comparison), severe weather, and conflicts over ever-dwindling natural resources as our home planet’s climate change forcibly changes our behaviors. Humans generally suck at nonviolent conflict resolution, so there will probably be much violence. The world will be divided between the nations as “haves” and “have-nots” even more so than today as our humanitarian relief effort resources are reallocated to deal with domestic crises. There is no avoiding it at this point, so let’s just accept it and try not to _completely _annihilate each other in the process, okay?

I can’t wait! I watched it twice.

So we started watching the film adaptation of Into the Woods. Before we could finish, we read this article, both poignant and amusing.

As much as I love Meryl, I’m never going to buy her records, and I haven’t been this uncomfortable watching her in a film since, what do you know, Mama Mia! If we’re living in any sort of movie musical cinema revival, it’s time to start asking ourselves what we sacrificed to get there.

Source: ‘Into the Woods’ and the Dumbing Down of the Movie Musical | David Toussaint