No. 418197Anonymous 27th June 2018 Wednesday 1:20 am418197Things which are mildly amusing but not enough to warrant their own thread.
I was in a meeting tonight and two people walked in late during a minute's silence. I was just thinking how truly weird it must have been for them to walk in and everyone was sitting there in dead silence.
>>418432 Chefs can't use wooden chopping boards anymore due to elf & safety but there are carpet-baggers out there whittling buttplugs out of yewtree RIGHT NOW and we can't do a thing about it.
As long as you are the only one using the butt plug, what does it matter.
Which reminds me, did you know that in ancient Rome, public restrooms had no separate stalls, and toilet seats were all arranged in rows facing each other... so you would basically have your poo in full view of other people... but the real kicker was that there was no toilet paper, but just one wet sponge on a stick that was kept in a water bucket. Whoever needed to wipe their bum did so with the same sponge on a stick that dozens of people had used before you.
I guess with no concept of germs and pathogens, no harm was seen in it.
>>418436 >As long as you are the only one using the butt plug, what does it matter.
Bacterial growth, mate. Wood's a porous material, and I'm sure you know about the massively increased risk of STI transmission in anal sex. I personally wouldn't want a wooden sex toy anywhere near my back passage.
Have you seen the crucifixion scene where Jesus is forced to drink from a sponge soaked in vinegar? Well, it was one of those sponges. Some retarded middle eastern christians even made a relic cult out of it:
But it also depends on how the wood was treated. If it's sealed with some sort of lacquer, then that creates a watertight surface really not much different from a rubber or latex butt plug. You can then just wipe it with disinfectant after each use like you would with other materials.
>An approximate recreation of the beverage can be made by combining 1½ cups of vinegar with ½ cup of honey, 1 tablespoon of crushed coriander seed and 4 cups of water
>>418780 If we go by this logic then my surname would seem to indicate that I'm destined to be a beekeeper. Fittingly with the course of the rest of my life, the only thing I'm incredibly allergic to is bee stings, so at least I'd be on course for the ironic* early death that's awaiting all 3 of us
*if this is one of those cases where you're going to link that Ed Byrne video about the missed definitions of "ironic" in that Alanis Morisette song, you can done one you massive pedant
My surname is an Anglicisation of an old-norse place name that roughly translates as "misty brook", so I guess I'm predestined to be bland and unnoticeable.
One of my history teachers had the surname Kerr. He would go on and on about the fact that it was an anglicisation of an old Norse word which meant something like "man of the marsh". Apparently, there is also a Clan Kerr in Scotland, but my teacher said he was not related to it.
On technological solutions to drivers falling asleep:
>IBM is developing an even more sophisticated system, known as the Artificial Passenger. An intelligent computer, which knows the driver’s personal profile and interests, holds a conversation with the driver. It asks questions and even tells jokes (though humour is reportedly not yet one of its strengths). If the driver’s responses are slow, flat in intonation and fail to make sense, the Artificial Passenger may judge that the driver is sleepy and urgently needs to be revived. If so, it will automatically open one of the car’s windows, sound an alarm or even activate a device that sprays cold water in the dozing driver’s face.
If you build cars for idiots, you will have people behaving like idiots. Electronic systems like that only serve to remove even more responsibility from the driver.
If you're too tired to drive, pull the fuck over already and rest for a bit. It's not complicated.
We are removing responsibility and self reliance from the act of driving a car, just as the Smartphone generation is waiting to get their licences.
I just liked the idea of a robot blaring a horn at you and squirting water in your face because you didn't laugh at its joke. I already do that when I'm in the passenger seat anyway.
There's no way that could react quickly enough to the biggest danger a tired driver faces, which is the phenomenon of nodding off for a second or two in a microsleep.
It's happened to me before and it was fucking terrifying, particularly as I was on a 60mph road at the time. I pulled over the very first opportunity I had and had a nap in the layby. As >419586 says, there's no way in hell the solution to that problem should ever be me thinking "oh well if it happens again then I'm sure the car will spit water at me before I smash into the central reservation"
I imagine it'd be far more effective to put money into tech that keeps the car in its lane automatically or can stop automatically when it senses an obstacle ahead of it. Both of these things exist already and are in my partner's relatively basic new Merc, and something like a Tesla will obviously quite literally take over the driving for you, and the only thing stopping it doing so for more than a very brief period of time right now is the law.
As much as I'm a motoring enthusiast who hates even traction control that's too presumptive, I think we'll all be better off once every bloody car on the road knows better than we do how to avoid us killing ourselves.
>Something like a Tesla will obviously quite literally take over the driving for you, and the only thing stopping it doing so for more than a very brief period of time right now is the law.
You've left out the detail where self driving cars have already killed several people.
The differance being that if I knew someone had a history of driving into stationary trucks at motorway speeds killing everyone on board we expect them to be held responsible for that and I wouldn't get in a car with them driving.
I can guarantee 100% you've been driven by multiple people that were the sole cause of a crash. Whether it was fatal or not, perhaps not, but anyone with even a semblance of knowledge on how road accidents work would know that's not relevant.
Besides that, human drivers as a whole are still hugely more dangerous than self driving cars, whether they've had an accident yet or not, they're orders of magnitude more likely to have one. The numbers are already in this thread so I won't repeat them, but let's put it this way - even within a single hour of the self driving fatality happening, a few hundred thousand humans also caused a fatal accident. Statistically even within a fifty miles radius of that crash, human caused road fatalities will have vastly outnumbered self drive fatalities.
You're basically staring at a million piranhas in a lake, and telling us the lake is dangerous because one bloke with a blood disease pricked his finger into the water last year.
Self driving cars are only going to reach peak kills when a stream of them all make the same mistake - driving off a mountain because the road markings are dodgy or some such. Until then, they're rare enough, and the errors are rare enough, that apologists can keep saying that a few deaths here and there don't matter. They _will_ matter when the efficiencies of scale kick in.
The true issue with self driving cars will never be them making mistakes - even relatively basic cars being sold right now are clever enough to put brakes on before they hit something, regardless of road markings or whatever else - seriously, I had a Peugeot I bought for six grand in 2016 and it had a feature where it'd essential stop itself if I was about to drive into the back of someone, and my missus car now knows when an incline is too steep for it and will refuse to let you drive down it - the tech is already reliable in that regard. Not to say that accidents won't happen, they certainly will - but I think almost every instance will be one self driving car versus a careless pedestrian or human driver. Until every car is self guided we'll have big problems, physically and ethically. I just can't see it working with mixed traffic, it has to be all or nothing.
In mixed traffic, real problems come when your car starts making decisions for itself. It's the classic trolley problem. Should your car swerve itself to avoid a pedestrian, endangering your own life in the process? Should it plough through them to preserve you? Should it just be based on the informed probability of survivability of both parties? Somewhere along the line that's a programming decision that needs to be made. Who is to blame when a self driver hits someone? The owner? The manufacturer? The government? Would you buy a car you knew had a chance of deciding that sacrificing you is the best course of action in a crash? Would you dare go out in your normal car if you knew a Tesla might shunt you to protect it's owner?
Obviously these aren't every day scenarios, the net benefit will still be hugely reduced accidents, but the accidents that will still happen might not be classified as accidental anymore.
>>419612 You don't know anyone's safe, it's all a matter of probability, the only difference is you can put statistics and measurements on self driving cars, which you can't do from your sample size of your mum.