A co-worker of years gone by sent me a link to the ProPublica article “The True Danger of Long Trains.” ProPublica advertises itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism
“Better to be lucky than good” is usually attributed to legendary New York Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez. I don’t believe it, the aphorism, most of the time. What I do believe is
While we’re all waiting for the carriers and the unions to agree or not on the recommendations of the Presidential Emergency Board, I thought I’d probe a bit more into the issue of the single-person crew for main line freight train movements in these United States.
I’ve received some comments, what is called “feedback” these days, on my most recent post regarding NTSB’s report on a fatal incident on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Some of the commentators agree with
We, the railroads, have established certain principles of safe train operations that we wish were absolute, positive, inviolable. We apply one such principle in the enforcement of train separation: the principle that
Sorry for the bother, but while you were out, away, on vacation, taking your first trip in 18 months, or otherwise engaged, someone dropped the other shoe and from a significant altitude. The bigger fish was dipped, battered and tossed into the deep fryer. The wolf was at the door with a muzzle full of jokes.
Regarding the “point-counterpoint“ debate originally published in Fortune about Precision Scheduled Railroading and reproduced in Railway Age, with Brannon and Gorman on the “for” PSR side, and Rep. DeFazio (D-Ore.) not exactly on the “against”
I’m not worried that human beings working on artificial intelligence are going to produce machines that are smarter than us, and certainly not smarter than my three grandchildren, ages 15, 9 and 5, all of whom are definitely smarter than I. I’m afraid that human beings designing artificial intelligence are, in doing so, going to make most other human beings using the artificial intelligence more stupid.
Have you every missed something so completely that you question your own connections to reality? Like maybe missing the year or more of notices and communications from the Federal Railroad Administration regarding its “Miscellaneous Amendments to Brake Systems Safety Standards and Codification of Waivers” (Docket FRA-2018-0093)?
There are many things that can’t be hurried in this life, and probably shouldn’t be, like wine and bread (let beaujolais nouveau and matzoh be a warning to us all). There are other things that could use a bit of hurrying, like medical fitness for duty standards and the National Transportation Safety Board, but those two have proven themselves so resistant to urgings, proddings, cris du coeur, that they’ve almost worn me down. Almost.