Spain's War on Speed, Part II

No photos this time, just a friendly travel advisory:

You know how, in the U.S., you'll often see signs that say "speed monitored by radar," and it's just kind of a general warning that a cop might be sitting behind a berm waiting to catch you for going too fast? Well, in Spain those signs actually mean something. All over the country on the motorways, Spain has installed little boxes that monitor your speed and take pictures of your license plate if you go too fast. They then mail you a speeding ticket, and deduct a set number of "points" from your license. (Enough deductions, and you can't drive anymore.) However, as part of the surveillance law that enabled these boxes, the authorities must notify you of any unmanned radar installation. So when you see a big sign warning you to slow down, you can be sure that one of these radar-camera boxes is about a half-mile down the road.

The good news is that once you figure out what the boxes look like, you'll know when you've passed one of them. Then, you can resume whatever speed you were traveling before.

Spain's War on Speed, Part I

Here's a clever idea:

Photo taken on the road between Fuente De and Potes, Cantabria, Spain, June 5, 2007.

These mechanisms are all over the north of Spain. To reduce the number of drivers who speed through little towns, these traffic lights are attached to a radar gun that automatically turns them red if the approaching car is traveling above the posted speed limit. Once the driver slows to the permitted speed, the light turns to a flashing amber.

While very annoying, I think this is actually one of the most effective traffic control devices I've ever seen. Lots of American small towns could really make use of them, I think--though then again it would probably make it a lot harder for the local police to issue tickets!

Gaastra, Michigan -- May 28, 2007

This is the first of a series of posts I hope to do featuring pictures from various travels I've done. I enjoy photography, though I'm not particularly good at it. So any tips on improving the photographs (in the comments) would be greatly appreciated!

This post contains four pictures from the town of Gaastra and its surroundings, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which I visited back at the end of May on a swing through the Midwest. The area has a generally depressed farming economy and a few remnant mining and timber operations. Like Vilas County, just over the border in Wisconsin, it has begun to transition into a service-vacation economy; the area is dotted with small glacial lakes and kettle moraines, which make it prime location for summer cottages and recreation for Midwestern city-slickers.

This picture was taken in the town of Gaastra in the local playground. This swingset was the best-maintained piece of equipment in the place. Tire swings were pretty common when I was a kid, though today they're considered dangerous because water collects in them and breeds mosquitoes and other nasty things. (Here in San Francisco, all of the playgrounds are nice and safe and made out of colored plastic.) But not in Gaastra, where the tire swing still reigns supreme:


This next picture was taken just outside of town. The soil in this part of the country is littered with rocks, courtesy of the retreating glaciers of the last Ice Age. Farmers had to clear them all by hand. Sometimes they used them to make neat stone walls like this one:


However, typically there were so many of them that they would also just create enormous piles of rocks in the middle of the field and just farm around them:


(Incidentally, the above setting is one of my favorites in the area. The light wasn't ideal when I got there, but I plan to go back and take a few more next time I'm in the area.)

Finally, there's this shot. For some reason, barns with smiley-faces are a fairly common sight in the Great Lakes region (also watertowers with smiley-faces). So are barbed wire fences. So this shot brings the Midwest's two great tastes together, in one "good fences make good neighbors" taste sensation...

PapaRatzinger Blog!

So, Blogger has a button you can press to take you to a random blog. I just pressed it and came up with this:

http://paparatzinger-blograffaella.blogspot.com/

There's a particularly charming picture of the Pope sitting in a verdant garden buried in there, like something out of a Robert Herrick poem.

Anyone speak Italian? I'm curious to know if the blog has any insights into the Pope's recent attack on the legitimacy of Protestant and Orthodox Christianity. Between the Supreme Court's recent decisions on race, religion, and free speech; and the Pope's slow-motion repeal of Vatican II, soon we'll all be partying like it's 1960!

Ctrl-Alt-Del

Is this thing still on?

I had very good intentions of maintaining this blog on my three-week vacation back in May and June, uploading some photos from the Midwest and Spain and commenting on my journeys as I went along. The pace of my travels kept me from doing it in real-time, and since I got back I've been swamped with work and preparations for my trip to Australia. A quick summary of what's been done on that front since June 12:

• Bought plane tickets
• Found a place to live
• Whittled my prospectus into something remotely researchable
• Began to set up the financial side of things
  

Beyond this, I'm revising a paper, writing a paper, and gathering data for two more papers I hope to write in Australia. Oh, yeah, and working as an RA on a very cool project looking at the brief heyday of hospital rate-setting commissions in the 1970s and 1980s. So, keeping busy!

I'll try to post some pictures from Michigan and Spain in the near future.

PupusaQuest Restaurant Review: Mi Tierra

My rear tire died yesterday, so today I went to get a new one installed. While I was waiting for them to service it, I wandered down the street to get lunch. My destination: Mi Tierra Salvadoran and Mexican Restaurant, 324 South Van Ness Ave, San Francisco.

I had actually eaten off of Mi Tierra's menu before, during a catered lunch at CUAV several years ago. It was good but not particularly memorable. Today, however, I went straight for the pupusas.

I am on a quest to find the perfect Bay Area pupusa. Mi Tierra is the sixth restaurant I've tried, but the first I've reviewed. Previous venues include El Patio, Balompie, Platanos (SF and Berkeley varieties), and Panchita's. [I'll try to revisit these locales and write up reviews in the coming months.] The verdict: there's lots to like, but the overall experience is not as good as Balompie or El Patio.

Mi Tierra is spacious and brightly colored. Spanish telenovelas play on a large-screen TV in the back. I ordered (as is my wont) two loroco pupusas and a Diet Coke. The total bill was $5.60.

First, the good: The pupusas themselves were large and tasty. Mi Tierra uses more loroco than many other places, which gives them extra flavor. And they were not greasy or overcooked.

The problem lay in the accompaniments. I was intrigued by the curtido because it was made with jalapenos and hot chilis. Unfortunately, despite this, the slaw lacks flavor. It also lacked crunch, and some of the cabbage bits looked decidedly old. Likewise, the salsa was thin and runny.

In sum, the pupusas themselves compare favorably with the pupusas at El Patio and Balompie. However, the overall combination of pupusa, curtido, and salsa falls a bit short in terms of flavor and freshness. I'd rank Mi Tierra third in my pupusa rankings:

SF Pupusa Rankings
1. Balompie
2. El Patio
3. Mi Tierra
4. Platanos (Berkeley)
5. Panchita's
6. Platanos (SF)

How to Test a Folk Theory

For all aficionados of the five-second rule, this New York Times piece is fun must-reading:

Prof. Paul L. Dawson and his colleagues at Clemson have now put some numbers on floor-to-food contamination.

Their bacterium of choice was salmonella; the test surfaces were tile, wood flooring and nylon carpet; and the test foods were slices of bread and bologna.

First the researchers measured how long bacteria could survive on the surfaces. They applied salmonella broth in doses of several million bacteria per square centimeter, a number typical of badly contaminated food.

I had thought that most bacteria were sensitive to drying out, but after 24 hours of exposure to the air, thousands of bacteria per square centimeter had survived on the tile and wood, and tens of thousands on the carpet. Hundreds of salmonella were still alive after 28 days.

Professor Dawson and colleagues then placed test food slices onto salmonella-painted surfaces for varying lengths of time, and counted how many live bacteria were transferred to the food.

On surfaces that had been contaminated eight hours earlier, slices of bologna and bread left for five seconds took up from 150 to 8,000 bacteria. Left for a full minute, slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood.

In my opinion, the scariest bit in there is the bit about the longevity of salmonella in your carpet. Scary, but perhaps not surprising. So there you have it: another cherished folk theory bites the dust, courtesy of science.