Friday 20 March 2009

Like a police state, only funnier

We have stated before, and we will repeat it: this site is a community effort to build a community version of an oppressive police state, with the goal being friendly and more humourous. Less "Orwell", more "George", and we will do that in partnership with Google and Yahoo!, and use logos like cuddly toys to make everything seem friendlier.



This week's contributions, then, are a New York Times article on how Apache Hadoop is commoditising Petabyte-scale datamining. It is, and you should all give the yellow elephant the respect is deserves. When we start our large-scale datamining experiments this is the tooling we will use, though for some reason the NYT didn't ask us for any quotes, or use our plans as an example use of the technology.

Meanwhile Google, provider of free storage for the blog, has just added Bristol to streetview, with a lovely photograph of a bike-on-bike collision in City Road.



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It appears that someone heading to Stokes Croft has gone straight into someone crossing the road on their own bike. Google have managed to snap the collision mid-wipeout, and you can just see the unhelmeted rider about to hit the ground, while the other rider, the one apparently going across the road, manages to bail out standing, which is a slick little move, though his bike does come out on the bottom of the pile, which is less good.

Given all the cars are waiting at the lights, there is distinct likelihood that the cyclist in the bristol-chic fluorescent top was running the red light. For all ghost-riders out there, remember, we only put up photos of those who get captured on film, so please carry your own helmet cameras when you choose to run-the-reds on or near the A38.

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If you were involved in this collision, we would love to hear the full details. Please email us at bristol.traffic at gmail dot com.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

...there is distinct likelihood that the cyclist in the bristol-chic fluorescent top was running the red light...

I wondered if the other cyclist was pulling out of the one-way side road, because of the way his handlebars are pointed in one picture, in which case they'd both be at fault. Speculation of course.

Anonymous said...

That is a good point. I had assumed they were coming out of that road, but hadn't noticed they were contraflowing.

I've also realised a more obvious sign that the fluro-rider is running the lights is that the google car was going across the junction on the green light. Neither bike should have technically been doing what they were doing -but because they were both being naughty, they got hurt.

Anonymous said...

We'd better brace ourselves for more of these appalling pile-ups, now that we're a cycling city.

On a lighter note - I found myself (face blurred-out), but instantly recognisable to anyone who's met me, walking with my wife in Bristol (lucky...).

Yokota Fritz said...

Very nice capture.

I suppose car pileups are somewhat less apalling in comparison, Quercus, perhaps by virtue of their humdrum frequency.