Category: learning curve

All mouth and no trousers?

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Big words from the Western Cape Transport MEC Robin Carlisle this week on two new plans to improve road safety in the Province. Firstly, he outlined plans to institute huge fines for parents who do not belt their children in when they are in the car. And those driving on the roads of Cape Town will note that this is a very common issue. Very common.

Currently, SA law only made provision for fines of about R200 for failing to use seatbelts, Carlisle said – and children were not differentiated from adults.
He said the provincial government wanted this increased to between R4 000 and R6 000 per child, which was in line with countries such as Britain, the US and Australia.

This is, without doubt, a good idea.
The statistics stated within that report are horrendous and include (but are not limited to):

  • 85% of parents do not strap their children in.
  • Road accidents remain the top non-natural killer of children in the country.
  • Between 200 and 300 children treated for trauma at the Red Cross hospital every year, between 70 and 90 percent had been injured in car crashes.
  • About 8 000 children die each year on the roads.
  • About 89 percent of those taken to the hospital for treatment had not been wearing seatbelts at the time of the crashes.

So of course, I’m fully in support of any steps taken to reduced these injuries and fatalities. Who wouldn’t be? Reinforcing the laws around kids and seatbelts is a good idea and upping the fines for those who don’t comply is a no-brainer.

The trouble is that it’s illegal to talk on one’s cellphone while driving, to speed and, in fact, to not wear a seatbelt yourself. It’s illegal to drive while under the influence of alcohol. But people still do it. And they do it because they can – and do – get away with it.
Remember this?

The spokesman for Cape Town Traffic Services, Kevin Jacobs, said 4 184 drivers in six months had been fined for the unlawful use of a cellphone while driving.

From which I calculated this?

4,200 in 6 months. That’s 700 a month. Or 24 a day. 1 an hour.
In a city with 3,000,000+ inhabitants. It’s a drop in the ocean.

So the laws are there, but the fact that they’re just not enforced means that the driving public feel that they don’t have to obey them. As Mrs El Presidenté said of the “Buckle up your kids, or pay” article, on Facebook:

Nice idea, but exactly how are they going to police it?

And I agree: this is pretty much worthless without backup. However, I’m also aware that the first step is to at least have decent laws to enforce. At the moment, we don’t even really have that. So this is a move in the right direction.

But perhaps a better way of making the roads a safer place to be is to change driver attitude and raise awareness of the effects of poor or illegal driving practices. And Robin Carlisle has made plans here too, with the new Crash Witness website, featuring genuine CCTV footage of accidents on the Province’s highways.

Described as:

Not for sensitive viewers /Ayilungiselelwanga abaButhathaba / Nie vie sensitiewe kyker nie

it is obviously designed to encourage drivers into thinking before they engage in dangerous driving. When I visited the site yesterday and again this morning, the videos refused to play – which merely served to encourage a lot of frustration here Chez 6000. I had to have a couple a Red Bulls to calm myself down before hitting the M3 into town.

I very much doubt that it will be possible to measure the results that Crash Witness may/will have in the Western Cape. I presume that beneficial effects from this type of thing have been shown elsewhere. But again – anything which improves the safety of our roads has got to be a step in the right direction.

What do you think? Do you buckle your kids up when you are driving? If not, why not?
Do you use your cellphone at the wheel? If so, why? What would make you stop?

Hoax emails hurt

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…as I’ve said before.

I don’t expect that anyone who reads my blog forwards this sort of junk on anyway – you’re all far too intelligent, right? (right?!?).
Thus, I really don’t expect this to make much of an impact in the greater scheme of things, but the trouble is that some people do believe all that they read on the internet. And if Maureen from church sent them an email saying that the moon was going to fall onto Cape Town next Wednesday, they’d probably save time by not making any plans for the rest of that that week.

I am, of course, talking about bananas, or more specifically about the bananas email that did the rounds in SA last week. It first originated in the USA in 1999, and – contrary to what is stated therein – bananas from KZN are not infected with the killer flesh-eating bug that kills and eats flesh.
Streptococcus pyogenes has no interest in bananas. Not enough protein, see?

It wants you.

But please don’t have sleepless nights. You’ll be fine.

Unless it gets you. In which case, you’ll die. Horribly.

Seriously though – as I linked at the top – we’ve been here before, but that was just one man who suffered annoyance and inconvenience thanks to an email attributed to him. Amazingly, bewilderingly, this is having a huge negative effect on banana sales in Mozambique:

Sales of bananas in Maputo have plummeted following the circulation of malicious e-mails and mobile phone text messages claiming that South African bananas are infected with a lethal bacteria.
The bananas sold in Maputo are grown in Mozambique, not South Africa indeed, Mozambique exports bananas to South Africa. But this has made no difference to panic-stricken consumers who are avoiding the fruit altogether.

Now, I’m no expert in the economics of fruit farming in Southern African states, but I’d wager that there isn’t a whole lot of money readily available to those on the ground (or in the tree?) of the banana growing business generally. And because of this, there’s likely to be even less now. This isn’t harmless fun. It’s affecting real people. Really.

Of course, you’re reading this high-brow blog. You are sensible, rational, informed. But when was the last time you checked on your mother-in-law or any other elderly or BlackBerry-using relative, hmm?
Why not do the decent thing and send them a link to this post and make the world of a Mozambican banana farmer and his family just a little bit better this December?

Android is *still* blowing everyone away

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Remember when we told you that Android was Blowing Everyone Away back in May of this year?

They were on the up, with about 37% of market share, RIM was in freefall (down to 25%) and Apple was doing “ok”, fairly steady at about 25%. Well, now Business Insider have updated that graph for November – 6 months on:

As BI note:

Android now has 52.5% of the global smartphone market. No matter how you want to slice it, that’s amazing. It’s stealing share from every other smartphone operating system other than iOS, which is basically flat.

Which begs the question, when you look for your next phone – why would you look at anything except Android?

Cute gets hits

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Think of this as some sort of web-based experiment. And yes – if you’re reading this, you are one of my experimental subjects. If you don’t want to take part, you can always close this window, but actually, in just being here, you’ve already taken part. Thanks.

Bizarrely, one of the posts which recurrently scores the highest number of hits is this one from June 2009, which features a baby pygmy marmoset. There’s nothing else of interest in that post, so I’ve formulated the hypothesis that “cute gets hits”.

That being the case, have some baby platypi platypuses:

    

Cute, hey? Yeah, cute until they get you with the pair of short spurs tucked away on their back legs, each of which is hooked-up to a venom gland that makes a viciously painful toxin:

Platypus spurrings of people are rare, but the select group who have survived the trauma (often fishermen trying to free irate monotremes from their nets) report pain strong enough to induce vomiting which can persist for days, weeks or even months. The pain is resistant to morphine and other pain-killing drugs and anaesthesia of the main nerve from the spur site is often the only way to relieve the patient’s suffering.

Or, of course, brandy:

“… the pain was intense and almost paralysing. But for the administration of small doses of brandy, he would have fainted on the spot: as it was, it was half and hour before he could stand without support: by that time the arm was swollen to the shoulder, and quite useless, and the pain in the hand very severe.” – W.W. Spicer (1876)

Mmmm….. Brandy….

But I feel we’re drifting away from the original idea of this post, so for more cute pictures and all you need to know about baby platypi platypuses head here.

Do you want fries with that?

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I’m often asked how close the nearest McDonald’s outlet is. Aren’t we all? Most days, right?
Of course, with my Android smartphone in my hand, it’s easy to help the enquirer out – I just use Layar or some similar augmented reality browser (note: first time you use it, you will feel like you’re in a science fiction movie) [Android QR here].
But what if I wanted to know how far it was between McDonald’s “restaurants”?

Well, then, I would turn to datapointed.net – because they have helpful maps for that sort of thing:

    

Here are their images for the UK and Ireland:

…on the isle of Great Britain, proper – anywhere reachable from London on foot, aka the mainland – Cape Wrath ranks McFarthest. From its restless shores to the nearest McFix, the hungry traveller must traverse the Scottish Highlands to Inverness, 136 kilometers [84.5 miles] inland.

And the US of A:

As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

Initally, they had the McFarthest Spot™ down as “between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley: 107 miles [172km] distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles [233km] by car!”, but that has since been updated:

Because per our calculations, the winds of McDistance have shifted – from your lovely rolling grasslands to the dusty Western outback. There, in the high desert of northwestern Nevada, you’ll find antelope, wild horses, and the Lower-48?s new-and-improved McFarthest Spot: a patch of sage and soil that is 115 miles [185km] away, as the crow flies, from the nearest McDonald’s!

Which is all very interesting and shows a certain degree of obsession and nerdiness. Not, however, as much obsession and nerdiness as actually getting in a car and actually going there. Really.

What follows is a diary of a two day road trip to Nevada, complete with photos, videos and an image of the McFarthest Spot™,  appropriately marked:

Brilliant.

There’s loads of other wonderful stuff to get immersed in at datapointed as well – including a statistically computed visual representation of the game “Chinese Whispers” and horoscopes dismantled:

David McCandless and friends have analyzed the text of 22,000 online horoscopes and found that they’re different permutations of the same few words, more or less.

Who knew?

Gotta love the internet. How ever did we manage without it?