No harm no foul?

[warch]

When he was 19,my brother was hit on his motorcycle by an old lady pulling out from a side street. (the above mentioned blind spot) It was PA, so he was wearing a helmet. He still suffered injury, has managable seizures to this day, but being forced by law to wear a helmet saved that punk's life. I think about that when I see a riders in MN tooling around with no lids. Yikes.

[Undertoad]

This is where gaming makes you a better driver. Scanning the horizon, threat assessment, reacting quickly but without panic to dangerous conditions.

It's true! After playing Q3A (sweet heroin back in my veins, even though my DSL sucks), I find myself more alert and cognizant of the environment around me. That's why I'm always catching Jenni doing silly things driving - I simply pick up on more because I've trained myself to be scanning everything at all times. Everyone should play Quake.

[russotto]

I was in Montreal, Quebec this weekend. Speed limits are posted in km/h, but the Quebecois treat them as if they are in mph. They also cheerfully ignore "Arret" (stop) signs and pay only fair-to-middling attention to turn arrows. They do seem to obey red lights, at least. This is the good part; my driving fits right in :-)

The other part is that Montreal pedestrians have absolutely no concern for their own safety. They will walk directly out in front of cars, no matter where they are. Old ladies, parents pushing strollers, it doesn't matter, they'll walk into the road anywhere, whether there's a crosswalk or a red light. Worst case I saw was a man jaywalking across a busy street. He reached the island in the middle, looked at me approaching, and continued without even breaking stride.

I've noticed this about Canadians in general. When I was in Toronto in the fall of '99, two of my friends were crossing the street. I stayed back - there was a car coming, and rather close. Sean says to me, "It's okay - they're not allowed to hit you." I responded "You can have them put that on my headstone - 'Here lies Dave; It wasn't his fault.'"

[xoxoxoBruce]

"It's okay - they're not allowed to hit you."

Whether you agree that might makes right or not, it's hard to refute that might makes right of way. It's not wise to step in front of anything heavier than yourself or even lighter things that have momentum.

[warch]

Very French.

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by dave
Everyone should play Quake.

I don't remember it being posted on the Cellar, but last week sometime there was a study released that suggests people who play a lot of first-person shooters have better visual skills than others.

I don't remember who did the study, but it was on the newswires. They also had people who had never played games before play for a while, and their visual skills improved as well (this was done to ensure people with good visual skills aren't just more likely to be attracted to video games).

[OnyxCougar]

News Article Here

In case that link breaks, here's the text:

WEDNESDAY, May 28 (HealthScoutNews) -- You might lament the endless hours of video games your children play, but a new study suggests the obsession can lead to more than high scores and sore thumbs.

Playing action-rich video games like car racing and shoot-em-ups can improve visual perception and allow people to focus on many tasks at once. Such training helps them play the game at hand, but it might also give them an edge in real-world situations like driving a car in traffic, experts say.

"It's certainly wonderful to be able to focus on multiple things at once," says Catherine Harris, a psychologist at Boston University who has studied video games and perception. "The video game generation is going to be very resilient under distraction."

Video games might also be gender equalizers, Harris adds, helping girls trim certain perceptual edges boys now hold. "Typically, girls do have poorer use of spatial relations than boys do, but if girls could be encouraged to play more video games maybe that could change," she says.

In the latest study, Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester's Center for Visual Science and a colleague looked at the effects of action video game habits in a group of young adults. Players had logged at least four hours a week at their sets while non-players had little, and ideally no, experience with the games.

Not surprisingly, players performed better than non-players on tests of visual attention in fields directly engaged by the video games. They tracked 30 percent more items, and did so faster. They were also more adept at locating a specific object in a field of clutter.

But they also did better in areas beyond what the games "trained." They had less "attentional blink"-- a lag in perception that occurs when processing multiple tasks -- and were better able to switch tasks, according to the study to be published May 29 in Nature.

Of course, it's possible that video game players by nature have better visual abilities than other people. So the researchers had a group of non-players train on a war game for an hour a day. After 10 days, they outscored a group of people who'd played Tetris -- a rather simple but highly addictive shape game -- on three measures of visual attention.

Laurent Itti, a perception expert at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, says part of why people improve at playing video games or in doing other tasks that drench the senses is that they learn to sort out what's important and what's irrelevant.

"The naive observer will have his or her attention attracted to anything that's flashy. The trained observer will know that only a few [stimuli] are the ones to care about if you want to win at the game," he says.

However, he adds, the latest work and similar studies also show that "you develop a better ability of switching between objects and have a wider field you can monitor in a more efficient manner."