mad

Karma: 414

mad May 4, 2025, 5:18 AM
3 points
1
on: Roads are at maximum efficiency always
I’m a traffic engineer and I’m just cringing at this metaphor. Like, it’s probably a great metaphor, but the maximum throughput for cars is generally accepted as 1200 vehicles / lane / hour, and you have to keep these vehicles at a specific speed range, otherwise the traffic flow breaks down.
More info is this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic_flow

mad Feb 12, 2025, 11:57 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: samusasuke’s comment on: Why you maybe should lift weights, and How to.
I think the reason I worry about injury is because I am far, far more clumsy than average, am really bad with form in general (I am in a theatre troupe and we often have to learn choreographed movement or rarely simple dances and I’m always the worst at it), and when I did running I ended up with a hip injury that still gives me grief (that said I am trying to build back up to hopefully running 10-20k a week again as I did really love it).
So, yeah, essentially, I’m terrified of baking in poor form and then injuring myself over time, as well as terrified of dropping a weight on myself (that said, I have never dropped a weight on any machine, so maybe that’s a good way to update myself).
The lower body exercises I do on the gym are the leg press, hip abduction/adduction, leg curl, leg extension. They also have an ab and back machine but to be honest I hate them and only use them rarely (once a month when I’m having a good week and want to do everything). But I do alternate between leg-focused machines and arm-focused machines when I exercise. Sometimes I do split sets between two machines if it’s quiet but that’s obviously rare because I want to be courteous. I aim to do 7 rep sets, and will lower the weight if I can only get around 4 and raise the weight if I can get 10+.
Thank you for the suggestion, it honestly didn’t occur to me that I could just add in one or two free weight exercises and use the machines for everything else.
My fitness goals are “have nice buff looking arms”, “do a pullup” and “lift up my husband (~80kg) in the traditional wife-carrying pose”, though I’m not pursuing them relentlessly or optimally, they’re just milestones I want to reach.
What free weight exercises might be best for getting me there, and have the most straightforward technique?

mad Feb 12, 2025, 6:50 AM
4 points
0
on: Why you maybe should lift weights, and How to.
I’ve been lifting once a week for 20-45 minutes for two years and have noticed that I am stronger in everyday life and my body looks better (arms/shoulders/etc). There’s definitely a benefit to be had even if you think 45 minutes twice a week is too much.
Here’s my questions:
- I only use machines because I was intimidated by the risk of injury with free weights. What are your thoughts on machines in general?
- What is your advice for someone who wants to move from machines to free weights?
- How do you track your progress? I use a very bare-bones android app that is simply called “Strong” which I use to keep track of my reps/sets/weights, and find it really useful as it tells me what my previous weight with that machine/exercise was. There’s a lot of paid options out there. Do you have any advice?

mad Jan 8, 2025, 10:24 PM
12 points
8
on: The Type of Writing that Pushes Women Away
Thanks for posting this, it’s not something I talk about but (As A Woman) I have noticed the same things.
I’m trying to be the change I wish to see in the world but I’m not inclined to the sorts of contributions that do well on LW.
That said, I did write a rational vampire romance novel (Vampire Flower Language) as I noticed the same trends with the rational fiction craze (HPMOR et al).
So yeah, please make more posts, about whatever subjects come to mind for you.

mad Aug 21, 2024, 4:00 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: How great is the utility of “saving” endangered languages?
I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn’t require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it’s just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.
There’s plenty of research showing that bilingual children have some small advantages, e.g.: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/advantages_of_a_bilingual_brain
Then there’s the cultural value of language that I raised in my previous post, especially for minority cultures (and you state that things from your culture like Buffy and TVTropes are valuable to you). I’m assuming you’re from an English-dominant culture. Can you imagine if you moved to, say, Portugal, and you learned Portugese and all your friends and family spoke Portugese all the time, you might feel as though something was lacking if they watched Buffy episodes that had been dubbed into Portugese?

mad Aug 21, 2024, 2:13 AM
8 points
4
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: How great is the utility of “saving” endangered languages?
Generally speaking, people who speak endangered languages also speak the majority language—otherwise it wouldn’t be endangered. Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language. Being bilingual has been linked with a lot of benefits, and the only downside is that it slightly slows initial language acquisition (but children quickly catch up).
Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language. I went on a date with an Australian man who was half belgian half japanese and he said that he wishes his parents had taught him either language, instead he just speaks english.
Our local (australian) Indigenous language is called Noongar and is undergoing revitalisation. By all accounts, the Noongar people benefit from this socially, and the language itself has information and culture.
Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we’d lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. They can be translated into other languages (and, well, Chaucer has to be translated to be understood). But, to my mind, something valuable is lost if culture is lost. These “endangered” languages had culture too—songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That’s important.
I get the feeling that a lot of people in the rationalsphere think that if something won’t help us invent friendly AI or space travel it’s pointless. Culture’s important. Lesswrong has culture (HPMOR, the sequences, etc).

mad Aug 6, 2024, 3:47 AM
13 points
1
in reply to: Adam Marsland’s comment on: Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
Thanks, you’re right.

mad Aug 2, 2024, 11:55 PM
7 points
−1
in reply to: fearlessiron’s comment on: Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
It’s a real horses / zebra kind of thing, though.
The situation: a hiker goes missing in an area where hikers are known to go missing (and, sadly, die).
The problem: eyewitnesses report the hiker’s truck being in one direction, then not present at all, then in another direction.
Solution 1: eyewitnesses were mistaken about whether they saw the car / what direction it was facing
Solution 2: someone stole the car, took it away for a bit, and then returned it to the trailhead
Occam’s razor requires only one additional assumption for solution 1 (eyewitnesses sometimes/often make mistakes, which is well-known, especially about something as banal about an ordinary car), whereas solution 2 requires us to postulate an entire person (or persons?) who had a motivation to take and then return the car (what? any motivation—e.g. maybe Bill was involved in the drug trade—adds more assumptions).
Let me posit Solution 3: the ranger deliberately recorded his information wrong because he didn’t want to be in trouble for not sounding the alarm about a missing hiker.
or Solution 4: the park management/police colluded together to falsify the witness reports to provide doubt to Bill dying hiking to try and reduce the number of deaths attributable to JTNP
Both Solution 3 and Solution 4 seem far less fanciful than Solution 2. Sure, Solution 5 (“Aliens!”) would be more fantastical than the u-haul one, but just because the Solution 2 doesn’t rely on us changing our understanding of our place in the world doesn’t mean it’s valuable to think about.
If Bill’s body had been discovered buried in the back yard of some drug lord, then sure, Solution 2 all of a sudden looks good. But the situation presented (missing hiker in a place where hikers have been known to get lost and die) does not require that level of attention.
I don’t deny Adam contributed more to the case than almost anyone out there, but the u-haul theory doesn’t become valuable just because it was he who postulated it.

mad Aug 1, 2024, 10:52 PM
11 points
1
in reply to: Adam Marsland’s comment on: Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
For the record I’m the same person who brought it up in 2022 on reddit when he was found and objected to it when you posted the original blog to unresolvedmysteries in 2018, so I think this is a case of one particularly annoying person who follows you around chanting “U-Haul! U-Haul!” :)
Thank you for all your hard work on the case, I actually had no idea you were the same Adam on the search and the blog.

mad Jul 31, 2024, 11:00 PM
6 points
2
on: Recommendation: reports on the search for missing hiker Bill Ewasko
Thank you for posting this. I’d been following the Bill Ewasko story and Tom Mahood’s blog for years so it’s interesting to see it posted here.
I think the “Death Valley Germans” is another very good series of articles from the same blog, with a much more conclusive (but equally sad) ending.
What strikes me is before 2022 there were a lot of people posting theories, and there was one person who posted to /r/unresolvedmysteries that the discrepency between the reports of whether and how Bill’s truck was parked could be explained by… someone putting it into a U-Haul, taking it away, and then returning it(!). Source: https://ijustdisappear.com/wp/2018/05/22/unsolved-mysteries/

mad Jul 31, 2024, 3:40 AM
12 points
0
on: Cat Sustenance Fortification
I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I feel it’d be right up your alley. It’s the story of a war between a human who knows how to weld and a cat who wants to thwart their automatic feeder.
https://blondihacks.com/furiosas-cat-feeder/

mad May 13, 2024, 7:09 AM
5 points
1
on: Benefitial habits/personal rules with very minimal tradeoffs?
“Drink only water” is a good one. Depends if you think forgoing deliciousness, or other effects (alcohol, caffeine) counts as a tradeoff.

Given you don’t think forgoing the convenience/enjoyment of using your phone in bed counts as a tradeoff, I’m guessing this likely is the sort of thing you’re looking for.

mad Jan 1, 2024, 11:30 PM
8 points
0
on: shortcut roundabouts
From a traffic engineer’s perspective:
- Roundabouts can run into efficiency issues when the two traffic directions don’t have roughly even flow. The shortcut roundabout seems as though it is intended for intersections with a primary and secondary route, with the primary route having the through lane
- This sort of “hamburger” roundabout is similar to your proposal: https://www.bristolworld.com/news/hamburger-roundabout-plans-for-a4174-bristol-ring-road-shelved-after-overwhelmingopposition-3443196
- Note that your proposed roundabout will not be as safe as a traditional roundabout as the through traffic and circulating traffic can collide at a right angle and at a decent speed (the deflection in the middle isn’t going to be super effective at slowing vehicles, but I love that you thought to include it!). The safety benefit of a roundabout comes from reduced speeds (due to pre-deflection and circulating speed) and the reduced impact angles, both of which are affected by your proposal.
- Drivers doing a u-turn while vehicles are stopped on the circulating carriageway at a first pass makes me very uncomfortable but I’d have to think about it seriously / do research on it to work out whether it’s actually a bad idea or if I’m just afraid of anything different to the status quo. Early thoughts are it will confuse drivers (both not knowing how to perform the manouvre/that they can perform the manouvre, and also drivers who witness vehicles doing it won’t be sure what’s happening), and the efficiency benefits are probably minor
Note that my specialty is in improving safety rather than efficiency. I have experience in project work where I had to balance them, but the above is all strongly biased towards discussing safety.

mad Dec 12, 2023, 12:12 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
I think I’m making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn’t tell you much about my uncle’s actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. “has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers”?)
Then again, my example here seems to have failed because people do study tallness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000291499390523F , but they crucially define tallness as above the 95th percentile. Other studies I’m glanced at use height as a continuous variable, so who the heck knows.

mad Dec 11, 2023, 10:51 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
Yeah, okay.
Look at me thinking like an engineer—“but it’s not useful from a practical point of view because we don’t have access to that data”.

mad Dec 11, 2023, 10:20 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
I think the thing you’re missing is you’re still exposed to crashes because of some maniac doing something extremely risky and hitting you.
I’m also a very cautious driver (as you can imagine in my line of work), but I do make mistakes all the time.
This paper seems like it might be interesting for you to read: https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1513271113
I’ve just had a skim but here’s some of my impressions. I might read it in more detail when I get to work today.
It doesn’t deal with fatalities (just crashes) but having a quick look at Fig 1, drivers who aren’t distracted or impaired are involved in ~28% of crashes. Note that “impairment” also includes things like anger.
Fig 2 is pretty great for you—shows the baseline of each type of impairment, error, distraction and the odds ratio for crashes it’s involved in. Not a statistician but I believe that means you’re 10 times more likely to get into a crash if you’re visibly angry/sad but only 3 times more likely if you’re drowsy. Which is very interesting to know.
And that 51% of drivers are observed to be distracted in some way during normal driving condition (which can include “dancing in seat to music” and “interaction with adult passenger”.
This paper was just the first result in a scholar search for the term “crash causation factors driver”, so this info is relatively easy to find.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on Deeply Cover Car Crashes? by jefftk (Dec 11, 2023, 11:24 PM; 3 points)

mad Dec 11, 2023, 10:11 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Joachim Bartosik’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
“Passenger mile” is not a stat we use in my jurisdiction (we use VKT, vehicle kilometres travelled), but if I’m interpreting it right, then you need to know the average number of passengers to know the number of crashes the driver is involved in. For example, say that each bus has 10 passengers on average, that would put the fatalities per passenger mile at 0.80, which given this is OOM seems pretty similar to cars.
That said, following that to its conclusion you’d end up with trains having some horrendously high rate of crashing, which doesn’t pass the sniff test. I think I might be having a failure of logic somewhere here.

mad Dec 11, 2023, 10:06 PM
4 points
3
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
I mean it doesn’t describe something objective/measurable unless you define it explicitly in terms of behaviours. People can do research on e.g. crash rates for drivers who never drink and drive vs frequently drink and drive, people who speed and people who don’t, etc.

mad Dec 11, 2023, 1:23 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
I can’t believe you’ve never heard the stereotype that taxi drivers aren’t safe drivers.
I don’t know about proxies for “careful driving”. That is not my area of expertise.
That said, it’s well-known that professional race car drivers die in car crashes at higher rates during their general driving (I don’t fancy digging up a citation; you can google it yourself).
I always think of the old chestnut that something like eighty percent of people think they’re above average at driving.
I attended a training course recently that stated that educating drivers about the dangers of texting while driving is not very useful, as everyone thinks that they are careful with how and where they choose to text (e.g. only while stopped), but they agree that other drivers shouldn’t. Apparently, they reckon it’s most effective to tell people “if you text and drive, your kids will grow up to text and drive too”. Psychology, eh?
I think all of those are very illustrative of the biases people have in how perceive their operation of their vehicles.
I am relatively convinced that 95% of crashes involve a variety of factors contributing (swiss cheese model). There is rarely, if ever, only one thing that causes a serious crash. As a road safety professional, then, my duty is to make sure that the road forgives any human errors. Safe Systems is the current philosophy in road safety, which states that nobody should be seriously injured or die on the road, even though people do make mistakes. And they do. All the time.

mad Dec 11, 2023, 12:44 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: Bezzi’s comment on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
https://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/RS050099.pdf ← there’s a paper that covers your exact question (comparing crashes in taxis and passenger cars. in case you don’t know the terminology, “fleet vehicle” refers to cars that are registered as work cars for an organisation, so more likely to be people on their “best behaviour” as far as drinking/speeding/etc)
Table 5 in particular, per 100 million vehicle kms travelled you have taxis having about half as many fatal crashes as cars but about 50% more injury crashes and maybe 10% more towaway crashes (eyeballing it)
Table 10 also shows that some 30% of taxi drivers involved in crashes weren’t wearing seat belts (they’re apparently not legally required to in NSW! news to me), which is a pretty big clue that taxi drivers aren’t the paragon of careful driving one might assume.