Avoiding car crashes

Six million car crashes a year in the United States, leading to 30-40,000 dead Americans every year. Here are six main causes. Read the full article on how to avoid them:

The Rolling Right Turn on Red

You approach a red light, and you’re about to turn right. You slow down but don’t come to a full stop. As you continue to roll, you look to your left to see if there are any cars coming at you from that direction. You turn your head back to the right and suddenly, out of nowhere, there’s a pedestrian or a bicyclist…

The rolling right on red now accounts for 6 percent of all pedestrian fatalities, and the number is on the rise. Worse still, 21 percent of the deaths happen to kids.

Falling Asleep

…about 7 percent of all car crashes, and 21 percent of fatal crashes, happen to drowsy drivers.

Loss of Control

…accounts for 11 percent of all crashes. It’s comforting to think that these unfortunate drivers occupy the bottom 11 percent of the driving skill scale, but science has some humbling news for us. It turns out that most of us think about driving skill far too simply… Aggressive maneuvering and taking a sharp curve too fast account for about 5 percent of all crashes. Another 2 percent happen when we don’t slow down for water on the road.

The remainder of these crashes happen when another driver or even a sudden turn in the road puts us in a surprise situation that demands an instant response. We imagine ourselves coolly responding when something unexpected pops up, but most people overreact and overcompensate and sometimes kick their car afterward.

Into the Blind

Ever make a left turn at an intersection when there’s a huge bus blocking your view of what’s coming from the other direction? Or cruise through a red light thinking that there won’t be another car coming across your path? Or even race down a road not realizing that it just might end at some point? The data tell us that 12 percent of all crashes happen when drivers do these things…

The Rear-Ender

Your first job when driving: Don’t hit the car in front of you. As simple as it sounds, hitting the car in front of us accounts for between 23 percent and 30 percent of all crashes.

We drive close to the car in front of us because we think it’ll get us there faster. It’s true, technically, but just barely: Science says we save 26 seconds per day as a result of our hurrying.

Distracted Lane or Road Departure

Your second job when driving is to stay in your lane. Thirty-three percent of all crashes happen when we don’t stay in our lane, or even on the road… the distraction of phones, our attention gets pulled by roadside crashes, billboards, activities inside the car, and mind wandering. Humans are not natural performers when it comes to keeping an eye on much of anything and even less so when asked to attend to several things at once.

About 1,700 words: https://slate.com/technology/2017/11/the-six-main-causes-of-car-crashes.html.

Making of The Fugitive movie

The movie The Fugitive has been on reruns since forever. Great movie, received an 87 out of 100 from Metacritic (which is an average of critics’ ratings: 60 is good, 70 is high, 80 is very high, 90 or above is rare). But making the movie had… issues:

There was no finished script or even an ending and a key cast member became fatally ill during the production. Three decades after the release of the landmark Hollywood thriller, the cast and crew look back at the film’s chaotic creation and reflect on the legacy of the instant classic that almost fell apart…

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/the-fugitive-movie-oral-history-cast-director-1234789685/. About 12,400 words.

The famous scene where US Marshal Gerard has Dr. Richard Kimble at gunpoint in the tunnel, and Kimble says, “I didn’t kill my wife!”:

I was on set that day. Tommy did not want to say “I don’t care.” But he needed to tell the audience he does not care if the guy’s innocent or guilty. It was freezing cold. The water’s running through. Harrison had been such a trooper. He’s standing there in this opening, which has a jump of about four feet, to a mattress. We’re all freezing. And Tommy keeps saying, “No, I don’t like that line. It doesn’t work.” And we had, “I don’t care” in the script, but he kept trying others. And so after a while I just said, “Why don’t you just try, ‘I don’t care?’” And once he did it, Andy Davis said, “That’s it. Wrap.”

Good news! delivered to your inbox

The website https://futurecrunch.com collects good news about the world and will send you a weekly email for free. Here are some bits from this week’s email:

Schoolkids in eight US states—Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Vermont, Michigan, Massachusetts, California and Maine—now receive free school meals, regardless of family income. Several other states are considering similar programs, and congressional supporters are working on legislation to extend universal free meals to every state.

The US FDA has approved the first vaccine for RSV for use during late pregnancy, giving the country a powerful new tool to protect young children. RSV is the country’s leading cause of infant hospitalisation, resulting in half a million emergency room visits and 300 deaths in young children every year.

In Pichincha, Ecuador, 120,722 hectares have recently been protected, safeguarding 13 different ecosystems, 67 endemic bird species, and water sources for local communities. The network links to a further 74,281 hectares of parks in Mejía, creating protected migration corridors for pumas, Andean bears and imperiled species like the Andean condor and the capuchin monkey.

A family-run environmental organisation in Indonesia called Sungai Watch has successfully removed 1.2 million kilograms of plastic from polluted rivers and mangroves; and out to sea, nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup has collected over 11,000 kilograms of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the most rubbish cleared from a single extraction.

The usual news outlets don’t cover these (or do so only occasionally… since a lot of this is little-by-little progress every day). Good news on the environment, health care, poverty, violence, pollution, politics, women’s rights.

Egypt used to have the highest rate of hepatitis C in the world. In 2018, the government decided to implement a massive and unprecedented campaign to screen and treat every citizen, crystallising into something called the 100 Million Healthy Lives Campaign. Today, both the World Bank and the WHO say Egypt has eliminated hepatitis C from its entire population. Forbes (from a previous newsletter).

Here’s a link to this week’s entire email. Consider signing up for the free weekly newsletter or even subscribing to the premium version for a mere $80/year.

Yes, we know democracy is in mortal peril in the United States–except for the fact that US states have enacted more than twice as many laws expanding voting rights as restricting them in the past year. So yes, 16 states have made it harder to vote, but 26 have made it easier, including both blue and red states. Fivethirtyeight

Some schizophrenia may actually be lupus

A woman had been diagnosed with schizophrenia for twenty years. Bloodwork found elevated antibody levels, antibodies that were attacking her own body:

The first conclusive evidence was in her bloodwork: It showed that her immune system was producing copious amounts and types of antibodies that were attacking her body. Brain scans showed evidence that these antibodies were damaging her brain’s temporal lobes, areas that are implicated in schizophrenia and psychosis. (…)

Even though April had all the clinical signs of schizophrenia, the team believed that the underlying cause was lupus, a complex autoimmune disorder in which the immune system turns on its own body, producing many antibodies that attack the skin, joints, kidneys or other organs. But April’s symptoms weren’t typical, and there were no obvious external signs of the disease; the lupus appeared to be affecting only her brain. (…)

Every month for six months, April would receive short, but powerful “pulses” of intravenous steroids for five days, plus a single dose of cyclophosphamide…. She was also treated with rituximab, a drug initially developed for lymphoma.

The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately.

It’s possible that many psychiatric patients actually have other — curable — medical issues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/01/schizophrenia-autoimmune-lupus-psychiatry/. About 4,400 words. If you don’t have a subscription (and you should), this link also works.

Printing replacement organs

In the United States, there are 106,800 men, women and children on the national organ transplant waiting list as of March 8, 2023, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration. However, living donors provide only around 6,000 organs per year on average, and there are about 8,000 deceased donors annually who each provide 3.5 organs on average.

Currently, if one of your important organs stops working or is too damaged, your choices suck: get a transplant, or die. And transplantation means someone has to give up an organ, or has to be dead (and yet still have the needed organ and that in good shape, and a reasonable match for blood type, antibodies, and HLA). 3D printing has spread into the area of printing biological materials. If we can print replacement organs, the donor and donor-match problems go away:

What if doctors could just print a kidney, using cells from the patient, instead of having to find a donor match and hope the patient’s body doesn’t reject the transplanted kidney?

The soonest that could happen is in a decade, thanks to 3D organ bioprinting, said Jennifer Lewis, a professor at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Organ bioprinting is the use of 3D-printing technologies to assemble multiple cell types, growth factors and biomaterials in a layer-by-layer fashion to produce bioartificial organs that ideally imitate their natural counterparts

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/10/health/3d-printed-organs-bioprinting-life-itself-wellness-scn/index.html. About 1,500 words.



Missed movie jokes

Time for something a little lighter. Here’s 22 people admitting that they missed a joke in a movie and only figured it out years later. For example:

When describing Austin Power’s ‘Mojo,’ Dr. Evil has a line like, ‘What the French call a certain… I don’t know what.’ I always thought the joke was that Dr. Evil was just being stupid. I didn’t learn until much later in life that this is the literal definition of ‘Je ne sais quoi.’ Upon a recent rewatch, that was probably my favorite joke in the entire franchise.

See them at https://www.buzzfeed.com/alliehayes/movies-jokes-people-missed-reddit.

The United States in a new kind of collective order

Why have the number and severity of wars dropped noticeably in the past century? In the past, one state could gain power until it was a risk to all the states near it, so all the states near it ganged up to keep it under control, repeat ad infinitum. But not for the past several decades:

This post will focus on what I do think is the US position in the international order, although the focus here is going to be somewhat less on the United States’ role within what I am going to call the ‘status quo coalition’ than it is on the coalition itself. Because the existence and breadth of this coalition is really unusual and thus remarkable; indeed it may be indicative of broader shifts in how interstate relationships work in an industrial/post-industrial world where institutions and cultural attitudes are beginning, slowly, to catch up to the new realities our technology has created.

(…)

Globally we can see the failure of balancing. Despite the fact that the first real challenger to the US-led world order since 1989 has emerged in the form of the People’s Republic of China, the PRC has the same meager list of allies in 2023 that it had in 1953: North Korea. Russia likewise has a single European client state (Belarus); Russian friendship with Hungary has merely bought neutrality, not aid.

(…)

Meanwhile, the United States’ list of allies is preposterous. Of the top 10 countries by nominal GDP – a decent enough measure of potential military capabilities – one is the United States and six more (3. Japan, 4. Germany, 6. UK, 7. France, 8. Italy and 9. Canada) are close allies of the United States. Of the next ten, five more (South Korea, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, and Turkey) are formal US treaty allies, one is pointedly neutral (Switzerland) and three more (Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia) have either extensive economic ties with the United States, significant military ties with the United States or both.

Why have things changed so drastically? https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/. 8,000 words and worth it; Steven Pinker wrote an entire book about how we got to where we are (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature.)

Medical mystery

Seated next to a radiologist, Thomas P. Trezona scoured the images of his CT scan, dreading the thing he was sure he would find: evidence of pancreatic cancer, the same disease that had killed his mother. Given his age, sex and family history, that was the most likely explanation for the violent abdominal pain, nausea and rapid weight loss that in July 2021 hijacked the life of the retired surgical oncologist.

To Trezona’s enormous relief the scan showed no sign of cancer. His internist suspected he was reacting to grain in his diet, while blood tests performed after the scan suggested a rare, chronic gastrointestinal disorder.

The cause of Trezona’s debilitating symptoms, confirmed nearly two months later following surgery, turned out to be none of those things…

It took a doctor with many medical friends two months to find out what the problem was: an ingested wire from a metal barbecue-grill brush. An estimated 1,700 people suffered the same problem from 2002 through 2014.

https://wapo.st/43kc3fn (2,000 words; should be free to all). More medical mystery stories at wapo.st/medicalmysteries.