mattbell

Dec. 8th, 2008

When you lift a heavy weight, you feel your muscles strain to pick it up. I believe it originally was an unpleasant feeling, but over time it became associated with exercise and increasing strength.

I was recently listening to a book on procrastination (The Now Habit) and I was getting an emotionally unpleasant feeling as it touched on certain aspects of the subject. I realized that this feeling should be viewed in the same way as the muscle sensation -- it's a sign that my brain is stretching and building up strength as it deals with something unpleasant. I should actively seek things like that out as they give me opportunity to grow.

Most of you are familiar with London's congestion pricing system, where you have to pay a fee of around $14 to drive into downtown London during peak hours. The system was designed to eliminate its famous downtown congestion. Reports of its success have been controversial, but positive enough that other major cities are looking at it.

The Netherlands is considering a nationwide system that will continuously tax people based on what roads they are using, how far they drive on them, what time they're using them, and even how fuel-efficient their vehicles are.

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009146.html

(It's not approved yet, and even if it is approved, it will take around 10 years to fully implement)

This sort of system, which has only become possible with recent computer vision technology, will allow for much more accurate taxing for use of public goods. ~~Right now, Americans pay the same amount in taxes for roads and highways whether they drive for 1,000 miles per year or 20,000 miles per year. That's unfair.~~ (A commenter has pointed out that gas taxes do charge heavy users of roads more than light users, though gas isn't the only source of road funding) It would be much fairer to have people pay according to how much they use the system. This congestion tax covers two public goods -- roads and air cleanliness. Cars that chew up the road more would be charged more for the increased maintenance that the roads will require, and cars that pollute more will be charged according to how much pollution they put out. This helps people understand the true financial consequences of their actions and behave accordingly, which makes the whole system work better.

I spent some time last weekend with L wandering in the Japanese gardens in San Francisco and taking pictures in near-infrared. In near-infrared, foliage tends to be very light, as well as most man-made inks (including some black ones).

(Near-infrared is different than the "body heat" infrared you may have seen in these videos I posted a while back: http://www.youtube.com/user/sinfrared )

I do need to order some better filters... a lot of the shots suffered from ghosting, overexposure, and other problems stemming from the fact that the camera I was using did not have good exposure control and I usually couldn't block enough infrared light. My "camera" was a Sony videocamera in nightshot mode, with an infrared bandpass filter on the front.