Video game players make worse drivers (and make you late)

I read a report on a study while waiting in a deli. I don’t have a link for it, unfortunately. The study measured whether frequent video gamers are better drivers. Findings? They are not.

They are actually more prone to accidents, tickets and road rage. This is something I didn’t need the study to just know in my bones. There are certain cars you see treating traffic on a morning commute like a video game. They take risks all out of proportion with any time saved (usually very little to none). And you can imagine that some of them are very taken with their own “skills”, to the point where they are kind of “showing off” to us lesser drivers.

To them I say, “we know you CAN do this or that, but you really SHOULDN’T”. Even if you are super skillful, there are all sorts of people on the roads and the populations’ skill level is the old bell shaped curve. I call it the rule of “mom”. You must picture every other car being driven by your mom. Would you tailgate then? Would you flash brights? Flip them off? Cut them off? If mom doesn’t work for you, then picture Jesus. Ask yourself the same questions. He died for all the dumb things you ever did: would you still cut him off?

The study posited that perhaps the video gaming removed the thought of real world consequences from these folks. Sure. I’ll buy some of that.

Add to all this, the fact that in other studies I have read, volume tie-ups are actually CAUSED by the most selfish drivers. Yup, because they go too fast and travel too close to the guy ahead of them, they have to over react to speed changes, and that slowing down propogates backwards through traffic until someone is stopped dead and traffic piles up behind them. Once that happens, the only way to undo it, is one car at a time, from the front.

So the guy flashing you the brights and passing you with inches to spare to shame you; he’s not only endangering your life (and property), he’s actually making you late on a good many days. And you thought he might be a good guy because of that big, giant, NY in the back window of his black SUV…

Downing: John Henry in a white suit

Robbie Fowler still has the white suit. He is blase about it saying that if they’d won, no one would care, and I think he’s right about that. So much of media stuff deliberately manufactured and manipulated. Have a look at newsbusters.org any day to read examples from bias to outright lies.

Anyway, my brother and I have a fascination with Fowler and I had not seen the white suits in years. I still recall the sting of Cantona’s goal. I was at O’Donahue’s on 1st Street in Hoboken, NJ. I recall the ball brushed Ian Rush as it went by and I always thought, “…how odd that his last touch in Red was that one.” Cruel really. Things like that made yesterday all the more sweet.

There was one alarming piece of news regarding the Downing transfer. It is theorized that Werner and Henry were duped by this video of Downing putting balls into trash cans willy-nilly, from 30 yards. If you play footy, you know instantly that this is doctored footage. Once or twice you could get lucky, but it’s clearly not real. And even if it were, the game of football has so many different skills, that even if you could do that, it wouldn’t guarantee that you’d be a top EPL player!

So the urban legend that is building is that the stupid Americans got duped by this video and overpaid for Downing. While I’d like to think there was SOME explanation for it, this is bad. This will turn the fans on the American owners and now, as soon as anything negative turns up, the ire will be directed at John Henry. The Yanks need to do some serious damage control asap! This is not a good thing longterm. They’ll never live this down. They have gone from the guys who swooped in and, with Liverpool 4 hours from bankruptcy, saved the team and righted the ship. It was a great platform from which to start, but, I’m afraid, is pretty much undone in this one story, true or not.

Being that Henry made millions in farm futures, you are pretty sure that there is no grass growing under him. I don’t believe that their due dilligence was limited to this doctored video. I don’t doubt that the video might have piqued their interest, but I would like to think they did more homework, but, with the fans we’re looking at, it won’t much matter once this becomes accepted as “the version” of what went down. They don’t need much convincing to buy the “Americans are stupid and know nothing about soccer” meme. Henry might just as well show up at Anfield in a white suit next time. Is he Fowler’s size? The suit still hangs and is a phone call away.

Patent bread bowl?

Finished re-skimming Dale Carnegie’s 1920′s era meisterwerk, How to Win Friends and Influence People”.  Like I said, I had read it before (Sioux Falls, SD on a February, 2-week business trip) and thought I might benefit from a re-read.  I ended up skimming it.  Probably read 60% of it but I reviewed the stuff I wanted to.  Mrs. Pinetar makes fun of me for “skimming” certain (not all) books and I say that it’s just time-management.  By skipping (and not suffering) certain lame parts of books that don’t interest me, or don’t apply to me, I get through more material that DOES.  Nothing wrong with that.

I thought I needed the re-read because lately I’ve found that I have been wasting time getting drawn into stupid arguments.  (Spoiler alert!)(If you can have a spoiler for a book written in 1927) One of Carnegie’s big tenets in the book is that you don’t argue: almost never; with anyone.  It’s a losing proposition.  He says, and I mostly agree, that even if you win, you have only won a small, academic point and yet in the bigger picture, you have antagonized the man you beat and lost him.  He goes on that there is a way to point things out to folks who need learnin’, but do it right or you gain nothing.

I find myself arguing too much.  It’s not good.  Most people are not even considering your ideas in the typical argument IN GOOD FAITH.  You may THINK your ideas are having their day in court, but the other person is not even considering them–not giving them a chance.  He’s waiting for you to take a breath, so he can dazzle you with his stuff…long story short, you’re both wasting your time–get back to work.

Other gems in the book are the idea that to “Win friends” and “Influence People”, you need to be a smiling, active, engaged LISTENER.  Carnegie says that people don’t care about YOU at all.  They only care about themselves and if you let them bloviate on about themselves, they’ll walk away from that lecture (Carnegie says “let it BE a lecture”) LIKING you.  That’s it.  That’s all.  Shutupayourmouth and listen.  Be genuinely intersted; ask engaged questions but SHUT UP and let THEM talk.

I never did sales, but imagine that lots of this Carnegie stuff is now long-boilerplate in the sales-force-training manual; particularly the part that says: “NEVER argue with a customer!”  In fact, if the customer says that the competitor’s product is great, you are supposed to AGREE with that immediately!  Yikes.  But really, anything else you say devolves into an argument and you are then DEFENDING your own product instead of selling it.  Carnegie was big on the sales stuff, so if you are a sales person and you haven’t read this book, shame on you.

In fact, I’m throwing a big “shame on anyone” who hasn’t read this book.  It’s that core.  It’s basic.  It’s worth it.  You might learn something about yourself that you can tweak.  I know of a person who holds a big government job (where else?) and he is NOT liked by his charges.  They gave him this book anonymously for Christmas one year to send a message.  If your employees send you this book anonymously, they are trying to tell you something, but STILL, you should read it and think it over.

Where I work, I have a guy reading a book I thought was great, “Baseball Between the Numbers”.  He’s reading it reluctantly but has a real attitude about it BEFORE even reading the ideas presented.  And he was telling me basically that I’m going to be the one DEFENDING the Baseball Prospectus guys’ work.  I told him “no, I’m not”.  If you don’t like a piece, email the author!  I’m not going to be put in that position.  I enjoyed the book, and I hope that you do too, but if you can’t accept the fact that they found no mathematical evidence to support ‘hitting protection’ in the lineup, or that they found most sac bunts, stolen bases and hit-and-runs to be HURTING the team that does it, then it isn’t my fault.

What it does mean is that people, for the most part, are not objective.  They get an emotional attachment to an IDEA and to do that you must SURRENDER ALL OBJECTIVITY.  That’s why you don’t argue with anyone.  Because most people get emotionally attached to ideas and can NOT stand off and be a passive, truly objective observer; which is what you need for a true “debate” to have meaning, and not just be two guys shouting their “stuff” at each other.

I’m sure I’m guilty of it too, but I try to look at objective facts and evidence on its merit and incorporate that info into my view.  I think my ability to do that, to the extent that I can, reflects my education in Accounting and Computer Science.  I also have always loved Science and read every bit of non-fiction science-history that I can get my hands on.

The Accounting and Comp-Sci trains you to be objective and look at measures and build up assumptions off of them.  I carry this out even in an emotional avocation like fantasy baseball–building spreadsheets and then trusting what those numbers tell me.  For many, a thing like baseball is a very emotional, seat-0f-the-pants thing.  Don’t go showing those guys any numbers that say the way their daddy or their high school coach showed them was wrong–it only gets them mad.  They are totally convinced that they KNOW, so don’t go showing them anything else–it’s noise.  If it’s numbers, there’s a built in prejudice that, well, “…you cooked those numbers to have them say what you wanted”.

Reading Science-history books (there are so few good ones) is the other thing that I think helps me to be more objective at times.  It always fascinated me how certain really brilliant things came to be.  We always take for granted that a telephone or a computer or transistor, just WORKS.  But I always think that at some point in the past, some person had to MAKE it work for the first time.

And so you read about these people and it seems that the ones who succeed and make the breakthrough are ALWAYS the ones who question the current state of the art.  They question the conventional wisdom.

I just finished the Wright Brothers book, and they doubted the published, accepted figures for the day for lift and drag on a surface.  They built their own wind tunnel and derived their own numbers and when their numbers were far OFF the published, academically-accepted marks, they had the guts to TRUST their own results and proceed from that assumption.

Another example is in the great book “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” ( a must read for anyone–tremendous book).  They explain very well how Einstein’s real breakthrough was the simple fact that he was the first to ACCEPT the experimental results that had been accumulating, that said light traveled the SAME speed no matter the speed of the source or, of the observer.

That concept didn’t make sense to people because it is so fantastic; so counter-intuitive to everyday life.  People were not willing to ACCEPT that result after experimental result was piling up and confirming this odd “fact”.

Einstein’s genius is that he was just the first person to think,”…ok, let’s assume that is true, where does that lead?”.  That’s what led to his theory of relativity–just being WILLING to believe experimental results.

The analogy is a baseball fan when they first hear that the numbers show that hit-and-run, stealing and bunting almost always HURT the team doing it.  That’s not what they have been taught all their lives.  To accept that means that not only have THEY been wrong their whole lives, but all their peers and teachers (dad) were dead-wrong too.  Some are able get past being “wrong” or “fooled”, and say, “thank you very much, I am glad to have this knowledge!”, while others will not yield: “…light speed MUST vary with the speed of the observer or source! It MUST!” (“All those people can’t be wrong!”)

So you read the science history and you see how many times the accepted stuff was WRONG and the challenger was the breakthrough guy.  You see it over and over and over.  Lister and hospital cleanliness.  The Wrights.  Edison.  Einstein.  Heisenberg.  And on and on and on.

I’m not saying I’m smart like Einstein or anything dopey like that.  I’m saying that I’m working on the Jackie Robinson statue and I’m spending long hours doing that and you end up thinking about prejudice and where it comes from and why and so forth.  Prejudice can be about numbers and everyday notions too–work or play, it’s everywhere.  It is the human tendency to ASSUME things without looking at evidence; it is the human tendency to get EMOTIONALLY INVESTED in IDEAS for no reason.  It’s usually damaging in some way.  Some, obviously, more than others.  It’s beneficial to try and avoid it for yourself, if you can.  (I think this is also why I like Mythbusters so much)

***

For anyone still reading this far, the book we’re reading now is “Patent it Yourself” 13th ed by Patent Attorney David Pressman. I love it!  It’s reading like a text book, but it covers Intellectual Property, which is a bigger area than I originally thought: Patents: Utility, Design and Plant; Trademarks/Trade names, Copyrights & Trade Secrets.  It is fascinating.

For instance: To get a patent, you apply and pay a fee.  There are two levels: one for small guys and one for big institutions.  Then, when they grant the patent, if they do, you pay again.  This usually takes 3 years.  Then, at 3.5 years and 7 and 10 years, you will have to pay “maintenance fees” that add up to more than you lay out to get it or get it issued.

How this jag started was that I have been working on an “invention”, let’s just say, for a few years.  It was an idea for a year or two before I built a prototype last January.  My nephew and I were having fun dreaming about taking it commercial when I did what I always do, which is, bought a used patent book on Amazon used books.  In the first 15 minutes of reading that, I realized, “oh no! If I don’t have a patent for this and I take it out in public or publish it in ANY way, I have one year to file a patent or I LOSE the ability to EVER patent my own idea!”

So that put the breaks on our plans (not that we had time anyway–there were little league games to win).  I was amazed at that, but after reading Pressman (a much more in depth book), I understand why it has to be this way.  And I’m starting to see what my options are and that is making my planning much easier.  It takes the paranoia out of it.

Patent searching, has also never been easier than it is now.  You can go to google patents and look to see if anyone has thought of your idea but be careful, these online patent searches are not full.  They don’t go all the way back.  To do that, you need to go to Alexandria, Virginia, to the PTO library there.  Oddly enough, when you look out the front window of the Gaylord National Hotel in Washington, DC, you see Alexandria.  So we may be heading over the Potomac River to hit the library.  But there’s  a lot of work that would have to be done first.

Looking through the patents online is also very entertaining.  Check out this one.

Click here to open the patent in google-patents in a new window

One of the big takeaways of looking through the patents is the realization that some pretty dopey stuff gets issued.  And that’s not cheap.  If you are a small business or individual, you will be paying $1,100 minimum if you patent something COMPLETELY yourself.  That’s doing the writeup yourself, the full patent search (Alexandria, VA) yourself as well as filling out all the gov forms and the drawings!

Paying a patent attorney, a searcher and draftsman to do all that typically runs between $5,000 and $15,000,  so it makes you wonder who would bother to draw up, search and file a basically frivolous patent.  But apparently, some do.

And no, Phil, I’m not looking to patent the bread bowl, although it is a nifty idea…

I’ll end this longest ever post with my favorite Edison quotes:

Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.

Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!

Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

I know this world is ruled by infinite intelligence. Everything that surrounds us- everything that exists – proves that there are infinite laws behind it. There can be no denying this fact. It is mathematical in its precision.

I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.

I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

I start where the last man left off.

If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.

It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.

Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

The best thinking has been done in solitude. The worst has been done in turmoil.

The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.

There is far more opportunity than there is ability.

We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.

Mythbusters: Caught Out & Not Admitting It

[This is in regard to the Airplane-on-a-conveyor belt myth] 

It has occurred to me that the wacky explanation of the Mythbusters producers can mean only one thing. They KNOW how badly they have loused up this myth and so they are going deep into stonewall country and insisting the myth was something entirely different.

But they are steadily losing valuable credibility with their sophisticated core audience. They need to come clean and admit that they were way, way off on this. The idea that the myth is provable by a skateboard on an exercise treadmill leads to the obvious question: WHAT WAS THE AIRPLANE FOR THEN? Why go through all those gyrations if that was what the myth was about? Why not put a little fan motor on a skateboard and do the myth on a treadmill? Come on, guys; we are not swallowing this hooey! The reason there’s an airplane in the myth is because the myth is centered on the concept of LIFT, which is something that skateboards and cars and even shallow draft everglades fanboats DON’T trade in!

We are not swallowing your lame explanation that you hit this myth out of the park and we don’t understand the concept. The more time that ticks away without a mea culpa from the show, the more your credibility erodes with your incredibly loyal audience! How about it, Mythbusters? –Fog

*******

Below is the important snippet of my earlier post re this:

Click here to read the full post

Click here to read the producers’ lame explanation in a new window

The producers drone on and on about how us dopey guys out there in TV land don’t understand how the engine moves the airplane forward. To me, the myth was never about that. The myth is about LIFT. Lift is how an airplane takes off. If the wheels never leave the ground, an airplane is just a car with a propeller.

The very instant the wheels leave the earth even a millimeter, the myth is over and proved, so long as the plane was prevented from moving forward WHILE ITS WHEELS TOUCHED THE GROUND. That’s the whole point of the dopey conveyor belt, which has just got everyone so snafu’d here. If your experiment allows the plane to move forward AT ALL, then you aren’t doing the concept that I am talking about. You’re doing another myth entirely and frankly, one that doesn’t make much sense because if you allow forward motion, you’ll increase the likely hood of a takeoff, greatly.

What would have been a far clearer and more definitive experiment, would have been to rig a plane up so that it could only rise on the vertical, but not travel an inch forward. A big cable? Or a “pin” of some sort at the tail would have done nicely. That way, the only lift forces generated would have been generated by the isolated engine, moving air over the control and lift surfaces.

I don’t think the producer’s explanation mentions the word “LIFT” even ONCE! If you don’t mention that word, then you (a) were doing a totally different myth, or (b) didn’t understand the thing at all (what they accused US of!).

Add to all of this, the fact that this myth (my interperatation) is not a good myth for the show at all because there is a different answer to this myth for EVERY AIRPLANE EVER BUILT! I would be willing to bet that an old, under-powered WWI Sopwith Camel would not be able to lift itself absent of any forward motion through the air. For a propeller plane, I would rather test one like the uber-powerful Grumman Bearcat of late in WWII. A plane that could do well over 400 MPH in level flight. Perhaps the Bearcat had a powerful enough powerplant (engine) to lift itself while cabled.

When you get into jets, the myth changes again, because on a plane like the early MIG’s, where the air intake is at the front of the craft and the exhaust is at the back, you have the situation where the engine is not moving ANY air over the lifting surfaces, but rather is providing only THRUST, the very thing the myth removes from the equation with the silly conveyor belt. So, with the MIG situation, you are into rocketry, where it’s raw thrust on one side of the seesaw and the weight of the craft on the other.

In fact, now that I think of it (hey, someone had to because the producers and Jamie and Adam sure weren’t), a rocket, like the Saturn V, is a pure example of this experiment. It gets absolutely NO LIFT AT ALL from air movement over it’s surfaces; it gets all of it’s ability to leave the ground through thrust. Anyway, forget about the details; just remember that there is a different result for this experiment for each and every plane ever built: not one result for all airplanes. That’s another item the producers and Jamie and Adam neglected to ponder and comment on.

As a parting thought, understand that I love this show. I think it is fantastic in so many ways and I will not stop watching it or thinking (because it makes you think!) and I do believe that for a show of this nature, their overall batting average is very, very high and I am, and remain, impressed with the science on the show. If I met Jamie or Adam, I’d put it up there with meeting Willy Mays. Keep it up, guys.

Another addendum: If you read the Executive Producer’s explanation and then read the cold read done by Adam in the show, you’ll notice on thing has changed.  The open read by Adam says clearly: “a huge conveyor belt that is matching the planes forward speed in reverse“.

And the producer changes it to: “…a plane on a treadmill where both the plane and treadmill are going the plane’s take-off speed” 

Ah-HA!  To cover their fannies, the producer has added the limitation that the belt only go at the plane’s takeoff speed, and no faster.  Well, that’s the problem right there.  Any airworthy plane will be able to exceed by a reasonable margin, it’s average takeoff speed, or it wouldn’t be a very safe or effective craft.  So, in effect, the producer wants us to swallow, that the myth centers around whether or not planes can exceed their own takeoff velocity, never mind that takeoff velocity is really a curve and depends on many variables such as wind on the runway and fuel load and cargo and passenger load.  There isn’t one definitive takeoff velocity for a plane.  Are we to assume that a plane can only do its own theoretical takeoff speed and no more?  No margin for payloads or wind?  Nothing extra?  Are you telling me THAT was what this myth was about?  Then you are insulting my intelligence and that of many, many of your loyal viewers.  C’mon, Mythbusters!  Don’t blow smoke!  Come clean here!

– an increasingly annoyed fan