Alcohol as a fuel 4878Guess you don't know what a strawman is, because I am not making someone else's arguement into an easily knocked down extreme. No, that wasn't what I...
Pete C.
ear
octane in gas does knock damage the engineDetonation is different from pre-ignition, which is the early ignition of fuel-air mixtures. it can be caused by the timing being early, or by hot carbon spot in the cylinder...
Gee, Pete, you seem to have all the bases covered ... except a rudimentary knowledge of how your *vision* works while driving.
FWIW, I learned this stuff while training as an instructor and now I help teach it in BMW CCA driving schools.
Your vision isn't designed to work at angles other than horizontal. Here's how you can test this. Time yourself while reading a page or paragraph of text. Then, read a similar amount of the same typeface and style with your head tilted at 45 degrees. Check your time. Try it at 90 degrees. Still slower. So, when you have that cellphone wedged up between your head and your shoulder, your vision is screwed. You can't properly analyze what you see as quickly as you can with your eyes level. This is why we instruct drivers to keep their heads level as the car leans in turns. This is the same thing that motorcyclists are taught. Watch a MotoGP race and see what their heads are doing and compare it to what you see from the onboard cameras tilted at crazy angles. OK; that's Lesson 1.
Lesson 2 is about the peripheral vision you claim to use for text messaging while driving. Absolutely impossible. You have *no* ability to focus with your peripheral vision! *No one does!* Your field of focus is on the order of 2 degrees; yes, you read it right: *two degrees*! Test it *right now*. Focus on the word in the middle of any sentence here and concentrate on *that word*. If you're being honest about it, you'll admit that you can't actually read the words at either end of the same line. The only reason you (and all of us) think our field of focus is larger is that we move out eyes a lot and focus on a lot of different things, but in truth, it's only *one small part* at a time. What you are *really* doing is shifting your focus to your phone. It logically follows that when you do so, you *cannot* be focused on traffic ahead of you. This brings up Lesson 3.
Although you might save a millisecond or three by having your phone *nearer* your field of focus, every time you actually *focus* on it, your eyes have to adjust for depth of field. They have to focus close, on the phone, and then when you're ready to look at the road ahead again, they refocus. This is a slower process than the movements they make side to side all the time. For one thing, human eyes weren't designed for close-up work, either. They work for hunting and tracking but not very well (certainly not for very *long*, as any over-50 guy like me will butture you) for stuff you can reach with your hands.
celphones was Why not methanol 4875Motorhead Lawyer I'm not going to argue your other points, but two things you are fundamentally wrong on are: 1. You will not on any optical system that while there is a good...
While I might give you a break on using the cellphone in the absence of traffic, I find your practice of text messaging while driving to be downright stupid whether there's traffic or not. *Talking* on the cellphone shifts your attention but not your vision. *Typing* dangerously shifts *both*. -- C.R. Krieger (Been there; taught that)
