Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to George Darroch,
I totally agree that speed is a big contributor, but I'm not so sure about the conclusion that more advertising is going to change this significantly. But we certainly should do it, just to find out if it will work. It would be very hard to be sure, but we're not the only country doing it, so there should eventually be enough data to find out whether such programs do actually change anything.
Gut feeling is that they would have some small effect. The direct effect on drivers might not be that great (they basically disagree with the advertised sentiment), but the indirect effect through other people as passengers or mates could be more.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Martin Roberts,
I wish the ad every success in fostering that attitude.
Yeah, me too. It might help a bit. Better roads clearly would (remember when the Harbour Bridge had no barrier down the center? There were fatal crashes every week, it seemed). Enforcing lower speed limits? Probably helped significantly too. I can certainly remember being one crazy bastard when I was a young driver. I drove at breakneck speeds everywhere. Then I just outgrew doing that. I'd probably have lost my license with higher probability nowadays, or slowed down. I think I had general road sense, apart from the speed, and that probably saved my life. But that sense would not have saved me, had I ever actually had a prang at those insane speeds that I routinely drove at.
If we had an autobahn, though, then insane speeds would be normal, and comparatively safe. It's surprising how boring going 240km/h can get on a really good road.
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Just in case anyone doesn't know what song I'm referring to:
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Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm glad you recognize this, Russell. I've had a few friends credit me with that recently, on this. They really didn't think the government would go this far, but I just haven't seen any movement at all in a direction that would ever make me think that a guy like Peter Dunne ever had the slightest interest in whether people actually have a good time on legal (or not) highs. The most credit I'll give him is that he may have believed that driving legal stuff out would cause more harm. He might even still believe that - he professes to. It might even be true (I think it is, and I think it started intensifying the very moment the PSA first passed into law). But he's not prepared to put in even one word on the positive side of any substance against which his silver hammer struck over and over again, just like in the song. Because he believes the safest high is no high, and any attempts to get high are just a sickness to be treated.
And this is what I can't get hip to medical pot as the path to legalization. I just hate the idea that the only way you can justify having pot is by declaring yourself to be sick. Can't you just like the stuff? Why do we have to consider a desire to change your mental state an illness? I say "prove it's an illness, before you ban it. It's not on me to prove it's not one". But then I'm an evil liberal. I don't see the death of pot because it got all the fun extracted out of it when they made it only help granddad with his cancer as a good thing. I see it as a shocking indictment on our fucking weak willed culture allowed itself to be marched to the nuthouse just to get a hit.
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Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to ,
It is worth noting how you can lose several rights if you turn psychotic.
That's a risk I'm willing to take every single time I drink alcohol, which is actually the only substance I've ever had a psychotic break on.
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There are rights to chemicals as yet ungotten and unborn/
That shall have cause to curse our politicians' scorn -
Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think there is a silver lining. We may, at some point, change the debate from just about harm reduction to one about harm reduction and human rights. It's kind of amazing how far the rights aspect has been crushed out of the discourse. It's like rights just don't even exist, in this debate. All we talk about is harm. All we measure is harm. All we legislate on is harm. The fact that every single one of us just lost the right to every single chemical invented (barring 3), and yet to be invented, if it is the least bit psychoactive, until such a time as goodness-knows-who decides it's OK, barely even lifts its head. I'm quite astonished, really. Are we so used to losing our rights one at a time that when they just take the rest it barely rates a mention?
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I can’t follow your argument there. A mean can drop, without variation dropping.
That said, of course it’s not the only factor. It’s pretty hard to be sure which factors are the most significant in this country.
Watch the ad.
To be honest, watching it, when I see the other car from the perspective of the speeding guy, my own instinct is that he’d be able to stop in time, even at 108km/h. You don’t have to wait until the road is fully obstructed by the other car before you even begin slowing down. Indeed, personally, I begin slowing down automatically that I even see a car at all in that exact situation, just on the presumption that they might pull out for whatever reason. I have my eye pretty much fixed on that car as the most likely danger, and my foot is already on the brake. So inattention would have been a big factor in this accident.
But given that they do have an accident, the speed is indeed going to be a factor. Others have already calculated the difference in kinetic energy between 108 and 100 as around 15%. But that’s not the whole story in an accident, unless they actually hit at that speed. In reality, the driver will have slammed on his brakes and begun dropping speed, and the difference in the kinetic energy proportions unleashed, given those two initial speeds, will be considerably more than 15%. The most obvious way to see this is on the extreme end case, that the 100km/h car actually managed to stop with just the lightest of touches on the other car. Let’s call the energy of the collision one joule. The other car, going 108km/h initially, will hit going 40.8km/h, or 37.2m/s. At this point it has kinetic energy equal to 0.5*mass*v^2. If the mass is 1500kg, this is over a million joules, ie more than a million times more energy in the crash. That’s an extreme case to show how the difference in the crash energy as a proportion is not just quadratic on the speed. It’s actually exponential (obviously I could have had it not even being one joule, it could have been zero, in which case the difference is undefined/infinite, but people get confused by infinity much more than they do by a million-fold).
Say we wind both cars forward 10m. Then the 100km/h car hits at 45km/h and the 108km/h car hits at 61km/h. The energy difference as a proportion is around 61^2/45^2 which is 1.83. In other words, the faster car hits with 83% more energy. Both are going to be pretty big stacks, but you can bet that the one that has 83% more energy is going to look like it too. You might not be able to tell on the car hit from the side, but you will on the other one. The driver is going to probably take a lot more damage.
So in conclusion, no, it’s actually true. Small speed difference really does add up to quite a big difference in accident damage.
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to ,
What If you had to get a doctors certificate to but alcohol, because you need it to go with your dinner?
I'd leave the country.
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to Sacha,
blue pills, red pills; they’re all about to be illegal again..
Yes, Kansas already went bye byes.
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