You may have heard about the “internet of things”, but what is it? At it’s core, it’s the idea that we can collect a lot of data about various parts of our lives with simple little devices. (IoT also includes the ability for the devices to perform operations, but I’m mostly interested in the data side for this post.) All those datda points may seem insignificant if you look at a single source for a single day, but if you start looking at these data streams over years and combine them with dozens of other data feeds, you can learn some really interesting things.
My main frustration is that all of these different devices are silos of information. I can’t take information from my fitbit and combine it with my GPS data from my phone or data from my spinkler. Why would I? Who knows, but that’s kind of the point. If you can’t get at these data sets, your ability to learn from them is severely limited.
Thankfully a lot of these devices have APIs available. I’ve started writing little programs that pull the data down to my computer and then dump them all into a single database. Right now I have tables that show the weather each day, how long my sprinklers were on, and the weight reported by our WiFi scale. We’re upgrading to a WiFi thermostat soon so I hope to have another table that shows how long our furnace was running. I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get per-circuit monitoring and logging for my electrical panel too.
Some day we’ll have a great service that combines all of these things for us, but until then, I’m hoarding the data. It’s a fun data science distraction every now and then.
I finished all six seasons of the Justified TV show.The whole series (except for parts of season 4) are excellent, but wow, the ending is a doozy.
I’ve been in the Seattle area for almost 10 years now and I still haven’t been to a Seahawks game. It’s a combination of me being cheap and the tickets being nearly impossible to aquire firsthand. I don’t love buying tickets secondhand, but if I’m ever going to see a game, that’s probably what I’ll have to do.
How often have you been doing a repetitive task and thought, “A robot could do this”? Now imagine what would actually happen if you tried to build that robot. It probably wouldn’t work very well and it might be hilarious. That pretty accurately describe’s
Toll-Free Times On 405
If you read the notes from the meeting where they decided this, it’s clear that they have a lot of data available. Some of those charts are incredibly interesting. If you’re a data nerd who travels 405, you’ll love it. But the main problem I have, as I’ve stated before, is that they aren’t optimizing just for maximum throughput on the road. You can see it in their notes. They always talk about how much money each of the options will cost them in lost revenue. The system is in place to generate money and give rich people a fast lane. I’m fundamentally opposed to that. The highway is a shared resource. Let’s maximize throughput. End of story.
So why am I surprised that they created a toll-free time? Because people are going to start realizing that the toll isn’t the part of the system that is important. The important part is having separate lanes with limited entry and exit points, just like a standard express lane setup. There are already calls for WSDOT to experiment with no-toll times during the day instead of just at night, but I can’t imagine them doing that. They’d be giving up a lot of money and that’s a higher priority for them than just improving throughput. Making it free at night and on weekends costs them 3% of their total revenue and removes traffic jams that the HOT system added on the weekends so it’s a nice PR win and actually does improve traffic. Changing the daytime rates would be a much bigger hit to their bottom line.