Driving with a Banana in your Ear
as in a cell phone or an MP3 player or whatever

There's been plenty of discussion about this being a hazard. Some people insist it's not. Sorry, but they are just being stupid.

There are two different kinds of things happening when you're driving with a phone in your hand: distraction and impairment. You can be dangerously distracted by the phone conversation even if you have a headset or hands-free speakerphone. Distraction can happen for other reasons, including havine a good time with friends in your car, daydreaming, absorption with music, and (God forbid!) watching television while driving.

And of course now there's this GPS business. Trying to find an address intently such that you can't find the road. Remind me to tell you a story about GPS.

Impairment is the other thing, and it is not insignificant. If you have ice cream in your hand, you are impaired. If you have a phone in your hand, you are impaired. But there's more than that. If you have a phone held up to your ear, you are doubly impaired. That seemingly simple thing takes a lot of your brain off the road.

I have not had a cell phone myself for several years but when I had one I was one of those "early adopters" of the headset. Not because anybody told me I should, but because it was almost instantly obvious that when I was on the phone, I was a hazard on the road, for several reasons. The thing that really caught me up was recognizing the 'hand-ear' impairment.

The headset thing was so easy, and the benefit was so obvious, that I'm incredulous how many people don't think they need to do this. Including the ditzy chick who driving into the plaza the wrong way one day recently, and heading right for me ... But then 85 percent of drivers think they are better than average.

It was a big load off my mind when I switched. Either way you can pull over when you need to make a call, and if you are trying to dial while driving I hope you get busted. But you can't control when incoming calls come at you, and just letting them all go to voice mail is just kinda not what's happening. What I did was to put the phone on automatic answer, count to five when it rang, and say hello.

It works. Try it.

Moderately Successful
Would you believe Successfully Moderate
My bedtime is in one minute but maybe I can dash off something here — I don't seem to get much blogging done any other time, so this is probably the best time to do it. But I got up at 5 AM so since it's 10 PM, I'm outta here. Except for the mention of my invention. (Haven't actually made one yet, but Real Soon Now ... )

OK, the invention: the iPatch — a thingie for putting over the throbbing light on the edge of the MacBook so I can sleep.

Electoral Dysfunction?

It's not the Electoral College that's the problem. We have plenty of problems to go around. The system at its core, except in Cambridge and a couple other places, is not merely undemocratic, it's antidemocratic.

Lets' make up, for example, an election: The candidates are Shrub, Nerf, and Bogontz. With numbers off the top of my head. If 50 percent of the people thought Nerf was the best choice but 4/5 of them (40 percent of the total) were convinced by the media that he didn't have a chance and so voted for Bogontz, they thereby voted against Nerf. Likewise, the other 1/5 (10 percent of the total) voted for Nerf anyway, damn the torpedoes, and they thereby voted against Bogontz. None of them wanted Shrub. There were another 3 percent who did want Bogontz. His total is 43. Shrub got 45 percent. The majority didn't want him. He won.

Is this democratic? Duh!

In a few places, and it should be everywhere, you ought to be able to indicate:
1. Your first choice
2. Your second choice
3. If it is so, the fact that none of the people on the ballot are acceptable for the particular office.

This is not real easy to tabulate if you have to do it by hand, but it's important enough that in a few places they have been doing it anyway for a very long time. (Maybe not the last one, generally called "binding none of the above") In these modern times with computers, it's a snap.

Now we come to the machine problems. Very simple: use open-source software. Total transparency. As Eric S. Raymond has pointed out, with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

Lions and Tigers and Guns, Oh My!

Suddenly, at least in Albuquerque, there's an upsurge in gun buying. Fear that they might soon become unavailable. Naah. Private enterprise will rush in to fill any void. Personally I'm not into guns but I can shoot. I don't think it's a good idea for anyone to be able to get angry, get a pistol, and get even in the space of twenty minutes. The ID check is one possibility; a blood pressure check might be a good way to weed out the hotheads. Just a thought.

Debate, my bippy!! (Department of Redundancy Department)
Check out this gem:
http://www.236.com/video/2008/watch_synchronized_presidentia_9857.php

It's been a long while since I've posted ... I've been trying to think up a name for my new political party. Finally got it: "Sour Grapes Party"