phobile mones

There is solid science at work here too.

It is actually quite hard work for a brain to understand speech. The sounds of human speech are composed of very many different sounds, over a broad range of frequencies and amplitudes. But around 50% of the sounds fit neatly into a much narrower band.

Mobile phones are digital. That means when you speak into them, your voice is actually sampled at intervals and chopped into neat little packets of data. The amount of data has to be limited as much as possible, so some fairly clever computing reduces the entirety of your speech into a small number, a mere 8000 times per second.

The consequence is that all of the subtleties of human speech are completely lost. The voice you hear on the phone barely as much resemblance to the speaker's voice as a child's painting resembles a tree. But like the child's rough approximation painting, the receivers brain does its magic. Based on experience of what it expects to witness, it takes the crude approximation and reconstructs it. All this takes huge amounts of brain power. Thinking power that when you're driving really should be dedicated to not killing anyone with 2 tonnes of high speed steel.

 

Now Im glad "they" are trying to clamp down on this menace but at the same time councils/road dept etc insist on putting up more and more road signs that are designed to draw your eye away from the road to read them.

How many people have been injured or killed by a motorist that had been distracted by one of these signs I wonder ?

On the Edinburgh bypass they have huge digital displays and todays important message was "take care when towing"

Surely taking your eye off the road when doing 70mph to read this unimportant nonsense is just another example of dangerous meaningless signs .

 

Same as the one that says 'tiredness kills. Take a break'.

Yes. Thanks for that. Now I'm thinking about being tired. And how nice it would be to take a break. Maybe a short snooze.

As a related aside, I was once driving back from a meeting with a car full of work colleagues. We'd just hit the motorway at more or less the beginning of our approx 3 hour journey when one of the lads yawned loudly and said 'I could just go to sleep'. One by one the others replied that they could just go to sleep too. When I'm driving I hate anything that puts me in mind of tiredness or sleep. When I sarcastically yawned loudly, shuffled in my seat, and said 'yeah I could just go to sleep too', the atmosphere in the car changed instantly. For the rest of the journey is heard no further yawns or mention of sleep or tiredness.

 

What did you say your name was?

 

He was too busy avoiding all those holes outside your drive

 

Oh yes! Now I remember you Is it still thriving?

 

Well the law is being tighted up which is a good thing but where's the police to catch them

I've reported a few people for a few things and i got to the stage where i was going to give up on reporting them because nowt was being done, 2 years of reporting and thousands of phone calls later something had happern funny you give the police all info name/address and the date of birth and it takes 2 years to catch them but i'm not sure if they got fined or just a slap on the wrist but living in the countryside you don't ever see a police person
I would like to see the fine for moblie and driving at £2000 and the money go to getting most police on the streets and in the countryside

 

Go and give it a cuddle

 

Think i might have mentioned a few years back I was driving from Axminster to Chard, a 60mph road but rather bendy and with only one decent bit of road for overtaking.

Woman in front was clearly talking on the phone, driving between 25 and 30 mph, I was stuck behind her for miles.

Got to the straight bit, which is going up a rather steep hill, overtook her and slowed right down to 20mph. Of course, she had to slow down, but having her phone clamped to her ear, she didn't have a hand free to change gear.

She stalled it, I dropped into second and left her standing there

Hopefully the message got through to her.