YH has pointed out, quite correctly, that tailgating actually saves fuel. This is due to the reduced air resistance acting on the tailgating car. It's also known by the much cooler sounding term "drafting".

I don't use this fuel conservation tactic, it's too dangerous. The inconveniences of getting in an accident are too great to make it worthwhile.

Singaporean drivers are a strange lot. It seems reasonable to assume that many are well educated professionals who are valued for clear thinking and great foresight. These qualities are relegated to the backseat when they take the wheel.

While driving on the expressways, you will see some people tailgating. Some do it in the overtaking lane, presumably to pressure the driver in front. Others tailgate large, slow moving goods vehicles. Why do they do that? A bit of thought should convince anyone that there is no reason for it. Firstly, the one following the goods vehicle can't see anything in front. In the event of a sudden stop, he will just rear end the goods vehicle. Newton's 3rd law suggests that it is a bad idea. Secondly, following so closely prevents him from moving to a faster lane. Switching lanes while still at a slow speed will obstruct the approaching vehicles, so that won't work. With no room to accelerate and unwilling to back off, they are stuck. It's a bit tricky to plan when the rear end of an SBS bus is in your face. They seem to like it.

Those who tailgate other vehicles hope they can pressure the one in front to go faster, or maybe get out of their way. They probably want to, but cannot because they are overtaking another vehicle. I guess these are the "road hogs" people complain about in forum letters. But what if they are already going at the speed limit? Are they still road hogs? They are not unreasonably slow, they are overtaking, which is the purpose of the right most lane. On the contrary, it is the tailgating driver who is at fault. He is driving recklessly, he wants to speed, and some of them still have the nerve to glare at the law abiding driver when they finally get the chance to overtake.

A very common example of shortsightedness occurs at traffic lights. The light in front is red. A driver has taken his foot of the accelerator and is coasting towards it. Another vehicle approaches rapidly from behind, slows down and tailgates a while. He then gets impatient, pulls over to another lane and accelerates away. Zooom..... Ooh look, the light is red. He brakes hard and joins the queue waiting at the traffic light. The "slow" driver now coasts serenely past, taps the brake gently and comes to a smooth stop.

The much more amusing scenario occurs when that lane already has a stopped car while the other is clear. The impatient guy comes to a stop and the light turns green. The "slow" one who coasted accelerates smoothly and leaves everyone else behind. It's much easier to speed up then to start off from a dead stop. Inertia, Newton's first law. Secondary school physics isn't as useless as most people seem to think.

Petrol in Singapore is expensive. People know it. They feel the hit on their pockets. Yet many do not apply some simple practices which can save them quite a lot. "Wait a minute" you say, "there's no free lunch". True enough, the tradeoff is time. You'll need to spend just a little more time travelling. Would you queue 20 minutes for a 30% discount off your petrol bill? The fact is, you don't lose that much time. Even if a more aggressive driver gets a 1km lead on you, that's a grand total of about 1 minute at 60 km/h. For a twenty minute trip, it's about a 5% difference. Your petrol saving might be 30%. Think about it.

And yet when this is mentioned to people, they laugh. "Why drive so slowly?" "My time is precious." "It's fun to drive like that." Guess what? At the end of it all, you hear, "petrol is expensive." But they miss the entire point. The trick is to look ahead and minimise speed changes. Gradually accelerate up to highway speed. The difference between accelerating quickly or slowly up to 90km/h is negligible over the course of a long journey.

Some figures might be useful. A 1.5L manual car, driven carefully, can get 20km/litre. Using a petrol price of $2.246/litre, that's 11.23 cents per km. A 1.6L auto family car usually gets 12 to 13 km/litre, according to car salesmen. That's 18 cents per km, 60% more. A large luxurious car, driven aggressively, gets 7.4km per litre, which is 30 cents per km, 2.67 times more. Clearly, the choice of car plays a great factor, but so does the driving style. The Green Transport Guide, which you can find buried deep in http://www.aas.com.sg says the difference is around 20%. There's no need to moan and hope for petrol prices to drop. Drive properly and cut 20% off your fuel bill, plus you lower the risk of getting into an accident.

This post is already long enough. Thank you if you read till this point. Next time, I'll go into practical ways to cut your petrol bill.

(Figures from personal experience, and reading off a friend's instrument panel.)
(Although I am comparing different cars, the original point stands. Driving properly can lead to significant savings.)

The holidays are here. Not much of one this time round because I'm on internship. Had less than a week of real holidays before I had to start work. Since internship is 12 weeks long and the holidays are also 12 weeks long, I'll only have week 0 to take a break, assuming that it isn't extended because I have to go for ICT in the middle of June. Means I'll miss the most fun week of hall orientation.

I tried to apply for deferment but it was unsuccessful because they have this black out window where they can call uni students to go back for in camp trainings. The 3 unis are supposed to guarantee that there will be no academic programmes during that period. Need to clarify what happens when there are academic programmes, such as VIP or special term. It's weird cause there are those who are on some list which exempts them from call-ups.

Working a 5 day week 8.30 to 6pm job is really a slog. It takes 2 hours for me to get home during peak hours, then by the time I've finished dinner and washing up it's 9pm. A couple more hours later and it's time to sleep to prepare for the next day. Then the whole cycle repeats itself.

Weekends suddenly seem very short, and a long weekend is a great relief. One good thing about my internship is that I don't have to bring work home, so can do my own stuff when I'm not working.

Trying windows live writer as a way of blogging. Their web layout doesn't seem to work for my blog, or maybe I just don't know how to use it.

 

 

 

Over here, I just tried uploading a picture. It works well. It helped me resize it and uploaded it automatically to picasa web albums. Cool

 

I can even add maps

Finished papers on the 5th, but haven't had much time to really relax due to various things.

Right after MNO, I went to watch the movie Enchanted. It was a very nice show, with a most interesting mix of cartoon and real world scenes. The cartoon princess was totally lost in New York, but tried to hold on to her innocent values. Doing so brought about a positive change in the lives of quite a few people. The songs were captivating and many people asked about the soundtrack after watching the show. All in all, an excellent movie well worth watching.

Another incident occurred right after the MNO paper. While walking back from the exam hall, a friend told me I had wasted my time attending the professor's help sessions since many of the questions were just past year questions anyway. However, I certainly do not think that my time spent at those discussion sessions was wasted. It's true that many our exam questions had come out before and some solid group discussion would have led us on the right track, but being there and asking him meant that I could be sure of getting the right answer, and pick up any contingencies as well. After all, the contingency anchor of OB essentially says that each situation may require a different solution. The discussion sessions were very enlightening. Learning is more than just about spotting exam questions. It might be the practical way in the short term, but to me it's not satisfying at all. It is so much better to truly understand the material and appreciate the intricate ways in which all your knowledge links together. Once you can see that, it actually becomes fun to answer exam questions. Even if you don't do well, you know you tried your best.

It has been said that education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. There's nothing wrong with spotting questions, but if one takes a module just to satisfy a requirement and closes his mind to it, he will finish it thinking it is a waste of time, though his own attitude has made it a self fulfilling prophecy.

Learn for the sake of learning, and school will become much more enjoyable.

Just took my first paper for this semester. It was quite ok, but most people thought so too. Guess all the hard work over the past week has really paid off for this module. At least I was able to write something on the paper and it seems to make sense. The paper was Signals, a module which seemed very daunting at the beginning. At least it's doable now, but I have no idea whether my answers are correct, haha. Will know when results are out.

There was an article on the front page of the Straits Times on Saturday about the inflation rate. It's the highest in 16 years, at 3. something %, I can't remember the exact figure. I remember a quote from an economist. He was so surprised he nearly fell out of his chair. Maybe their figures and past experience worked against them, but it seems very obvious to the man on the street that inflation will definitely be high with constantly increasing prices.

If a hawker raises his price from $2.50 to $3, that's a 20% increase. With many hawkers doing so and with food making up a large part of the CPI, why is it so surprising that inflation is high?

Those statements actually give me the feeling that the economists are out of touch with reality. Or perhaps the extra 50 cents didn't seem all that much relative to their salaries. Still, anyone can tell that inflation is high even without the CPI, so why is it so surprising to them? Out of touch with reality? Or simply too buried in the figures?

Jeff says I will start the post by saying "It's been a month since I last posted". However, he has been proved wrong, I started by saying "Jeff says I will start the post...." Haha.

Anyway, it has been a month since I last posted. (I did not start with that statement). The past month has been very busy, with quite a few projects due, such as MNO, EE2006 and our SS project. The SS project was a real last minute affair as our MNO project was due on the weekend. As a result, we started after that and rushed it over the next two days. Thanks to chris' smoke generator and good research support, we managed to get a very decent grade for it.

If you want to know what CH thinks of that, check out his blog.

MNO project was quite interesting as it involved shooting a video and uploading it to video. That means there are now many MNO project videos floating around. Find them by searching for BTSL. My group's video is here.

After watching that one, search for A28 P4. I think that one is quite worth watching. However, it seems that the professor has some slightly different ideas. He prefers stories which are actual adaptations of bedtime stories instead of entirely fictitious ones which just throw in a few characters. He showed a couple of good ones during the lecture, but the others weren't that appealing to me.

EE2006 went quite smoothly after I found out that I don't have to debounce the dip switch. That saved a lot of D flip flops and allowed me to place everything on the breadboards provided with space to spare.

There have been rumours that some people are hiding in closets to mug. Perhaps it's time to write a story titled "The hock, the witch and the Closet" (Tong 2007). Only the witch part is subject to change. I might do it if inspiration strikes, but then again I might just be too lazy.

Time to go study for exams, which are slightly more than a week away.


Reference

Tong 2007, Message History of Illucid, 16 November 2007.
Retrieved from MSN message log on 17 November 2007.