Chemistry

[nineveh_uk]

Scanning the bookshelves in search of something fairly short and fun, I picked up Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. Ah! I thought, space opera. Perfect for a couple of days before I go on holiday. I put it in my bag, and opened it on the bus. A paragraph in, and I knew it was going to be a very long bus journey. I kept going for the half-hour, but no good. It was perfectly well-written, but we didn’t gel. (On the plus side, this means that ankaret won’t have to wait years to get it back.)

On getting home, I therefore hunted for something else and came across Janet Neel’s Death among the Dons, recently picked up in a second-hand shop on the advice of antisoppist (at least I think so, that could be wishful thinking and a bid for theft). I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a detective novel, so I had a quick look at the first couple of chapters. I was hooked within a paragraph. Reader, we were made for one another.

On another note entirely...

Oxfordshire speed cameras switched off: Oxfordshire motorists speed. My colleague who drives into Oxford says it’s a nightmare – a big increase not only in speed, but in drivers aggressively tail-gating to bully people observing the speed limit into going faster.

Comments

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

The people I hate are the people who say "but I am a good driver, I can judge the safe speed for the road".

I keep to the speed limits mostly because they are there for safety's sake - they have been judged by the professionals. But on the M621 coming into Leeds - which maybe be grim at rush hour, but when I drive it is wide and empty and lovely - I grit my teeth and drive at 50mph because that is the speed limit. I know that it would be safe for me to go at 70mph, and some people do. But I don't, because if I want to be the judge of safe road conditions (and I don't, because I don't know what's round that bend), then I have to allow other people to be so too, and the evidence shows that "other people" on the whole are not accurate judges of safe speed, but quite the opposite.

(Though apparently most people actually support speed cameras, even if irritated by them - they're just one of those things when a few people pushing it can be really significant. I know that cameras make my driving worse, because I am am already going at 30mph, so get paranoid I need to go at 29 1/2. But that's a fault in my driving, and probably a safer one that someone racing through at 50.)

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. There are times and places when I can quite see the temptation to speed could be justified it on the grounds of safety. But the point is that I don't make the rules and if I think the rules are wrong, there are ways to address that, rather than just breaking them.