So, NMR was renamed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging and people are happy, still ignorant, but happy.
Uh, only in a hospital is it called "MRI". The NMR Lab at the Dept. of Chemistry at UCSD is just one example of the opposite. Industrially, it's still "NMR".
there would be no wars
Yeah, right. The US Indians were doing a good job on each other before the White Man came to focus their attention on the real threat far too late.
If you look at governments as just big meta-people, it is easy enough to accept that any body made up of people will ultimately behave on that scale just like a person would.
Instead of two people fighting over a slab of bacon, well, it's two nation-states arguing over the oil rights in a third country.
While I agree about the shipping stuff, I would bet that the nuclear material is already holed up in the US somewhere. I can also imagine some scenarios where low-grade radioactive waste is trickled out of that stream. After all, it's garbage, right?
Given time, and looking for relatively high potency radioisotopes, it's possible to probably build up enough of a stash of some bad radioactive isotopes w/o garnering too much attention from anyone.
Think about how much Cobalt-60 is used in irradiation facilities and "radiation knife" systems. A few kilograms, at best, per facility. It's not only a pretty potent gamma-ray source, but it's got a pretty long half-life.
What if North Korea decides to lob a few nukes on Taiwan? What then? The US is in a bind, because it doesn't want to necessarily respond to Taiwan's benefit, because that will piss off China, but then lobbing some nukes in response on N. Korea is likely to piss off the rest of the world, and China, too, and burn down whatever diplomatic bridges the US might still have up, once and for all. I don't see France lobbing one of their nukes on N. Korea for the sake of all mankind. France, take one for the team?
Anyways, the orbital information for just about every known satellite (whether its purpose is known or not remains an excercise for the reader) is well-published. It's an excercise for how to do things w/o arousing too much spysat attention.
Saddam Hussain built his main command bunker this way: They built the thick roof slab first, then jacked it up, so they could work on the inside details w/o spy satellites looking in. Of course, we knew details about it, and obviously knew where it was.
Others have talked about working around spy satellite observation periods...fictionally and non-fictionally.
Plus, all the North Korea fear-mongers are assuming that NK is acting on their own, w/o thinking about the possibility of them being a bit of an agent provocateur for China.
But I don't expect to see a "free North Korea" bumper sticker anytime soon...
...but what about Al Quaeda getting a coyote to get a few wetbacks to help carry an extra load or two with them into the US between Brownsville and San Diego?
Probably takes too much coordination and too many loose lips, even if they only speak Spanish involved.
The only reason you can't spend $10K on a contractor vs $120K on a server is budgeting, which you don't really control. You ask for your budget, but others determine your budget for you.
Now what is fun when those others decide that they need to raid most of your budget areas for their own pet projects...
Capital projects can be preferred, because they depreciate (except for property), which can usually have other positive tax implications for the company, compared to hiring contractors or employees.
Maybe a way needs to be figured out to more appropriately figure for the cost of employees based on how their output contributes to the output generated.
Hmm... this might make sales droids and actual production line people more valuable to the company than most of the executives and managers... and possibly IT as well, at least for the parts that enable production and sales to happen or happen more effectively.
Re:Cockroach bomb shelters and buttered kitten pow
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Funny
PeTA probably has plans about the cats to be used, as well as the poor cows that get milked for the butter.
And it has to be butter. Oleo (margarine) has about half the effect that Butter has.
Funny how immigration works, then. It's OK to emigrate to the US. The US will most likely let you in. A caucasian american emigrating to Saudi Arabia? India? Sudan? Japan? Not too likely. Lots of things in the way.
Even "emigrating" to Canada has a lot of problems. Until you get Canadian citizenship (and thus, give up your US citizenship. The reverse doesn't happen, though!), you're wages are taxed heavily by Canada, the IRS also taxes you at the top tax bracket, and you're probably getting paid in $CDN to boot.
Funny, I remember as a kid going to the doctor, getting my throat swabbed to culture for strep, and after the culture came back positive, only THEN my mom getting the prescrip for penicillin.
We've taken our kids to the doctor, they look, but no cultures taken. "Here's some amoxycillin." At least my wife's a nurse, and they do the full course.
Re:Doctors hand out antibiotics like candy?
on
Seaweed Antibiotics?
·
· Score: 1
Hmm... antivirals are good at treating common cold or flu-like symptoms? No?
I know if my job was in "death march mode", and I got sick, I would be seeing it as a blessing.
this responsibility usually plays out in civil court, not criminal court.
No parent is going to go to jail because their kid was DUI, but if the kid gets in a wreck, the parents are gonna be paying out for it for some time...
My insurance company cares about two things: that I pay my premiums, and that if they can find any way to avoid having to pay out (or finding someone else to get the $$$ from), they will do it.
Some of the ways make sense: stupid people should have to pay stupid person insurance rates. Insurance fraud needs to be tracked down and cost-effectively reduced for all sorts of reasons.
Some of it doesn't: the insurance company has a "right" to track people so it can more easily justify it shouldn't have to pay out for their stupid activities, which they agreed to cover in the first place?
The cops? Well, from a human perspective, if I had to be a first-responder at stupid driver accidents all the time, I would want to try and do something to help prevent it, if only because of the sheer stupidity involved, but realizing that people, even people who think they're doing the right things (like driving 45mph in the left lane of a 60mph highway when there are no other cars around...), I would have to figure out that perhaps the best way is to NOT do too much. Stupid people will always figure out ways to circumvent things. Look at how many people STILL don't wear seatbelts.
Then you take different tracks(Monaco vs. Monza), and there will never be an optimal design, just an optimal compromise.
The NASCAR way is to have about 15 different cars set up at the home office. Going to Pocono? OK, take the "road" car. Going to Bristol? Take one of the short-track cars. Going to Talledega? Take the superspeedway car.
NASCAR might be more interesting if they stuck to one car setup per season.
Sorry, even with the Logitech wheel, it leaves out way too much. There is more to the "seat of the pants" argument than people think. In a real car, you can feel things getting awkward in your ass and back, and even your hands. Playing GT3, there is none of that. In a real car, you can "feel" where your car is. In GT3, you can't.
Yes, GT3 is leaps and bounds above "Night Drivin'" standards.
Not only that, but it is considerably more difficult to drive a real Formula 1 car which has no power steering as opposed
While not having driven one, I would say that the steering effort in a F1 car at speed is probably not nearly as bad as it is at 50 mph.
Did you ever notice why NASCAR cars have such huge steering wheels? I thought about this, and it has something to do with the tech rules as well as the geometry of the steering setup. When these cars are driving at 200+ mph, it helps dampen the driver's input compared to a smaller steering wheel, for this kind of car. In-car cameras shows NASCAR drivers making LOTS of steering wheel inputs all of the time at speed, and some of them seem to be relatively large amplitude inputs as well, all while zooming down the back straight.
I've read other articles about race car drivers, and you just don't hop into ANY race car and expect to drive it at speed. Do you remember how awkward it was to drive the first time, especially if you had a manual transmission car? How many times did you kill it while trying to start going uphill, until you learned how to either put the parking brake on to keep you from rolling back, how to do the gas pedal and brake with one foot while you feathered the clutch with your left foot, etc.?
The amazing thing about most race car drivers is not necessarily their ability to operate their cars at speed, but their abilities to pretty much operate the car consistantly, lap after lap.
Probably the most consistant driver right now is Michael Schumacher. He would clean up in riding lawn mower racing.
Like most things, it's not that there is specific training that will make you a good race car driver. Just like there isn't any training that will help you cut beef faster with less effort, shovel shit, lay bricks, frame buildings, etc. You just tend to get better and more efficient at doing them over time.
If you've ever done "construction" work, you might understand. There are some people who seem to do what they do very well. If I were a carpenter, it would be amazing to work with Norm Abrams. If I were an aspiring chef, Jacques Pepin. Have you seen him debone a chicken?
People like this make doing difficult things look breathlessly trivial. Some of it is talent, and the rest of it is just time and practice.
If you ever decide to do work on your house, watch a professional drywaller at work, and then do it yourself. You'll probably hire the drywaller. I know I will.
The best tennis player in the world could not compete with a raquet from the 70s...they would be able to compete if everyone else was using the same equipment.
Yes, but F1 has pretty much given up the ghost on this one. It is possible now to do traction control w/o having traction control by writing clever engine control software.
Remember the McLaren cars from the 80's and 90's? Those had all sorts of cool electromechanical devices. F1 put in all sorts of rules to ban them, but the teams figured out how to do most of them simply with the engine control computers.
The shifter is no longer a direct mechanical linkage between the driver's hand, the shift lever and the transmission. They don't even have a clutch pedal anymore. It's just two buttons or paddles on the steering wheel that can be triggered with the thumbs. One tells the computer to shift up a gear, the other to shift down. The computer takes care of adjusting optimum engine rpms for the shift, the timing, activating the gear changes, and the engagements of the clutches, to the point that for some time it has not been humanly possible to match the car's ability to shift gears.
Personally, I think it gives the driver more opportunity to focus on driving, instead of having to manage a bunch of other manual tasks.
Maybe what they'll eventually have to do to slow down F1 is put a couple of car seats in back, with crying kids who need bottles, toy dispute resolution, "are we there yet", drinking a mocha and changing CDs, all at the same time, to bring the driver's workload into more realistic realms of every day reality.
I don't think anyone questions what it takes to successfully race cars. Racing cars is racing cars. You do what you can with the tech available and the rule set imposed.
What I think is open to question is "NASCAR Nation", the body of fans... (but you can throw in pretty much any group of fans you want in here, be it #3 fans, Ferrari F1 fans, NY Yankee or Boston Red Sox fans, etc. They're by definition not very objective).
Yes. While complaining that the drivers don't really drive F1 cars anymore, people forget that the success of Ferrari is the sum of all the people involved. OK, being willing not only to want to throw money at it, but having a good idea WHERE to throw money at it, also helps Ferrari.
What has Sauber-Petronas done in F1, wrt Ferrari and McLaren or Williams?
This is all fine and dandy for Sauber-Petronas to feel good about things, but it won't matter.
It's like any other pack-filling, back-running team suddenly thinking it's relevant to the race podium or overall standings, much like the Chicago Cubs after getting Dusty Baker last season...
Re:Why reimplement Ruby?
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 1
So can Java classes be used within Ruby? If so, then why not figure out which ones need to be used to handle I18N/L10N on strings in a clever Ruby class?
Or, for Win32, identify which Win32 DLLs/Com objects need to be invoked to do it, etc.
So test audiences become instead screeners/raters for parametric computer beings. "Is this one seem happier, or sadder? 1 or 2?" blah blah blah, just like for getting a pair of eye glasses. Get 100 people of a certain demographic pigeonhole, and let them rip. Or, maybe it will be even more meta than that? A website, ala "Hot or Not" (whatever it's called), where people will sort of generate character appeal parameters w/o knowing they are doing it.
The trick, if I remember reading correctly, is to not try to be TOO human. Given the amount of appeal of and loyalty to some anime characters, though, it's probably not as hard as we think it might be.
This has been beaten to death with ways to keep computers cool enough for overclocking.
1. Keep it running. 2. If you have to stop it to work on it, do the repairs there, in the cold. 3. If you have to bring it inside, it'll take a few hours to let the condensation on it evaporate. 4. No humidity is as bad as too much.
Hmm... useful information like cell phone system outage briefs get cloaked away because "terrorists" could use the data. Like anyone with a couple of thousand dollars of hardware and software, a GPS receiver, a camera phone (!) and some good local maps couldn't go around and discreetly, casually map out the local cell phone infrastructure over a period of a few weeks?
Then, map out the cell coverage areas, and map out which ones need to be knocked out to render an area or few (need to do a few dummy areas with some bogus dummy action first) before going for the big one.
Hmm... I'll guess that the scientific discussion on weatherunderground.com is the decoded/parsed NWS stuff that is part of their data stream...
But where I live, I really like the local weather stations. In the summer I can go north on Hwy 99W about 3 miles into Amity and go from sunny and dry at my house to pouring rain. Not t-storm rain, because the rain track is right over the Eola hills, and then watch later on the PDX news how bad Hillsboro or downtown PDX got soaked, while wishing I had irrigation rights...
Well, chances are, there are key intersections that have far lower "tipping point" thresholds than most other intersections. Without looking at the traffic flow details for the whole path, it's hard to say, really.
The "tree" view (i.e., anyone driving in the area) perceives ill-timed traffic lights that make them "waste" time. The traffic engineer sees several critical intersections (such as road-highway interchange areas) that end up being choke points, and the goal of the system is to manage the traffic flow through that area from several intersections away. Chances are, the traffic that gets priority is traffic coming off of the highway to get it out of the intersection, not the surface-street traffic entering the intersection.
Slashdot Mirror
So, NMR was renamed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging and people are happy, still ignorant, but happy.
Uh, only in a hospital is it called "MRI". The NMR Lab at the Dept. of Chemistry at UCSD is just one example of the opposite. Industrially, it's still "NMR".
there would be no wars
Yeah, right. The US Indians were doing a good job on each other before the White Man came to focus their attention on the real threat far too late.
If you look at governments as just big meta-people, it is easy enough to accept that any body made up of people will ultimately behave on that scale just like a person would.
Instead of two people fighting over a slab of bacon, well, it's two nation-states arguing over the oil rights in a third country.
While I agree about the shipping stuff, I would bet that the nuclear material is already holed up in the US somewhere. I can also imagine some scenarios where low-grade radioactive waste is trickled out of that stream. After all, it's garbage, right?
Given time, and looking for relatively high potency radioisotopes, it's possible to probably build up enough of a stash of some bad radioactive isotopes w/o garnering too much attention from anyone.
Think about how much Cobalt-60 is used in irradiation facilities and "radiation knife" systems. A few kilograms, at best, per facility. It's not only a pretty potent gamma-ray source, but it's got a pretty long half-life.
What if North Korea decides to lob a few nukes on Taiwan? What then? The US is in a bind, because it doesn't want to necessarily respond to Taiwan's benefit, because that will piss off China, but then lobbing some nukes in response on N. Korea is likely to piss off the rest of the world, and China, too, and burn down whatever diplomatic bridges the US might still have up, once and for all. I don't see France lobbing one of their nukes on N. Korea for the sake of all mankind. France, take one for the team?
Anyways, the orbital information for just about every known satellite (whether its purpose is known or not remains an excercise for the reader) is well-published. It's an excercise for how to do things w/o arousing too much spysat attention.
Saddam Hussain built his main command bunker this way: They built the thick roof slab first, then jacked it up, so they could work on the inside details w/o spy satellites looking in. Of course, we knew details about it, and obviously knew where it was.
Others have talked about working around spy satellite observation periods...fictionally and non-fictionally.
Plus, all the North Korea fear-mongers are assuming that NK is acting on their own, w/o thinking about the possibility of them being a bit of an agent provocateur for China.
But I don't expect to see a "free North Korea" bumper sticker anytime soon...
...but what about Al Quaeda getting a coyote to get a few wetbacks to help carry an extra load or two with them into the US between Brownsville and San Diego?
Probably takes too much coordination and too many loose lips, even if they only speak Spanish involved.
The only reason you can't spend $10K on a contractor vs $120K on a server is budgeting, which you don't really control. You ask for your budget, but others determine your budget for you.
Now what is fun when those others decide that they need to raid most of your budget areas for their own pet projects...
Capital projects can be preferred, because they depreciate (except for property), which can usually have other positive tax implications for the company, compared to hiring contractors or employees.
Maybe a way needs to be figured out to more appropriately figure for the cost of employees based on how their output contributes to the output generated.
Hmm... this might make sales droids and actual production line people more valuable to the company than most of the executives and managers... and possibly IT as well, at least for the parts that enable production and sales to happen or happen more effectively.
PeTA probably has plans about the cats to be used, as well as the poor cows that get milked for the butter.
And it has to be butter. Oleo (margarine) has about half the effect that Butter has.
Funny how immigration works, then. It's OK to emigrate to the US. The US will most likely let you in. A caucasian american emigrating to Saudi Arabia? India? Sudan? Japan? Not too likely. Lots of things in the way.
Even "emigrating" to Canada has a lot of problems. Until you get Canadian citizenship (and thus, give up your US citizenship. The reverse doesn't happen, though!), you're wages are taxed heavily by Canada, the IRS also taxes you at the top tax bracket, and you're probably getting paid in $CDN to boot.
Funny, I remember as a kid going to the doctor, getting my throat swabbed to culture for strep, and after the culture came back positive, only THEN my mom getting the prescrip for penicillin.
We've taken our kids to the doctor, they look, but no cultures taken. "Here's some amoxycillin." At least my wife's a nurse, and they do the full course.
Hmm... antivirals are good at treating common cold or flu-like symptoms? No?
I know if my job was in "death march mode", and I got sick, I would be seeing it as a blessing.
this responsibility usually plays out in civil court, not criminal court.
No parent is going to go to jail because their kid was DUI, but if the kid gets in a wreck, the parents are gonna be paying out for it for some time...
My kids are my responsibility.
My insurance company cares about two things: that I pay my premiums, and that if they can find any way to avoid having to pay out (or finding someone else to get the $$$ from), they will do it.
Some of the ways make sense: stupid people should have to pay stupid person insurance rates. Insurance fraud needs to be tracked down and cost-effectively reduced for all sorts of reasons.
Some of it doesn't: the insurance company has a "right" to track people so it can more easily justify it shouldn't have to pay out for their stupid activities, which they agreed to cover in the first place?
The cops? Well, from a human perspective, if I had to be a first-responder at stupid driver accidents all the time, I would want to try and do something to help prevent it, if only because of the sheer stupidity involved, but realizing that people, even people who think they're doing the right things (like driving 45mph in the left lane of a 60mph highway when there are no other cars around...), I would have to figure out that perhaps the best way is to NOT do too much. Stupid people will always figure out ways to circumvent things. Look at how many people STILL don't wear seatbelts.
Then you take different tracks(Monaco vs. Monza), and there will never be an optimal design, just an optimal compromise.
The NASCAR way is to have about 15 different cars set up at the home office. Going to Pocono? OK, take the "road" car. Going to Bristol? Take one of the short-track cars. Going to Talledega? Take the superspeedway car.
NASCAR might be more interesting if they stuck to one car setup per season.
Sorry, even with the Logitech wheel, it leaves out way too much. There is more to the "seat of the pants" argument than people think. In a real car, you can feel things getting awkward in your ass and back, and even your hands. Playing GT3, there is none of that. In a real car, you can "feel" where your car is. In GT3, you can't.
Yes, GT3 is leaps and bounds above "Night Drivin'" standards.
Not only that, but it is considerably more difficult to drive a real Formula 1 car which has no power steering as opposed
While not having driven one, I would say that the steering effort in a F1 car at speed is probably not nearly as bad as it is at 50 mph.
Did you ever notice why NASCAR cars have such huge steering wheels? I thought about this, and it has something to do with the tech rules as well as the geometry of the steering setup. When these cars are driving at 200+ mph, it helps dampen the driver's input compared to a smaller steering wheel, for this kind of car. In-car cameras shows NASCAR drivers making LOTS of steering wheel inputs all of the time at speed, and some of them seem to be relatively large amplitude inputs as well, all while zooming down the back straight.
I've read other articles about race car drivers, and you just don't hop into ANY race car and expect to drive it at speed. Do you remember how awkward it was to drive the first time, especially if you had a manual transmission car? How many times did you kill it while trying to start going uphill, until you learned how to either put the parking brake on to keep you from rolling back, how to do the gas pedal and brake with one foot while you feathered the clutch with your left foot, etc.?
The amazing thing about most race car drivers is not necessarily their ability to operate their cars at speed, but their abilities to pretty much operate the car consistantly, lap after lap.
Probably the most consistant driver right now is Michael Schumacher. He would clean up in riding lawn mower racing.
Like most things, it's not that there is specific training that will make you a good race car driver. Just like there isn't any training that will help you cut beef faster with less effort, shovel shit, lay bricks, frame buildings, etc. You just tend to get better and more efficient at doing them over time.
If you've ever done "construction" work, you might understand. There are some people who seem to do what they do very well. If I were a carpenter, it would be amazing to work with Norm Abrams. If I were an aspiring chef, Jacques Pepin. Have you seen him debone a chicken?
People like this make doing difficult things look breathlessly trivial. Some of it is talent, and the rest of it is just time and practice.
If you ever decide to do work on your house, watch a professional drywaller at work, and then do it yourself. You'll probably hire the drywaller. I know I will.
The best tennis player in the world could not compete with a raquet from the 70s ...they would be able to compete if everyone else was using the same equipment.
Yes, but F1 has pretty much given up the ghost on this one. It is possible now to do traction control w/o having traction control by writing clever engine control software.
Remember the McLaren cars from the 80's and 90's? Those had all sorts of cool electromechanical devices. F1 put in all sorts of rules to ban them, but the teams figured out how to do most of them simply with the engine control computers.
The shifter is no longer a direct mechanical linkage between the driver's hand, the shift lever and the transmission. They don't even have a clutch pedal anymore. It's just two buttons or paddles on the steering wheel that can be triggered with the thumbs. One tells the computer to shift up a gear, the other to shift down. The computer takes care of adjusting optimum engine rpms for the shift, the timing, activating the gear changes, and the engagements of the clutches, to the point that for some time it has not been humanly possible to match the car's ability to shift gears.
Personally, I think it gives the driver more opportunity to focus on driving, instead of having to manage a bunch of other manual tasks.
Maybe what they'll eventually have to do to slow down F1 is put a couple of car seats in back, with crying kids who need bottles, toy dispute resolution, "are we there yet", drinking a mocha and changing CDs, all at the same time, to bring the driver's workload into more realistic realms of every day reality.
I don't think anyone questions what it takes to successfully race cars. Racing cars is racing cars. You do what you can with the tech available and the rule set imposed.
What I think is open to question is "NASCAR Nation", the body of fans... (but you can throw in pretty much any group of fans you want in here, be it #3 fans, Ferrari F1 fans, NY Yankee or Boston Red Sox fans, etc. They're by definition not very objective).
Yes. While complaining that the drivers don't really drive F1 cars anymore, people forget that the success of Ferrari is the sum of all the people involved. OK, being willing not only to want to throw money at it, but having a good idea WHERE to throw money at it, also helps Ferrari.
What has Sauber-Petronas done in F1, wrt Ferrari and McLaren or Williams?
This is all fine and dandy for Sauber-Petronas to feel good about things, but it won't matter.
It's like any other pack-filling, back-running team suddenly thinking it's relevant to the race podium or overall standings, much like the Chicago Cubs after getting Dusty Baker last season...
So can Java classes be used within Ruby? If so, then why not figure out which ones need to be used to handle I18N/L10N on strings in a clever Ruby class?
Or, for Win32, identify which Win32 DLLs/Com objects need to be invoked to do it, etc.
So test audiences become instead screeners/raters for parametric computer beings. "Is this one seem happier, or sadder? 1 or 2?" blah blah blah, just like for getting a pair of eye glasses. Get 100 people of a certain demographic pigeonhole, and let them rip. Or, maybe it will be even more meta than that? A website, ala "Hot or Not" (whatever it's called), where people will sort of generate character appeal parameters w/o knowing they are doing it.
The trick, if I remember reading correctly, is to not try to be TOO human. Given the amount of appeal of and loyalty to some anime characters, though, it's probably not as hard as we think it might be.
This has been beaten to death with ways to keep computers cool enough for overclocking.
1. Keep it running.
2. If you have to stop it to work on it, do the repairs there, in the cold.
3. If you have to bring it inside, it'll take a few hours to let the condensation on it evaporate.
4. No humidity is as bad as too much.
Hmm... useful information like cell phone system outage briefs get cloaked away because "terrorists" could use the data. Like anyone with a couple of thousand dollars of hardware and software, a GPS receiver, a camera phone (!) and some good local maps couldn't go around and discreetly, casually map out the local cell phone infrastructure over a period of a few weeks?
Then, map out the cell coverage areas, and map out which ones need to be knocked out to render an area or few (need to do a few dummy areas with some bogus dummy action first) before going for the big one.
Hmm... I'll guess that the scientific discussion on weatherunderground.com is the decoded/parsed NWS stuff that is part of their data stream...
But where I live, I really like the local weather stations. In the summer I can go north on Hwy 99W about 3 miles into Amity and go from sunny and dry at my house to pouring rain. Not t-storm rain, because the rain track is right over the Eola hills, and then watch later on the PDX news how bad Hillsboro or downtown PDX got soaked, while wishing I had irrigation rights...
Yes, he still gets about 15 minutes to do the weather, explain a little bit, and offer up some "weather trivia" to the other news marionettes.
If you get WGN via cable or satellite, he does the 9pm weather during the week.
Well, chances are, there are key intersections that have far lower "tipping point" thresholds than most other intersections. Without looking at the traffic flow details for the whole path, it's hard to say, really.
The "tree" view (i.e., anyone driving in the area) perceives ill-timed traffic lights that make them "waste" time. The traffic engineer sees several critical intersections (such as road-highway interchange areas) that end up being choke points, and the goal of the system is to manage the traffic flow through that area from several intersections away. Chances are, the traffic that gets priority is traffic coming off of the highway to get it out of the intersection, not the surface-street traffic entering the intersection.