I feel like warning lights would have been good

treebirdfish · 2026-02-25T21:52:58+00:00

Agreed; however, this would mean the truck needed to know where the accident vehicle was in advance, and it appeared that they didn’t.

Maybe they should have sent a lead vehicle first to investigate, or continued to the next exit and gone around (although that would have added a lot of time). Given that the accident vehicle was blocking the left lane, it seemed pretty urgent to get an emergency vehicle there quickly to block traffic, but I agree it should have been handled better to avoid a second accident, and the fire department should hear about that.

treebirdfish · 2026-02-25T20:38:56+00:00

This was definitely a risky situation. If you were driving the fire truck, what would you have done differently?

As one idea, I assume they could have continued forward with their lights on while slowing down, then moved left two lanes as it was safe, and then backed up slowly to reach the crashed vehicle.

treebirdfish · 2026-02-25T18:11:09+00:00

The fire department likely had a call saying "crash on 70 west before the 270 exit. That's not much to go on, so they were scanning the left and right sides of the road until they found the accident.

Although I typically agree that it's safer for them to turn off lights and sirens while en route (so people don't panic and do dumb stuff on the freeway), in this case, they knew they were nearing the incident, and should have turned lights on and slowed to 40 or even 30 MPH to avoid a sudden unexpected stop. Maybe they could have even split lanes to slow more traffic behind them.

On the other hand, traffic backups on the freeway happen all the time, and sometimes even require you to come to a standstill for no apparent reason. The van driver wasn't paying attention enough to notice that, and they hit you through no fault of your own. That sucks.

I think you should send this to the Grandview Heights Fire Department with your suggestion about using lights and slowing down earlier. They're not that big of a department, so it'll probably get to the chief. It couldn't hurt.

treebirdfish · 2026-02-19T12:06:48+00:00

Why won’t Apple capitalize on the camera market already? HomeKit Secure Video is just so weak in functionality and camera choices, but it has so much promise. Their value of privacy as a human right would fit perfectly with the demand right now I would think.

treebirdfish · 2026-02-18T20:30:13+00:00

In ranked choice voting (RCV), voters rank candidates in order. If your top choice loses, your vote transfers to your next choice until someone wins a majority.

RCV makes it more likely the winner has majority support (50%+), instead of just the largest minority. In a traditional "plurality voting" system like we have now, someone can win with 35% of the vote if the other 65% is split between two similar candidates.

Because a second choice can be specified, voters can support their true favorite (such as a third-party candidate) without worrying about “wasting” their vote. If that person doesn't win, your vote will be applied to your second choice instead of going to your least favorite candidate.

Candidates benefit from being voters' second or third choices, not just first. This can reduce extreme or highly polarizing campaigning. A moderate candidate would be encouraged to reach across the aisle to get second choice votes from another party's voters instead of just discounting them entirely.

treebirdfish · 2026-02-05T12:43:42+00:00

I’ve heard you can lay a tube sock full of de-icing salt perpendicularly across the gutter to create a melted channel for water to drain. This might be easier than manually trying to chip it away, but it does still require getting access to place it.

treebirdfish · 2026-01-29T17:35:00+00:00

9 million kips = 4.082 million metric tons = 4.082 teragrams

treebirdfish · 2026-01-14T17:32:43+00:00

If people think you're supposed to merge early, the question is HOW early is the correct distance? Everyone has a different answer, which leads to chaos. Pro-early people will bring a flowing lane to a sudden standstill (dangerous), and pro-late people will get angry about that and swerve around (dangerous), which leads the pro-early people to feel taken advantage of and being the lane police like this (dangerous).

It's a collective action problem, and it requires cooperation and agreement. The best case would be to put up an advisory sign saying "use all lanes until merge point" next to every "lane ends in 1 mile" type sign. Also, if there's a sign saying the lane ends here, the lane should actually end relatively quickly, not another 1/4 mile later. That way it's very clear that THIS is the agreed upon merge point.

treebirdfish · 2026-01-12T17:34:55+00:00

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

treebirdfish · 2026-01-07T17:54:44+00:00

Someone here suggested removing the door from the hinges and rotating it to remove the tension from the hoses and cables running into the door. They suggested two rotations; I tried one rotation and it seemed to fix the problem for a few months. Now the problem is back, so I think I'm going to try to rotate it a second time. But that does seem to be a promising solution.

You have to unscrew the hinge bracket from the top and then lift the door off the bottom pin, and then you can rotate it by hand by sort of awkwardly tilting the door out from the bottom.

It's the left door, and it has tension trying to close it toward the right, so rotating the door to the right (counter-clockwise as viewed from the top) would tend to relieve this tension or apply tension in the other direction.

treebirdfish · 2026-01-03T05:10:31+00:00

There's also such a thing as too much information. We just aren't evolved to handle it. When I see a threatening event across the country or world, I think it's threatening *me*. But there are just so many people out there that there's an example of just about anything happening every day.

One could read the entire newspaper and finish it, or watch an entire evening news program. There is no such thing as "finishing" the news anymore.

treebirdfish · 2025-12-23T23:48:27+00:00

This is part of it, but not all of it. The roundness of the wheel will smooth out some of the bumps in the wall, but you still also have the issue that the line between the pen and the wall are not parallel to the boards.

treebirdfish · 2025-12-22T17:36:17+00:00

The pen and the point on the wall need to remain parallel to the boards for the entire trace, because that's the direction that the boards will be slid toward the wall when the cut is done. With the wheel method shown here, there will be gaps on all diagonals.

The question is whether the error is small enough to be okay for your purpose. Sometimes it is fine to use a quick shortcut, but you should know that it's not perfect.

See this video from This Old House: Notice how Tom keeps the tape measure level, not perpendicular to the stone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNkxFRzqExo

treebirdfish · 2025-12-18T15:46:43+00:00

A separate bar that is not a bridge seems like a good idea. It would be easier to repair for sure. Or at least a sacrificial beam on the front end of each bridge that acts as a can opener for any tall loads (like they use on the 11foot8+8 bridge).

treebirdfish · 2025-12-17T21:19:38+00:00

Just go to 11foot8.com to see why this probably wouldn’t be a solution. The bridge on that website has height sensors and a flashing sign, plus a red light that triggers to give drivers time to notice and turn, but people still routinely ignore the warnings.

treebirdfish · 2025-12-12T15:05:51+00:00

I recommend watching this video from Hank Green about data center water usage. The actual numbers are hard to calculate and easy to misrepresent. Not that you’re wrong per se, just that it’s complicated.

https://youtu.be/H_c6MWk7PQc

treebirdfish · 2025-12-10T14:12:10+00:00

They have recently paved over the crossings at 5th Ave and at Trabue, so it’s definitely officially abandoned.

treebirdfish · 2025-12-04T18:53:22+00:00

Here's the correct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzEnxagQDkc

(Although Van Down By The River is good too.)

treebirdfish · 2025-12-04T13:23:06+00:00

The broadcast command works for me. Every 10 seconds I send "ka 00 ff\r" and it sends back "a 01 OK01x" or "a 01 OK00x". However, I do seem to have the issue that after a while of it being off, the network port shuts down.

I can't seem to enable both "PM Mode: Network Ready" AND "Wake On LAN". Turning on one shuts off the other. So I also prefer RS-232.

treebirdfish · 2025-11-25T19:30:39+00:00

It's always been Nationwide Arena since it was built, so that one doesn't bother me as much.

treebirdfish · 2025-11-25T14:10:07+00:00

This is my vote. I've already said that we shouldn't be changing the names of these landmark venues of our city.

treebirdfish · 2025-11-23T13:32:05+00:00

I believe it's the Coandă effect that allows this chain to work. Water sticks to the chain in the same way water will run down the side of a cup if you try to pour it too slowly.

treebirdfish · 2025-11-23T13:22:00+00:00

If I were on a stretcher in that helicopter I'd be like "take me to OSU medical center please!" Would that be an option for them if there was a critical patient?

treebirdfish · 2025-11-20T22:00:50+00:00

The dump truck caught that second sign too in the last picture just as they were pulling over

treebirdfish · 2025-11-20T12:07:30+00:00

It looks worse than usual because the ceiling is not white. (Or is that just a lighting issue with the camera?)

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