Your Car's LED Daytime Running Lights Are Dangerous And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: LED daytime running lights are bad, how architecture catches thieves and why you shouldn't hit the trails with a bike from Walmart.
A DIM OUTLOOK
The LED Daytime Running Light Is Not Helpful
Most modern cars come equipped with two things that, on the surface, are pretty excellent. LED daytime running lights are bright, efficient and relay a simple fact: Hi, yes this car is on and running. LCD screens are cool, make your car feel like it's from the future and allow for some nifty UI designs. But, as Jalopnik's Jason Torchinksy points out, when the night falls, these two features combine to turn otherwise safe drivers into real nincompoops.
Torchinksy, rightly, points out that the brightness of the daytime running lights is just high enough to fool some into believing their lights are on. This error is compounded when a bright LCD screen replaces traditional sign of UH HELLO YOUR LIGHTS ARE OFF: a dark analog dashboard. And so you have these yahoos driving very sophisticated cars — replete with blindspot warnings, lane correction, adaptive cruise control and a litany of safety features — and their dang lights are off and not only do they not know, they're convinced they are actually on.
Torchinksy presents a simple fix: when your lights are off the LCD dash displays LIGHTS OFF. When your lights are on the dashboard displays LIGHTS ON. Not the most elegant solution, to be sure, but
[Jalopnik]
BUILDING MAZES
Architects Have Been Catching Thieves For Decades
At their core, buildings are designed to protect the things inside of them. When it comes to issues of security, we mostly focus on the the things that get added to the building: the locks, the cameras, the trip wires and so on. But an oft-overlooked element of keeping thieves at bay are the walls themselves.
Atlas Obscura's Lauren Young spoke with architecture writer Geoff Manaugh, and found that not only are architects thinking of how to design building to keep burglars out, but also to keep them in. The thinking is not unlike designing a maze: make it hard for would-be thieves to escape, create chokepoints, make it easy for security to keep on eyes them and predict where they'll try to escape. Truly, if walls could talk they'd tell you how you're about to get pinched.
GOOD FOR GETTING GROCERIES THOUGH
Don't Ride A Walmart Mountain Bike Down A Mountain
Right now, you can go to Walmart and buy a whole dang mountain bike for $179. How far will that paltry sum go? Professional downhill rider Phil Kmetz rode a Huffy Carnage down a double black diamond trail. Halfway down, the brakes were completely cooked. Soon, a rough landing off of a jump bent the handle bars. By the end, Kmetz had to resort to either bombing through turns way faster than he should like and just straight up dragging his feet on the ground to slow down. Sure the phrase "Trail Rated" is plastered on the top tube, but these trails were probably not the ones Huffy had in mind.
[Digg]
A HIGH TALE
There Was Once A Weed Lake In Yosemite
At the ass-end of 1976, a plane carrying 6,000 pounds of marijuana crashed high in the mountains of Yosemite National Park. Frozen in a mountaintop lake, park officials could only drag away a third of the payload, leaving the rest behind until Spring thawed things out. In the interim, the story of a plane full of weed hidden somewhere in Yosemite was apparently too good to keep under wraps. As such, while park rangers sat on their hands, outdoor enthusiasts who enjoyed getting high in both mind and body made pilgrimages to the plane, securing their own personal frozen brick of green. Finally, Spring came, melted the ice, and all was dragged away. Thus ended That One Summer Where A Bunch Of People Got A Bunch Free Weed From The Sky
SAME SALARY, DIFFERENT DAY
Lawyers And Doctors Still Make A Lot
Despite the absurd cost of medical school, and the perceived glut of law graduates, these two traditionally well-respected professions are still up there with managers and finance workers as some of the top earners in this country, according data pulled and visualized by Flowing Data's Nathan Yau.
What's even more shocking however is that as you toggle between the four timeframes — 1960, 1980, 2000 and 2014 — the spread of incomes begins to move outward. In almost every field listed, by 2014 growing number of people have jumped into the $200k income threshold, while the rest huddle somewhere around $50k. This could be partly explained by the influx of a large amount of young workers, those dang millennials, but it's still arresting to see the income gap grow right before your eyes.
YOU WON'T BE BEAMING THEN
This Laser Rifle Is So Bright It'll Mess Up Your Eyes Just Looking At It
This 200-watt laser pointer is both very impressive and also underwhelming. Your standard laser pointer touts the tremendous power of .005 watts. If you shot this 200-watt laser directly into your eye, it would be 33 million times more powerful than staring directly into the sun. It's safe to assume that your eye would be cooked. Just watching someone fire it without eye protection will probably also suck. However, when you point this thing at a piece of sheet metal, it just sort of lazily, silently burns a hole in a dozen seconds or so. Which: okay, is probably very impressive for a homemade laser rifle, but it's a far cry from the beam weapons science fiction has promised us.
[Digg]
Previously on What We Learned This Week
Donald Trump Is Going To Quit Eventually
Selling A Printer Can Get You Sued
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