Sorry, but yes. In my state, crosswalks are legally defined to exist at every street corner whether or not they are painted lines. Furthermore, the obligation of drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks starts when they step into the street and not a moment before. (Standing on the sidewalk means nothing even if there is a painted crosswalk). Stepping out into a safe gap in the curbside lane and expecting traffic to stop is legally prescribed behavior and is the behavior drivers should expect. And pedestrians should encourage drivers to expect that behavior by actually behaving that way.
Seattle? Place yourself in the bike lane stopped at Eastlake and Fuhrman southbound. Very common commute route. No way to not be in the bike lane there given you just crossed the U bridge. (Unless you like riding on steel grating while drivers honk at you.) Then try to make the left onto Harvard Ave (again, extremely popular route) after the light turns green. You have one block to move left across two lanes. Post youtube if possible. I guarantee that proceeding across Fuhrman against the red light, doing your lane changes in the absence of traffic, is safer and less antagonizing if there is even moderate traffic. Only other safe alternative is to use the pedestrian crossings, which kind of fucking proves the point here. There's a million little situations like this.
A baseline rate of wildcards among cyclists encourages greater attentiveness in drivers that interact with me, whether or not I am a wildcard in that moment. It's a herd immunity sort of thing. The practices called "defensive driving" would not be followed by anyone unless there were something to defend against.
In WA where I am, and I believe in CA, standing on the curb facing the crosswalk != using a crosswalk. Standing around looking like you might use the crosswalk someday doesn't mean anything; using the crosswalk (and having right of way) starts only from the moment they step off the sidewalk. The WA code makes this pretty clear; CA uses the specific phrase "withinin a crosswalk" which makes me believe the interpretation is the same there.
So waving through someone who's not actively crossing is not correctly yielding the right of way. OTOH, drivers should bloody well expect pedestrians to start crossing in front of them when you haven't stopped yet (both states say that a pedestrian may not step out if there is inadequate room for the car to react and stop; by the contrapositive a pedestrian may step out in front of a car if there is adequate distance.)
Matlab is not a JVM language, it just has some ability to call Java built in, and some of the IDE is in Java implementation. Launch Matlab without booting a JVM: matlab -nojvm
I picked the one with the longest distance between the T and the E. That was the wrong answer.
This quizz is an excellent training though. I didn't know anything at all about typography prior to taking the test (never bothered to learn the names of the fonts or their shapes), ended up scoring 17/20.
Gelman and Hill is a wonderful and under-rated book. My guess is that its clumsy title (Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models) hides the fact that it's an introductory textbook that takes the reader from knowing nothing to eventually constructing complex Bayesian models. Plus, it's a pretty good tutorial on R and BUGS.
