Dee wrote:
As time constraints get tighter and tighter, a
self directed vehicle would sure make my life a
bit nicer. At a minimum I could get more reading
done (I may eat, talk on the phone, etc.... but
never read while driving).
Get Emacspeak running on a laptop and listen to it read `Pride and
Prejudice' or other classic from the Gutenberg Project. I have not
done that in a car, but I find that its text to speech conversion,
using the purely software `espeakf' package, is good enough (though
not very good). My regular reading speed tends to be too fast for my
proper appreciation of Jane Austen's writing. For the same reason, I
found that I understood and appreciated `Alice in Wonderland' much
more when the computer read it to me than when I read it.
Incidentally, the permanently blind refer to a driver as
`situationally blind'. That makes sense. You do not want other
drivers around you looking away from the road. I suspect that there
are more people-hours in the latter situation than the former.
I don't know how dangerous text-to-speech listening will make drivers.
Evidentally, it is not too dangerous to talk with a passenger,
possibly because they stop interrupting you during a dangerous event,
but to talk on a mobile phone increases your and others' danger by a
factor of five: apparently, a safe middle aged driver using a mobile
phone becomes as dangerous as an 18 year old boy.
(Accident proclivity is all a matter of cultural learning. Because
flying is impressive enough on its own and they don't have to show off
or be more macho, and because they learn quickly and well, 18 year old
boys are, statistically, the second safest group of airplane pilots,
after commercial airline pilots. The most dangerous pilots are
successful, middle aged male businessmen.)
--
Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises
http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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