The Denver airport is among the more smoker-friendly airports, historically speaking. It’s not quite as great the one in Salt Lake City, but they at least have a few private establishments where they allow people to smoke in piece. No more, though. They’re down to only one, and the signs are that one will be going away in 2018 as soon as the lease expires in 2018.

I understand that we do not want to go back to the days when smokers were rampant and their smoke was nigh-impossible to escape. But seriously, are we reaching the point where room cannot be made in an airport of however many square feet? That it is just too much of an imposition on non-smokers that smokers have a single place rather than a Jamba Juice?

I really do wonder the extent to which it is no longer the second-hand smoke that is required to bother other people to justify a ban, but the notion of being bothered by people smoking. The rubber will hit the road when it comes to ecigarettes and what kind of restrictions we place on them. I made note of the fact that Starbucks is banning them along with regular cigarettes on their property. Brandon Berg made a good point that this may simply be a measure to avoid having to police whether it’s smoke or vapor coming out of the thing that the guy or girl has between her fingers.

Maybe so. At least, that’ll be the rationale that most people rely on. A part of me wonders the extent to which we have really reached the point where smoking, or vaping, is to be considered such shameful behavior that it is to be pushed out of public view altogether regardless of the harm or lack thereof of people around. Which wouldn’t be a completely bad thing (if the ecigarettes take off, I will try not to use them in Lain’s sight), but overlooks rather obvious problems.

Namely, that smokers are going to smoke somewhere unless you go the route of Hawaii or Albuquerque (even there, I’m told that you should simply ask an employee who smells like cigarette smoke and they’ll tell ya). Preventing them from having a lounge in the Denver airport is going to cause a non-trivial number of them to clutter up the security lines re-entering.

Ed Zitron has a fantastic idea:

Google 16GB Nexus 7 retails for $200. Cheap Android tablets are rapidly racing toward the $50 range – though one can’t guarantee quality at $64.99 – and I see no reason why Google hasn’t jumped into [the consumer GPS industry] and squashed the competition. Google Maps navigator is twice the GPS that TomTom or Garmin has created (I’ve used around 8 in the last year) and is better than anything I’ve seen inside a car outside of Elon Musk‘s Tesla. Android is cheap to build for, easily customizable (look at the Kindle Fire or any of the different open source ROMs like Cyanogen Mod and Jelly Beans).

Google could create a small tablet – 6 inches, perhaps – put a SIM card in there much like Apple does for their cellular iPads – customize Android to focus on maps, and price the thing at $200. They could run a deal with Verizon like they do for the Chromebook – 100MB a month, for free, for two years.

I know that this idea is fantastic because it’s what I have been thinking for some time now. Indeed, it’s a variation of a goal that I have been working towards. I want an Android GPS system. I’d prefer it inside my dashboard, but I’ll take it outside of it. In fact, I’ve been road testing all sorts of Android map apps (I’ll be posting reviews) in preparation for buying one to have installed in the Forester. The Forester’s stereo interface is dreadful, and when we bought the car we agreed that I would be able to replace it. I hadn’t thought of Android – or even a GPS-capable player – at that point, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I like it.

What are the advantages of an Android GPS system? Namely, that I can use all of the addresses I already have stored in my phone. That’s a pretty big deal to me. The apps tend to be lackluster, either because they’re online-only (like Google Navigator, Waze), they don’t incorporate contact data easily (NavFree, MapFactor), an inability to work offline (Skrobble), or some other issue. But I’m working on it. If I get my Android car stereo system, I’ll have a map program in there.

Right now I am switching between my Garmin standalone device and putting my phone on a mount and using that. Both have their problems. I’d really like a dedicated device. I hope that there’d really be a market for it and I think Zitron has some good ideas.

I think it would be even better, of course, if they were actually talking directly to the car companies. More and more of them are working towards devices with interfaces and apps. But they’re proprietary. I don’t see a whole lot of great reasons that they shouldn’t be using established OSes with an established app-base. But absent that, I’d be more than happy to have a device propped up on the dashboard while being able to keep my phone in its holster.

Clancy’s last day at work was Friday. She finished her notes and paperwork on Sunday. She is officially free!

Tomorrow/today (Tuesday) we are heading to Deseret to the airport. It’s going to be a busy day. Wednesday we’re going to be flying. Thursday we’re driving from Colosse to Genesis in Deltona. It’s going to be a busy few days.

We’re leaving Arapaho on the 13th and expect to arrive in Stonebridge, Queenland (not to be confused with Queensland, Australia) on the 19th.

Apropos none of the above, our fridge died, so before we head to Deseret tomorrow, we get to clean out the fridge. Yay. We’ve been reducing volume in preparation for the move. The big thing is the bottled breastmilk. Which we’re just going to have to freeze (the freezer still works).

The NTSB wants to lower the legal driving blood alcohol content to .05 from .08. This hasn’t proved to be as popular as I would have guessed, though it appears most commenters at OTB approve.

No surprise, but I’m not a huge fan of the idea. But, as a compromise, I’ll sign on to this if we were to start making a legal distinction between driving impaired/intoxicated (say, .05 to .12) and driving while blasted (higher than .12). There’s an argument to be made for pushing more people off the road, but current law relies a great deal on treating milder offenders like the truly dangerous save for prosecutorial discretion.

My drinking days are mostly behind me. I was the inheritor of the leftover liquor content of Leaguefest 2012 and despite there having been maybe 10oz left over, I still haven’t finished it. My weekend trips to the music bars where my regular consumption was seven beers over four hours or so are likewise done. So the Fish-You-I-Done-Mine part of me says “Sure, lower it.” Safer roads and all.

But at least a part of me remains a little exasperated by the contradictions of society. We pose drunk driving as a unique evil, and then proceed to use drunk driving as a metric to prove that other things are just as bad. Drunk driving is uniquely bad, but using a phone while driving is as bad as drunk driving.

By which they mean, it’s as bad as driving with a BAC of .08. If we lower the BAC to .05, then we open the door for more things that are “just as bad as drunk driving.” Fortunately, Ray LaHood’s proposal to disable cell phones while driving didn’t go anywhere, and probably won’t.

And even though sports radio may be just as dangerous as drunk driving, it probably won’t be banned any time soon. Cops in California are pulling people over for eating behind the wheel.

I expect smoking-while-driving to become expressly illegal (the food thing is discretionary enforcement rather than express law)at some point. I stopped smoking and driving years ago, but trust me when I tell you the danger of it does not come close to matching that of eating behind the wheel. But smokers, as always, are an easy target.

It all relates back to our society’s inability to accept risk. I fear that, ultimately, what gets legislated and enforced and what doesn’t will depend on which things we want to do because freedom, and which things others should not be allowed to do because safety.

Jalopnik asks what old-style feature from cars do we miss the most? His answer:

As for me, there’s a lot that I could list, but I especially miss pop-up headlights. Maybe it has something to do with growing up in the 80s and 90s, but I just think they’re so damned cool, you know?

So many great cars used to have illuminators that rose from the hood on demand: the Porsche 928 and 944, the NSX (for the first few years, anyway), three generations of RX-7s, a whole plethora of Corvettes… the list goes on an on.

Mine is more general. I miss the slightly boxier design of old cars. As cars have become more aerodynamic, they ironically look like they’re trying to look cool even though the design is (I am pretty sure) for function as much as anything. There is a stupid little practical aspect to my yearning for yesteryear however. I was looking at a late-model Camry the other day and noticed that it would be hard to put a soft drink or something on the back hood because it’s not as level as the old Camry that we currently have.

Another thing – and this is relatively minor – is that it used to be a lot more common for cars to have hitches available than today. I don’t know if it is due to liability or cost-cutting, but I don’t think they offer that as much as they used to.

A last thing are a few models and model types… it’d be cool if Subaru still offered the Justy in the US. Dodge should still have a car called the Dodge Colt (well, it was actually a Mitsubishi, but Mitsubishi at least has a cool name for its current small car).