Safe Speed Forums

Yes, we can agree that the medical profession is another one of those 'behind the times' professions (like solicitors), stuck in a local minima. Can't last forever though - even the government is talking about 'choice' being the main thing, so get with it, Moggie.



I can't see how you can compare the hit-and-miss medical profession with engineers who have to design roads and decide modifications based on very intimate knowledge of physics and mathematics, statistics, individual history of areas and layouts, specialist knowledge of safety practises and costing estimates, material handings, people and project mangement, local politics and potential side-effects and combinations with other on-going engineering work for other related and non-related situations. It is certainly not the same thing. Is it?

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Thanks for the URL ,arthurdent, but it's quite the reverse - I prefer to work things out manually. I have no IPod or personal organiser etc. and my PC is as old as the hills. Before you accuse anyone of being a ''fascinated person', look at your own reliance on technology and decide what you can do without. Your phone? Your email? Your video? Your DVD? Your CD? Your TV? Your Sat-TV/Freeview? Your PC? The micro-chip that runs your car? Your digital alarm clock? Your digital camera? Your colour printer? But there is more - computers control the level in the reservoir of water you use to wash your socks, and work the valves in the pipes and the motors that pump it. They monitor the supply chain to the shop where you buy your food, the electicity to the cooker you use to prepare it, the power used to work your dishwasher (and it's micro-chip controler) and so on. If you use a train, the signals are being converted to digital. Why spend more time typing - it is obvious we have become as much dependant on the micro-chip as we have to electricity. Yet the road system is stuck in a local minima. Hm... I wonder why? Could it be that people use thier cars for more than just getting from A to B? Could they actually enjoy the freedom of driving about? That could be it. But freedom has led to abuse, especially of the absolute top speed limit, which many poorly performing driving have got into the habit of ignoring. The cameras detect those, and shock them into better performance.

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You keep on bleating about speed limits with such religious fervour, that you're starting to sound like a stuck record - and a particularly irritating one at that.

The only reason we have speed limits in the first place is because some nameless individuals in the past thought that they may be a good idea - and because speed is so easy to measure, they made it important.

Give us some proof of your contention that speed limits and their enforcement are so vital to road safety. Either that, or shut up about them, for heavens sake man!

Do you mean "choice of hospital" - "choice of doctor" - "choice of treatment" and when government of whatever colour talks of choice - I would not take bets on what they mean by "choice". "Choice" to a wally in Westminster is not what me and thee necessarily understand by "choice!"

You cannot get over the fact that when it comes to choice of treatment - I have initimate knowledge of a patient's inner workings. I know their medical history to even their patterns of farting! I have intimate knowledge of their bodies, medical histories and can thus prescribe which medication will suit and cure them the quickest! It is not necessarily the most expensive either. Medicines are drugs and affect each individual's body chemistry differently. I have to know about what my drug options are and how they may affect my patient.

I have to decide if surgery if appropriate - myocarditis and endocarditis for starters - and sometimes even liaise with the transplant team down in Manchester. We may specialise in specific fields - but our fields of expertise often overlap as would be normal with such a complex human machine.



My wife is bio-chemist. She knows how bodily chemicals inter-act with each other. She is also known expert in her field.

You forget that one thing can never change - at least in our life time as evolution occurs over thousands/millions of years - the human machine and its capabilities and capacities.

According to scans - my next child (we have asked not to know the sex - my wife and I are old-fashioned and want the thrill of looking and seeing in the delivery room! Though - if the last three times are any indication - poor old me could end up with being called lots of very rude names and getting a black eye! Still - got until November to make my escape plans........... )


Oh yes - I was on about .... my next child appearing to be developing in time honoured fashion - according to the specialist treating my wife.





Hit and miss? You go to GP and describe how you feel and where it hurts. He makes initial diagnosis and then refers up the ladder for further tests. I have very intimate knowledge of how a body actually works - and each body chemistry is different - chemically, genetically and psychologically. I have to have very intimate knowledge of this - and I need to know a person's medical history as well to diagnose and decide on best course of treatment. I have to have specialist knowledge of how much the drug I prescribe is going to cost my department and the NHS (or the taxpayer),. I have to be aware of the side effects drug and operation may have on patient and his/her family, whether or not treatment will affect any other ailment patient may be being teated for. Diabetic heroin addict with HIV or AIDS for example ! I have to have another possible course of treatment and modified doseage up my sleeve.

You mention specialist safe procedures! Why do you think I wear latex and lycra from head to foot on occasions? For fun?


Maths? Physics? Bio-Physics? Bio-Chemistry? You think I just see people and say "open wide -= say "Ah!" for me and burp!?

My research is never ending. My wife's research is never ending. Other medics in this family - neurologist in Wales, heart surgeon in Cambs, oncologist in Oxford, urologist in Stirling --to list just four of us within both mine and my wife's families! It is never ending! We learn something new about our human machine every day!

I think it is safe to say that the medical profession is darned sight more focussed than the road engineering profession. On aggregate - we do much better than computers and engineers and so-called safety prats!

I also think that we medics meet the intellectual demands the public expect - and on aggregate - we do very well indeed.

As for MRSA - it is everywhere. It exists in Swiss hospitals. Swiss paper "Le Matin au dimanche" of 11/07/04 carried story of Swiss concerns that this was rife and raging in their hospitals. "Blick am Sonntag" (Swiss edition carried same story and "Le Figaro" and "FAZ" have also highlighted that hospitals in both France and Germany are also plagued by this. It is not a British phenomenum. But then -- not many Brits read a foreign language - so they are not likely to be as aware of this as perhaps they should be! I can get the gist and reasonable take - but naturally my wife will just read them as natural. She is fluent !




My colleague is still contesting a ticket for 34 mph in 30 mph zone. Lancs may claim it has never done this - but my colleague has such a ticket and numerous people in this county state that they too have received such tickets. On that phone-in they had on the radio - people rang in stating similar and were told to contact the Constabulary. Um - You tried ringing that number? My colleague has! The nurses who have been NIPped have! No-one bothers to pick it up! They know they do this - but will insist they do not! Chap here may have been on course where all 14 had ticket at 35mph - but I have heard too many stating otherwise - and my colleague showed me his ticket at the time - it said 34 mph! Three months or so have elapsed and he is no wiser as to what will happen. He did get a reminder to name the driver and got his lawyer to respond. It has been a bit quiet since!

Have wind up alarm clock with bells on it and a battery one. Much more reliable in case of a power cut!

e-mail? Use the phone whenever I can!

Digital camera? I use a Brownie and a Leica - plus normal SLR! Much more fun!

Golf? OK - so I have an "Improve your Technique" thingy on my PC!

OK - so I use a PC and the Jag has those doo-dahs! But my STAG and my MOGGIE and my other CLASSICS do not! And they are much more fun to play drivin' in!




And if we have a power cut, if the HUMAN MACHINE programming it or keying in the codes makes a mistake - we are in doggy's doo-dahs!

We still need to know how to do these jobs and have a manual back-up!

My mother found she could not do her chopping the other day because the computer at the supermarket crashed. A large mult-national lost miliions in one day because a computer crashed.

That is ridiculous!



People are people. We need our freedom. This freedom and curiousity led us to create these darned machines - and they are and should always remain our SERVANTS and not our masters.

People have basic instincts - they need thrills, excitement and something to feed that desire to feed independence. Motivating and rekindling the spirit of human drive for perfecting skills is way forward and not maaking people too relaint on machines.

If machines break down - we would be like new born babies and more will die through ignornace of survival techniques!

Do you have X-Ray vision, like superman If I go to a doc and ask him what’s up, I need the facts – what is it, what is going to happen to me, what can you do about it, what does it cost and how long does it take and will it hurt? If there is uncertainly, I need to know. If there are several treatments with differing outlooks, I need to know. If one thing costs more than the other, or is prohibited due to NICE rules, I need to know. I don’t expect a trip around the houses



Good, perhaps she might be interested in silico design . I work in Cambridge, amending a Fortran application that designs drugs in-silico. It takes a library of viable drug like fragments, and combines them in chemically sensible ways using modelling methods. It attempts to fit the resulting drug like compounds into crystalographically prepared receptor proteins, performing chemical rule transformations to achieve a good fit. It scores the fit against previous molecules, and writes the most viable candidates for further research to disk. These are sent to white powder chemists for synthesis, and to biologists for down stream drug screening and so on. We use an 80 node grid farm to parallelise the work. It still take hours to get results. Also, we have a program to perform virtual high throughput screening. The program uses a super computer/grid farm to create pharmacophores. It goes on to search massive drug compound libraries (millions or billions of compounds), scoring possible fits and writing results out for further analysis.



That is true, but as you can see above, in silico drug design is a reality, and what would take a white powder chemist years to do can be done by computer in hours. That is what automation does – it frees people up for more important things.



Sorry for being provocative - you’re doing your job properly, like everybody else should be. Keep it up and you’ll get somewhere



OK, enough already – I thought actors were the ones who talked themselves up. Maybe you should have a ceremony for Doctors – it would be a cross between the Olympics and the Oscars. But as you can see from my experiences in in-silico drug design, computers help you to do your job. That is their purpose.



I learned to read and speak German in the Geothe Institut, Munich. I was fluent back then but it slips if you don’t use it. Yes, of course MRSA is everywhere, because of over prescription of penicillin.



30 mph is the absolute top limit, so what has he got to contest?

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Manners maketh the man.



Perhaps the signs grew up out of the sidewalks on their own!



This is a web site about speed limits! Why on earth would I shut up about them?

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Basingwerk, thanks for your comments. We call them pavements or footpaths in the UK.

More importantly, this site is not just about speed limits. It is intended (correct me if I'm wrong SS) to offer a central point of reference for all road safety related issues!

As such, here's a quandry I'm having about Speed limits. I've heard two stories (both from credible, published sources) as to where they originated but I don't know thich is true.

1. A racing driver, during the 60's was caught speeding on the newly built stretch of the A1 (at the time) in his AC Cobra. Attempting to tune the engine, he was clock travelling in excess of 160mph! As a result, the authorities viewed it high time speed limits were introduced, thus the 70mph limit.

2. During oil shotages (60/70's, whatever I'm too young to remember) the 70mph speed limit was introduced to keep peoples speed down so they used less fuel.

Answers on a post card...

Does the battery one have a computer in it, Mad Moggie?



A cell phone, of course. But using a cell phone while driving is more dangerous than being drunk at the wheel, and hands free kits are even more dangerous still, which makes a mockery of the government’s approval of hands free kits. It also belies SafeSpeed’s assertion that the static casualty curve is due to cameras. Around the time cameras became common, so did cell phones, around 10 years ago. Now research shows that cell phone use in cars is still common, and that it is dangerous with hands free kits. Could that be the reason for the stubborn refusal of the graph to turn down? If so, the curve would shoot up if we scrapped cameras. I don’t expect a great deal of agreement on this site about that possibility because it would be bad news, and we like to bury bad news, don’t we?



I wonder why they don’t save money by scrapping their computer altogether? Could it be that those computers save time and money?



One could also say that this freedom and curiosity led us to create doctors in the first place - and they are and should always remain our SERVANTS and not our masters! Just kidding, Moggie.



So there it is – for some people, the roads are not about transport, but adventure. Pete317 rudely thinks this is bleating but I don’t want to share my road space with adventure seekers. Try sex and bungee jumping for thrills and obey the speed limit.

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Your are on the Internet now, young fella, and it recognises no borders.

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Belonging to the 'technological elite' is not the same as having an affinity for gadgets. It would be foolish indeed to deny that 'the microchip is everywhere'. It would be foolish however not to ask if it creates more problems than it solves. Jacques Ellul does not talk about iPods or engine management units. In fact neither of those things existed when he first put pen to paper in the fifties. His thesis is about the modern fallacy that technique/technology will solve our problems. BW, I do not need to accuse you of being fascinated by technique, your posts speak volumes. I was just pointing out the possibility to you. You may dismiss Ellul's work without reading it but such sidestepping hardly helps your case. I respect you for standing firmly by your views but it is frustrating when you stop short of substantiating your opinions as if opinion in itself is enough.

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PS the singular of minima is minimum

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DO NOT PANIC

It was 70 mph before the OPEC crisis in 74. They cut it to 55 for a long time to save fuel. Glory days.

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No, honest aurtherdent, I just can't afford to splash out right now and the URL you gave me just offered books I could buy. If his stuff is out there somewhere, I'll go and read it up. It does sound interesting to me. Just give me some time.



I’ll make you some graphs of deaths due to talking on the mobile phone (in my infinite free time) since 1994, which corresponds to the halt in the curve (which SafeSpeed attributes to cameras).

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Have you ever played ten famous Canadians? One of them, Marshall McLuhan, had some interesting things to say about it too.



and



and

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IIRC a temporary 70mph limit was introduced in 1965 after a pile up in fog and someone hooning it up the M1, may have been a Cobra but may have been something else. It was made permanent a couple of years later.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Been there. Done that.

After RoSPA trawled coronor's court reports and found that 19 fatalities were possibly due to mobile phone use over a period of 12 years I rejected the idea. Fatal accidents are generally well investigated and if we now had even 10% of fatalities due to mobile phone use I'm quite sure that we would know all about it. We're still looking for 1,200+ deaths each year to explain the "fatality gap".

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I've been trying (for some time) to find out how many accidents are caused by people smoking whilst driving. I'm not having a bash at smokers but surely there must be some corrolation that can be drawn between being on the phone and smoking. This doesn't stop the manufacturers building fire hazard into the car!!!

On top of that, if mobiles were responsible you would have to wonder why the same thing hasn't happened in all other countries with mobiles. Didn't Germany, Italy and France (to name only three) all see improving figures throughout the 90's? Didn't they get mobiles at the same sort of time as we did? I wouldn't say the mobile is blameless by any means, but if we are going to ask if it could be solely responsible for the "fatality gap" we would also have to ask why the same effect is absent elsewhere.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

A report out today reckons about half the motorists on Britains road Tailgate. . . I think most of us have had a few % of them up our Exhausts!!
Read full story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3526692.stm

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RoADA Member -GOLD 2008
If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.

Thanks - I enjoyed looking up M. McLuhan on the internet. Seems he shared at least one of Ellul's ideas:


He sounds confused
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