I live a block away from a train crossing for a track that does a lot of local refinery transfers and occasional has freight. It has the normal old style crossing with an arm on each side with lights, a loud bell, and trains required to signal with horn. There are 8 road crossings in a short distance so each train is signals 8 times nearby.
The requirements for a no-signal crossing is essentially a pedestrian gate. The quote the city has for each crossing was if I remember right 1.5 million usd. And you’d need to replace many of them. The city doesn’t want to prioritize that much money. (FWIW I agree)
The worst thing is we have under utilized tracks going all over the region and no commuter train service. Even with the rail expansion prior to the Olympics (I’m near Los Angeles), the commuter rail is only being extended to the northern most edge of the city.
Neighbors have been fighting against commuter rail every step of the way. I’ll say attending local govt and rail proposal meetings is at once interesting, impressive at what some groups are trying to achieve and disturbing at the lengths people go to prevent change.
I believe this is a reference to the tech you are talking about. I have a similar take as you: current cgm tech plus closed loop is pretty good. Self activating insulin is the first promising tech I’ve seen in the 40+ years of following the research.
I’d suggest the book Life Ascending. It talks about how certain major jumps in complexity occurs. It directly addresses the “bumping in the ocean” you mention — according to the book the likely explanation was these initial reactions occurred in local environments around certain types of thermal vents that were constrained by small geologic features. Interesting read.
Interesting that they’ve been dropping cars out of airplanes at that same drop zone since 1996. You can look up Joe Jennings skydiving video “Good Stuff”. His car drop total is purportedly over 200 now. Hard to see why a plane in a near vertical dive is more dangerous than a dropped car.
http://www.joejennings.com/GS.htm
I have a bud who uses a custom built electric go-kart for filming stunt scenes — specifically those low camera moves of one car passing another.
He had to build his own controllers to allow smooth acceleration as visible jerks ruin the take
His tops out at 100+ mph but I thing they usually film at 70-80mph.
But yeah — those things are death traps