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Originally Posted by MrSelfDestruct
So you don't take your eyes off the road for too long, have your kids count how many you pass under that don't go out.
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We can do one better. We can construct Camelot!
Wait, no. It's only a model.
Let's see if we can't make some conservative estimates here. Let's assume that on the streets you drive on there's a street lamp every twenty-five feet. And let's also assume you do very little night driving; say, an average of 1000 yards a night (or, if you prefer, about three miles a week). This would really mean that you're hardly ever under any lit street lights, comparatively speaking.
But then we crunch the numbers. And we discover that by using my decidedly arbitrary numbers we can calculate that you drive by (((1000*3)/25)*7) or 840 street lights per week. Today is the 21st of the month, so assuming there haven't been any new instances, we've had six incidents in the past three weeks of a lamp going out as you passed it. At a rate of 840 lights per week we have ((840*3)-6) or 2514 street lights that
didn't go out. Thus, according to the figures I'm using here (and remember that I've chosen deliberately low numbers) for every light you've passed that's gone out, there have been 419 that didn't. Really, given that arc sodium lights are
notoriously unreliable, the true wonder is that you don't see this more often.
Of course, this is all hypothetical on my part. I don't know your driving habits, nor the average street light density of your area and thus I have difficulty putting real numbers into play. However, I think it's probably safe to assume you drive more than three miles per week in low light conditions (most folk do) and that your street lights are very unlikely to be spaced further than 25 feet apart (they very rarely are). Thus, we ought to be on the low end of average; it wouldn't surprise me if the actual number of lit street lamps was double or even treble the 2514 I came up with. Which all just goes to show that we as humans are really good at noticing the stuff that doesn't do what we expect it to and really bad at noticing the stuff that does.