🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <827255530snz@tmsl.demon.co.uk> Paul@tmsl.demon.co.uk writes:

>Let's look at it another way. Roads are not dangerous, cars are not
>dangerous. It is the motorists who are dangerous. Cyclists are killed
>by motorists. The road and car merely provide the place and
>instrument of execution. Once you realise this, you will see that
>even with your head surrounded by polystyrene, you are still no
>match for the motorist surrounded by a ton of steel.

No match only if if you regard it as a collision-surviving contest. This
is of course the way many car-drivers and safety "experts" think. There
is, however, another route to staying alive on the roads on a
bicycle. It is most unorthodox, heretical, and involves using your brain
to *avoid* collisions instead of parcelling it up to survive them.

This is of course a technological replay of the old evolutionary arms
race between armour and agility. We have much bigger brains and much
thinner skulls than other mammals; evolution as it were having "decided"
that being cleverer and lighter overall (in our case) scored more
survival points than being stupid and more heavily armoured. Of course
if you are stupid you have alas no choice -- you should wear all the
armour you can get, and probably you should give up cycling and drive a
Volvo. But if you are intelligent, there *is* another way...


-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh         +44 (0)131 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205
"The mind reigns, but does not govern"             Paul Valery