December 23, 2006

• These people blaming their GPS for stupid mistakes are just the latest example of passing the blame for their own stupidity. Beavis and Butthead "made" teens play with fire and burn down their house. It's McDonald's a person puts hot coffee between her legs and burns herself. My TomTom will often times tell me to turn the wrong way onto a one way street or to turn right too soon which if I followed her advice would have my drive off of a bridge. Sure, my TomTom is trying to kill me. But I'm driving. If I turn off the road into a ditch, it was my fault. Nav systems can be helpful. But they are really nothing more than an overglorified map and can be out of date or just plain wrong. The driver still has to be paying attention. Cell phones are the worst since many people haven't been able to do more than one thing at a time. When you're driving you should be first concentrating on driving, not the phone, or the radio, or your hair, or what the passengers are saying. Or eating. Or reading the WSJ. Or texting someone. Or ...
• Word! birdherder. Personal responsibility! It comes with being a grown-up.
• A driver nearly killed my wife and I a year or so ago. She turned the corner, swinging wide enough that she was barreling straight at us in the wrong lane. Seconds from collision she realized that she was about to hit us. Her immediate instinct was to throw her hands in the air, scream and stomp on the accelerator. She actually let go of the goddamn wheel to scream. Managed to throw her cell phone over her shoulder in the process. Lucky for us, by throwing her hands up she also spun the steering wheel. She swerved off the road and into the side of a building. We just kept driving.
• I think it's important to remember that half of the population has an IQ of below 100. That sliver between 55 and 70 is about 6 million people in the U.S. alone, and some scales have that as mild mental retardation. Now I know that some of these people are good drivers, but when you start adding gadgets, 2-ton pickups, a crapload of traffic, and drivers licenses handed out like Crackerjack Box toys, then mental acuity is a really genuine concern.
• 55 and 70 . . . some scales have that as mild mental retardation 70 is 2 standard deviations below the mean and by definition retarded or whatever the politically correct term is this year. Plus it seems like lots of people lose 20 IQ points just by getting behind the wheel.
• It's McDonald's a person puts hot coffee between her legs and burns herself. Can we not use that as an example? In this case, McDonald's was serving food that destroyed human flesh on contact, something that food should probably not do. The coffee was kept so hot that it had melted the lid to the cup, and the woman who had to have her genitals debrided was merely trying to deal with the stuck-on lid when it spilled on her. Additionally, it came out in the trial that several other people had been injured by McDonald's flesh-destroying food products, and that McDonald's simply found it cost-effective for one reason or another to keep their coffee flesh-destroyingly hot and pay off the occasional victim rather than serve their coffee at temperatures that would merely injure rather than destroy flesh it touches, as normally hot coffee might.
• I was just thinking about this today. Apparently many of you have never worked in restaurants where old people like to eat. They lose sensation in their tongues, I think. I was remembering how we'd send out food, hot from the oven or grill or whatever, on plates that had been kept hot in the oven, and old people would send it back saying it was cold. We'd heat it hotter. We'd send food with gravy actually bubbling and burning onto the plates, that the waitresses had to carry to the table with oven mitts. It still wasn't hot enough. I am not exaggerating. The coffee was never, never never hot enough. We'd have to take it steaming from the pot, pour it in a cup, and put the cup in the microwave until it was at a full boil so that it would be hot enough. I work with an older woman who does this with her coffee as well. So I can see both sides of the coin, and why a restaurant might choose to make their coffee that hot.
• Also, I will never buy a TomTom because I find the ads so stupid and annoying.
• McDonald's simply found it cost-effective for one reason or another to keep their coffee flesh-destroyingly hot and pay off the occasional victim rather than serve their coffee at temperatures that would merely injure rather than destroy flesh TPCQ: "Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one." As for human dependence on robots: My father occasionally took us skiing when we were kids. He insisted that we take lessons each time, and never let us use poles. "Why not?" I asked, wanting to look sharp with the sleek professional-looking poles. "Because," he explained, "if you learn to ski with the poles and need them to turn or stop, then what happens when you accidentally drop one at the top of the hill? How are you going to turn or stop then?" Too many of my students are dependent on spellcheck. We all saw that documentary film The Matrix about what happens when humans trust the machines..
• I think it's important to remember that half of the population has an IQ of below 100 That's an average, not the median. There could be five people with IQs of 88 and one of 160, and you'd still get an average of 100. BTW, in case you didn't already know, I'm the one with the 160.
• OMG I kant spel without the spelchek! Or ad without the calcleator. The use of either one of these, however, does not affect my driving performance.
• There could be five people with IQs of 88 and one of 160, and you'd still get an average of 100. Kind of a small population, isn't it?