Douglas_Knight comments on Calibration fail - Less Wrong

8 Post author: PhilGoetz 09 August 2009 05:15PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (36)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 August 2009 07:09:52PM *  2 points [-]

I've seen them taken down for repairs, and they're much larger than I'd thought, but not 7 feet tall. Maybe 4' IIRC?

The lenses are either 8" or 12" in diameter in the US: http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2003r1r2/part4/part4d.htm

So if you're looking at 3 8" lenses in a row vertically, the whole thing is at least 3' tall, probably more.

I just looked through hundreds of photos of traffic lights on google, and not one was of the standard yellow US kind that hangs from a wire.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 12 August 2009 06:37:38AM *  3 points [-]

I just looked through hundreds of photos of traffic lights on google, and not one was of the standard yellow US kind that hangs from a wire.

Inference: your neighborhood (or your belief about it) is not representative and yellow and/or hanging from a wire is not standard. I was surprised by the diversity of results on google. On the first page, there were no yellow-on-a-pole and just two cantilevered yellow ones. Bing put a cantilevered one first and had a couple on wires[dead] in the top 20. But they weren't yellow! They do seem to be in the US. Maybe traffic lights aren't yellow?

ETA: Bing's "similar images" produced a few yellow lights on wires, but it was still dominated by the familiar green and gray.