Mobile phone use while driving can kill!

There is a motorcycle in this picture

This is a strip of pictures that is making the rounds of the Internet with the intention of making people aware that using mobile phones while driving is such a distraction that all manner of incidents might arise.

This car is specially placed on show to drive home the point of what can happen.

The car was being driven by a young woman. She was stopped at a side street while at the same time having a conversation on her mobile. In the car with her was a passenger. She moved out into the traffic without noticing the motorcycle coming at her at 85 mph. The cycle slammed into the side of the car, and is still inside the car, where the driver also ended up.

All three people were instantly killed!

Personally, I have trained myself to sometimes just let the dammed phone ring. The things that people interrupt to answer the phone immediately is amazing. We will tell the person to whom we are speaking to wait while we answer the phone. We will interrupt our meal, and we will even interrupt the act of sex. How riduclous is that?

Mankind is not wired to always be instantly contactable. Just the fact that the phone is able to ring generates a certain amount of stress. So, these are my recommendations: (a) when the phone rings while driving, either make a mental note to answer when you get to your destination, or find a safe place off the road where you can turn off the engine, (to save yourself a fine) and then answer or return the missed call.

(b) while in conversation with another person and the phone rings, just let it ring. You can return the call when it's convenient; (c) avoid the practise I see so many people engaging in, and that is sitting down at a restaurant table and whipping out your phone, or, just as bad, using your phone to text while at the movies, and, if you even might engage in any kind of lovemaking, turn the phones off, or you may find the whole thing is a turn off.

I know no-one will heed my advice, but there, I've said it.

Copyright (c) 2014   Eugene Carmichael

A Driver-Less future awaits?

I told you So!

Sorry about that. However, twenty-five years ago I celebrated my 50th birthday by writing a full page article for a newspaper that covered the first fifty years of my life.  In hindsight it was an interesting thing to do because over that first fifty years there were monmentous things that had happened, including the start of World War Two and the Franco dictatorship here in Spain in the year of my birth. I feel a little arkward about that connection, but I really had nothing to do with either event.

Without doubt, the greatest thing to have happened during the first fifty years was the coming  of the computer and the digital age. That changed everything in a bloodless coup that continues to this day, and will affect life far into the future. I ended my essay by making a few predictions about the future, one of which was that the day was coming when we would no longer have to actually drive our cars. That was based on the fact that there were so many lives being lost on the roads, usually because somebody failed to do what they should have, or did something that they should not, that something had to be done to take the responsibility out of the hands of humans. In other words, humans were the principal problem, or so I thought.

Google has taken up that challenge and have advanced the science to such a degree that laws are being passed in anticipation of the day when it will all be so common place not to do the driving ourselves. However, at the time I made the prediction it did cross my mind to wonder just how could that possibly work in reality. I can imagine programming one's car to drive us between our homes and our place of work, or to other principal destinations. In real life that's not how we live. Now, I get in my car, and sometimes even I have no real idea of where I will go. Now I have the flexibility of changing my mind on a moment's notice, and driving to the exact location.

I think that perhaps the easy part of engineering a self drive car, especially one without steering wheel, may already have been done. Now how do we continue to move about with the degree of freedom we have become accostumed to?

Congratulations to Google, of all people for their advance in this field. I do wonder why it is Google rather than an auto manufacturer that is leading the way. Could it be that auto manufacturers know all too well about recalls for faults that in some cases have led to deaths, even though the vehicle was under the control of a human. I can see an experience that will go well, just so long as nothing will fail in the operating system. Assuming they got it right to begin with, we all know that as machines age they being to crash, just like my computer does when it has a mind to. But to have my machine crash while it's on my table is one thing.

We are taking another quantum step into a very brave new world. Who knows what awaits us?


Copyright (c) 2014  Eugene Carmichael  

Trains and buses and seatbelts

I do love trains

A reader of The Costa Blanca News wrote a letter to the editor which resonated with me. He complains that at great expense trains and tracks are equipped to allow for travel at speeds up to 300 kph, but in all that preparation an obvious part of the safety precautions for the passenger has been overlooked. That being seatbelts.

In April and May I rode the AVE from Valencia to Madrid roundtrip. I thoroughly enjoyed riding the train and marvelled at how the trip has been reduced from more than three hours to just one hour and a half. Older Spanish residents can tell you they remember the time when getting between Valencia and Madrid was as much of an effort as getting to a country across the Atlantic is today.

When so much is made of the importance of safety belts in airplanes and cars we have to wonder why trains, especially the fast trains are not fitted with them. Older buses don't have them and the Metro is not fitted with them, so from the passenger's perspective it is very much a case of mixed messages.

Do seat belts save lives? Absolutely they do. We are all learning to stay buckled up while in the air. If you have ever experienced a sudden drop while flying, anyone who is not securely buckled in gets slammed against the ceiling, only to get slammed to the floor when the plane stablises. When on a bus that crashes into something, all the people keep going. That does not end well at all. In cars we step in and automatically buckle up. Anyone without his done up and the driver gets fined. I have delayed moving forward until my reluctant passenger has buckled up.

Lady Diana gave her life in proving the point that seat belts are important and that they must be used. We have certainly had as many examples as we need of what happens when there are no restraints, the most recent being the high speed train crash in Santiago de Compestela.

The question that troubles me concerning why there are no seatbelts on the AVE trains is: when travelling at 300 kph is surviability even possible, with or without seatbelts?

Maybe the answer is no, which is why they simply haven't bothered.

Life is all about risks!


Copyright (c)  2014   Eugene Carmichael