● The interstates were originally designed to be able to run military equipment from coast to coast on flatbed trailers at sustained speeds of 75 mph.

● Did you know that if you're on interstate 5, you have 5% of the U.S. left to the west of you? If you are on interstate 95, you have 95% left to the west of you?

● If you are on interstate 20, you have 20% of the U.S. left to the south of you? If you are on interstate 90, you have 90% left to the south of you?

● ALL [or mostly all] interstates going east or west have EVEN numbers. ALL interstates going north or south have ODD numbers.

● If a city bypass has an even number it loops [called a LOOP] back to the same interstate. i.e. I-440 ends back up on I-40.

● If a city bypass has an odd number it does NOT loop [called a SPUR] back to the same interstate. i.e. I-540 does not come back to I-40.

Highway know-how from truckers.

-janelane

Map Facts & Highway Facts by Truckers

Senator Coburn told me that he's not anti-birth-control: "I'm not a no-condom person. I prescribe tons of birth control products. But that's only one-half of the issue. The other half is preventing S.T.D.'s." This is not the message of the federal abstinence initiative, however. The emphasis there is squarely on promoting a moral framework that puts sexuality in a particular place. As the 2007 federal guidelines for program financing state, "It is required that the abstinence education curriculum teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity."

Read and be warned.

-janelane, SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

Contra-Contraception - New York Times

PIRACICABA, Brazil — At the dawn of the automobile age, Henry Ford predicted that "ethyl alcohol is the fuel of the future." With petroleum about $65 a barrel, President Bush has now embraced that view, too. But Brazil is already there.

This country expects to become energy self-sufficient this year, meeting its growing demand for fuel by increasing production from petroleum and ethanol. Already the use of ethanol, derived in Brazil from sugar cane, is so widespread that some gas stations have two sets of pumps, marked A for alcohol and G for gas.

In his State of the Union address in January, Mr. Bush backed financing for "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but wood chips and stalks or switch grass" with the goal of making ethanol competitive in six years.

But Brazil's path has taken 30 years of effort, required several billion dollars in incentives and involved many missteps. While not always easy, it provides clues to the real challenges facing the United States' ambitions.

Energy self-sufficiency. God, I hope I live long enough to see that happen here.

-janelane

With Big Boost From Sugar Cane, Brazil Is Satisfying Its Fuel Needs - New York Times

WHITE PLAINS, New York(AP) -- Dana Reeve, who won worldwide admiration for her devotion to her "Superman" husband, Christopher Reeve, through his decade of near-total paralysis, has died of lung cancer at the age of 44.
...
Reeve had succeeded her husband as chair of the foundation, which funded research into spinal-cord paralysis cures. She announced in August that, while she wasn't a smoker, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
...
A year ago, she won a Mother of the Year award from the American Cancer Society. A society vice president, Dr. Michael Thun, said Reeve "has shown strength and courage in the face of tremendous adversity." Doctors say 1 in 5 women diagnosed with the disease never lit a cigarette.

There is definitely something in the water that celebrities are drinking. First Puckett, now Reeve? He was 45, she 44! He was an all-star athelete and she didn't even smoke!

Since when is 45 the new 85?

-janelane, anti-2nd-hand-smoking

Dana Reeve, widow of Christopher Reeve, dies of lung cancer - Mar 7, 2006

All of them are chasing the same holy grail: bio-based substances that can replace oil and gas as building blocks for chemicals. "We figure out what works in theory, and then we see what works in practice," Alexander D. Kopatsis, a research associate, said.

E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, unlike most chemical companies, has moved the quest for bio-based raw materials off the wish list and onto the to-do agenda. The company has allocated nearly 10 percent of its $1.3 billion research budget to extracting ingredients from carbohydrates — things that grow and can be infinitely replaced — rather than from hydrocarbons, which are mined or drilled and readily depleted.

Way to go, DuPont!

-janelane, birthday girl

DuPont Looking to Displace Fossil Fuels as Building Blocks of Chemicals - New York Times

XM Satellite Radio posted a wider than expected loss yesterday as a result of extra spending to lure subscribers and disclosed that a director had resigned in a dispute over corporate strategy.

The director, Pierce J. Roberts Jr., said in a letter to XM's chairman that he had been "troubled about the current direction of the company" and had shared his concerns with directors and management without "any useful effect." Without offering specifics, Mr. Roberts, the former head of the telecom investment banking unit of Bear Stearns, said that XM faced "a significant chance of a crisis on the horizon."

He went on, "Even absent a crisis, I believe that XM will inevitably serve its shareholders poorly without major changes now."

Mr. Roberts did not return a telephone call yesterday.

XM, which disclosed the letter in a regulatory filing, said its other directors and management executives disagreed with Mr. Roberts about how to balance the company's drive for growth against its desire for cash flow. Mr. Roberts has favored cutting XM's expenses associated with marketing and creating new programming, while other executives believe the company must maintain its spending to attract subscribers to its pay-radio service.

This guy's got the right idea. I know that XM is the no-talent ass clown as far as satelite radio is concerned, but I had to expect that Mr. Roberts will land on his feet.

-janelane, business-minded

Director at XM Resigns as Costs Skyrocket - New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Science and math have zoomed to the top of the nation's education agenda. Yet Amanda Cook, a parent of two school-age girls, can't quite see the urgency.

"In Maine, there aren't many jobs that scream out 'math and science,"' said Cook, who lives in Etna, in the central part of the state. Yes, both topics are important, but "most parents are saying you're better off going to school for something there's a big need for."

Nationwide, a new poll shows, many parents are content with the science and math education their children get -- a starkly different view than that held by national leaders.

Fifty-seven percent of parents say "things are fine" with the amount of math and science being taught in their child's public school. High school parents seem particularly content -- 70 percent say their child gets the right amount of science and math.

Oh. My. God. I think I've just had a stroke and heart attack.

-janelane, WTF??!!

"If popular culture has taught us anything," Daniel H. Wilson says, "it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace." Luckily, Dr. Wilson is just the guy to help us do it.

-janelane, scientist for a grey goo tomorrow

If Robots Ever Get Too Smart, He'll Know How to Stop Them - New York Times

WASHINGTON DC -- Websites get looked at by two different kinds of visitors: the human ones who peer around, look at the graphics, think about the links and click slowly; and the spiders, those automated scanners that come in from search engines like Google, or, more ominously, from malicious attackers, competing businesses and spammers looking for e-mail addresses.

Fortunately, it has always been pretty easy to tell the difference between the two in server logs, and block unwanted or anti-social crawlers. But research presented at the Shmoo Con hacker conference here Friday may change that.

Billy Hoffman, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics unveiled a new, smarter web-crawling application that behaves like a person using a browser, rather than a computer program. "Basically this nullifies any traditional form of forensics," says Hoffman.

Look, Ma, it's Acidus on Wired!

-janelane, fiancee extraordinaire

Wired News: Covert Crawler Descends on Web

"There's no shock absorber left," says Gal Luft, executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. "That leaves us with zero options when it comes to leverage against these oil producers. Why do you think Hugo Chavez is so emboldened? Why do you think Ahmadinejad is saying, 'Go ahead, make my day?' "

Clearly, becoming less dependent on foreign sources should be among the West's - and most especially America's - most urgent priorities. But not in the way that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney seem to prefer, which is to try to drill our way out of dependency - an utterly impossible task for a country that uses one-fourth of the world's oil while possessing only 3 percent of its reserves, and whose once-abundant supplies of natural gas are now severely stressed. A much better answer would be a national commitment to more efficient vehicles and to the rapid deployment of new energy sources like biofuels.

America cannot win President Bush's much-vaunted war on terrorism as long as it is sending billions of dollars abroad for oil purchases every day. It cannot establish democracy in the Middle East because governments rich in oil revenue do not want democracy. And it will never have the geopolitical leverage it needs as long as it is dependent on unstable foreign sources for fuel.

If any of you are still wondering about the validity of the Bush-Cheney energy policy, this article sums the inanity of it up nicely.

-janelane, energy goddess

Energy Impasse - New York Times