another option that would have been interesting to see here is serving PostGIS GeoJSON export -> tippecanoe encode. Tippecanoe is super fast, parallelizes well and built solely for generating vector tile data (with lots of configurable options that PostGIS lacks)
What is amazing to me is that this post references an "epidemic of slipping on banana peels", was posted within a day of a wonderful (33 minute long!) video about the history of slipping on banana peels, and neither references the other! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8W5GCnqT_M
A great book about how animals survive super cold winters is "Winter World" by Bernd Heinrich.
Bernd is a super fascinating biologist who really dives deep in to things. At one point in the book I think he was talking about chipmunks surviving winter, and it goes really fun on the first principles. Something like: "chipmunks have a surface area of X m^2, and need to maintain an internal temperature of Y˚C. If the outside temperature is -40˚C they therefore they need to consume Z calories per hour just to maintain body temperature. Their favorite food are pine nuts from the white pine tree. The pine nuts each have B calories, so the chipmunk will need to eat D of them per hour. How many nuts can a chipmunk fit in its mouth? Well I found a dead one and shoved pine nuts in to its mouth until I couldn't fit anymore, and managed to get 17 in there. That means..."
"Well I found a dead one and shoved pine nuts in to its mouth until I couldn't fit anymore, and managed to get 17 in there."
That part is .. weird. What is the point except morbid humor?
Chipmunks have a food storage, so they don't store nuts in their mouth. They wake up, go to the food storage and eat and go back to sleep. They don't go outside to collect more nuts in -40°C. Maybe that was the point of that calculation, to show it would not be a good strategy, but there ain't much nuts in winter on trees left anyway.
(and the calculation above lacks insulation of the fur and their sleeping place)
It'll be part of the time-spent-eating calculation, I expect.
Edit: I think I found the direct quote among a trio from a Goodreads review, which gives more context [0]:
> To get a rough idea of whether the flying squirrel’s nest indeed affords much insulation, I heated a potato to simulate the body of a squirrel and examined its cooling rates.
> I do not know how many seeds a chipmunk usually packs into each of its two pouches—I easily inserted sixty black sunflower seeds through the mouth into just one pouch of a roadkill.
> Some years ago, I took on the brave, or foolish, task of measuring hornets’ body temperatures, grabbing and stabbing them with an electronic thermometer as they left their nests.
But you're saying the speed limit (being too high or low) makes the road dangerous. Aren't the people driving their cars too fast making the road dangerous?
A great many people when they see a open straight road with little obstacles or pedestrians will go 45-50 MPH. A great many people when they see a 15 MPH sign will go 20 MPH. Pair that low speed limit with a "fast" road and you will end with many people going 45 MPH and many people going 20 MPH. This variance in speed, with some people going much slower than others can be more dangerous than if most went the same speed - e.g. if the limit were 45 MPH.
You are correct that people driving too fast make the road dangerous, but so does people driving too slow. Generally, from a safety point of view, you want the slowest speed at which almost everyone will actually drive at, as large variance in speed between drivers is dangerous. I think this is what the parent post was getting at: a speed limit too fast OR too slow will increase the number of accidents, keeping in mind that there will always be at least some drivers speeding.
> You are correct that people driving too fast make the road dangerous, but so does people driving too slow.
It's accurate to say that people driving too fast are extra dangerous when there are slower vehicles in the road. The danger is still caused by the people driving too fast, not by those driving slowly, though. Speed kills.
