Researchers working for the city of Yamato in Japan went out to two stations in town, waited for 6,000 people to pass by, then crunched some numbers and calculated that 12 per cent of them had been looking at their smartphones while they were walking.
That's apparently too high a number for some politicians in the town of roughly 240,000 people who were concerned that distracted pedestrians would be injured.
The Yamato City Council will now vote on a proposal to make walking while looking at a smartphone illegal. The new law would cover city streets, "shared public spaces" such as malls and train stations.
Here girl! Come here puppy!
What does tear gas do?
Tear gases irritate the mucous membranes of the eyes, nose, mouth, and lungs, and cause tearing, coughing, burning, and stinging sensations, chest tightness, and difficulty breathing. At higher concentrations, exposure can cause stomach irritation leading to vomiting and diarrhoea. According to German toxicologist Uwe Heinrich, dispersing the gas at a concentration of 1mg per cu m causes symptoms of irritation.
From there, things go sour pretty quickly. A concentration of 10 mg per cu m can force trained soldiers to retreat from an area. Above that, from 10 to 20 mg per cu m can cause serious injury or, depending on the victim and conditions of exposure, death.
In one incident reported in a Swiss medical journal, an otherwise healthy adult man was exposed to a tear gas grenade containing just one gram of gas inside a building. He quickly developed toxic pulmonary edema, a condition where excess fluid collects in the air sacs of the lungs and causes difficulty breathing, and recovered only after weeks of medical treatment. (Via Mental Floss)
An analogy…
"Imagine your child is dying and you are giving a eulogy explaining what your own child meant to you and how special your child was, and then someone grabs the mic and says "actually , all children are special…" That's what "all lives matter" sounds like. Embarrassing." (Tweeted by @elisaivers)
