Drivetime Mahatma

Mug shots on licenses date to '37

Dear Mahatma: When did the state of Arkansas start requiring photos on a driver's license? Inquiring minds want to know. -- Stuck in a Meeting

Dear Stuck: The mind sure does drift during those long, dull meetings, doesn't it? We are happy to jump-start your brain with an answer. We asked the state Department of Finance and Administration, which kicked the question around some before it landed with Travis Adams, a law clerk with the Revenue Legal Division. (Imagine the meetings in that office. Oh, the electricity.)

Adams turned up Act 1937, No. 280, from the year 1937, section 18, paragraph b. Or maybe that's paragraph 18, section b. We flunked that class in law school. Actually, the law school repeatedly refused us admission, so technically we flunked every class.

No word on whether those first photos made drivers look fat.

A giant telecom company, let's call it AT&T, has passed along information about a study it did of texting while driving, which is now one of the great curses of modern civilization.

We've all seen them -- we may be them -- driving too slowly in the right lane of an interstate highway, head down, thumbs tumbling across a cellphone. Good grief, but that's dangerous. May their catalytic converters become clogged with pollutants.

AT&T's local folks shared the results of a study by the company's scientists (newspapers don't have scientists; they have people who properly use past participles) that compared rates of texting while driving in the four states that don't prohibit the practice with the 46 states that do.

How was this done? AT&T's many scientists have binoculars. Ha! That was a joke.

What the scientists did was take existing data to look at outgoing text messages, used a cell-tower algorithm, and figured out which texts were sent from moving vehicles. We promise, right now, to never use the word algorithm in this space again. We also note that AT&T said, repeatedly, that this data collection was anonymous.

Data in hand, the scientists studied commutes in metro areas and adjusted the data for the rate of solo drivers in those areas. For instance, roughly 80 percent of commutes are solo, but in the greater New York area, the rate of solo driving is 50 percent. So the likelihood of a text being sent by a passenger in a moving car in New York is higher than other places, but lower for drivers.

Everybody got that?

Result: The four states that don't ban texting while driving have a roughly 17 percent higher rate of the misguided practice than the states that do. Legislators in those four states will be flogged. That's another joke.

The Mahatma now speaks only for himself. If 17 percent more people texted while driving on his commute to work on the Interstate 30 bridge, his head would explode.

Vanity plate seen on an orange Camaro: BEZENGA. About this, readers, we are clueless.

Mahatma@arkansasonline.com

Metro on 05/28/2016

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