The Big Picture - The 2008 Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix (23 images)
The noise and the oil and the petrol and the track and the ten thousand shades of dull grey green and brown and the wa-hey!
I love motorsports.
Did I mention the noise?
Ford MyKey lets parents set the maximum speed of their kid’s car -
MyKey uses technology that allows owners to program a key that can limit the vehicle’s top speed and audio volume. The technology also encourages safety-belt usage, improves fuel efficiency, provides earlier low-fuel warnings and provides sound chimes to alert drivers to their speed.
You can spin a car off the road at 30km/h and die in a crash at 60km/h, so this is great for helicopter parents and doesn’t really achieve much in the way of safety.
MyKey will be launched in 2009 as a standard feature on the 2010 Ford Focus coupe and will be offered on many other Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models.
On the other hand, the Focus has good active safety (ie it handles and stops) and passive safety (ie it’ll absorb the energy of a crash as best it can) so parents could do worse than putting their kid in a Focus.
But, Ford’s Driving Skills for Life program is probably a better, if less gee-whiz, way of actually turning new drivers into safe drivers.
Of course, we all know that there are no technological solutions to social problems, right?
fro:
I always carry on about these particular add-ons to the tarmac Lancia Integrale. Just awesome. (via SKF8)
Mmm… tasty. The side mirrors are awesome as well.
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Lately I’ve wanted to make better use of tumblr’s tagging feature but my tags never “took”. I’d enter a tag and it wouldn’t appear in the post.
Then today I wanted to tag something with two tags so I comma, separated, them. Aha.
Of course, this is in the FAQ.
…or why you can’t make your Nanna’s banana cake they way she does.
My Nanna makes an amazing banana cake. It’s light, fluffy and moist. It has a very thin, delicate, dark brown crust and is pale yellow inside. My mum has tried for years to make this cake. She has a recipe, written down by my Nanna, that she follows. The cake that the recipe makes is not the cake that comes out of my Nanna’s oven, even though my Nanna says it’s the recipe that she follows. My mum’s cake is not the same colour and has a different texture. From the same recipe!
It’s a basic principle of “expertise” that experts don’t follow explicit rules when they’re acting as an expert. Instead they act “intuitively” and they make decisions in a blink. The action of an expert and the decisions they make are guided by their recognition of the salient features of a situation. Gary Klein calls this the “recognition primed decision model”.
Novices, on the other hand, do follow explicit rules. It’s a characteristic of a novice’s interaction with a system that they will follow rules to achieve an end. This works when you’re learning or when you’re doing something simple.
When an expert explains something to a novice, they’ll often use a rule of thumb or some other aphorism that explains how to acheive some end. “Keep your eye on the ball”. “Keep your head down”.
When I’d work on cars with my Dad I’d ask how tight a particular fastening should be. “Finger tight”. (My dad has never owned a torque wrench.) I’d always get him to check my bolt tightness, until one day I was confident enough to just do it finger tight myself. How tight is finger tight? I’ve no idea.
Experts talk in this sort of gobbledygook because they’re not following rules. They’ve completely internalised the process they follow and they quite literally can’t explain it. If you get an expert to write down the rules they follow, at best, you get a set of rules that allow competence and little more. The differences that make the difference in an expert’s performance are so subtle and so tacit that even they are unaware of them.
This was a problem encountered often in the days of much excitement over expert systems. You’d get a doctor in a room and ask him how he diagnosed, say, lung cancer. You’d encode the rules and steps he gave into software and then you’d pronounce that you had a machine that could diagnose lung cancer. Except you’d rapidly find that your machine was wrong sometimes, not just missing diagnoses but misdianosing. Because the doctor was explaining the rules, rather than being able to explain his tacit knowledge.
Nanna’s recipe is a description of a competent cake, so when you follow the recipe, all you get is a competent cake. If you want an excellent cake, you’d need to stand and watch my Nanna make a cake, and even then you’d probably not get it, because as a novice, or even competent banana cake maker, you’d be looking for all the wrong things. You’d need to stand and watch, and watch and watch and watch, for ages until you started to see the differences that made the difference.
And that’s the problem with Nanna’s recipe. It’s not that my mum is a poor cook — far from it. And it’s not that the recipe is a bad, or even just inaccurate, recipe. It’s that my Nanna is too good at cooking that Banana cake.
L’interface de l’hopital dans le film “Idiocracy”, qui ironiquement révèle comment certains aimeraient simplifier les processus médicaux dans le futur proche.
Mazda 808 Wagon (via my flickr)
By the early 70s most of the Japanese manufacturers were targeting their export designs for the US market.
This little Mazda features scaled-down American cues like the “W” fronted grille (in plan view) and the coke-bottle body line. Even the squared-off wheel-arches have the flavour of Americana about them.
Isuzu Bellett GT (via my flickr)
On the weekend I went to the local Japanese Classic car show with my son in tow.
I snapped a few pictures of some interesting cars.
The car above is an Isuzu Bellett GT, a very pretty and rare little rice rocket. Like quite a few Japanese cars from the early to mid 60s the Belletts have a very Italianate look to them.
From the late 60s the Japanese figured out that the US was where the big money was and started designing cars with more American cues.
When Paul Newman offers you a puffer, I mean, you take it. You don't turn down Paul Newman. -
Chairman Gruber points to this video of Letterman’s tribute to Paul Newman.
In the video, Letterman mentions that he and Newman had a pair of supercharged V8 Volvo station wagons custom built. As you do.
I don’t know what happened to Newman’s V8 Volvo or Lettermans’ but here’s a third one that’s internet famous.
“It’s easy to dismiss design — to relegate it to mere ornament, the prettifying of places and objects to disguise their banality. But that is a serious misunderstanding of what design is and why it matters — especially now.” —
A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink (via page69)
Page 69 is my new sub-venture. Interesting quotes from page 69 of books on my desk. And I go through a lot of books. I decided to track things that I read and page 69 was a good a meme as any to follow to allow me to track them.
The idea of page 69 being a good thing to read to see if the book is any good was apparently Marshall McLuhan’s. Naturally there are better page 69 (and page 99) blogs out there that you should read instead.