BlackBerry Jam

Better get an iPhone.

5,870 Completely Preventable Deaths In 2008

It boggles the mind even to try to imagine the heartbreak and loss that accompany each of the avoidable injuries and deaths encompassed by these statistics:

In 2008 one in six of the teenagers killed in car crashes in America was found to have been distracted, in one way or another, just prior to impact. Five years ago, the figure was one in eight. The authorities fear that the number of teenage deaths caused by distraction while driving is about to explode, given the variety of new gizmos about to invade the car.

“To put it plainly, distracted driving is a menace to society,” Ray LaHood, America’s Transportation Secretary, told an audience of more than 300 people at a two-day summit organised by the government in Washington, DC, that kicked off on September 30th. Last year, 5,870 people (16% of overall fatalities) were killed on American roads as a result of driver distraction, and 515,000 (22% of the total) were injured.

As this "Economist" article discloses, politicians and the journalists who cover (and sometimes enable) them hear these tragic numbers and swing into action, doing what they do best -- writing and endorsing new laws and regulations and new punishments for behavior that everyone of driving age, indeed everyone walking upright, knows is reckless and morally wrong without even having to be told.

I'm not against the laws. I'm astonished how the prevailing cluelessness of my fellow human beings and me makes them advisable. California's relatively mild hands-free phone law, which I see motorists flaunting several times a day, did work for me. But I could only manage to curtail obsessively checking e-mails while driving by promising my wife I would stop. I wonder how many conservatives who rail against government limits on their freedom indulge in behavior that gives government the warrant it needs to enact them?

IT Phone Tome

BlackBerry vs. iPhone -- you decide. (This analysis gives short shrift to the amazing BB Storm.)

Obama Wants His BlackBerry To Stay In Touch?

The BBC has the story. But you know it's so he can keep playing Brick.

Accountablogability

This might as well be me. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan. A year ago I wasn't blogging, and my life was full. On this most glorious of unallocated days, I tried to figure out where the time is coming from. Neglect of of either vocation? Inconceivable. Of loved ones? Starting to worry about that. Less guitar playing? Unfortunately, although the loved ones reckon it as a blessing. Less reading? More. Fewer movies and reprises of "The West Wing"? Undoubtedly. Less exercise? Oh oh.

Unplugging, I headed out for the traditional three miles around the neighborhood. I sometimes like to listen to music when I walk, plus I took something to read while getting a cup of coffee. Since everyone had gone shopping, I wanted them to be able to reach me. And so I prepared to pocket one device containing the equivalent of 1,000 CDs, another that has the book I'm reading (The Professor and the Madman) plus 20 more and about 45 newspapers and magazines, and a handheld with ten times the computing power of Apollo 11 and the capacity to reach every telephone and web site on earth. This was nuts. I left the BlackBerry home. Ironic, as I think about it.