More DUH!

From a spam notice: "Now you can talk and drive without using your hands."

No info on how the Bluetooth drives for you.

I am struck by how late to the dance are legislators, etc. who pretend that they are just finding out that distraction is the danger, not just using one's hands or eyes.

Particularly with aging I notice that just distractive thought is dangerous as are tuning the radio, looking at your passenger, and a host of other activities, but what we are getting are rules against texting and in some cases using the cellphone while at the wheel.

They have in some places forbade putting a TV where the driver might watch, but the GPS has eased this ban on visual distraction, although one could use the navigator in voice-only mode, but it doesn't work all that well.

Just as we made progress with seat belts and drinking/driving we will have to address distraction per se. The SKI Study on elder vision includes: "aging significantly reduces the effective visual field under conditions of divided attention (white circles, red line), and coarse stereopsis (depth perception) is also greatly impaired." and "Older persons self-restrict their driving based on several aspects of their vision, but not on the basis of deficits on attentional fields (measuring divided attention performance — one of the most important correlates of accidents). Testing and education is therefore needed."

And all Department of Motor Vehicle testing agencies still use the primitive visual acuity charts that are actually pretty useless.

Love.

My Favorite App

For many years I've used a program called TuneIt! to tune musical instruments I build. It is also a lot of fun to use for ear training, voice control, etc. If you try it you will learn a lot about intonation with voice/whistling/instrument.

He will guide you to a free download for thirty days' trial. Even if you're not a musician it's nice to see the harmonic analysis of your voice, etc. parade across the screen.

Love.

Protesteth 2 Much?

On this day (NYT): "On Nov. 15, 1969, a quarter of a million protesters staged a peaceful demonstration in Washington, D.C., against the Vietnam War."

While we protested the troops continued killing and dying for three more years.

In the current spate of U.S.-sanctioned murder-for-hire the actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have essentially no human rights' enhancement excuse.

And after a while the futility of protest saps such activity, possibly because the invaders' losses are "only" a few thousand, although the "collateral damage" in Middle Easterners' lives is orders of magnitude higher.

Now the airplanes torching the area are unmanned, flown by computer gamers near Las Vegas and the ground level massacre is usually muted with most attention to the loss of U.S. troops to truck and suicide bombs.

The Freedom Fighters cum Insurgents have no "in memoriam" tributes on our TVs but the Americans (mostly quite young) are paid off with a few seconds of mourning by sad-voiced anchors.

Even electing a candidate promising to bring the troops home couldn't stop the warlords from continuing to bristle patriotically and continue to protect people in Wichita from potential terrorist attacks. Please tell the mothers of the kids struck by fragments of cluster bombs that in war "shit happens" and it's all for the best.

Love.

Goodbye to Goldendale

It is really strange/moving to be uprooting and relocating.

It's something I have done rather often dating back to my escape from "The South" in 1942 as I had all my worldly goods (except my beloved Lionel electric train) in one big trunk (which got lost by the railroad company) on my way to Boston by way of New York City.

This time is just as adventurous/risky because I will arrive in Madrid on Wednesday with no known place to sleep that night, although I'm pretty sure it will be OK and not require finding room at the inn.

I was just invited to give the welcoming keynote at the Web4All conference next year in Raleigh and all of this is becoming part of that talk. The years since the WWW conference in Santa Clara (WWW6 - 1997) at which the Web Accessibility Initiative was kicked off have been largely flooded with almost magical experiences and the flight to Spain seems a fitting companion to all the relationships I've formed since.

This will likely be the last sermon written in Goldendale and I may never return here but it has been an incredible time during which I learned to be "old".

As I am fond of saying "if I felt any better, they'd put me in jail".

Love.