Al's Morning Meeting

I have heard of people who hunted for mushrooms -- but now I hear that those folks are actually eating (not smoking) the things. Last week, during the Reporting for Public Radio seminar I led here at Poynter, I listened to a wonderful story about whole groups of people who spend the weekends looking for mushrooms.

Now there are online mushroom-tracker sites and people who take this to the level of obsession, beyond just a hobby. Listen to this story from NPR.

There is even a National Morel Mushroom Hunters Association, which, of course, has a Web site with tons of information. And then there is an online journal of wild mushrooming to help you develop this story.   

The St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press recently tracked down some mushroom hunters:

There's nothing so providential as baskets overflowing with morels, and the taste is so divine hunters dream about it all winter. In spring, they offer a fervent prayer to the mushroom gods: May the fungus be among us.

Morels do taste heavenly. But it's the hunt that's so addictive, not the mushroom itself. For one thing, it's fun to find something for free that's so expensive in stores and restaurants, and it's fun to beat the odds by finding something so notoriously elusive.

It's a lot like gambling -- a windfall is hard to come by, but once you've had one, you want a lot more. And sometimes, people do get lucky.

"You get these mutant crops sometimes that'll bowl you over," says Mike McCall, a Winnebago, Minn., mushroom aficionado and educator. "I've walked out of the woods half-dressed, triple-bagging it with my shirt tied in knots."

"Boom-Car" Crackdown

The imminent summer season means people will be out at parks and driving with their windows down. It also means open season on your ears from people driving "boom cars" -- the annoyingly loud cars with thumping bass that rattle your windows if you are anywhere near them.

It would be fun to roam around this weekend with a sound level meter. How many citations did your police department write for loud cars last year? How do cops determine when to step in?

The city of Des Moines, Iowa, is sending a loud warning to people who drive "boom cars." The Des Moines Register reports:

Law-enforcement officials said Tuesday they will lower the boom this summer on owners of loud car stereos. The announcement came amid pressure from noise-battered neighborhood groups who say the problem has grown both in frequency and in decibels.

"We're talking about vehicles that, when they go by, you can hear the metal rattling in the car because the bass is so loud," said John Morrissey of the Highland Park Neighborhood Association.

Police spokesman Sgt. Todd Dykstra said officers will be instructed to keep an ear out for violators of the city's noise ordinance. No longer will they wait until a complaint is lodged. Citations require a court appearance, and a judge sets the fine, which, with court costs, can run around $100. About 80 were written all of last year.

Municipal noise ordinances are nothing new. The first such laws were passed in California in the late 1960s. Most communities have noise laws on the books -- some set measurable decibel levels, others depend on officer discretion -- but enforcement is typically complaint-driven.

Under the initiative laid out Tuesday, Des Moines officers will write a ticket if the noise can't be ignored from 50 feet away, Sgt. Chan Wallace said.

Look at this chart from the newspaper for some context:

The Des Moines Register

There is something of a national movement going on against boom cars. See this list, from LowerTheBoom.org.  (do NOT make the mistake of going to lowerthe boom.com which is a porn site)

Here is another collection of recently passed noise ordinances around the country.

LCD-TV Sales Going Crazy

C/Net reports that LCD-TV sales may have reached some kind of tipping point:

Shipments of LCD (liquid crystal display) televisions jumped 135 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same period last year, and allowed LCD TVs to account for 17 percent of all TVs shipped, up from 15 percent three months earlier, according to DisplaySearch.

Revenue from LCD TVs also grew, by 114 percent, and hit $8.8 billion. For the hardware industry, that's a somewhat rare result: Because of price-cutting, large increases in unit shipments typically lead to far more modest increases in revenue shipments.

The growth in revenue can be partly attributed to the fact that LCD TVs are growing in size. The average screen size, as measured by the diagonal length of the screen, grew by 19 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period a year ago. Customers snapped up more TVs in the first quarter measuring 37 inches or longer than they did the year before, DisplaySearch said.

Sandbags

This story in The (Bradenton, Fla.) Herald resonated with me. There has been a lot of hoopla this week about hurricane preparation. We are in the middle of Florida's hurricane-prep tax-free holiday, which is meant to encourage folks to buy emergency supplies. I am going to restock my emergency kits tomorrow.

But the one thing we should have and can't seem to find are sandbags. I looked everywhere last year and could not find them, so this year, I have been saving my plastic mulch bags and will fill them with sand if a hurricane comes our way. You can buy them online, but often not in stores. Considering the flooding problems of 2005, it seems like this would be a natural addition to people's emergency list. I really dig new technology, like reusable flood bags.  

Requiring Your Car to Spy on You: Auto Black Boxes

This summer, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will issue national standards [PDF] for on-board "event data recorders" -- essentially, black boxes for automobiles. It will be possible for investigators to use the data recorders to determine, for example, how fast a vehicle was traveling, whether or not the driver was using a seatbelt and whether or not the driver hit the brakes before a crash. Forty million vehicles built in the last 10 years already have these recorders and the owners don't know it.

Here is background on the data recorders from NHTSA.

Nine states now have laws requiring disclosure, and more than a dozen states are considering similar legislation.

CQ Weekly reports:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has indicated it will take a cautious approach by not mandating onboard recorders or deciding who can access the data on devices that already have been installed in vehicles. Automakers, insurers, lawyers, consumer organizations and other groups with an interest in the data already are circling Congress, convinced that the House and Senate will have to clarify who gets access to the information.

The NHTSA rules will establish government standards for the recorders, which vary in what type of data they record and are proprietary in nature. Standardizing the equipment will make it easier for crash investigators to retrieve the information. NHTSA also has said that the rules will require automakers to publicly disclose the existence of recorders in cars they sell.

That will be news to many consumers who are currently unaware of the sensors, which are about the size of a pack of cards. Since the mid-1990s, manufacturers including General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. have installed the event data recorders, or EDRs, on an estimated 40 million vehicles in an effort to track accident trends and make cars safer. The government does not require the equipment but uses the information for its own safety studies -- as long as car owners consent.

The recorders use tiny sensors to track variables including vehicle speed, seat belt use, engine speed and braking patterns. Unlike cockpit recorders in airplanes, the car devices don't record voices. Police at accident scenes download the information, generally the five to eight seconds of data recorded prior to the deployment of a car's air bags.

The story says:

Privacy advocates and consumer groups are lobbying aggressively for clear-cut standards, worried about scenarios such as insurance companies using the data to ascribe fault in traffic accidents or levy surcharges on unsafe drivers. Increasingly advanced sensor technology could make it possible for companies even to track cars they insure in real time, absent consumer protections, the advocates say.

"It's a little bit like your car is spying on you," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The privacy concerns have prompted nine states -- Arkansas, California, Main e, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Texas and Virginia -- to pass laws requiring carmakers to tell consumers whether vehicles are equipped with recorders and barring anyone from downloading data from the devices without the owners' permission. California and New York also prohibit car rental companies from using the data to impose extra charges.

But with at least 18 more states considering legislation this year to address use of the black boxes, automakers are growing jittery about the possibility of having to comply with a patchwork of laws. Though waiting to read the fine print of the NHTSA rule, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers says the federal government soon might need to step in to "pre-empt inconsistent state or local laws."

The automakers want continued unfettered access to recorder data, insisting that it is downloaded only in the event of a crash and has led to safety innovations.