Gordaen's Blog

I have my Google Homepage setup to display news articles from various sources as well as RSS feeds and other useful data, so that I don’t have to check too many sites (the ultimate point of technology is to make us as lazy as possible, right?). This morning I saw an article about drunk driving compared to driving while talking on a cellphone. The Department of Psychology at the University of Utah published the study yesterday in the summer issue of Human Factors. Basically the study reveals that people who drive while talking on cellphones drive as bad—if not worse than—drunk drivers. I don’t know why they had to do a study about it. Just take a trip anywhere and you’ll see it right away. I think SUV drivers are particularly bad. I’m not sure if it’s a particular attitude that many of them have, or if it is more of a combination of terrible visibility and cellphone distraction, but either way I’ve had to slam my brakes more than once from an SUV changing into my lane. It’s particularly bad when you can look over and see the driver through the side windows of the vehicles and you see the person not even look as he/she changes into your lane. I certainly think the regulations behind driving should be changed…

My other point was that news agencies are like a virus. Once one of them gets ahold of a story, it spreads to all of them in a very short period of time. I find it interesting to see that they tend to not cite their source. Sure, it’s usually a press release, but a lot of times news sites will use direct quotes from a conference they certainly did not attend even when there is no press release. I guess they are just plagiarizing news sources that are plagiarizing news sources that were actually there, probably to write an article about how downloading copyright content is illegal and so evil.