Shhhhhhhh – Ben’s made it to 7am (and counting!), In recent mornings he’s been waking at around 6!!

Did a New Scientist Enigma yeserday, for the first time in ages. I literally did on the back of an envelope too, which was cool.
It was all about combinations, which I’ve only just finished teaching to our undergrads, so I jolly well should have been able to solve it!!

Ok, as promised – my thoughts on why people speed.

1. Most obvious – “boy-racer” syndrome. Ridiculous and dangerous machismo, although this is more a feature of back streets and car-parks than motorways (but you do have to wonder when men in suits hare past at 150mph in their Audis)
2. The difficulty of sticking to the speed limit (as I talked about in a previous post)
3. Generally cars have gotten faster and safer, all of which tends to push up the perception of what speed is ‘safe’.
4. Impatience, lateness, emergencies, …
5. Most insidious of all, life has gotten faster.

It’s this last point that I think has lead to the average speed on motorways being nearer 80 these days. We feel like travelling is a waste of time, and so it’s something that should be got out of the way as quickly as possible. We try to cram in as much as possible, so that we have to travel quickly in order to get to the next thing in time. Faster trains and planes are lifted up as the ideal.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone – I often end up running to catch the train home because I wanted to do ‘just one more job’ before I left the office. Heh – even now I’ve just got in at 22.00 from a meeting, and have made a quick phone-call to arrange a friend’s visit this weekend and then quickly typed in all this, squeezing it all in before I feed Ben at 22.30.

I think it’s a shame though. We’ve lost the idea of travelling being a pleasure (probably because most of the time it isn’t), and imagine having the time to stop and literally smell the roses should it catch our fancy!

Done a lot of driving of late (most recently to a wedding at Brocket Hall, as in Lord Brocket, I’m a Celebrity.. and all that), and pre-Ben driving was a social experience with the missus, but these days she’s usually in the back looking after him, so we can’t really talk.

Although it’s sad not to be able to chat, it does leave a lot of time for thinking, mostly about driving, which probably figures. Anyway, latest jaunt along the M1 I was thinking about speeding, and speed limits. Why bother with speed limits at all?

I reached two (related) reasons for having a speed limit – first, and probably most importantly, it reduces the likelihood of accidents, for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a mo. Secondly, if there is an accident, the slower the vehicles involved are travelling, the less harm is likely to be caused to those involved.

So why does a speed limit reduce accidents? Well, the conclusions I reached were:

1. At higher speeds, things happen more quickly (relatively non-withstanding). During a 2 second glance in the mirror at 70mph, you travel about 60m. At 100mph, it’s about 90m – or something like 15 car lengths further. Similarly for reaction times.
2. If something does happen, you’ve got more speed to shed.
3. Cars are generally less stable at higher speeds and heavy braking, raising the likelihood of swerving/skidding/drifting into other cars, barriers, etc.
4. Speed differentials will be higher. What I mean is a 60mph wanders into the fast lane, a car coming up at 70 is a different proposition from one hareing up at 100. This is true of coming up behind other cars too – I’ve been caught out even at 70 when a Lorry or caravan has been going more slowly that I had thought.
5. Higher speed impacts will spread debris/cars/other obstructions further afield, raising the likelihood of further accidents.
6. Slightly more dubiously, driving faster may increase adrenalin, ‘pump you up’, making you more likely to make a silly mistake.

Arguments the other way probably would say things like modern cars are very stable, have lots of driver aids (like ABS), good crash protection anyway…

Dunno – shall post some thoughts on why people speed later this week, I think.

Oh yes, and I didn’t mention that I’ve chanted a few more CSS runes over the site. Nothing major, it was just bugging me that the text of the site was stuck at 800px wide flushed left. Anyway, now it (hopefully) resizes and is centered in the window. And I don’t mind saying it was a pain in the bottom getting it working with both IE and Mozilla, each of which choose their own special interpretation of CSS… It’s not even like there’s anything that clever either.

Phew busy time. Just been marking my third year’s exam papers (which I can’t comment on for obvious reasons), but one of them stopped by after the exam and told me that he’d read all of this garbage! I didn’t think anyone except me was interested in it, but there you go – I guess you go to any lengths to avoid revision!!

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, I did a mini site enhancement a week or so ago (which is what gave birth to the whole idea of a news section), to put “Eutony Computing” and “Eutony Music” under the auspices of “Eutony.Net”. These had previously resided at eutony.co.uk and eutony.com respectively, but I don’t really need 3 domain names! E.N has always been my favourite, so I’m going to stick with that. I was at one point thinking about being a freelance software engineer, and my company would then be Eutony Computing (and live at .co.uk) – life seems to be taking a more academic bent now…

Anyway, not much to see there – Computing has some links to tutorials and reference sites that I use a lot, someone may find them useful I guess… I’ve got some code and Perl scripts that I intend to make available too, when time allows.

Yup – he’s got the hang of sleeping again. This morning he even made it through to 7am.. quids in!

I take it all back – he slept through the night!!
Well, if you count waking up at 6.15 as sleeping through the night (which we do!)

G’rrrrr – five times in the night – FIVE TIMES
And three times the night before.

Ben the master sleep-depriver strikes again.