Quote:
Originally Posted by lifer
i guess you can't. You haven't so far. Tell me this, if you were driving from Banff to Golden at 100km/h are you likely to see more or less deer than somebody who drives the same stretch of road at (a silly example) 10 km/h? I have a hunch that the slow person would see more deer, even though you travel the same distance. If you disagree with that, well, I don't know what else to say. The speed difference we have been talking about is not 90km/h, so it wouldn't be that drastic of a difference (obviously) but why would the general trend not hold? I have presented this argument a couple times ( as the 2.7 vs 3 deer on a stretch of road) and you have not responded to it.
I'm not stupid enough to say that speeding is safer or anything like that, it obviously isn't, and I know that we are having a stupid argument right now that really has little to do with the intended topic here. I have been wrong in the past, so if you could bring yourself to explain to me using the sepecifics of the example above how the point in question is wrong, I will accept that.
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How many times do I have to explain that the chance of hitting a hazard has two variables, position and time.
Let's look at your example, that 3 deer appear every 10 minutes on a 10 km stretch of road. I'm traveling at 100km/h so I'll see 3 deer.
You're traveling at 110km/h so you will see 2.7 deer (approximately). SO you are 10% less likley to see a deer.
Now what are the chances of hitting the deer? Well, let's say that the deer is in a postion to get hit for about 1 second. In that one second that teh deer is in my lane I'll have traveled 27.7m. In that same 1 second you have traveld 30.5m or about 10% further than an I have, so for that 1 second that the deer is in your lane and a hazard to you, you are 10% more likely to hit it.
It all averages out. You may see fewer deer, but the chances of intercepting them is greater, so the chance of either one of us hitting a deer is exactly the same.
Let me relate this to hockey so you can maybe finally understand this.
Jarome Iginla can score a goal on aveage about every 10 minutes.
Mathew Lombardi can score a goal on average about every 60 minutes.
This is equavalent to the ammount of distance you traverse in the 1 second that the deer is on the road.
Now lets equate that to the time you're on the road.
If Jarome Iginla plays hockey for 100 minutes and Mathew Lombardi plays hockey for 600 minutes, who scores more goals?
See, there is an inverse relationship between the two factors that influence wheterh or not you'll hit a deer, position and time.
When you decrease time, you increase you're rate of change of position by a proportionate ammount so the probability stays the same.