Quote:
Originally Posted by elchase
Actually, a boat going 70 MPH passes 150 ft in 1.45 seconds. And the difference from the 45 MPH boat is 0.85 seconds. And therein lies the flaw in your logic. You see, the accepted average “perception and reaction time” is around 1.5 seconds for a sober driver in daylight conditions. (see any of the thousands of reliable sources around the internet, such as http://www.firerescue1.com/Columnist...tances-Part-1/) This is the time it takes you or me to see a kid's head pop up 150 feet directly in front of the boat, recognize the need to change course, send a signal from our brain to our hands to brake or steer (oh ya, we don't have brakes)...to steer, and to start effecting that signal. At 70MPH, we are just starting to turn our wheel 0.05 seconds AFTER we hear the thump of the poor kid's head as it is shattered into thousands of pieces of skull and brain. At 45 MPH, we have 0.8 SECONDS to spare. So yes, the 0.8 seconds that you dismiss as being so trivial is actually the very difference between the kid's life and death. |
Well no one else is going to point out how wrong you are then I will. I assume that you pulled the bolded text from whatever link you found and referenced. But if 1.5s was average human reaction time, we would see many more accidents in everyday life than we do.
Simple reaction time is the time required for an observer to respond to the presence of a stimulus. For example, a subject might be asked to press a button as soon as a light or sound appears. Mean RT is approximately 180-200 msec milliseconds to detect visual stimulus, and approximately 140-160 milliseconds to detect an auditory stimulus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_time
Do not believe physics, try it for yourself
http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/...time/stats.php
There is a link at the top of the page that will bring you to the test, you have to perform it 5 times before your score will be posted. Click Reaction Time in the first sentence.
If your reaction time is what you stated above, it is very clear why it is so hard to have a debate with you.