On the upside, I got to see a car crash into a cyclist today.
On the downside, it was a planned event on school grounds whereby a group of 'stuntmen,' were deliberately hit by a foam padded car in order to show how dangerous cars are.
On the upside it was cool, and the bike was mangled pretty badly.
On the downside it was super hot outside.
On the upside, I'm not outside anymore.
Three ups, two downs. Ups win.
Anyway, the premise is simple: show the kids what a crash is like and they'll be perfect citizens for the rest of their days.
I quite like the idea of showing something like a crash for a couple of reasons. Firstly, most of these kids will have never, and likely will never, see something like this in the wild. It puts a real consequence to a theoretical they've been taught all their lives. If they ever do find themselves as a spectator to something like this, the 'I know this,' effect will kick in, and all the people will be saved from the bald dinosaurs.
It's a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but at least they ask the students what the emergency service numbers are during the presentation, so a conceivable benefit has been realised.
The other benefit is employment. A troupe of unemployed actors get to roll around destroying bikes. Cool.
So they teach the kids how to be safe, don't ride without a helmet. Don't cross the street until the man is green. Don't stand near the edge of the pavement.
And all this great advice will improve the safety of the younglings not at all. They're taught how to act, (great word incoming) unilaterally, unthinkingly.
If the man is red then you wait. Implied in waiting in modern society is looking down at your phone, headphones in, entirely oblivious to the outside world. And then you cross on the green man, head down, oblivious to the outside world. But the green man said go. I assume you can see where this is heading. And it stands for so many aspects of Japanese society, working all the way through the corporate favour system they employ, to running a household.
Keep your head down and go when the man says to.
I would have stayed out longer and watched a few more stuntsmen pretend to get run over, but for some reason it's about a million bajillion degrees outside and I have a legitimate flu' (if it's influenza, why is the flu not 'flu' on account of missing letters on either end of the word?).
Also the name. Statistics show that the death penalty doesn't work, and that's the ultimate in scary straighteyness, so who are they trying to impress with a name like that? (P.S. It's in English so no fucker knows what it means anyway.)
If you think I'm stretching, take this somewhat less extreme example of this principal in action: taking bad kids to a prison to straighten them right up. The article shows it's an ineffective strategy to say the least. I wonder if there have been any studies translated into Japanese? Then again, this little circus employs eight or so people, so best not to rain on their parade.
Side note: Is it just me, or has tech suddenly become interesting again? For the last decade there's been an incredible amount of stagnation in the tech space, the last great innovation was the move to parallelism in computing then nothing seemed to happen, and now bam. VR. 3D printers. Drones (I don't think anyone actually cares about drones, but they have a cool connotation, pew pew gonna' bomb yo' non-European/American freedom hating free speech fuck yeah 'Murica ass). Space travel (One way trip to Mars. Cool!). 4K. Self Driving cars that only try to kill people a little bit. Fusion generated electricity within the next two decades (it's only taken fifty years, what's waiting another twenty?).
Of these things I want VR and a 3D printer. 4K is a natural evolution and will happen equally naturally. Who cares about drones? Who has the space for one in their home when it's not flying around spying on the neighbours? Or maybe you can mid air refuel them. 100 foot battery change, eternal flight.
I would sign up to be the first man on Mars even if it meant I was never coming back. In a heartbeat. But that's not going to happen, so I'll settle for the first two. In a strange way they're entwined, as both require virtualisation in 3D space, and you could conceivably work a design for your printer with VR.
I've watched the evolution of VR into a viable product for a few years now, and the obstacles they've overcome have been pretty interesting. Latency, resolution, fit and feel, brightness - all things that have been designed around and the results look great. I've only tried static 3D headsets up to now, no tracking with head movements and certainly no controllers that map to the 3D space of the virtual world (punching yourself in the face while trying to scratch your nose is a reality. I did it.) but they are all things that have been added to the pot. With the first release of occulus, vive and morpheus (facebook owned, valve owned and sony owned respectively) we'll see a brand new format war that I'm entirely ready to embrace because up until this point, much like 3D in cinemas, VR has been a gimmick. I want to see what it can do. Plug the internet straight into my brain goddamnit.
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