Ski By Fire

[yogi]

I once read how that happens and I'm certain I cannot explain it adequately here. But I'll give it a shot anyway. LOL

There is an area of the brain that processes square shapes, for example. The senses feed that area whatever inputs it has and after determining it's a square the brain passes the information on to other parts of the brain for further processing. Things like color, motion, size, distance, and the godz only know what, are all stored at different locations in the brain. Thus a square moving takes one cognitive path to consciousness and a square standing still goes another path. The sensory inputs triggers recognition of these familiar attributes and tries to match the lot of them with something already identified, such as a chair or a building. This information is then sent to the motor reflex center if it's identified as an oncoming moving van, for instance, so that you can get the hell out of the way. Otherwise this identified sensory input goes to the conscious mind center directly, which is where we make decisions about what to do.

In the case of the experiment you participated in, the duration of the sensory inputs were not long enough for the brain to clearly identify what the eyes saw. There is a lot of ROM in your head that needs to be scanned before any positive identities can be made. So, when sensory information is identified it is passed to the conscious decision making part of the brain where the best guess was applied. The first guess was incorrect because there was not enough processing time available. Not enough detail was perceived to make a correct guess. The moral of the story is that all our senses go through several stages of filtering in the brain and it takes a finite amount of time for the process to complete.

Seems obvious, doesn't it? Yet the article I read was quite lengthy and authored by some highly paid cognitive science researchers. LOL

[Kellemora]

Yeppers, our brains are about as slow as an 8080a eh!

I used to make Stare-E-Oh images, if you remember them.
Looked like static on the page, but if you learn to hold your eyes straight, then the image is visible.

And the tricks you can do with After-Images by staring at something, then looking at a white wall.

Wouldn't it have been nice if we could stare at test questions and the answers would appear, hi hi.

[yogi]

Wouldn't it have been nice if we could stare at test questions and the answers would appear, hi hi.

There are virtual reality (VR) goggles that can do that. Don't know if you recall but Google was trying to market glasses that would identify things as you walked along and stared at them. There is a feature in my clever phone that uses Google Lens to identify objects simply by taking a picture of them. It would be a small adjustment to the software to get them to read a test question and flash an answer across the lens of your glasses. But, alas, the glasses looked too nerdy and nobody was buying them. Google stopped selling them but the software behind them is license to many people.

Another feature of this clever phone/camera is that it can take stereo pictures, i.e. two pictures of the same scene side by side. When you place the display of these pictures into your Google virtual reality goggles you can get an in depth view of whatever it is you were photographing. This also works in the panoramic mode so that you can move your head side to side and see what's there. I've taken a few of those pictures just to see what they are, but I don't have the VR goggles. Perhaps some day ...

[Kellemora]

A number of years ago, I made several stereo slide pairs, using only a single camera and moving it from left to right to take each picture. Then it took two slide projectors to put the image up on the screen and getting them lined up properly was a pain. But the pictures were awesome. Would have been more awesome if you had a face mounted twin TV screen.

I played a couple of games at an arcade where you wore goggles and a pair of gloves. It was super cool, but very tiring.

I remember the Google Glasses, but don't know anyone who ever owned a pair.

I used to have a pair of mirrors on a clip-on you wore over your glasses to use for rear vision.
Only used it a few times, wasn't really what I thought it was. It was a rear view mirror, but not very helpful.

Was behind a tractor trailer on the way to the doctors office a few days ago. They had an LCD display on the back of the truck, which at first I thought was just for advertising, but then I realized it was showing the road in front of him. Now that is a good idea for people stuck behind tractor trailers. You can see if a car is coming so know not to inch over to see around them to see if you can pass. That's how a lot of head on's happen. Not from passing, but from getting over far enough to see around the truck.

[yogi]

The LCD screen on the back of a semi is a grand idea if it's intuitively obvious why it's there. I wonder how long that LCD stays clean enough for it to remain useful. Most rear ends of trailers that I've seen are covered with dirt and soot.

I think the correct way to pass would be to drop back far enough from the trailer, maybe 300 feet, so that you can edge over to the opposite lane and have enough reaction time to scoot back if necessary. It takes a bit longer to pass that way, but it's a lot healthier.

[Kellemora]

I few semi-trailers have small spoilers on the top edge to send air down the back of the truck.
Maybe they add this on ones with the LCD screens to keep them clean?
Hope they are watertight, hi hi.

There is something about folks who get behind a semi. No matter how fast we are going, for some reason, they just have to pass us, and once in front of us, they slow down slower than we were going when they passed.

Many of the highways interconnecting cities were only two lane concrete slabs when I first started driving.
I could be bookin' along at 75 mph (70 mph zone), and a few always had to get around me, then they would slow down to around 65 mph. A few times, when the road was clear, I would pass them back up again, only for them to speed up to keep me from getting back over in my lane again.
A couple of times, several miles down the road, Karma got hold of them!
One time, only a few miles outside of Hays, Kansas. A station wagon who passed me then slowed down again for about 20 miles, decided to take off again to pass another truck. Had a high pile of luggage on the roof of his station wagon when he passed me. I came over the rise and there was luggage all over the road, most busted open with clothes flying everywhere down the shoulder. Came across the next rise and there he was, backing up the shoulder of the road. He didn't know it yet, but his luggage was about two miles back, hi hi.

[yogi]

I don't do a lot of highway driving, but I see that passing game played all the time when I am on the road. I'll confess that I have played it myself a few times. What I see now and days is truckers come in one of two varieties. There are the ones who engage the cruise control and keep it there regardless. Better mileage is the reason for doing that. There are also truckers who for one reason or another are in a big hurry and don't know what cruising is all about. I took my cue from that first batch of drivers and set my cruise control to 5 over the limit. Then the game becomes driving so that I never have to touch the gas peddle or the brake. It's amazing how much passing you can do if you keep a constant speed. The only glitch is that the cruise control does not work well on an incline and my car will slow down going up a hill. That pisses off the guy in back of me, but I'm old enough not to care. He can tailgate me all he wants until I get around that semi doing the same thing I'm doing. LOL

[Kellemora]

Although my cars have had cruise control in them, I rarely used it, unless I was out on the open road with little traffic around me. My wife on the other hand uses hers every time she can.
None of the Rigs I drove had cruise control in them. A few did have a throttle lock which I would use occasionally like going across Kansas, hi hi.
The Rigs we owned did not have governors in them. All but one of the Rigs I drove for other did, and some of them actually made the trucks more dangerous to drive.
You get behind a semi that can't climb a hill, it is usually because of the type governor installed in that rig, and it is set very low besides. If you can't get the torque up on that motor, you can't climb a hill, or maneuver out of an accident situation, simple as that. They make the rigs more dangerous.

Think about your car, with a governor on the TACH, not the Speedometer. (By the way, my Blazer had a governor set at 85 mph, all of that year Blazer came out of the factory that way. I got a ticket for doing 97 mph uphill, pulling a fully-loaded cargo trailer. No way I could be going that fast, and my attorney told me to just pay the ticket because it would cost more to fight a crooked city hall and its judges.)
OK, back to your car. Watch your tach when you drive and see how often the tach goes over 3k rpm. Under normal driving it probably hangs around 1,200 to 1,750. But when you hit a hill and the transmission downshifts, it can easily go over 2k rpm and often over 3k rpm. You go to pass someone on a two lane road, and I'll guarantee you'll be above 3k rpm and maybe up as high as 4k rpm.
Now imagine having a governor on your car that works from the tach and won't let you get the tach over 2k rpm. Driving would become miserable, and in some cases dangerous, especially if you tried to pass on a two lane road.
Even if it was set a little higher, to 2,500 rpm, it would still be miserable to drive, especially on hills, but not quite as dangerous.
Nevertheless, this is what the truckers have to put up with on company owned rigs.

[yogi]

The thing I don't like about the Saturn I drive is the acceleration. Direct linkage went out with carburetors and it's all electronic now. That means the engine computer has to sense a load on the engine before it decides to downshift and/or accelerate. A gradual pressing down on the gas peddle does nothing for quite a distance. That is the main reason I like the cruise control. I can't manually fine tune the speed of my car with any precision. Passing is a no brainer. Punch it and I'm off like a bat out of Hell. Again, the cruise control has the advantage in a passing situation given that it will not increase the rpm much nor go through a quarter tank of gas when I floor it. Of course you need a lot of room to do that, which is not hard to do on a superhighway.

I don't know much about trucking but it seems as if a majority of them maintain a constant speed on the highway. I'll get in back of one and set my cruise control to go the same speed as the truck. The distance between us stays constant which tells me something other than the driver's foot is piloting at the helm. I can understand why there would be governors on trucks, but I also agree with you. They seem pretty dangerous if you don't have a lot of experience with them.

[Kellemora]

I'm still driving a '97 Blazer. I had an accident two years ago in the one I bought new and had all these years. The damage looked minor, but it was my right headlight bucket with all the electronics behind it, so it was totaled.
Took me a whole year to find another '97 Blazer, although I was looking for any year with the same features I had. Appears they only had them in '97 to '99 fully-equipped models. So needless to say, I was elated to find another '97 exactly like mine.

I've driven several newer Blazers over the years, and one heck of a lot of rental cars to go back home for a visit. I wouldn't want any of them! Even the ones with automatic floor shifters don't work right. You downshift and nothing happens. Some of them you just push buttons to upshift or downshift, and the Lag is unbearable.
One of the cars I rented recently acted just as you describe. The gas pedal did not seem to be connected to anything, it did nothing when you tromped down on it. A long delay, then it might do something, but not usually what I wanted it to do.
Made the drive home and back an exercise in frustration to say the least.

[yogi]

I never liked automatic transmissions for the exact reasons you describe. There is lag and in some cases no control over the transmission of power. I suppose I burned out a few clutches in my time downshifting manual transmissions, but at least I had the control I was expecting. I don't know that the automatics are any less safe, but you do have to adjust your driving habits and responses to the new equipment.

[Kellemora]

I never owned anything with an automatic until my late wife bought the 1997 Blazer.
However, even though this was an automatic, it still could be shifted, which is how I always drove it.
When I downshift, it instantly downshifts with no lag time. With the exception that it won't downshift if it will run the RPM over 5 grand by doing so. Basically meaning you can't shift into low gear at 70 mph without first shifting into second gear and slowing the car below about 45 mph. Actually, this is good.

The Blazer is a push button to get into 4-wheel drive high or low with autolocking hubs, and unlike earlier models, the hubs will unlock without having to come to full stop for them to disengage after going back to 2-wheel drive.
It's almost like having a stick, without having a clutch.
Also, it has an anti-rollback feature you can set if you stop at a stop sign on a steep hill.

Honestly, the way I use the transmission instead of using the brakes, I'm surprised I've never had to have the transmission repaired. I rarely have to replace brakes, since I don't use them much, hi hi.

Cars that were given to me back when I first started driving had automatics on the column.
And what I HATED about an automatic transmission was driving in places like Kirkwood where they have a stop sign every block or every other block. Now brakes on those cars wore out super fast because you were always using the brakes to overcome the wrong decisions made by the transmission.
For example: You are at a stop sign, you take off and the car upshifts into second, about the time you are coming up to the next stop sign, the car upshifts into third and tries to push you through the stop sign.

Even when I working in downtown Saint Louis and spent every morning and every evening in rush hour traffic, I still preferred a stick shift. I was also beefing up cars during that era, and owned several muscle cars. My advantage in traffic was I usually had 4-11 gears in the rear end, instead of 3-72 so at idle the car almost stood still, hi hi.
As long as the traffic was creeping along, I rarely had to use the clutch at all. Just keep enough of a gap nobody could squeeze between me and the car in front of me, hi hi.

I did have three sports cars that used hydraulic clutches, because they were rear engine.
You get used to them fairly fast, but what was missing was, you could not feel the clutch as it began to touch the pressure plate, like on a direct linkage type clutch where you can feel everything on the pedal.
Sorta like using air brakes in a way.

I've always loved my slap-stick automatic since I got used to an automatic I could control.
Can't say that for the automatics they make today though.

[yogi]

The Saturn I drive has paddles on the steering wheel to allow shifting of gears without taking your hands off the wheel. I thought that was a brilliant idea, even if it was a feature I never had a use for. Why the hell would I want to manually shift a car that I paid to have automatic transmission installed? LOL I have played with the paddles to see how they work, but in all the years I've been driving that Saturn, I never had a need to downshift manually.

I'm certain you know about red-lining, and that would be the reason why you need to be careful when manually downshifting an automatic transmission.

[Kellemora]

There are safety features in almost all automatics that won't let you downshift. An internal governor keeps it from downshifting until the rpms are low enough to do so.
Some cars this is set lower than other, in some cases too low.

Considering I always manually shift an automatic, I truly am surprised I've never worn one out doing so.
Towed a cargo trailer fully loaded for about 30,000 of the miles on that car too.

Ironically, my frau only used D to drive, and I did have to have a transmission rebuilt in one of her cars.
Albeit the car was old, and we don't know who had it before us or what they did with it.

[yogi]

Manually shifting an automatic transmission kind of defeats the purpose of it being automatic. LOL I loved all the cars I had with manual shifts, but when I had to switch it was complete. Once in a great while I have tried lower gears to get up a slippery driveway in winter. The traction actually was better in Drive or OverDrive. Something about gear ratios I guess. Most of the cars I owned were Chrysler products and the transmission in them were excellent. Had a brand new one where the pan was leaking because they used cork gasketing. It must have been repaired 3-4 times before the warranty ran out. At that point I took it to a regular shop and they replaced the cork with neoprene. Never leaked after that.

[Kellemora]

Cork gaskets had to be BURNED in. Created quite a smell in the car too, which is why they don't burn them anymore. But if they do it the right way, and Burn the Cork Gaskets, they won't leak.
A master transmission specialist, and friend of my dads, told us a lot of the secrets as to why his work always lasted.
After he retired from doing transmissions himself, he started teaching the for a trade school.
He almost quit because the trade school made him teach how the manufacturer says it should be done.
But instead, I took a handful of students near graduation and taught him privately as a tutor, if they were really interested in getting into transmission repair as a lifelong profession.

[yogi]

I know why the schools only wanted to teach what the manufacturers were selling. It all has to do with warranty work. Any unconventional methods would void the warranty, which is why the dealer never did anything but put in a cork gasket on my transmission. I'm certain the mechanics at the Chrysler store knew exactly what the problem was and how to fix it, but they were working for Chrysler and not some independent shop. There are many tricks of the trade that can only be learned on the job. It would be wonderful if somebody could document all those tricks, but if you can't use them in the particular shop you are working that extra knowledge is wasted.

[Kellemora]

When I was working for a plumbing company, working my way up the ranks, I had just started my Journeyman level when I as asked by another plumber to come help put the plumbing in at a new house he was building for himself.
I honestly was more than surprised he asked me, especially with all the other plumbers there who were faster than I was.
I had only worked with him on one, maybe one and a half jobs before he asked me.
I took the job and rode with him over to his house to get the supply plumbing in.
Naturally all the sanitary plumbing was already in, and I noticed right off it was well beyond code.
Before we started work, he said he liked my work, better than anyone else, and he is as picky as an old mother in law, hi hi.
He told me exactly what fittings he wanted used in his house, and dig this, there was not a single 90 degree el anywhere in his house. Not in the sanitary plumbing, and he didn't want any in his copper supply plumbing either.
The only 90 degree fittings I could use were 90 degree Long Sweep.
And if there was a Tee, he did not use the normal T-fitting, he also did not use a Wye like a DWV, he had Elkart custom make Long Sweep T-fittings for him, similar to the 2" but in 3/4" size.
The difference between a Wye is a Wye comes off at a 45 degree angle, so would require another 45 degree angle to end up at 90 degrees.
The fittings he had made were not cast, but the normal copper with the exception that the T did not come off at 90 degrees, it did come off at 45 degrees, but continued as a long sweep and ended up at 90 degrees.
They cost him about ten times more than a normal T would have cost, about 5 times more than using a Wye with an add-on 45. I figured the guy was either loco, or really paranoid over anything that turns 90 degrees.
In a way I was right! He even used Crossover Coupling type fittings rather than shift a pipe 1 inch.
He did tell me the reason for his madness was SILENCE.

When the job was all done, and he moved into his house, he invited me back.
But before we went from work to his house, we stopped at another house we just finished working on a few days earlier.
He carried a soft rubber hose and bucket in with him, which I thought strange there too.
He slipped the hose over the kitchen sink spout and put it in the bucket, and after a little water was in the bucket he cranked the tap wide open. What you hear, he asked. I said the water running in the pipes. Yes he said, it's barely perceptible but there. Now go into the bathroom and turn on the water. The sound of the water in the pipes drowned out the water from the spout or shower, it was that loud.

Then we went to his house. He did the same thing with the hose and bucket at his kitchen sink. Not a sound.
Went into the bathroom and he cranked up the water full blast. Again, not a sound other than the water hitting the tub.
He left this water running in the bathroom running, and turned on the sink too, then we went to the next bathroom and turned everything on there. Then we went down in his basement. Even with the water running full blast in both bathrooms and the kitchen, you could not hear the flow of water in the open ceiling basement.

Then he sent me around to go turn off all the faucets he turned on. When we went outside to leave, he cranked open an outdoor faucet. Checked his watch as he slipped a 5 gallon bucket under the faucet. He noted how many seconds it took to fill. Then on the way back to work, we stopped at the previous house and he did the same thing. It took 3 times longer to fill the bucket. But he said it wasn't a fair test, since his house was 3/4" throughout, and this house was 1/2" throughout. I should note that his house did use 1/2" pipe from the water heater to the hot water faucets.
He also talked about this. Said it cost too much to use a 3/4" continuous loop like he used to use for hot water supplies. Even if the pipes were insulated, they still lost too much heat, but it was nice having instant hot water when you turned on the tap.

[yogi]

All that extravagance in the plumbing you described is understandable. I do something similar with the computer equipment I use. The luxury of silent water flowing through the pipes is something a vast majority of people would not care about. Overclocking capability on my CPU is similar in that only 1% of the computer crowd would know what it is or care to have it. That plumber, and me, pay for the luxuries we construct. It is personal satisfaction and unimpressive to most of the world. Is it worth the added cost? Yes, of course it is, but only to a select few.

[Kellemora]

A while back, while I was between writing jobs, I was playing some on-line skill games.
There was this guy who was #1, the top ranking player for over three years.
Each time I thought I made it to the top of the heap, I would find others with higher scores.
Then I learned how to find who was really at the top of heap and linked my account to that group.
About the only way I could get my computer to go fast enough to beat some of the games was to Overclock my CPU.
I could do this in the BIOS by setting the clock speed up a tad higher.
It worked OK but not quite enough so I sped it up a little more, then a little more.
On the bright side, I finally beat this guy and became the king on top of the heap for a short time.
The downside was, not only did my computer start crashing, but it would shut-off due to overheating.
Once I made it to the top of the heap, I slowed the clockrate back down again, this helped the overheating, but I was still getting crashes, and they seemed to keep coming more often too.
Finally I set it back down to where it belonged, but it was too late, I apparently damaged the CPU and the computer would crash simply by opening a graphics program.
I've never overclocked a computer since then.
That being said, the computer Debi got from her son is water cooled and is overclocked from when her son used it for on-line interactive games. I wonder if that is why Windows 7 runs fairly fast on that computer? I've never messed with it.

Other than gaming, I don't know why one would want to overclock a computer. It makes it run hotter, and shortens the life of the CPU and possibly other hardware.