Things you always wanted to know the answer to [Vol. 3]

[StevieBee]

On Flightradar24, when tracking a plane's progress using the 3D option where by you look down over a map, the screen periodically moves quite rapidly left to right. Is this just the data catching up with itself and adjusting or is the plane actually being blown left to righto to that degree?

[Brother D]

StevieBee said:

Funkycoldribena said:

Why don't we build houses out of wood like the Americans? Must be cheaper and faster to bung them up.

More to the point, why don't they use bricks?...given the frequency of tornadoes in some parts of the States, I would have thought that brick and mortar would afford tad more protections and durability.

Cheap/Fast/Lasting - (sort of you can only ever have two of the three).
Plus US houses would never pass UK building regs regarding thermal efficiency - they are essentially your garden shed with plaster board on the inside- they are amazing st (and the US spec wooden structures probably wouldn't last long in the UK's rather wet climate). Just about every american I know with a house has a regularly leaking roof.

Bricks are relatively expensive to produce and transport vs wood. And I would not put it past local ordinance preventing use of brick construction (due to lobbying by building/construction firms). As mentioned - roofs require replacing every 5-10 years which is a nice earner for everyone apart from the end-user.

[iambeowulf]

StevieBee said:

On Flightradar24, when tracking a plane's progress using the 3D option where by you look down over a map, the screen periodically moves quite rapidly left to right. Is this just the data catching up with itself and adjusting or is the plane actually being blown left to righto to that degree?

I really don't know.

However. As the software used in these applications has little commercial value I'd imagine it's because of crap coding.

But then I don't actually know as I'm not an IT type.

[GokTweed]

The highway code stopping distances...do they have any meaning these days what with the improvement in braking performance of your 'average' car?

[P-Jay]

GokTweed said:

The highway code stopping distances...do they have any meaning these days what with the improvement in braking performance of your 'average' car?

If you ask the Police they say they haven't changed greatly, yes TopGear et al will occasionally show some mega-braked quarter-million pound behemoth stopping from 70 in 6 inches and laughing at the absurdness of the HC, but that's when the driver is driving along in total concentration with their foot hovering over the brake pedal wait to get to some cones and ttting it and letting the ABS / EPS sort it out.

In the real world, drivers are less attentive than they every have been and almost never brake at full force because they're not used to doing so - manufactures are trying to combat this with systems that can detect an emergency and brake much harder than the driver input, but they're still rare. So what we've gained in better brakes we've lost in reaction time and driver input.

[walm]

P-Jay said:

So what we've gained in better brakes we've lost in reaction time and driver input.

No - relative to the HC numbers the only thing that has changed is better brakes.
Driver reaction time hasn't changed. It's always been crap!

[Moonhawk]

andygo said:

Hadron collider. I understand the bit about hitting neutrons together in order to establish some sort of theory about the universe, but why?

Why do we need to know?

Are we going to be able to change anything with this info?

We don't know what difference the knowledge will make until we know it. The application of knowledge often comes much later than the discovery.

A great example of this is lasers. Almost 100 years ago - Einstein formulated equations that described the laser. It was almost 50 years later that the first working laser was built and back then it was still very much a "pie in the sky" academic curiosity. Fast forward another 50 years or so - could you imagine a modern world without lasers?

100 Years ago - people might have asked similar questions "why do we need to know about lasers" and "Are we going to be able to change anything by knowing about lasers".

[Einion Yrth]

Moonhawk said:

We don't know what difference the knowledge will make until we know it. The application of knowledge often comes much later than the discovery.

A great example of this is lasers.

And yet one important use of lasers (inv. 1960) is holography, which was invented by Dennis Gabor in 1947, so...

[Hugo a Gogo]

P-Jay said:

GokTweed said:

The highway code stopping distances...do they have any meaning these days what with the improvement in braking performance of your 'average' car?

If you ask the Police they say they haven't changed greatly, yes TopGear et al will occasionally show some mega-braked quarter-million pound behemoth stopping from 70 in 6 inches and laughing at the absurdness of the HC, but that's when the driver is driving along in total concentration with their foot hovering over the brake pedal wait to get to some cones and ttting it and letting the ABS / EPS sort it out.

In the real world, drivers are less attentive than they every have been and almost never brake at full force because they're not used to doing so - manufactures are trying to combat this with systems that can detect an emergency and brake much harder than the driver input, but they're still rare. So what we've gained in better brakes we've lost in reaction time and driver input.

so were drivers in the old days much better at concentrating and reacting with their crap brakes?

[Hooli]

Hugo a Gogo said:

P-Jay said:

GokTweed said:

The highway code stopping distances...do they have any meaning these days what with the improvement in braking performance of your 'average' car?

If you ask the Police they say they haven't changed greatly, yes TopGear et al will occasionally show some mega-braked quarter-million pound behemoth stopping from 70 in 6 inches and laughing at the absurdness of the HC, but that's when the driver is driving along in total concentration with their foot hovering over the brake pedal wait to get to some cones and ttting it and letting the ABS / EPS sort it out.

In the real world, drivers are less attentive than they every have been and almost never brake at full force because they're not used to doing so - manufactures are trying to combat this with systems that can detect an emergency and brake much harder than the driver input, but they're still rare. So what we've gained in better brakes we've lost in reaction time and driver input.

so were drivers in the old days much better at concentrating and reacting with their crap brakes?

Because the ones that weren't crashed & died. Now they survive, buy another car & crash again & again & again....

[marshalla]

Hugo a Gogo said:

so were drivers in the old days much better at concentrating and reacting with their crap brakes?

There were fewer of them, they knew they couldn't rely on the brakes so left bigger gaps and drove more carefully, and the ones that got it wrong only got it wrong once.

[Hugo a Gogo]

either way, quoted reaction times from when the HC was written also - did they not also feature drivers hovering over the brakes etc?


reactions are the same, but cars are much better

[Moonhawk]

Einion Yrth said:

And yet one important use of lasers (inv. 1960) is holography, which was invented by Dennis Gabor in 1947, so...

Initial experiments in holography used electron beams - not laser light. It was only after lasers were invented that it was found they were suitable for applying into the existing field of holography.

[P-Jay]

Hugo a Gogo said:

P-Jay said:

GokTweed said:

The highway code stopping distances...do they have any meaning these days what with the improvement in braking performance of your 'average' car?

If you ask the Police they say they haven't changed greatly, yes TopGear et al will occasionally show some mega-braked quarter-million pound behemoth stopping from 70 in 6 inches and laughing at the absurdness of the HC, but that's when the driver is driving along in total concentration with their foot hovering over the brake pedal wait to get to some cones and ttting it and letting the ABS / EPS sort it out.

In the real world, drivers are less attentive than they every have been and almost never brake at full force because they're not used to doing so - manufactures are trying to combat this with systems that can detect an emergency and brake much harder than the driver input, but they're still rare. So what we've gained in better brakes we've lost in reaction time and driver input.

so were drivers in the old days much better at concentrating and reacting with their crap brakes?

Yes, but not through choice really - drive a Ford Cortina LX at 70mph and it demands a lot of attention, it'll move around the lane requiring continuous steering input, when you brake it'll dive and rarely do so in a straight line so you 'drove' an old car, even if you were just going along the M1, if you wanted something to help pass the time, you had a radio, but it never really took away the much louder noise of the engine, wind and road - in short, in the days of our fathers and grandfathers driving required a lot more attention so if sometime happened, it was more likely the driver saw it happen.

These days, the latest Mondeo requires almost zero attention at 70, it's barely getting into it's stride, you won't hear much, if any, of the road, wind and engine noise and if you need to change direction or speed modern tyres, suspension and electronic aids will make it easy and error free - given this, most drivers pay about as much notice as they do when they're watching daytime tv - the whole experience washes over them - until sometime unusual appears in front of them, like a jack-knifed lorry - the react slower to it, and when they do they don't brake hard enough because they've never need to before - when they do finally react correctly the car will throw of speed, far far quicker than it's predecessor ever could - but the advantage has already been spent.

[Hugo a Gogo]

well, I disagree

most drivers back then had driven far less at high speed than nowadays (fewer motorways), so they were also not used to it, there was less traffic, they didn't have to brake so much either

they had radios, they stared out at the scenery, they smoked and ate sandwiches
they maybe had 2 pints at lunch

reaction tests are reaction tests, real world is real world

you can't say modern reaction tests are unrealistic, because old ones were exactly the same

[Moonhawk]

P-Jay said:

These days, the latest Mondeo requires almost zero attention at 70, it's barely getting into it's stride, you won't hear much, if any, of the road, wind and engine noise and if you need to change direction or speed modern tyres, suspension and electronic aids will make it easy and error free - given this, most drivers pay about as much notice as they do when they're watching daytime tv - the whole experience washes over them - until sometime unusual appears in front of them, like a jack-knifed lorry - the react slower to it, and when they do they don't brake hard enough because they've never need to before - when they do finally react correctly the car will throw of speed, far far quicker than it's predecessor ever could - but the advantage has already been spent.

It is clear though that whatever concentration has been lost is more than compensated for by the increase in car safety, shorter stopping distances etc

Fatalities on UK roads peaked at 8000 in the early 1970s and have dropped off steadily since then to their current level of around 1700. This despite the number of vehicles on UK roads and the number of miles travelled increasing massively over the same period.

The UK has amongst lowest fatality rate of anywhere in the world (3.5 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants), much better than many 'western' countries and only marginally worse than the likes of Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

[P-Jay]

Moonhawk said:

P-Jay said:

These days, the latest Mondeo requires almost zero attention at 70, it's barely getting into it's stride, you won't hear much, if any, of the road, wind and engine noise and if you need to change direction or speed modern tyres, suspension and electronic aids will make it easy and error free - given this, most drivers pay about as much notice as they do when they're watching daytime tv - the whole experience washes over them - until sometime unusual appears in front of them, like a jack-knifed lorry - the react slower to it, and when they do they don't brake hard enough because they've never need to before - when they do finally react correctly the car will throw of speed, far far quicker than it's predecessor ever could - but the advantage has already been spent.

It is clear though that whatever concentration has been lost is more than compensated for by the increase in car safety, shorter stopping distances etc

Fatalities on UK roads peaked at 8000 in the early 1970s and have dropped off steadily since then to their current level of around 1700. This despite the number of vehicles on UK roads and the number of miles travelled increasing massively over the same period.

The UK has amongst lowest fatality rate of anywhere in the world (3.5 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants), much better than many 'western' countries and only marginally worse than the likes of Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

Do you have any data on number of accidents, or just number of fatalities - roads are much safer now due to improved barriers, better surfaces etc, plus cars themselves are infinitely safer - accidents that would usually be fatal 30 years ago, can usually be 'walked away' from today.

[marshalla]

Safety feature = avoids the accident.
Survival feature = human still breathing after the accident.

Which are we really talking about ?

[P-Jay]

marshalla said:

Safety feature = avoids the accident.
Survival feature = human still breathing after the accident.

Which are we really talking about ?

Survival feature if you like then - crumble zone, air bags, etc.

[Moonhawk]

marshalla said:

Safety feature = avoids the accident.
Survival feature = human still breathing after the accident.

Which are we really talking about ?

Some technology can be split into those groupings (e.g. airbags). Other technology (e.g. brakes) can fit into both (better brakes mean you may avoid an accident altogether - or may reduce the impact speed should an accident occur - thereby leading to better survivability)

Edited by Moonhawk on Monday 13th April 15:26