Cellphone Crashes and Car Seats. . .
Not much bloggable went on today.
Went to bed kind of late – About 3 am
Got up kind of late – About 11 am
Left the rig about noon to see a computer client in Pearland.
Got back about 3:45 pm
Left the rig about 4 pm to head over to Cafe Adobe to meet some friends for dinner.
This is our first time to eat at this new location since it opened while we were gone this year, and we were really looking forward to it.
However Jan and I were both kind of disappointed, since it wasn’t as good as we remembered from another location. It wasn’t bad, just not great.
And it wasn’t as good as Chuy’s, where we ate our first night back in Houston about two weeks ago,
We’re going to eat there again on Monday night with Debbie and Jim, Jan’s sister and brother-in-law, and all the rest of the family. So we’ll give in another chance.
After dinner we went over to our friend’s Connie and Herman’s house to look at a computer problem Connie’s having.
We got back to the rig about 10:30. For not doing much, it sure seemed like a long day.
And now for something completely different…
If you’ve read either Freakonomics or SuperFreakonomics, you know that the conventional wisdom about something doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. (If you haven’t read these books, you should.)
For example, I found this chart the other day in an article about the so-called dangers of using a cellphone while driving.
Note that in the last 10 years the number of cellphones has almost tripled, but the number of car crashes has been dropping pretty steadily during the same period.
If cellphones were so dangerous, wouldn’t you think that the number of crashes would be rising, at least noticeably? I mean, I’ve read some articles that say that using a cellphone while driving is the equivalent of driving drunk.
As it turns out, analysts think that the reason this is happening is that cellphone usage is replacing even more dangerous driving habits, like driving with your knees while you’ve got a burger in one hand and a drink in the other. Like, reading a newspaper propped on the steering wheel in front of you, putting on makeup and plucking your eyebrows in the mirror, shaving, and my personal favorite, conducting the music on radio with a conductor’s baton in one hand.
(Note that they’re not talking about texting, which requires far more time looking away from the road)
Personally, I think that airbags have caused a lot of crashes all by themselves.
Anyone remember how we got airbags?
The government didn’t think people were using their seatbelts enough so they make the car manufacturers install switches in the seats, so that if someone was sitting there, and if the seatbelt wasn’t fastened, then the car wouldn’t start.
But this caused such a revolt from the public that the government decided that, if people weren’t using their seatbelts, then they would give us airbags instead, since those were automatic.
But then it turned out that airbags were very dangerous without seatbelts. (Don’t believe me, try Googling “airbag decapitations”) So now we got both airbags and seatbelts.
Oh, Goody!
Next, they discovered that, even with airbags AND seatbelts, it was very dangerous to have a baby in a carrier in the front seat.
So now babies in their carriers are supposed to be in the back seat.
So, ever watch a mother with a new baby in the back seat. They can’t keep their eyes off that baby. They’re either constantly checking it out in the mirror, or actually turning around to look
Then, BAMMM! Someone stops in front of them.
And for what it’s worth, I think that rear car seats are also responsible for at least some of the cases where parents accidently leave a baby in a car. That is hard to do when the baby is in the front seat, and it sure seems like we hear about this happening more in the last few years.
Well, that’s it for today. Discuss among yourselves.
Thought for the Day:
"…An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
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