I can still get to my destination using paper maps. The only time I had problems was driving in Europe where in cities there is no where to pull over and check them. I’m sure some US cities are as bad. I would not drive in NYC. I did DC what a nightmare. Take a wrong turn and within a block you are un-armed in the hood. LA is bad but there are plenty of parking lots.
There was a recent study on brain function and GPS use and apparently when one is using the GPS the brain is not much functional. So we are dooming our own brain.
I am with other folks here; I study the map before I take off. Even if I have the GPS running is just for back up in case I make a wrong turn.
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Just about anywhere in DC is safe during daylight.
I agree that getting around in DC is difficult. You have to understand the way the streets are layed out. I’ve lived near D.C. for my whole life, and I just remember a few main roads. I drive until I find one that goes in the general direction I want to go and take it until I have to change. Then I repeat the exercise.
+1
An old friend of mine suffers from extreme cheapness, an aversion to interstate highways, and no sense of direction. I finally prevailed on him to buy a GPS device when it was on sale so that he wouldn’t keep getting lost, but he claimed that it didn’t seem to help. And, he complained that it seemed to take him on very long routes, and it took him “forever” to get anywhere.
The last time that he left my house (at night), his return trip home should have taken ~50 minutes, but he reported that it took him a little over 2 hours. The next time that he was at my house, I examined his GPS and–sure enough–he had it set to “avoid all toll roads”, “avoid interstate highways”, and perhaps a few other choices that he had made.
Then I looked at the route that it gave him for his return home, and it all made sense. By avoiding the only direct (and logical) route from my house to his, it avoided I-287 and the NJ Turnpike, and instead routed him over a circuitous spider’s web of local streets until he could reach US Route 1, which has a traffic light every 1/2 mile or so.
I explained the programming problem to him, showed him why the GPS took him on a very indirect route that took him more than twice as long as it should have taken to get back home, and that I could re-set his GPS so that it didn’t take him on a ridiculously long route. His response was, “But then I have to pay a toll!!!”.
At that point, I gave up.
Just as you can’t fix “stupid”, you also can’t fix “irrationally cheap”.
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To return to the topic of the danger of using a hand-held cellphone while driving, please take a look at this article from today’s news:
I had an episode with a GPS some while back. I was driving Boston to Ottawa. It took me to the border OK, but then told me to make a U turn and drive to Albany NY ! (I had never been to Albany before)
Turns out I had too many “favorites” programmed, which totally confused the software. But how was I to know that?
So, after having read the article, I have 2 comments
Because the girl was thrown from the truck, it leads me to believe possibly/probably the girl wasn’t buckled up. That’s inexcusable for the mom to allow that. The parents should make sure everybody is buckled up, before proceeding to leave the driveway, parking lot, etc. Were the girl buckled up, she might have survived, in spite of her mom’s inexcusable actions all around
I feel the mom should get a prison sentence instead of jail time. As for the length of the sentence, I can’t say, because I don’t know what charge she was convicted of. But I feel it should be at least a few years.
I agree, but if her mother is one of those people who–irrationally–thinks that, “you are better-off being thrown clear” from a collision, then she would probably reject any advice to use seatbelts. In case you hadn’t noticed it, there IS currently a War on Science, and trying to introduce factual scientific evidence will do little or nothing to convince the anti-science crowd that they are wrong.
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Yeah, I’ve noticed the war on science
I’ve also noticed the war on truth, there’s some serious overlap
Well, the woman’s daughter is dead, in any case, and hopefully the woman will rethink her ways
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Not so fast guys. I think its more of a war on bias than on truth or science. Some experts like to pretend that they are not biased but tend to generate studies and white papers that bring in more money.
Back to cars. It was a fact that by 1985 or thereabouts we would be totally out of oil reserves and cars would be useless.
The potential for bias is why I look for unimpeachable sources for information. Johns Hopkins Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, and a number of other teaching hospitals have more to lose by fudging the results than by presenting unbiased results. That is also why so many people hold Consumer Reports in high regard. Their automobile reliability reports are unbiased since they rely on reader polls with a lot of respondents. Even reliable sources can have problems, but they are unusual.
I am not among that group .
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Back to the original post…I would call it more coincidence than irony. Irony would have been if the cop were using a cell phone and caused the accident.
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