Yes, it does.

And I have run motorcycles at the dragstrip there several times

Preserving green space in our crowded state: Yay!

Exacerbating the housing shortage and driving up home costs through scarcity: boo.

When we bought our house 29 years ago, we were assured that the oil tank had been decommissioned. BUT there was no paperwork.

About 6-7 years later, my wife (who is a licensed environmental engineer and certified hazardous materials manager) noted that the NJ laws were changing and likely to become much stricter and onerous on homeowners. IIRC, “decommissioning” was no longer going to be possible. So we bit the bullet and had the tank removed completely (not cheap). AAAaaand… it had not been decommissioned. Not at all. Goad we had it taken care of.

My advice: if you do not have legal paperwork from a licensed contractor, the tank is not decommissioned.

Or… in order to push an object through the wormhole you would need to add anergy. In the 1 km higher wormhole example, maybe you would need to put the same amount of enegy in as the 1km potential energy difference. So it would be like push the object up a 1km hill.

Which is less mass: “six times less“ or “one sixth”?

If I start with 100Kg and take away 6x that mass, do I end up with -500Kg? How does negative mass work?

It was 6F in my neighborhood for about 8 hours last night. Every branch and shrub is at ambient temp except for the one by my dryer vent :-)

Die, lanternflies, die!

My London co-workers sent emails to us in the NYC metro area that seemed like they thought we were all in danger. This must be getting news coverage in the UK and Europe.

It is 10F/-12C right now in Morris County. That is “bundle up”weather but not cold enough to keep me from going to a friend’s house or a movie.

My biggest problem is what to do with the giant pot if cioppino I just made for the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas eve. My plan was to put it on the (screened in) porch because the fridge is full and it would normally be “fridge temperature” outside. But at 10F and possibly lower, it will freeze. Then again, I will have all day tomorrow to thaw it :-)

My London co-worker sent a concerned email this morning las if some kind of major natural disaster was hitting. To be fair, there has been some deep snow in the midwest but NJ is not getting anything to be concerned about. Did the BBC report this as a big deal?

I am doing nothing special. I have propane portable heaters that I use for socializing on my porch and a 6 kW generator that I will break out in case the power goes out, but those are always on deck.

it is 7:50PM and the wind is howling and the outside temp is 11F/-12C which is cold but I have no need to go outside. If I did, I have tons of appropriate clothing (i am a skier). There is a huge amount if food & alcohol in the house; some left over from my big Christmas party last weekend, some on deck for hosting my family for Christmas Eve and day.

The weather report accurately stated that we would not get any significant snow accumulation, so I haven’t bothered with any special prep. No special prep is really heeded unless we expect more that two feet of snow, which only happens every other year or so. Anything under a foot and I just dig out and go on as normal. My wife drove to visit her elderly mother in Maryland with no worries, and she will drive back tomorrow morning. Note that she will take the Southern route through Delaware rather than the direct route through Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania roads are a clusterfuck when it snows.

Brave New World surf shop in Point Pleasant

It was ten times worse in my yoof (1970s)

Okay, grumpy old man here… Neuromancer? A difficult read? Who says this?
There are some SF and Fantasy books that are indeed difficult (looking at YOU, Dhalgren!). But Neuromancer is not one of them.

I had to explain that one to my daughter when she read Neuromancer in 2017. She was like: “The sky was black?. I wanted to find something to demonstrate TV static… had to go to Youtube. No CRTs left in my house!

Do not smoke, have never smoke tobacco. I see no reason to make kaws against smoking tobacco stricter… I can’t recall the last time I even smelled tobacco smoke in a publuc place.

I cannot vouch for the truth of this, but Steven Brust wrote a series of fantasy books that openly mimicked the Count of Monte Cristo. In his afterword, he claimed that Dumas wrotein this particular formal, redundat, and flowery fashion in no small part because his patron paid him by the word. This may have been Brust being cheeky, but I think he was seriouus.