13.2, 13.2, 16.8

I went to the monthly "entertainment" meeting of the RRE last night at the Newton Highlands Congo Church. It's been years since I've done that. The membership has aged. I would say the organization is doomed to die out except for the fact that the members that do the fan trips are considerably younger. Guest speaker was Craig Della Penna, a real estate salesman from Northampton. He has also been a trafic manager for the Pinsley railroad group, a paid lobbyist, chairman of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, a paid lecturer, and he currently operates a B&B along the Williamsburg Trail in Noho. The thrust of his presentation was rail trails. He spoke to the number of them that are being built, their economic impact, the people and organizations that are building them, the oppoents and their strategies, state support and the lack of it, and much more. He showed a collection of before and after pictures, including an RRE fan trip on the Williamsburg line that derailed in the snow. Excellect presentation. I took a look at a Christmas book that's been riding around in me car's right front door for several years, and he's the author.

Some days at work this week have been slow, and I've been using the time to play with Google Earth. One thing I did was to read through its help file. One thing it mentioned was that it can report distance in several different units. It listed them, and the last unit on the list had a hyperlink. The unit was smoot. I first discovered the smoot when quercum and I were in college and we walked across the Harvard Bridge from Boston to Cambridge. We found smoot marks on the sidewalk. The numbers kept going up as we walked along, and at the end was the marking "464.4 smoots + 1 ear". Some years later I learned the story of the smoot. What I didn't know until I chased that link was that Mr. Smoot went on to become the chariman of ANSI, and later took a similar post in ISO. That kept me grinning for over a day. I'm grinning now.

Dave, the guy at work whose wife just died, sent around his goodbye email today. It's his last day.

Finished a book - The Effect of Living Backwards by Heidi Julavits. Ostensibly about the perps and victims of an airline hijacking, it ran some of their life stories backwards. Towards the end it got more and more obscure to the point where I started skipping words and paragraphs just to be done with it, becuase I didn't care any more. It has a reader's guide, so it must be too intellectual for me.