11 posts were split to a new topic: How to create traffic signals and headlights that accommodate all people?
Also, deer.
Those high beams are useful when I’m on a country road in Ohio late at night and there’s nobody around except all the fucking deer that are everywhere. I will use my high beams then, and only then.
Talking of fearbeasts, you don’t want to get too close to an elk, even in a car.
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My general rule is:
- if it’s night and the road is not lit,
- if you can’t see taillights ahead of you, and
- if you could legally pass a car directly in front of you, meaning:
not with oncoming traffic,
not on curves, and
not near the crest of a hill.
then you may use your high beams.
That seems to be sufficient precaution to keep them out of other people’s eyes. However, I’ve experienced many examples of people who don’t follow the same rule set.
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German makers have some very annoying strobing turn signals - not stop signals. Audi is the worst; I guess they have to do something to justify putting a £5000 badge on a VW. I am surprised they are allowed. But possibly the most annoying things of all to me are the flashing lights people use on bicycles. I am not even sure they are legal here, but May has cut our police so much that these days criminals are relied on to turn themselves in.
Filament bulbs are bad for a whole lot of reasons but it is perfectly possible to make LED bulbs follow the attack/decay curve of filaments - most of my LED bulb controllers do this. I guess at some point car makers will stop trying to market LED bulbs as a “look at me” feature.
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Definitely easy – but will add $0.10 to each car! 
Some of the new taillights just look ridiculous. I guess the designers have to obey non-designers at the top. “Make it look distinctive! It’s branding! No, more cowbell! More!”
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Just saw racist shit goblin Sessions on the TV here. Little prick is testifying to some committee. Never had I wanted a meteor strike on DC more.
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Thanks!
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Section 508 isn’t really enough. It considers tty/relay services an accessible alternative to phones, but by law they require registration, which requires people to be able to use a phone and to prove we can’t use one for certain specified reasons.
And government websites don’t always have an accessible accessible alternative to the phone.
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Ah, 508. I needed to buy (that is, license) a commercial computer simulation package for research when I worked for th US govt. I had to go through hoops to get around the 508 requirements for software bought by employees. The available codes just don’t adhere to them. I was going to be the only user, and I don’t have any problems with vision that aren’t correctable.
Besides, I really can’t understand how someone with really poor vision (like I used to be without glasses & before my lens implants) could use such a program. It required CAD to make a 3D model, and advanced visualization graphics to interpret the results. Am I missing something? Are there alternatives to CAD and typical scientific visualization for people with vision problems? If so it would be amazing but I just don’t know of any.
ETA missing “don’t” in last sentence.
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I looked at braille displays and keyboards, out of curiosity. They’re crazy expensive (like $10,000 for a display that can handle 80 characters of text) and seem to be still using 80s-era technology. Voice recognition and speech synthesis have come a long way, but in terms of graphics…
With VR and AR and haptic-feedback and touchscreens and computerized image recognition and all, our technology sounds so advanced that it seems like there would be something that could make things usable without sight, but I get the feeling that there isn’t. We’ll probably have self-driving cars long before a computer can describe an image, let alone video.
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Also, most blind and visually impaired people do not read braille. The low demand is probably what’s stalling development and keeping prices high.
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I’m annoyed at myself because in the last few days I have managed to make three posts with, respectively, typos, a misquote and factually incorrect information (not here).
When you reach my age there’s a constant worry that your mind is losing the plot, and I’ve had it now for several days.
I try to console myself by thinking I’ve already outlived many of my childhood heroes such as Alan Turing, but the disadvantage of being in your late 60s is that a part of you still feels about 20.
Shit, I’m now older than T S Eliot was when he wrote Four Quartets, which was in a way his farewell to the world in case he was killed in the Blitz. And although I could afford a 911, I’m certainly not safe to drive one.
I still just about trust me with the vote, but I’m now firmly convinced that nobody over 65 should be allowed to vote on matters that will have long term effects.
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I have this little apartment freezer that people often mistake for a bar fridge. It is very handy and works great except for one design flaw: it’s easy to think the door is shut and sealed when it really isn’t.
Last night I got bread from the freezer and shut (I thought) the door. I have got into the habit of double-checking it.
Today I went to get some frozen chicken breasts out for dinner only to discover it hasn’t quite closed.
I had to toss two unopened boxes of chicken breasts, plus move four jars of homemade peach jam to the fridge because they’d thawed. Everything else seemed all right; even the chicken was only thawed in places.
Not really asking for solutions, just needed to vent 'cos I hate wasting food.
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My cat knocked open the door to my fridge freezer once. Never was I so happy I put things in ziplocs and vacuum bags.
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And the painfully loud construction pain is back. It often hits 70 dB. Getting hit by a car was equivalent to 65 dB.
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So I’m trying to get some fresh air.
I’m in a lot of pain, so I was just going to go to the place where no fearbeasts are allowed, and sit down, and read a book in the tennis court where no fearbeasts are allowed, so I’d have a fence between myself and the people walking their fearbeasts through the place where no fearbeasts are allowed.
But of course someone was playing with her fearbeast in the tennis court where no fearbeasts were allowed, and as soon as we saw each other, the fearbeast ran straight at me, and I ran away.
There aren’t many places where no fearbeasts are allowed, so maybe people who keep fearbeasts could respect those places and respect people with phobotherophobia?
And now the loud construction pain has started again, so it’s moot.
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Wait, you were hit by a car, and you care how loud that was?
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The only thing to fear is phobophobia.
This is not good. People shouldn’t crap their dogs on the tennis courts, for various obvious reasons. I don’t know why anyone would take a dog there, except maybe to let it out without a leash but not have it run too far away. Sounds like bad and/or lazy dog-parenting to me, but what do I know, I’ve never had a dog.
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I’m not talking about how loud it was, I’m talking about how painful it was. Getting hit by that car hurt as much as 65 dB, and 65 dB hurts as much as getting hit by that car. More when I have a bad migraine.
I know doctors prefer “on a scale of 1 to 10,” but that’s really uninformative without reference values.
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Most dog owners I know have voiced disgust and disdain for the minority of dog owners who:
- don’t clean up after their pets when the pets defecate on private property
- give their large dogs a 10’x10’ area for running (pen) and complain about haters who ask what value there is in raising the dogs to be neurotic and to bark from 7:30 am to 11 pm
- let their large, vicious dogs run loose in dog parks to attack other smaller dogs
- chain their dogs in the backyard all night (this month a cougar from a nearby reserve jumped a fence and killed the dog)
- bring their dogs to school sports events on school grounds against posted regulations so the dogs can yelp over the sounds of play calls or cheers
- bring their leashed dogs right onto the property with signs ‘Leashed Pets Only’ or ‘No Pets on Playgrounds’, and unleash them, leaving the animals to run while they busy themselves with phone calls
My gripe is people who let their large dogs in very small food retail spaces where there are food safety regulations against allowing non-service animals, or sprawl on customer seating in human hair salons. “Oh I’ll just stand, no point in a paying customer displacing a Great Dane.”
I feel comfortable calling these behaviors out as negligent or antisocial, because loving dog owners who care for their pets call them out too. If you don’t have a disability and are habitually bringing your Pekingese with you into a supermarket and sitting it in the grocery cart basket, you need to reorder your life like order your groceries online or pay for a dog sitter if your dog has separation anxiety
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