Administrivia: Comments Policy

Just a little friendly reminder about how Walkitout Does Things.

My blog is not a Free Speech Zone. And no one has a right to post anything in my blog (conceivably, I do, but I think it is actually more of a Terms of Service agreement thing with the lovely people who run Dreamwidth). This blog primarily exists as a one way form of communication about what is going on in my life for people who I unfortunately do not currently get to see in real life very often. I’m perfectly happy sharing it with a wider world, and if someone overhears something and chooses to join in, and I find them enjoyable, I’ve made new friends that way who I then went on to visit and get to know in real life.

But when you are commenting, please _think_ about the purpose of this blog. People I’ve known for a decade or more can easily get away with saying something brusquely oppositional to me, and I will respond to it as it is: a comment the context of which I have a lot of experience with. If you’ve never met me and you say something provocative, thinking that’s how this works, you have drastically misunderstood, and my history with things like this is I tend to verbally reprimand very briefly before I start deleting and blocking.

I find all kinds of political and conversational excitement to get into in person. I don’t want it online.

Puzzles

Yesterday afternoon, A.’s bus dropped her off, and her adorable companion on the bus, V., had a riddle they had been discussing. I didn’t hear the original version, the summary I heard involved someone guarding a bridge who told people who approached that if they told the truth, he’d beat them to death with sticks and if they lied he’d throw them in the river and they would drown. What should I do?

I immediately replied, “I would say, “That is a criminal threat. I am going to call 911.” If I was attacked before the police arrived, I would take the stick from the guard and choke him out with it (I used to train in martial arts and actually have a few techniques that I could try to deploy to accomplish this). When the police arrived, I would say, “He started it”.” Needless to say, this was not the anticipated response. The bus driver said he liked this answer better than his own (I don’t know what he came up with). I later determined that A.had suggested telling a half truth, and getting to cross on that basis (nice!). I don’t run very fast (okay, at all), so it never occurred to me to run away. Ooops!

V. next asked, what if the police don’t believe you? The bus driver, A. and I collectively figured out that there was probably a pile of rotting bodies of people who had beaten to death for telling the truth, or drowned in the river for lying, so we would tell the police to drag the river and dig around a bit under the bridge.

I observed — I forget what prompted this, and it is really the most reprehensible part of my comments on the topic — that if this all occurred in some corrupt small town in Texas or similar, where the person at the bridge was actually the chief of police, then this wasn’t going to work and the smartest thing to do would be to kill the person at the bridge, never tell anyone, leave and hope no one ever figured it out.

None of us — I’m only now contemplating this — actually questioned what the bridge led to and did we really need to cross it / have any kind of right to cross it. I feel that the guard’s questionable strategy for dealing with people approaching it means there was something really hinky going on here, so I don’t actually feel too bad about it.

When I was younger, and kinder, I probably would have said something like, oh, I guess I just wouldn’t cross the bridge then. And if I had produced an answer such as the one I produced yesterday, I would have been castigated for exiting the Proper Frame of the Puzzle. These days, nothing really slows me down in my complete failure to notice that There Is a Box and I Should Stay In It. I just trash it like a wet paper bag and then wonder why the bus driver is looking at me like I came from another planet.

Possibly I did. (I swim well. Here’s hoping the bridge isn’t too high, the water is deep enough and there aren’t any rocks I need to avoid.)

ETA: If anyone can find a version of this riddle online or in a book, I am moderately curious about the details of the original. If an original exists.

ETAYA: I apologize to V. today for disrupting her riddle. She says that there is no 911 in the world of the riddle. She also says that the person block the bridge maybe raises and lowers it? So if you off that person, you may still not be able to cross. She asserts there is no other route, and that the route and destination are not breaking into / trespassing, but just a road to an otherwise ordinary village. The correct answer is apparently, "I'm going to drown in the river", the idea being that if it is true, you won't drown because you'll be beaten to death with sticks, and if it is a lie, then it will be true, because you will be thrown in the river and drown. I personally think the wording could use a little improvement (being wrong != lying), but that minor quibble aside, this is really one of those Star Trek Robot Exploded With Logic Things. And I'm increasingly a Gordian Knot kinda person. With the sword, that is.

Self Driving Car Politics Link Fu: Will the First Pedestrian Fatality Change Things?

This is a Link Fu post: I'll be finding news articles and opinions etc. about the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car while self-driving (safety driver did not engage manual mode). There are people who are pretty committed to the idea that this could be a moment that changes the energy / politics of self-driving cars. I'm skeptical, but open to the possibility.

Here is an example of an opinion piece speculating / pushing the idea that a pedestrian death by self-driving car is an argument for slowing down / stopping self-driving car development / testing on public streets.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/uber-crash-kills-woman-in-first-pedestrian-death-caused-by-a-self-driving-car.html

First: Who, What, Where, When

I would personally suggest you do some hard thinking before you click on this link, maybe turn off auto-play if you still have it turned on. Police have released the car video from the event; it is embedded in this coverage.

The basics: at 10 p.m. on a clear, dry roadway in Tempe, AZ, an Uber in autonomous mode struck a woman who later died of her injuries. She was walking her bike across the road (so that's why it is a pedestrian fatality, even tho a bike is present) at a location without a crosswalk or a crossing road. The event occurs after she steps off / through the median in the middle of a four lane road, in the far right lane.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-selfdriving-uber/arizona-police-release-video-of-fatal-collision-with-uber-self-driving-suv-idUSKBN1GX39A

Unstated anywhere in this particular coverage is whether this is an event which would have occurred if the car had been driven by a human.

"“The sensors should have detected the pedestrian in this case; the cameras were likely useless but both the radars and the Lidar must have picked up the pedestrian,” said Raj Rajkumar, a professor at Carnegie Mellon."

Wired coverage, also with the car video:

https://www.wired.com/story/uber-self-driving-crash-video-arizona/

This one is even more focused on why the _non_ camera sensors (the lidar and rader) failed to detect the pedestrian / accurately anticipate what the pedestrian was about to do. It discusses in some detail whether perfect attention is a possible expectation of safety drivers / people charged with monitoring.

Neither of these two articles get into street design issues.

This article pre-dates the video release:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe-police-chief-says-early-probe-12765481.php

The police are much more concerned about assessing this event in comparison to what an ordinary driver in an ordinary car might have done. Some coverage has said the car was going 40. This coverage indicates 38 in a 35. Common to earlier coverage of self driving cars was a lot of speculation about whether self driving cars being sticklers for adhering to posted speed limits might create accidents of human drivers going around them.

"The incident happened within perhaps 100 yards of a crosswalk, Moir said. “It is dangerous to cross roadways in the evening hour when well-illuminated, managed crosswalks are available,” she said."

Moir is Tempe's police chief according to this article. This is an indication of how street design plays a role in accidents. 100 yards is a long walk (and twice that, if your destination is directly across the road, even longer) while pushing a bike laden with bags. Most adults drive, and can become highly insensitive to how distance and incline are experienced by people who are walking or using human powered vehicles. The pictures, and the video also show that this area is poorly illuminated.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe-breaking/2018/03/19/woman-dies-fatal-hit-strikes-self-driving-uber-crossing-road-tempe/438256002/

"A large median at the site of the crash has signs warning people not to cross mid-block and to instead use the crosswalk to the north at Curry. But the median also has a brick pathway that cuts through the desert landscaping that accommodates people who do cross at that site."

The physical hardscape strongly suggests that if we were to go digging through accident data for this location, we would find a lot of people crossing illegally and potentially unsafely at this location. Rather than light, signal and crosswalk the location, Tempe has chosen to try to "sign" the problem out of existence.

As a variety of sources (above and elsewhere) have noted, the driver has a criminal record and was not looking at the road for seconds at a time, and the deceased woman was homeless, had substance abuse issues and mental health challenges, and was crossing the road at a location where pedestrians are not supposed to cross.

I'm trying to figure out how much coverage there would have been if this had not involved a self-driving car. I'm also curious how _often_ some variation on this accident has occurred at this _exact same location_, but with a human driven car.

Lidar and laser sensing equipment is supposed to help with this kind of situation in darkness. But I'm a little skeptical of those solutions, because I've lived with cars that have parking sensors and I'll just straight up tell you that every little bit of dirty snow that gets thrown up on the sensors wreaks havoc with the information coming from them. If self-driving cars require those kinds of sensors to do their thing, self-driving cars are not going to happen in large parts of our country. Ever. And we could do all kinds of things to the vehicles on the road, but I personally think that if a trip through the Tempe police records turn up a lot of accidents at this location, the money would be much better spent lighting the location and putting up a crosswalk control so peds could request a red. Pretty sure that Uber car would have stopped for a red light, altho of course we can't be sure.

But if a self-driving car ran a red and killed a pedestrian, we would DEFINITELY then have a moment where we could draw back from self-driving cars on public roads and go, we have more than enough human drivers doing _that_ already. We don't need to automate the process.

Kids Book Reviews: _She Persisted_, and _Eleanor Roosevelt_

_She Persisted_ is by Chelsea Clinton. The illustrations are lovely. Many familiar figures are included: Nellie Bly, Claudette Colvin, Sally Ride, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for example. But there are also many who are less familiar to me: Maria Tallchief, Virginia Apgar, Clara Lemlich.

The pattern is simple: a little story of the woman, her dream, her persistence in fulfilling that dream, then a quote from the woman. In each story, the phrase, _She Persisted_ is incorporated. It is inspiring.

A bit denser, but also enjoyable is Mary Winget's _Eleanor Roosevelt_. A biography starting from Eleanor's birth, detailing her younger years at home, the deaths in her family, her time away at school in England, coming out, marriage to Franklin, the births of their children, early years in politics and out, etc. Then of course 4 terms, and all her work after the war with the United Nations and so forth.

#14 and #15. Technically, my daughter read the first one to me, and we split the second.

ETA: The above two were library books from the school library. This next one, #16, was a Scholastic Book Club selection, which my daughter picked because it came with one of those mermaid blanket tails — and it was almost entirely pink. Which. Pink World. Anyway.

Purr-Maids #2: The Catfish Club, by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, is the first book in this series that either of us had read. We think book #1 is lying around somewhere, but there are a _lot_ of purchases in this most recent order (they sent them home in the Book Box, which tells you something). Lest you think she is ordinarily an avid reader, my daughter typically picks her book club selections based on What Comes With. Also, she loves rocks. But really, who doesn’t.

Anyway. Reminded me a lot of Thea Stilton books / Mouseford Academy and some other series that we have sampled that I won’t mention because they were a lot worse. This has purr-maids, mermaids, but the top half is kitty, instead of human. Really. Two groups of three, competing, and there’s a bet putting favorite jewelry at stake. The competition involves producing art for a class project. They ultimately (SPOILERS!) fail miserably at their initial efforts and decide to work together as a group of 6 and produce something really great that is placed in the local art museum (partly out of necessity). Lots of silly pun artist names (Pablo Picatso, Henri Catisse, and let me tell you, spell check in this browser window really wants to fix those names). A. wondered why the girls were being mean to each other (and this author actually had the meanness pretty evenly distributed — in some books, there is a clear “victim / hero” and a clear “mean girl / villain”); I compared them to Zeta in Shimmer and Shine, and said it was basically being really, really competitive. I love it when her current video interests supply a narrative example of some concept she is struggling with elsewhere. I can point to it, and she immediately understands and can expand on it based on the video program. Kidvid today is so amazing compared to what I grew up with. I particularly liked the resolution of the bet.