Rundabouts are simple, just remember that cars in the rundabout generally has precedence. Then it's just a matter of judgement of if you can go before any car already in it, say if there is a car at the opposite side of you or if they are signaling that they are exiting. Signaling that you are exiting is very important because that will tell those who wants to enter that there is space to enter the roundabout. I'd say the biggest advantage of a roundabout is that you as a driver only have to care about cars coming from the left, compared to any other fourway intersection where you have to be observant of three.
For a second, I was wondering if I was watching a Top Gear car vs plane race instead of Mythbusters. The problem with leaving a big gap ahead of you is that other cars may weave in to try and get ahead of the traffic... at the expense of slowing down your commute since there are now more cars ahead of you and you haven't moved an inch.
As for roundabouts, we have a small "traffic circle" (same thing, different name) in my home town which I grew up with, and a larger one near work. I didn't think they were such a rare thing in the US. There WAS one at a major highway intersection near me many years ago, but it was remodeled into a simple on/off ramp at some point. I guess the locals couldn't handle it at highway speeds.
Indeedy. In my daily selection of traffic jams, I look for those gaps and zip into them if that lane is crawling slightly faster.
I love how the guy just a few seconds in pretty much tries to plow into a bus. And then about half-way through the video what I was talking about above. During one of the traffic jams we see it is due to police activity on the shoulder (looked like an accident or maybe a disabled car as a car was being put on a truck.) Traffic was crawling up until that point and then BOOM everything is operating normally. There's just something about that "point of interest" that gets everyone down to a crawl and then once they've had their look it's back to normal. I get slowing down or moving over to create something of a safety-buffer between you and the activity in the shoulder but sometimes when I encounter this it's just really, really too much. One time traffic for me was very much like that. The point of release? A disabled motorcycle in the shoulder. Way over on the edge of the shoulder practically leaning up against the rail of the overpass it was on in no way, shape, or form an obstacle for traffic on the roadway, no way it COULD be considering this is a very wide shoulder that actually becomes a bus-lane a little further ahead it's so wide. But, none-the-less this motorcycle over there was apparently distracting enough to cause people to slow down to a crawl. Kind of on the topic of "bad driver/driving experience stories:" I was driving to a ball game one evening and this was during evening rush-hour in one of the busier interchanges in the city even on a non-game day and traffic was pretty much at a stand still as people tried getting into the two lanes leading off the highway and onto the road that leads to the stadium/to a nearby community. So we're crawling along, I'm occasionally letting people in (providing they a) had their signal on, b) weren't on their phone, c) weren't trying to force their way in.) When all of the sudden I get passed on the right by a car going vastly faster than I am. I'm going, at best, 5 miles an hour. I have to keep my foot on the brake just to keep the car from making me go too fast at idle and a car whips past me probably going 30 or 40. What was going on? Asshole passed me, and everyone else behind me and in front of me, by driving in the shoulder (which even had rumble strips.) And it wasn't a particularly wide shoulder making the potential for him to crash into a car, the sidewall of a bridge/overpass or ending up the dirt was pretty high. Really one of those moments I wish I was a undercover-cop in some crazy Inspector Gadget-like world where I flip a switch, my car turns into a police cruiser and I go and pull that guy over and ticket him for being an idiot.
Yeah, but then I'm helping thin out the larger congestion a little bit by giving them that space. The problem is that drivers' selfishness, thinking only of themselves, is counterproductive, because their collective selfishness and urge to get ahead without consideration for the traffic around them makes the congestion worse and slows them down along with everyone else. It's been proven that if more drivers would just allow a little more space to form ahead of them, then there'd be far fewer traffic jams. In this, as in most everything else in life, you do yourself more good by being considerate to others. Also, I'm doing myself good because I'm wasting slightly less gas than I would by constantly starting and stopping. The less you need to brake, the more money you save yourself. So again, grabbing at the short-term perception of personal gain actually leads to personal cost.
At the point in my video labelled "traffic jam #1", it's a 3-lane-to-1-lane merge where one highway empties onto another highway. Almost every day some people use the shoulder to pass the jam. Over the years I've seen a cop catch them maybe twice.
New episode 8/21, apparently an unannounced season finale: Boarding an aircraft: I'm puzzled by the assertion that airlines always board back to front. When I flew to and from the Shore Leave convention recently, I was in one of the last zones to board each of the planes even though my seats were in the middle or toward the rear. Nice to see the great big hangar again. And ya gotta hand it to those volunteers for being willing to put themselves through the airline boarding experience without actually getting to go anywhere. I'm not surprised the WILMA method worked so well. It makes so much more sense to seat windows first and aisles last! I have to wonder why airlines don't already use it. I guess the drawback of the two WILMA methods is that they were complicated to explain, but the last test got past that easily by just printing zone numbers on the tickets. I wonder if this episode will bring about some changes in the industry. Probably not, though. Tooth bullets: For some reason I found this very disgusting. I wasn't bothered by the bone bullet, but I could hardly bring myself to look at all the teeth. And good grief, they actually put those in their mouths? I don't really agree with their decision about the tooth shotgun round being a good match for the standard round. Sure, the center of the grouping was in the same area, but the grouping was much wider, meaning fewer pieces would've struck a real target. Anyway, no surprise that the myth was busted. It sounded fishy to me from the start, the premise that a pathologist wouldn't be able to tell the difference between bone fragments from the victim and tooth fragments from someone else. It seems to be a myth based in total ignorance of what forensics can do. On the other hand, I can definitely see them getting a CSI episode out of this, and I'd be surprised if they haven't used it already. And now the bombshell Adam and Jamie dropped at the end... Kari, Grant, and Tory are leaving????? "Back to basics" with just Adam and Jamie? I'm totally shocked. True, I've had my criticisms about the trio's methodology in the past couple of seasons, but they were getting better this year. And Mythbusters without Kari scarcely bears contemplating. By the way, it took less than five minutes after the announcement for someone to edit Kari's Wikipedia page with the news. But apparently there was no advance notice of this. I wonder why they're leaving. My guess is that they're spinning off their own show. But it won't be the same, and Mythbusters won't be the same without them. Plus I wonder if they'll be able to keep up the same number of episodes if it's just Adam and Jamie. That would double the workload for them, and they're each a decade older than when they started. Honestly, I had expected that eventually one or both of them would retire and turn the show over the B team. Seeing it go the other way around is quite a shock.
D*mn! I think I bruised my jaw when it hit the floor! That was certainly a "bomb" to drop in our laps! I loved the chemistry of "the trio"! They "clicked". Well, maybe they will get their own show, but the way Adam and Jamie spoke, they gave the impression they had no idea what might happen with the others. If they did, you'd think Savage and Heineman might have said something like, "Be sure to catch the trio on their new show..." I think I'll have a lil' sniffle when I retire for the night. Sincerely, Bill
In the entertainment industry, there's often a long gap between when the creative people know about a project and when they're able to talk to the public about it, because it takes time for development and contracts and approval of involved parties and other such stuff to fall into place. So Adam & Jamie could know but not be in a position to tell us. Or it could simply be that the trio's show is on another network unaffiliated with Discovery, in which case the highers-up don't want Adam & Jamie to promote the competition. (If so, then they've escaped a sinking ship and I wish A&J would follow them to some other network that isn't so completely fraudulent with most of its programming. Did you hear that Discovery actually lied to shark experts in order to get quotes that they could take out of context and misrepresent on their totally faked "documentaries" about monster sharks?)
One of my hugest pet peeves is when someone responsible for creating an educational animation doesn't know that only the goddamn lead bullet comes out of the gun, and the brass cartridge either stays inside (rifles and revolvers) or is ejected out the side (semi-autos). Basic, simple firearms knowledge. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And then they made me cry by saying Kari was leaving.
Kari's leaving?! But... But.... But.... I hope she, and the others, are getting their own show or something because I can't see any intelligent show producer saying, "Yeah, let's get rid of the attractive woman on our show!" I really have nothing to say about the episode after that bombshell.... It's just... Painful.
This news is getting quite a bit of discussion on the MythBusters subreddit, and quite a few people there have brought up the (quite reasonable I think) point that the show used to have fewer myths per episode whole going more more in-depth on the build process; if this is a return to basics for the series, that could well be the plan. If we get one, maybe two myths an episode with more of the behind-the-scenes process it'll probably work fine. The show's current form is so results-focused that we're undoubtedly missing days if not weeks worth of footage from each myth so it'd be easy to get an episode up to the proper length by putting some of that back in. Plus – according to what I'm reading – Adam and Jamie have been pretty vocal recently about wanting to show more of the build process and get more rigorous about the science and engineering. We can only hope that trimming the B-team is part of a renewed focus. As for the news: I'm shocked but I can't say I'm too upset. I can still recall how vividly annoyed I felt, way back when, seeing these less-charismatic not-Jamies and not-Adamses begin to intrude on the show after the first season; even though it's been years and Tori, Kari and Grant have certainly earned their place on the show, I think on some level I never really stopped viewing them as interlopers. It's a minority opinion, though I've seen a few people here and there express similar. It'll be interesting to see how the show fares from here on out.
If the goal is to show more of the planning and building process, I think I could go with it even if it means one "big myth" per episode. But the Jr. Mythbusters were usually a lot of fun to watch and, well, Kari.
Christopher, I too am disgusted by teeth for some reason I could never fathom. I had to close my eyes a few times there. The WILMA method: Okay, it works faster, but what about families? Are they really going to board a mother with a window seat and make her 4-year-old wait in the lounge until the B-seats' turn? That way lies screaming.
But the thing about Kari is, she was never just "the attractive woman," and no truly intelligent producer would ever reduce her to that alone. She was there from the start, literally from the first pilot episode, as a builder and assistant, and as someone willing to do what had to be done to serve the myth; and then she earned her way to more prominence in the show by proving to be a smart, charismatic, and capable TV personality. She has the bonus of being beautiful and sexy, but that's never been her primary purpose on the show; it's incidental to her other assets, her personality and her skill. (Same with Scottie in the early seasons. I found her very sexy myself, but she wasn't a conventional glamour babe by any standard; she was a welder and a skilled worker and she was funny and tough and had an entertaining rapport with the others, and her physical charms were just a fringe benefit.) Indeed, that's what worries me: That the producers next season will feel compelled to bring in some "hot babe" as an assistant so the male viewers will still have someone to lust over, and because she'll be hired for her looks rather than really earning her position through her talents like Kari did, she just won't be as effective. I hope that doesn't happen. I certainly wouldn't mind if they brought in another female co-host; I have little interest in watching an all-male show. But I'd want her to be someone who deserves to be on the show for the same reason the male hosts are, because she's a talented engineer and designer and is willing and able to do crazy and bizarre things for science and is smart and likeable and a capable TV host. The male Mythbusters weren't hired for their looks alone, so it would be wrong if a female Mythbuster were. Actually my recollection is that it used to have more myths per episode. In the first couple of seasons, there were usually three myths, maybe one big one and a couple of shorter ones, or two big ones and a little one. For years now, the norm has been to do just two myths per episode, or sometimes just one massive one, or sometimes a bunch of little ones. But I agree, even despite that, it still feels like they're fitting less procedure into the episodes. I think it's because they're focusing more on funny banter and goofing around and such. That's actually a very good idea. I'd also like it more if whatever new team members they bring in are integrated with Adam and Jamie like the build team was in the early seasons, rather than off doing their own entirely separate myths. But I'm uneasy with the implication that Adam & Jamie pushed the other three out. My hope is that they helped the trio get a promotion to their own show in order to enable the back-to-basics approach. Actually my preference would be to keep at least Kari as Adam & Jamie's co-host, but perhaps the trio felt they'd rather stay together or that going back to a supporting role would be a demotion. Well, the trio have already gained a fair bit of prominence on their own, hosting things like Discovery's annual Punkin Chunkin' event and doing those car commercials (that I never cared for since it was selling out too much). They'll probably continue to get work, although I hope it's on better channels than Discovery. Oh, that's an excellent point. I hadn't thought of that. That's probably the reason they don't use it: because so many passengers travel in groups and sit together. But then, maybe that suggests another method: Have those people traveling in groups board separately from those traveling individually, and seat the individual boarders window-to-aisle. Not sure whether it would be faster to seat groups first or second -- that's something worth testing. Time for a revisit!
Kari is also a very talented sculptor. I remember the episode about a body being compressed within a brass diving helmet and she had constructed a miniature analog to test within a swimming pool. She didn't just shape a vague bipedal form, she replicated Grant's features to an amazing degree. Sincerely, Bill
That's one thing I love about the Mythbusters -- how they don't just recreate the basic mechanics of what they need to test, but go the extra mile to give it the aesthetics as well, even though they usually intend to blow it up.
Sorry to see Kari Go but we had 10 good year with her ! and as the saiding goes "All good things most come to a End" ! Mythbusters was there before them and it be there After them! and yes us men watch because she was a fine looking women! Good luck to all 3 of them ! Any 1 know when Mthbusters be back on ?