Safe speeding

I just recieved a speeding fine. 102km/h in a 60km/h zone. Well above the limit, yes. Fair cop? Yes.

However.

I feel that I was innappropriately charged. You see, the story starts like this. The road on which I was offending the law is two lanes each way, isolated, open, empty. I was booked at 11:20pm - the road was, subsequently, deserted. Now, this is not an excuse. Speeding is speeding, so write the lawmakers. And indeed, I don't dispute the legality of the charge. I dispute the philosophy.

Speed in of itself is dangerous. But it doesn't cause accidents. "Excess speed was a contributing factor" is a phrase bandied around a lot in response to motor vehicle accidents. Well of course. Accidents wouldn't ever happen if no-one moved anywhere. No matter the accident, if the car had been moving slower, it probably wouldn't have happened. This is as true at 5km/h as it is at 100km/h. So what is the purpose to limiting speed? I have always believed that speed is limited in the interest of appropriateness. 100km/h is appropriate on a road designed for it. Open, wide, smooth, gentle curves in place of sharp corners. 50km/h is more appropriate for a tight, winding suburban street.

A little more of the story . . .

Following the recording of the speeding offence, the officers followed me home, close behind, lights off. I had no idea they were there (black car, no lights, dark night) until they switched on their lights as I pulled into my driveway. On the way into my driveway, I turned into my street. This is a ninety degree turn from a major road into a minor one; a minor road likely to be bordered by parked cars and filled with errant cats. This turn I took at 50km/h (from the outside lane, with indication). A perfectly legal maneuvere. But one that was hardly safe, extending as it did near to the limits of the cars adhesion and ability to be controlled (although well within these limits). And one that was observed in full (and in fact commented upon as a well executed racing line) by the arresting officers.

So there is the problem.

At one point I broke a relatively arbitrary limit in a very safe way. At another point I stayed perfectly within the letter of the law and yet still managed to do something quite dangerous and unsafe.

So what was the true offense to the spirit of a law intended to ensure safe roads?

In the interests of safety, I believe I should not have been booked with a speeding offence, but rather with a dangerous driving offence. That the officers should have been permitted to make a judgement on the true nature of the driving taking place, and make a booking according to interests of safety. Our legal system has allowance for situations where the exact letter of the law is not appropriate. This is partly why we have a system of appeal. I don't deny the officers did their job (which they did, with professionalism, courtesy and friendliness). I deny that the job they were set to do was appropriate.

Some reading on the topic can be found at wikipedia, discussing the SafeSpeed campaign in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SafeSpeed

the city table

I'm working on a coffee table design for my brother's lounge room. This is what i've been thinking about.





I currently have a couple of ideas about how this could really come together. Idea one is what you see here - with some sort of attachment for the blocks, probably metal tubes running in a grid through the lot of them. I really like the look and idea of the base coming up through the surface. Colour wise, the render is pretty close, although instead of red and white (say hello mr trendwhore) it would probably be mainly white, with the supporting posts (the three currently red) left a natural woodgrain finish, with possibly random faces throughout the "city" also left as polished wood, with the rest of them gloss white, with probably frosted glass.

That is what I'll do if I can afford to watercut the glass top. If I can't, I have another idea. I think it would be cool if you could move the blocks around. How I would do this would be to make a base with space for the blocks. The supporting posts would have a strong magnet placed flush with the top surface. There would then be three free floating magnets which would be slid into place above the glass, holding the table top in place. Other than that, you would be free to place the blocks in whatever arrangement suited you. But this would mean that the blocks could not pierce the glass top. So if I can't afford the cutting, I'll do that, otherwise Idea 1. Although I do really like the idea of being able to move the pieces around. It's like playing with building blocks.

going knowhere

i have been somewhat absent from here. i keep meaning to blog stuff but always forget to do so. is that wrong? i'm not sure what it is that keeps turning me away. it feels like i always have something else i want to do. but hey. here i am.

and what news i have.

new jobs, new stuff, new things to say.

hmmmm.

i've been thinking lately about collective power - as in, things which in of themselves are not powerful, but which collectively in large groups become powerful indeed. and i was in the city the other day looking out at the yarra and the rubbish collecting things and how unsightly they are, and had me some thoughts as to how this theory could be applied here. i started thinking about water filtration, and how nice it would be if the yarra was clean.

now the first thing i thought of was largish robot things, suitcase size, but lots of them. dozens, crawling along the base of the river, and possibly floating along the surface, performing a dual task. they not only chemically filter the water, they also collect floating garbage.

but then i thought, why not more? and smaller? and better?

why design something that looks like it shouldn't be there? why not something that looks like it should be there?

what should be in a river?

so i turned to fish. little robotic fish. piezoelectrically propelled, they would look and move just like real fish. they would filter water as it passes through them, and move around in schools. there could be thousands upon thousands in the river. this also brings in all sorts of economies of scale, given that if you're manufacturing tens of thousands of small simple things they would each be nice and cheap. they could even get rid of floating garbage and whatnot in the same way fish do. by eating it. if one robofish finds a plastic bag, say, it could radio for help from it's nearby robofish buddies, and if they each take a small bite of the bag and store it internally, pretty soon the bag is gone.

there could be little refill and repair stations here and there, where the robofish could stop by the empty their little bowels and clean out their filters.

this is a system of eco-management taken from asimov in many ways. but so practical. imitate nature. nature's good at doing this sort of thing, when we're not around to screw it all up.

just imagine the look on the big fishes face when he eats a little robofish!

hehehe.

- a

geeky activities

ok, i know it's geeky but it's still fun damn it.

went out wireless sniffing with my friend today. we had to drive into the city, so we took his wireless enabled laptop and set it on "sniff" and went driving. we first drove a bit around my suburb, yarraville, where we found 77 different wireless networks, most of them with absolutely no security whatsoever, so we were able to use internet and should we have wished it, could have hacked the internal networks of these people as well. some people are just silly. after that we drove to the city to see my brother - between yarraville and south melbourne, we'd picked up a further 96 new networks.

one of them, suspiciously named "LASERCAM", we picked up just off the bridge. we strongly suspect it is the network controlling the speed cameras on the bridge.

more on that later.

- a

yet more maxwell stuff

hmmm. but it is fun.

here's a room i'm creating - i'll probably end up creating the entire house, pretty much, and have it as a simple set up to make contextual renders - objects floating on geometrical planes with a perfect sky are great, but it's hard to get a real feel for what's going on. this way, as shown in the speaker renders, it is possible to get a good feel for the product in a real world environment.

plus, it's surprisingly enjoyable working on interior designy kinda architecturey things. designing for single production, rather than mass production, has it's benefits.

an interesting idea about product value

my mother needed a pen, the other day. she was frantically rumaging around, and when she finally found one, it didn't work. now, usually, a ball point that doesn't work can be cajolled into working by writing on something soft, like skin, or leather, for example. so what does my mother do? she picks up my brother's watch off the desk and starts scribbling on the back of the leather band.

i was immediately horrified, and snatched the watch off her, saying: what the hell are you doing?

trying to get the pen to work, she replied.

on the watch?

why not? it's on the back, it's not like you'll ever see it.

but this is a very expensive watch. $500 worth.

and then . . .

but why should this matter? she's right. it would never be seen. under all circumstances under which the watch would be seen, this mark would not be. the worst that could happen would be that it would perhaps rub some ink off onto the wearer's skin.

straight away, i was struck. why was i placing so much value on a material item? why was i so upset, not so much because i liked the watch, or that it had some special sentimental value . . . yes, it was an expensive watch, but it was free. yes it was a nice watch, but it's no tour-de-force of the watchmakers art.

so what was at the root of my objection, here? i seemed to be placing value on a thing purely based on it's monetary cost. and retail cost at that - i am fully aware that the production cost of a watch like this would be less than $20 at most.
now, i have been accused in the past of being elitist, and placing to much emphasis on monetary value, and i think this is a perfect example.

sure, there is a fairly large proportion of the objection relating to my general appreciation for quality goods, and a corresponding unwillingness to damage them, but i have to admit that a possibly equal proportion was an objection to damaging an expensive item.

so what does this say about me, and my attitudes towards value?

- a

even more maxwell

graininess is noise from the render. the longer you render, the cleaner it gets. these two took about 2 hours each.

- a

more maxwell

well here's my first successful render, after some playing around.













have several more on the way, all queued up in my network.

- a

even cooler thing about maxwell

just found out something even cooler. something i've been waiting for someone to do for years. something that is just brilliant.

you can save a render in progress, and pick it up later.

*speechless*

- a

maxwell test render

here is the first render i've managed to pull out of maxwell. mmmmmm. soooo tasty.













the whacky thing about the renderer is that since it's so accurately representing a camera, you can't just fudge it with lighting and things. you have to get your shutter speed, film speed, f-stop, everything just right.

luckily for me, i have a professional photographer for a brother.

swish

took me a bit of playing with the exposure to get this visible.

it's not a brilliant render, just me playing around and trying to get a result. i've decided to build a room to put the speakers in. grooooovy. cause maxwell does such brilliant internal renders, how could i not, hmmm?

the other thing i've figured out how to do is get maxwell to network render, so i can parcel the render out to my brother's computer while he's watching cartoons and nick all his processing time. sweet.

still playing.

- a

first year cad

just to prove a point in a comment, not to worry.

first year second semester cad:
















first project: redesigning the object

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second project: form as character

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third project: human powered vehicle

to sleep, or not to sleep. that is the question

my sleeping pattern is totally screwed. i've been staying up very late, and consequently sleeping very late. this is bad. very bad. i don't like it, but it tend to happen to me with annoying regularity, what with all the late night rendering sessions and whatnot. so tonight, i'm doing what i tend to have to do once a month or so, which is kick the old sleep clock in the head a few times to effect a reset. basically this means staying up all night, and then not sleeping until a reasonale regular hour the next night, such as 10ish. this way i sleep properly, wake up at a real time, as in anti-meridian, and can return my sleeping patterns to something approaching normality. you know, for the holidays, when every second of the day counts. i suppose.

ha.

anyway, that's why this post is time-stamped at 0322hrs. groovy.

in other news, i have a new toy. a fun new toy. it's called maxwell render. it's brilliant. truly brilliant. the kind of rendering engine that everyone has just been hanging out for, for as long as rendering engines have existed.

where other rendering engines use the false colour spectrum of RGB, maxwell uses the real spectrum, all the way from infra-red to it's archrival, ultraviolet. it simulates everything this way. perfectly. it even simulates the camera to an obsessive degree, such as, for example, the shape of the iris - as in how many mechanical elements go into the iris, what angle they are at, and so on.

this thing is brilliant. here's an example.

if you model a nice pretty prism, and tell maxwell render it is made of glass. then you shine a nice pretty white light through it. you will get a rainbow. a nice, pretty rainbow. no other piece of commercial software on the planet will do that.

now how cool is that?

only downside is rendering time, which is fair enough, and hardly unexpected. i am currently waiting on my first test render of my speakers. it's taking some time.

however, the thing about maxwell is, the way it works, you don't tell it to render and it tells you when it's done, you tell it to fractally render the same scene for as long as you like, and it does. so i've told it to render for 5 hours, or 50 iterations, whatever comes first. looking at the speed of the iterations, i'm thinking it's going to be a close call. but will probably time out first. but even a half completed, blurry, noisy render, still looks better than anything i have ever rendered before.

mmmmm. i like new toys.

- a