I use mine for spot checks given some health issues I’ve been having; in general, it tracks OK with how I’m feeling, though I recently wore a heart monitor for a week and the Fitbit completely missed some bouts of tachycardia. They claim the devices are reasonably accurate if worn correctly… I’ve been amused when mine flashes up a message saying something like “Great - you’re in the cardio zone!!” (no, my heart is just doing screwy stuff because it feels like it).
Huh. I didn’t know they read speed limit signs. I thought that was tied into GPS. The speed limit being an attribute of the road.
I first noticed this in a rental Honda CR-V in 2021. I was with a friend of mine, who is also a CS geek, and he had never seen it either. We started to do an experiment to determine if it was reading the signs or getting the speed limit from a database. We noticed that the speed limit would update around 2 seconds after the car passed a white, rectangular “normal” speed limit sign, but it would not change if the sign was orange, if it was non-rectangular, or in any way non-standard, so we concluded that it must be reading the sign. We also noted that if the sign was obscured, it would sometimes miss it. I later looked up that model car, and found a mention of the front-facing camera doing this. In the Bronco, it also is used for collision avoidance and lane-keeping.
I love my Zojirushi rice cooker. But when I use it I have to let it sit out for a few days with the top open so that the water in the lid evaporates, otherwise it drips into the pot. I have a nice spot for it in a cabinet, but it is almost always on the counter evaporating.
I do too. I does not live in a cabinet though. We have a huge laundry room and it just sit’s on a counter top in there.
It’s likely the designers never considered the possibility that a rice cooker would never not be in use. (Too many negatives, let’s try again.) The rice cooker is designed to be in continual use, always having rice within it cooking or warming.
Hm… the “rice cookers need to be constantly in use” thing reminds me of ink jet photo printers. There is no way to use one periodically with long gaps between usages. The nozzles always clog, and the process for cleaning uses too much ink and profanity.
This situation is so annoying that it has driven me to set up a darkroom and use an enlarger to produce true film prints.
(I realize you posted this in March, but I’m seeing it 5 months later)
When my kids were teens I bought full sets of Fiestaware for each family member. We each had a dinner plate, salad plate, bowl, cup, and knife + fork + spoon–all in one color.
My color was orange; my wife had light blue. That meant that for every meal I had to wash my orange plate and orange fork. It was an excellent system.
Sadly, Fiestaware doesn’t sell single-color flatware sets anymore; they only seem to sell sets with multicolored handles or sets where all of the spoons are one color and all of the knives are another.
That’s an interesting idea. I shared an apartment in college with four others and that might have been a good way to avoid arguments over whose turn it was to wash dishes when it’s obvious whose dishes are in the sink unwashed. Really someone ought to sell such sets on Amazon.
Teslas, and perhaps other cars, do both. Definitely fits in bad product design, based on how often it gets the speed limit wrong. I’m going to blame this on Google maps, though, not Tesla. I’m sure you’re aware of how hard it is to get map data correct.
Can the stupid product design be a roommate? I guess they occasionally come from craigslist. Different colored dishes sounds great, but is just kicking the problem down the road by a day, “Who used my plate? I’m supposed to be blue, and I know I washed it yesterday!”
BMWs have had cameras reading speed limit signs for years. And rarely miss one that looks like an NHTSA standard speed limit sign.
They make no effort to read construction zone signs and such. Just as a speed limit system based on GPS location and online maps would be unaware of any construction zone limits until / unless they were for a long-lasting project that filed the limit changes with whoever maintains those databases.
IME the big problem with reading speed limit signs is the same one humans have: you turn onto some road from another and it’ll be 3+ miles before you encounter the first limit sign for the direction you’re driving. In an area where the limit on that type of road might plausibly be 35 or 55, that’s a problem. But not one the car can fix. At least not without reliable speed limit maps. Easy enough to just drive the speed of traffic. But what about when there are nearly no other cars? Or in areas where other cars often do limit plus 25 and you’re uncomfortable much above limit plus 10?
Constant battle in my field - GIS.
It is sort of funny that my wife’s car shows the speed limit on our road to be 50 mph. Dirt road with 5 inch deep potholes. A good dirt bike rider could do it with the right machine. Would still be dangerous as shit though.
I’m currently reading a Matt Parker book “Humble Pi - When math goes wrong in the real world” and learned that there’s a Null Island.
ISTM, however, that Google Maps does a fairly accurate job when it comes to speed limits. Anecdotal, to be sure, but there’s a stretch of interstate that I travel frequently. For many miles the speed limit is 75 mph, then it drops to 70, and few miles later, 65 as you enter a city. I’ve watched both Google on my phone and the map app in my 2017 car, and they both make these switches within a second or two of passing the speed limit sign.
We recently started using a web-based tool at work for tracking project status, etc. After a certain period of inactivity you get logged out and are presented with a message:
“Your session has expired. Click here to start a new session.”
Below the text there is a large “OK” button.
Clicking the “OK” button, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing. To start a new session you have to click the word “here” in the text of the message. That is, technically, what the message says to do, but the OK button is much larger and more prominent and is what most people are instinctively going to click, not the smaller and much less noticeable link in the message text. But besides that, why is the OK button even there if it apparently serves no purpose?
One issue, around here at least, is that trucks and cars often have different limits. The truck sign will have extra text indicating such, but the car isn’t smart enough to interpret the difference, and the speed limit part looks the same. So sometimes you drop down to 55 from 65 for that reason.
The car should read the sign and transmit that data to the map provider. That way the maps can be kept up to date continuously.
I’m sure Google would love to do this–they collect traffic data by checking how fast their phones are going–but they don’t have access to the car’s camera. They’d need some kind of partnership.
Google might be able to guess the limit by looking at typical speeds. Take the speed at the 75th percentile or something to eliminate slow traffic and speed demons.
When we moved into a new hospital, all the doors had handles on both sides. A few months later push plates were fitted to replace all the ripped off handles.
probably not gonna work well in high-congestion areas … e.g. my wife’s car tells me the lifetime-speed-avg. is 24km/h …(15 or so mp/h) mostly b/c she lives in traffic jams…
That’s why I suggested a percentile, not an average. Throw out at least the bottom half of reported speeds, if not more.
It’s probably not a bad task for AI. I’m 100% certain that if a human looked at the speed distribution, they could infer the limit. But it might be a little tricky to actually convert into a normal algorithm. Machine learning is good at that kind of thing, though.
In Ohio, the default speed limit for a road with no posted limit is 55. One of my aunts lives on a hilly curvy backcountry gravel road, that nobody’s ever bothered to put any signage on. The fastest I’ve ever traveled in a vehicle was once, when I was with my uncle, going the speed limit down that road.
I occasionally contemplate the fact that there’s no “universally understood” push or pull symbol, despite how common the actions are in public spaces.
A red hexagon is understood to mean STOP. A red triangle means YIELD. A green circle is commonly understood as GO or OK. The green “running man” is increasingly considered as “universally understood” as an EXIT sign that doesn’t depend on language. The circle with the line (I/O) is POWER.
Why didn’t anything become as common for PUSH and PULL without needing to use the words? And how does something get proposed and actually become widely accepted and understood?
I think about this rather often and have no answers!