From: jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us (Jeff Liebermann) Newsgroups: scruz.general Subject: Re: hwy 17 potholes Date: 16 Dec 1996 23:25:37 -0800 Organization: COmmittee to Maintain an Independent Xenix Lines: 36 Message-ID: <595hth$3a3@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> References: <5924ct$15a@darkstar.ucsc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Don Fong (dfong@cse.ucsc.edu) wrote: : on my daily commute over hwy 17, i can't help but notice how cruddy : the road condition is around scotts valley. after the latest storm, : there are many new potholes. why is it so much worse than the rest of 17? It's a conspiracy. The pot holes were always there. They were previously covered by asphalt that the rains softened and the traffic crumbled away. There is some research attempting to establish the connection between pothole production and the local gopher population. Results should be in immediately after the grant money runs out. Yet another explanation is the holes are really marks left by the landing struts of UFO's. Since SCZ County support a large group of alien visitors, this may be worth considering. Look for geometric pothole patterns and possibly exhaust blast marks. It is interesting that most of the potholes are in SVLY. I suspect this is due to a conspiracy of automobile manufacturers attempting to accelerate the demise of vehicles that seem to be lasting longer. Short product lifetimes are desireable because they stimulate the economy. Running over a pothole in SVLY will only destroy the suspension while doing the same on Hwy 17 will probably launch the vehicle over a cliff. This will tend to accelerate the demise of the vehicle buying consumer at the same rate that it accelerates the demise of the vehicle and is therefore undesireable. Dead drivers buy no cars. This is why potholes are only installed on flat sections of pavement. =========================================================== From: jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us (Jeff Liebermann) Newsgroups: scruz.general Subject: Re: hwy 17 potholes Date: 19 Dec 1996 23:15:26 -0800 Organization: COmmittee to Maintain an Independent Xenix Lines: 96 Message-ID: <59deee$86d@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> References: <5924ct$15a@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <595hth$3a3@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> <596u2f$hf1@darkstar.ucsc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Don Fong (dfong@cse.ucsc.edu) wrote: : In article <595hth$3a3@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us>, : Jeff Liebermann wrote: : >It's a conspiracy. The pot holes were always there. : dude, that's KOSMIC!! but can you explain why they : all suddenly decided to appear on FRIDAY THE 13TH? Certainly. Potholes have a rudimenary form of intelligence that allows them to move and appear in places where they will do the most damage. Since it only rains on weekends, the potholes were merely preparing themselves for the downpour. Water filled pot holes are very difficult to see and are pre-lubricated by the water to inflict the maximum damage on your suspension. : >They were previously covered by asphalt that the rains softened : >and the traffic crumbled away. : sheesh, i have seen better roads in snow country. Roads in the snow country have lighter traffic and thus offer a reduced opertunity to destroy suspensions. The conspiracy to trash vehicles and gophers find it more efficient to operate in Scotts Valley. The snow country roads also have the added benifits of black ice and road salt to deal with exessive vehicle lifetimes. Therefore potholes are not needed to destroy vehicles. : >There is some research : >attempting to establish the connection between pothole : >production and the local gopher population. : seems pretty far fetched to me. i can't see how the : potholes would make gophers want to have more babies. Well, if I lived in a pot hole, I would also be in a hurry to reproduce lest I get run over by some maniac commuter. I once saw a picture of a field full of prairie dog holes. Freeway potholes immediately came to mind. I suspect it is a common suspicion which has finally achieved the credibility offered by a massive government research project intended to transfer the blame for rotten roads from Caltrans to gophers. : >alien visitors, this may be worth considering. Look for : >geometric pothole patterns and possibly exhaust blast marks. : yknow Jeff, it never occurred to me until now, but many of : the potholes bear an uncanny resemblance to THE MANDELBROT SET!! Ugh, right. I haven't done mescaline for many years, but that's the only time I've seen mandelbrot's. I would lay off the heavy stuff and install an autopilot. : >It is interesting that most of the potholes are in SVLY. : hmmm, i see what you mean... downwind of Seagate! : you don't suppose... i mean, all those magnetic particles : they use... could they be disturbing the earth's magnetic field, : causing an influx of cosmic rays...? Methinks that you're looking in the wrong direction. Haven't you ever wondered what the "bore" in Borland really meant? I bet they feed the gophers. : >I suspect this is due to a conspiracy of automobile : >manufacturers attempting to accelerate the demise of : >vehicles that seem to be lasting longer. Short product : Jeff, everything you're saying makes perfect sense. It does? : but i still don't think we have all the answers yet. True. All research projects end with the line: "More research is required". It's part of job security. : all i can say is, OJ can thank his lucky stars he didn't : try his "bronco run" on hwy 17 near scotts valley. There's a big difference between driving in Smog Angeles and Scott's Valley. In L.A., a "high speed chase" means either 15 mph or driving on the sidewalk. There are so many cars, that there's no way to drive fast or make a getaway. This lower speed has a profound affect on the lifetime of the road surface. Although the traffic is higher, the road damage is less. L.A. also is sitting on a sand pile. There is no know species of gopher that will live in sand. Many L.A. freeways are also elevated making pre-installing gopher holes during construction a difficult proposition. My money is on the politically expedient explanation. Blaming Seagate, Borland, Caltrans or UFO's is potentially inflamatory. Blaming the gophers is a safe bet. ================================================================== From: jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us (Jeff Liebermann) Newsgroups: scruz.general Subject: Re: hwy 17 potholes Date: 21 Dec 1996 16:36:10 -0800 Organization: COmmittee to Maintain an Independent Xenix Lines: 156 Message-ID: <59hvpq$fe5@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> References: <5924ct$15a@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <595hth$3a3@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> <596u2f$hf1@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <59deee$86d@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> <59emk3$h9o@darkstar.ucsc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Don Fong (dfong@cse.ucsc.edu) wrote: : Jeff, i was with you until this point, but now you are going too : far. to suggest that potholes have intelligence is ... well ... nutty. Well, perhaps not intelligence in the manner in which we've become accustomed to insulting. Pothole intelligence follows the conspiracy theory of inanimate objects. For example, I've determined that cashews, M&M's and various cookies can escape from a sealed plastic jar and hide. I had originally thought that they evaporated, but the sealed jar experiment disproved that theory. Potholes are also capable of independent movement. No sooner does Caltrans shove asphalt down their throat, that they move to another location. They are quite shy and thus have never been seen to move. The reason they move is that they find a diet of asphalt and cold patch to be indigestible, prefering the more organic diet of steel belted tires and auto suspension parts. While pot holes locally show no indication of becoming and endagered species, certain parts of the country have exterminated them by destroying their natural asphalt or dirt habitat through the exessive use of concrete. Airport runways are a good example of such a desert. : to ascribe malice to potholes is even nuttier. look, potholes : are inanimate non-objects. they aren't even objects. they're just : holes. they are not alive. they do not have consciousness. they : do not have free will or a soul. i suppose next you're going to try : to tell me they "like it" when you run over them because it helps : them to reproduce. Methinks we had better test your assertions. Let's take them one at a time: 1. Malice: This is a general attribute of the victim of any pothole. But ossiffer, the pothole jumped out of nowhere and caused me to wreck my car. These potholes are malicious. 2. Inanimate non-objects: Metaphyics mandates that all things as well as their absense are objects. GAIA theory defines any object feature as part of the whole planet. Conspiracy theory describes the motion of inanimate objects and their perverse effects upon humanity. (I don't pretend to understand this). 3. Alive: The minimum requirement to be defined as alive is the ability to reproduce oneself. Secondary requirements include the necessity to consume and pollute. Since potholes seem to be the result of asphalt digestion and seem to grow out of nowhere, methinks they can be considered alive. 4. Consciousness: Here, we agree. Potholes have no concience. I've never known a pothole to display remourse after wrecking anyones suspension. However, the mysterious accumulation of water at the bottom of the pothole might be tears. 5. Free will: No attorney will ever do ones last will for free. For a pothole, methinks a low cost will might be arranged. 6. Soul: See #2. : hah! but *some* roads in snow country *do* have potholes! : explain THAT, smart guy! There are numerous species of potholes. Some species have become aclimatized to cold weather and hibernate under the pavement during the summer. They come out during the winter to feed on automobile suspensions. Unfortunately, most winter tourists protect their tires with chains interfering with the pothole's digestive system. Therefore, they tend to be less numerous but much larger than the local variety. : the army has stockpiled millions of Iranian gophers and Cuban : gophers? (i didn't say it made sense did i?) It's not the DoD. It's Caltrans and it's all part of job security research. Were there to be a dinosaur style mass extinction of potholes, Caltrans would be hurting for work. : no Jeff, the "Mandelbrot set". i'm not talking about those : psychedelic Julia set thingies. the Mandelbrot set looks like a : hole with a bunch of little holes attached to it, with littler : holes attached to the little holes, ad infinitum. if you haven't : seen the Mandelbrot set, you haven't been looking. Got it. I've seen them. My chess set has those little holes in the middle of each square. There may be smaller holes underneath, but I don't want to tear it apart. My chess set is a Duncan Chess Set. I've never seen a Mandelbrot Chess Set. Where do I look? : obviously you've never heard of the "western sand gopher", : the biggest and most vicious gopher species ever found. : they have sand-colored fur and they move verrry slowly. So much for the gopher theory. My experience with gophers is limited to the lawn chomping variety. : are you saying they don't have potholes in LA? Well, there may be some potholes in L.A., but they tend to be obscured by the bullet holes. : my personal theory is that it's somehow related to the Mystery Spot. : all the space and time that disappears at the Mystery spot has to : go somewhere. there has to be an "anti-mystery" spot somewhere. Possibly. The current Disney promoted Dalmation fad has resulted in a large number of dogs named Spot. I suspect they are trying to use a fad to promote the acceptance of potholes. The only thing that disappears at the Mystery Spot is the admission fee. : for longer hours without paying overtime. did you know there is a : straight line between the Mystery Spot and Seagate? and Seagate : is right on that line. this is mind blowing. I've read various Charles Fort books on the subject of lays and alignments. Some are really amazing. Others are dumb. Seagate is such a distributed company that finding the geographic center of Seagate would be a major effort. Methinks you're stretching the possibilities a bit. I originally favoured the gopher theory because it created the least amount of potential backlash and favoured political correctness. However, I received a message from RADICAL (Rodent Anti-Defamation Independent Conglomeration Action League) informing me that they will picket my office if I continue to blame gophers for road maintenance problems. Therefore, I offer a better explanation for Scotts Valley freeway potholes. Long ago, the Carbonerro Creek area was inhabited by a species of dinosaur known as stucco-saurus that inhabited an area of Scott's Valley known as Lost World. The area was also known for its deformed plant population in the Tree Circus section. This arrangement worked well until the arrival of Hwy 17 which cut off the stucco-saurus from its main food supply of small children found at the nearby Santa's Village. (See Jurassic Park movie for details on the diet of dinosaurs). Although the stucco-saurus could survive on a diet of deformed trees, children were a necessary part of their diet. When Borland elected to appropriately build its palatial new offices on the site of the former amusement park, they realized that the stucco-saurus population may decide to eat programmers (as described in Jurassic Park) and therefore exterminated the stucco-saurus population and move the deformed trees to Gilroy. Borland thought it was now safe. Wrong. A small colony of stucco-saurus still survives in the jungles around Carbonerro Creek behind Seagate. They are extremely shy and are rarely seen. They have developed a taste for Borland programmers which explains the rather obvious reduction in programmers around Borland. In order to feed on programmers, the stucco-saurus must cross Hwy 17. This is where some of the potholes come from. The rest are from holes left by the original stucco-saurus population and recently uncovered. Eventually, the population of edible Borland programmers will be exhausted causing the extinction of yet another endagered species, but resulting in fewer freeway potholes. ======================================================================= From: jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us (Jeff Liebermann) Newsgroups: scruz.general Subject: Re: hwy 17 potholes Date: 24 Dec 1996 01:25:19 -0800 Organization: COmmittee to Maintain an Independent Xenix Lines: 31 Message-ID: <59o7hv$qd1@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> References: <5924ct$15a@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <595hth$3a3@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> <596u2f$hf1@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <59deee$86d@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> <59emk3$h9o@darkstar.ucsc.edu> <59hvpq$fe5@comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us> NNTP-Posting-Host: comix.comix.santa-cruz.ca.us X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] j.r. pierce [see .sig] (antispam@here.not) wrote: : Heh. That whole hole thing is cuz the early electrical researchers : were convinced that electricity was the flow of the POSITIVE charges : towards the NEGATIVE. It wasn't til many years later that it was Sure. But having an entire industry adopt the convention of "hole" flow gives the pothole creationism theory a new level of credibility. It is no longer necessary for me to establish that potholes are created by the absense of asphalt, but only to demonstrate that pavement is created by the absense of holes. It is apparent to even the most casual observer, that the electronics industry has made considerably more progress than the paving industry, especially considering the time spans involved. If road construction would only adopt the conventions the electronics industry has so successfully employed, I would expect to see major improvements in paving technology. For example, it should be axiomatic that potholes move by themselves. Shovel a patch here and a new hole soon appears nearby. The error is in assuming that it's a new hole. It's not. It's the same hole that has moved. Once this is accepted, research should be directed into anticipating the direction of pothole movement and inspiring preventive rather than symptomatic technology. ----- # Jeff Liebermann Liebermann Design 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 408.336.2558 voice wb6ssy@ki6eh.#cca.ca.usa.noam wb6ssy.ampr.org 44.4.18.10 # 408.699.0483 digital_pager 73557,2074 cis [don't] # jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us http://members.cruzio.com/~jeffl