"Fact: Speed, 35 in a 25, 50 in a 40, is not necessarily the major factor in accidents."
Citation, please? The sources I find claim that there are substantial differences in safety for pedestrians hit at 20, 25, 30, and 35mph, never mind the ability of the pedestrian and driver to avoid the crash in the first place when lower speed allows more time to avoid the collision. Yeah, I know, you said "not necessarily", weasel words to make your claim actually content-free and uncontradictable.
Interesting that you should bring up New Hampshire. They offer the option to trade your own convenience for your own (alleged) risk; they are not offering you the option to trade on someone else's risk. They're not encouraging antisocial behavior.
"Because you want to control everyone's every move and use "danger" as your justification, perhaps?"
Nope. The goal is to avoid gratuitous early death and injury, and in particular, avoiding that which is inflicted on other people. If I go speeding through a neighborhood, that adds risk for the people who live there -- kinda antisocial. In particular, it's antisocial because they have to modify their behavior to obtain an acceptable (to them) level of safety. That's why we have speed limits, that's why we enforce them. Doing it with cameras just does it more cheaply. The goal is not rule-making-because-it's-fun-to-tell-people-what-to-do.
"which was doing that". Feel free to quote and point out how.
My objection is to anyone driving claiming that "they're not dangerous". That's just not true. Bad drivers are much more dangerous, sure, but the chance of human error is always there, and that car you're driving can do a lot of damage. Not 20 minutes ago, I had a guy in broad daylight run a red light at an intersection I was almost in. If I was going faster, I would have been less able to stop, and if we had collided (a distinct possibility, perhaps avoided only by lucky timing) the faster I go, the more energetic the accident. My car adds danger, even if driven legally, and the faster I drive it, the less time I have to see and react to other people's mistakes.
You're doing the standard black/white reduction. "Danger" is the probability of harm or death resulting, and there are values other than zero and one. Zero's unattainable, but lower speeds are safer than higher speeds in almost all cases.
"This is false. I'm not a danger to anyone on the road. Almost no one is."
And you know this, how? And we should believe you, why? The Lake Wobegon Effect is alive and well -- most people think they are "better than most" drivers. It's also possible that you are ignorant and unaware of it -- the Dunning-Kruger effect. I know, how insulting of me to even raise the issue -- but how can I know which cars contain safe drivers, and which do not?
There's also multiple views of "danger". If you say, no harm, no foul, no danger, then indeed, danger on the road is pretty rare. But there is driving that raises the probability of a crash -- for instance, tailgating -- that most people regard as dangerous even when no crash results. And to be most expansive in the definition of the word, simply having a car on the road and driving at high speeds creates danger; the pedestrian who jaywalks into your path (his fault, according to the law) is at greater risk when you are driving fast than when you are driving slow. That is increased danger. And note that "jaywalking" is our word for breaking one of those evil rules that you hate so much, so if you decide to just dump all the blame on the pedestrian for breaking a rule, that would be a little inconsistent of you.
So think it through. We're talking about operating heavy machinery in public. We're all surprisingly good at it, but that doesn't mean it's not dangerous, and the inevitability of human error means that nobody can claim to be "not dangerous".
Or, somewhat lower tech, if you have a white car, use some white retroreflective tape to put your own distracting shapes on the car; the strobe will illuminate those, too, and they will confuse its license-plate detector.
Sure those aren't for detecting oncoming emergency vehicles? Check to see if the "camera" is strobing when an ambulance or fire truck is driving through. It switches the lights to a phase that clears the traffic and lets the emergency vehicle through more quickly.
Dammit, I did the math again, and I am getting a different number now. I can see where we fence-posted an exponent in the ice volume calculation. That gets us to 2.3y. I also used the actual density of ice (lower than 1) and your estimate of top-of-atmosphere, not mine of bottom, and that cuts it all the way down to 1.9, but my second go round gives 1.4 years.
So don't go quoting this to anyone else quite yet, we might want to do a 3rd round of checking.
Statistically, it's not that unsanitary. Messy, yes, but most people don't have STDs, and coughing and sneezing can loft nasties into the air where you can breathe them.
This is just one of those rules that we have because we like it. The "reasons" that we concoct to justify it don't hold up too well against a "compared to what" test.
"Worst"? I don't think that word means what you think it means. I direct your attention to the distinct lack of anyone that Anonymous has killed, tortured, or kidnapped. They're pranksters, and not half bad at it. Much more entertaining, and much less harmful, than many activities that have managed to be declared "legal".
IANAL, but the advice you got sounds 100% wrong. If you wrote it, it's implicitly copyrighted. It's actually damn hard to put something into the public domain in a way that (some) corporate lawyers will agree is actually public domain. And copyright lives a long, long time, with no effort from you.
There are plenty of differences in what you get by electing a Republican (probably Romney) or Obama. They may not be important to you, and that's what's interesting. A Republican administration is somewhat more likely to start a war, and a good deal more likely to adopt policies that will increase our deficit (cutting taxes "permanently" w/o cutting spending, in particular, but also repealing the Affordable Care Act). Environmental regulations? Much more likely to be rolled back by a Republican. Job safety regulations? Again, much more likely to be rolled back by a Republican. Women's rights? Much more likely to be rolled back by a Republican. Universal health care? And so on.
It's pretty obvious from the way I present this who I prefer, but you could just as easily turn it around -- all those safety and environmental regulations, really not such a hindrance to economic growth, are they? Universal health care -- not that big an intrusion. Cutting taxes on job-creators, makes no difference.
If you want to move things to the left, we need to primary out the DINOs in the Senate, if you want to move to the right, you primary out the RINOs, and in both cases, hope that your "improved" candidate wins. If you completely, totally, cannot stand to do tactical voting, agitate for some other voting scheme, like single-transferable-vote (fat chance getting THAT to pass, but I'd be with you in that effort).
So, for you, none of this stuff is particularly important? What is? Who would be better, both on the metrics that matter to you, and on all this other stuff listed above that happens to matter to other people? (Because if you can't sell your "better" choice to other people, what ever made you think you had a prayer of getting him, her, or it elected?)
That's nonsense. The tax code is complex, but trained professionals are not that expensive (speaking as someone who has leftover shares in a dot-com LLC converted to subchapter S that still survives on paper, and finally gave up to hire an accountant to file taxes, and is pleasantly surprised at the relatively low expense *). As an example, some years back, our local elementary school PTA discovered that they should-have-been filing returns for about a decade (complications of being the paper entity behind the after-school, so that they could get cheap insurance through the PTA, and the after-school having a giant cash flow). Straightening out this unfiled mess and making nice with the IRS cost all of $1800 from the accountant hired to make it better, and that job was well out of the ordinary.
The actual tax level is just a knob, a number, and we turned it down in the Bush years, a little more under Obama, and we could turn it back up again. The complexity did not change that much during all that time. And if the rate is unimportant to you, but important to me, that sounds like you would have no objection if I were to choose the (unimportant, right?) level. Right? Or is it really not so unimportant?
(*) mandatory car analogy. I pay professionals to work on our cars. I have myself rebuilt transmissions, brakes, clutches, and some parts of an engine, but I don't have time now, cars are so complex, and professionals do it faster and better and don't cost that much compared to the time it would take me.
There's a lot to be said for primarying the weak-tea candidate of the party closest to your preferences. This seems to have worked moderately well for the "Tea Party" (they don't always win the primary, when they do, they don't always win the general, but look at their influence on the Republican Party).
The game is fixed by the voting methods -- as long as we have most-votes-wins, and no preference voting or transferable voting, we're stuck with tactical voting. All methods of voting have pathologies, but most-votes-wins seems to have more of them. With transferable voting, you truly could vote first-of-all for the candidate who most nearly matches your views, and also not lose your vote entirely if your favorite candidate happens to be not attract many votes.
You don't win this game by pretending you're playing some other game that you like better.
Of the two candidates that actually have a chance of winning, is there one that comes closer to what you desire? You may vote for ponies, but what you're getting is a kitten or a puppy.
It may have more to do with shareholders that customers; Rivendell is privately owned, and if its owners care to promote their own hobby horses (everything from Smile Train, to being picky about product sources, to offering low-cost replacements for carbon fiber forks), they can.
The question then becomes, how do you reach the shareholders? (Credible) threats of boycott and the possibility of legislation or lawsuits are two of those.
I might care more about Apple's practices because that's where my dollars tend to go -- not Dell, not HP.
In the bicycle industry there is certainly Chinese competition, and it is a similar issue there, though it does not receive as much press because the dollars involved are so much smaller.
You have to start somewhere, and a large, profitable, visible company is a good place to start (and I am a huge fan of Apple products, if not this recent news). They should do better. There are tiny, almost invisible, barely profitable companies who do better. Here's one. Check their catalog, note how most products list where they were produced.
All you have to do is put your center of force through the contact point of wheels and pavement -- ahead, and you go over, behind, and you fall down -- and not exceed the static friction of tires on pavement (coefficient of friction is at least 0.5, proven by bicycle and car braking). That's the basics of the math. 0.5 G is about the fastest possible panic stop on a "normal" bicycle, pushing your butt off the seat and modulating the front brake as you feel the rear end of the bike coming off the ground. Rear wheel braking gets you only 0.25G.
So, in order to brake at 0.5 G, you need to arrange for center-of-mass to be on a line that is atan(0.5/1) behind vertical (sanity check -- atan(0/1) = 0 = upright, ok). That's 26.5 degrees. 0.5G from 35mph is a decent panic stop, though cars can do better.
Notice that the speed is irrelevant. It's all about acceleration and sticking to the road. 35mph = 51.3fps, a little more than 3 seconds to stop at 0.5G. At 0.8G (what you might get in a car) it's 2 seconds. 1G, you are not reliably sticking to the road anymore (you might, you might not, do you feel lucky?)
There's pictures here of people leaning more than 26 degrees on bicycles and motorcycles: http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/knee-down-on-a-pushbike Slalom water skiing is another instance where humans balance various forces at an angle well off vertical.
So there's the math. Which assumption do you find impossible? That a human could lean stably against an acceleration, at 26 degrees? The pictures suggest it is entirely possible.
Ever used skates? Hockey players do the same maneuver. You just have to be willing to lean a lot, and have good control. Or consider front-wheel brakes on a bicycle; experienced cyclists do the same thing, sliding their butt off the back of their seat, bracing with hands and feet. You can get to about 0.5 G before you start to flip, and that's with the bulk of your weight perched up in the air. Tandems and recumbents can brake harder, up to about the limit of rubber-on-road static friction.
And to do it automatically, yes, there is an instant where you must tilt-before-you-brake. But humans do this stuff all-the-time to control bicycles and motorcycles.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fact: Speed, 35 in a 25, 50 in a 40, is not necessarily the major factor in accidents."
Citation, please? The sources I find claim that there are substantial differences in safety for pedestrians hit at 20, 25, 30, and 35mph, never mind the ability of the pedestrian and driver to avoid the crash in the first place when lower speed allows more time to avoid the collision. Yeah, I know, you said "not necessarily", weasel words to make your claim actually content-free and uncontradictable.
http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b4469.full
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8406569.stm
http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/pub/hs809012.html
Interesting that you should bring up New Hampshire. They offer the option to trade your own convenience for your own (alleged) risk; they are not offering you the option to trade on someone else's risk. They're not encouraging antisocial behavior.
"Because you want to control everyone's every move and use "danger" as your justification, perhaps?"
Nope. The goal is to avoid gratuitous early death and injury, and in particular, avoiding that which is inflicted on other people. If I go speeding through a neighborhood, that adds risk for the people who live there -- kinda antisocial. In particular, it's antisocial because they have to modify their behavior to obtain an acceptable (to them) level of safety. That's why we have speed limits, that's why we enforce them. Doing it with cameras just does it more cheaply. The goal is not rule-making-because-it's-fun-to-tell-people-what-to-do.
"which was doing that". Feel free to quote and point out how.
My objection is to anyone driving claiming that "they're not dangerous". That's just not true. Bad drivers are much more dangerous, sure, but the chance of human error is always there, and that car you're driving can do a lot of damage. Not 20 minutes ago, I had a guy in broad daylight run a red light at an intersection I was almost in. If I was going faster, I would have been less able to stop, and if we had collided (a distinct possibility, perhaps avoided only by lucky timing) the faster I go, the more energetic the accident. My car adds danger, even if driven legally, and the faster I drive it, the less time I have to see and react to other people's mistakes.
99% safe is typically not regarded as very safe -- stats I just found googling around put the risk of giving birth or the risk of skydiving once at about one death per 100,000 (in Sweden). So skydiving once is 99.999% safe. Cave diving has an estimated risk of 138 deaths per 100,000 dives (1957-1979 figures) which earned it a reputation as an incredibly dangerous sport -- it's 99.862% safe, or 138 times riskier than sky-diving, depending on how you want to look at it.
You're doing the standard black/white reduction. "Danger" is the probability of harm or death resulting, and there are values other than zero and one. Zero's unattainable, but lower speeds are safer than higher speeds in almost all cases.
Go with the low tech, then. Nothing illegal about adding extra safety reflective tape to the back of your car, is there.
"This is false. I'm not a danger to anyone on the road. Almost no one is."
And you know this, how? And we should believe you, why? The Lake Wobegon Effect is alive and well -- most people think they are "better than most" drivers. It's also possible that you are ignorant and unaware of it -- the Dunning-Kruger effect. I know, how insulting of me to even raise the issue -- but how can I know which cars contain safe drivers, and which do not?
There's also multiple views of "danger". If you say, no harm, no foul, no danger, then indeed, danger on the road is pretty rare. But there is driving that raises the probability of a crash -- for instance, tailgating -- that most people regard as dangerous even when no crash results. And to be most expansive in the definition of the word, simply having a car on the road and driving at high speeds creates danger; the pedestrian who jaywalks into your path (his fault, according to the law) is at greater risk when you are driving fast than when you are driving slow. That is increased danger. And note that "jaywalking" is our word for breaking one of those evil rules that you hate so much, so if you decide to just dump all the blame on the pedestrian for breaking a rule, that would be a little inconsistent of you.
So think it through. We're talking about operating heavy machinery in public. We're all surprisingly good at it, but that doesn't mean it's not dangerous, and the inevitability of human error means that nobody can claim to be "not dangerous".
Which means, build a slave strobe that spots the strobe and fires back. http://strobist.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-now-few-words-from-tourist-standing.html
You could do it with LEDs, too. Might mess up the look of the back of your car.
Or, somewhat lower tech, if you have a white car, use some white retroreflective tape to put your own distracting shapes on the car; the strobe will illuminate those, too, and they will confuse its license-plate detector.
Sure those aren't for detecting oncoming emergency vehicles? Check to see if the "camera" is strobing when an ambulance or fire truck is driving through. It switches the lights to a phase that clears the traffic and lets the emergency vehicle through more quickly.
Dammit, I did the math again, and I am getting a different number now. I can see where we fence-posted an exponent in the ice volume calculation. That gets us to 2.3y. I also used the actual density of ice (lower than 1) and your estimate of top-of-atmosphere, not mine of bottom, and that cuts it all the way down to 1.9, but my second go round gives 1.4 years.
So don't go quoting this to anyone else quite yet, we might want to do a 3rd round of checking.
Radius of earth, r = 6.4 × 106 m
Size of illuminated disk = PI × r2 = 1.3 × 1014 m2
Sunlight at top of atmosphere = 1366 W/m2
Continuous solar watts, p = 1366 W/m2 × 1.3 × 1014 m2 = 1.8 × 1017 W
Solar energy per year = p × seconds/year = 1.8 × 1017 × 3.15 × 107 = 5.6 × 1024 J
Volume of Greenland and Antarctic ice caps = 29 × 106 km3 = 29 × 1015 m3 = 29 × 1018 l
Weight of ice caps = 0.92 kg/l × 29 × 1018 l = 2.4 × 1019 kg
Heat to melt the ice caps = 333.55 × 103 J/kg × 2.4 × 1019 kg = 8 × 1024J
Years of total solar power received by earth required to melt the ice caps =
8 × 1024J / 5.6 × 1024 J = 1.4 year
Statistically, it's not that unsanitary. Messy, yes, but most people don't have STDs, and coughing and sneezing can loft nasties into the air where you can breathe them.
This is just one of those rules that we have because we like it. The "reasons" that we concoct to justify it don't hold up too well against a "compared to what" test.
Yeah!
"Worst"? I don't think that word means what you think it means. I direct your attention to the distinct lack of anyone that Anonymous has killed, tortured, or kidnapped. They're pranksters, and not half bad at it. Much more entertaining, and much less harmful, than many activities that have managed to be declared "legal".
Innocent till proven guilty is the rule for criminal cases; not so sure about civil suits. Different legal standards, etc.
IANAL, but the advice you got sounds 100% wrong. If you wrote it, it's implicitly copyrighted. It's actually damn hard to put something into the public domain in a way that (some) corporate lawyers will agree is actually public domain. And copyright lives a long, long time, with no effort from you.
Lack of enforcement is what dilutes trademarks.
There are plenty of differences in what you get by electing a Republican (probably Romney) or Obama. They may not be important to you, and that's what's interesting. A Republican administration is somewhat more likely to start a war, and a good deal more likely to adopt policies that will increase our deficit (cutting taxes "permanently" w/o cutting spending, in particular, but also repealing the Affordable Care Act). Environmental regulations? Much more likely to be rolled back by a Republican. Job safety regulations? Again, much more likely to be rolled back by a Republican. Women's rights? Much more likely to be rolled back by a Republican. Universal health care? And so on.
It's pretty obvious from the way I present this who I prefer, but you could just as easily turn it around -- all those safety and environmental regulations, really not such a hindrance to economic growth, are they? Universal health care -- not that big an intrusion. Cutting taxes on job-creators, makes no difference.
If you want to move things to the left, we need to primary out the DINOs in the Senate, if you want to move to the right, you primary out the RINOs, and in both cases, hope that your "improved" candidate wins. If you completely, totally, cannot stand to do tactical voting, agitate for some other voting scheme, like single-transferable-vote (fat chance getting THAT to pass, but I'd be with you in that effort).
So, for you, none of this stuff is particularly important? What is? Who would be better, both on the metrics that matter to you, and on all this other stuff listed above that happens to matter to other people? (Because if you can't sell your "better" choice to other people, what ever made you think you had a prayer of getting him, her, or it elected?)
That's nonsense. The tax code is complex, but trained professionals are not that expensive (speaking as someone who has leftover shares in a dot-com LLC converted to subchapter S that still survives on paper, and finally gave up to hire an accountant to file taxes, and is pleasantly surprised at the relatively low expense *). As an example, some years back, our local elementary school PTA discovered that they should-have-been filing returns for about a decade (complications of being the paper entity behind the after-school, so that they could get cheap insurance through the PTA, and the after-school having a giant cash flow). Straightening out this unfiled mess and making nice with the IRS cost all of $1800 from the accountant hired to make it better, and that job was well out of the ordinary.
The actual tax level is just a knob, a number, and we turned it down in the Bush years, a little more under Obama, and we could turn it back up again. The complexity did not change that much during all that time. And if the rate is unimportant to you, but important to me, that sounds like you would have no objection if I were to choose the (unimportant, right?) level. Right? Or is it really not so unimportant?
(*) mandatory car analogy. I pay professionals to work on our cars. I have myself rebuilt transmissions, brakes, clutches, and some parts of an engine, but I don't have time now, cars are so complex, and professionals do it faster and better and don't cost that much compared to the time it would take me.
There's a lot to be said for primarying the weak-tea candidate of the party closest to your preferences. This seems to have worked moderately well for the "Tea Party" (they don't always win the primary, when they do, they don't always win the general, but look at their influence on the Republican Party).
The game is fixed by the voting methods -- as long as we have most-votes-wins, and no preference voting or transferable voting, we're stuck with tactical voting. All methods of voting have pathologies, but most-votes-wins seems to have more of them. With transferable voting, you truly could vote first-of-all for the candidate who most nearly matches your views, and also not lose your vote entirely if your favorite candidate happens to be not attract many votes.
You don't win this game by pretending you're playing some other game that you like better.
Of the two candidates that actually have a chance of winning, is there one that comes closer to what you desire? You may vote for ponies, but what you're getting is a kitten or a puppy.
Their tax policies are the same? Obama's on record proposing to increase them, and Romney proposes to cut them. Does this not matter?
There are certainly other issues on which they differ, many of them important, but this one seems pretty obvious and recent.
It may have more to do with shareholders that customers; Rivendell is privately owned, and if its owners care to promote their own hobby horses (everything from Smile Train, to being picky about product sources, to offering low-cost replacements for carbon fiber forks), they can.
The question then becomes, how do you reach the shareholders? (Credible) threats of boycott and the possibility of legislation or lawsuits are two of those.
I might care more about Apple's practices because that's where my dollars tend to go -- not Dell, not HP.
In the bicycle industry there is certainly Chinese competition, and it is a similar issue there, though it does not receive as much press because the dollars involved are so much smaller.
You have to start somewhere, and a large, profitable, visible company is a good place to start (and I am a huge fan of Apple products, if not this recent news). They should do better. There are tiny, almost invisible, barely profitable companies who do better. Here's one. Check their catalog, note how most products list where they were produced.
Nope. I want them, right?
All you have to do is put your center of force through the contact point of wheels and pavement -- ahead, and you go over, behind, and you fall down -- and not exceed the static friction of tires on pavement (coefficient of friction is at least 0.5, proven by bicycle and car braking). That's the basics of the math. 0.5 G is about the fastest possible panic stop on a "normal" bicycle, pushing your butt off the seat and modulating the front brake as you feel the rear end of the bike coming off the ground. Rear wheel braking gets you only 0.25G.
So, in order to brake at 0.5 G, you need to arrange for center-of-mass to be on a line that is atan(0.5/1) behind vertical (sanity check -- atan(0/1) = 0 = upright, ok). That's 26.5 degrees. 0.5G from 35mph is a decent panic stop, though cars can do better.
Notice that the speed is irrelevant. It's all about acceleration and sticking to the road. 35mph = 51.3fps, a little more than 3 seconds to stop at 0.5G. At 0.8G (what you might get in a car) it's 2 seconds. 1G, you are not reliably sticking to the road anymore (you might, you might not, do you feel lucky?)
There's pictures here of people leaning more than 26 degrees on bicycles and motorcycles: http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/knee-down-on-a-pushbike
Slalom water skiing is another instance where humans balance various forces at an angle well off vertical.
So there's the math. Which assumption do you find impossible? That a human could lean stably against an acceleration, at 26 degrees? The pictures suggest it is entirely possible.
Ever used skates? Hockey players do the same maneuver. You just have to be willing to lean a lot, and have good control.
Or consider front-wheel brakes on a bicycle; experienced cyclists do the same thing, sliding their butt off the back of their seat, bracing with hands and feet. You can get to about 0.5 G before you start to flip, and that's with the bulk of your weight perched up in the air. Tandems and recumbents can brake harder, up to about the limit of rubber-on-road static friction.
And to do it automatically, yes, there is an instant where you must tilt-before-you-brake. But humans do this stuff all-the-time to control bicycles and motorcycles.