h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh, hey... an update. http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-05/nasa-ids-voyager-2-communication-glitch-hint-it-wasnt-aliens

What a relief

Had to knock the dust off this thread.

So, the Czech Republic, in an effort to slow down traffic with an eye to austerity measures, places cardboard posters of sexy miniskirted police women near intersections.

http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/The_long_legs_of_the_law

I think the British police tried this a while back with cardboard cutout rozzers sitting in cop cars parked in strategic places.

The fact they don't do it any more explains a lot

I recently saw a similar tactic where they painted a perspective view of a child picking up a ball onto the road surface. It did work to slow drivers down. Unfortunately they kept getting rear ended as they slammed on their brakes unexpectedly.

However, I quite enjoyed the surprising results from this experiment.

http://www.wimp.com/trafficlights/

So effectively they've created an all-way stop. British drivers aren't used to those because we don't have them but it seems to work there, I guess because it's kind of a roundabout without the roundabout so the drivers are at least used to the idea of giving way to traffic already on the junction or traffic that arrived there first, like at an American stop sign.

It's not exactly the same though because the roundabout itself is a piece of road, and you don't have to stop at a roundabout, only give way to traffic already on it.

Unless you're in France where the traffic on the roundabout has to give way to the traffic approaching it

I think it's more of an all way yield. I didn't see a lot of cars stopping unless there was a pedestrian.

I remember a scene in Robert Heinlein's book, Job: A Comedy of Justice. The main characters are being tossed between alternate universes where small historical and technical become quite problematic. The main character, Alex is quite astonished when he first sees traffic lights. (His universe has the US as a theocracy (not much of a stretch these days) with blimps as cutting edge aircraft.) He's amazed that people "obey" a device. He's just baffled that people will stop their progress and sit idle just because a light bulb lit up, and they'll wait there until it changes regardless of what the actual traffic conditions are.

Don't get me started on sitting at traffic lights when there's no traffic travelling in the other direction

When I used to deliver magazines around London through the night I wasted so much damn time sitting at red lights for no damn reason. I actually sat down with my A-Z one day and counted all the sets of lights I passed through on my route (I can't remember what the exact number was but it was in the several hundreds), and I figured that if I didn't have to stop for them I could shave between one and two hours off my seven-hour work night.

And then there's the dozens of sets of traffic lights on the A10 between the North Circular Road and the M25 motorway. I used to leave my home at about 11pm to head up that road to pick up the magazines from the printer, and I'd get stuck at almost every one of them. Bear in mind, that I'm on the main road - the Great Cambridge Road, a four-, and sometimes six-lane dual carriageway, and it's fairly late at night, and there's no traffic on any of the roads that intersect at these damn lights. It would take me 15 minutes to do that 5 mile, 40mph stretch of road

Except for one night when I caught almost every one of them on green It took me a fraction of the time.

And let;s not forget all the extra fuel that's wasted and pollution produced when you have to unnecessarily stop and start a 3.5 ton van, especially one that's loaded to capacity. Then think about having to do the same with a 40 ton artic.

The Mythbusters recently tested the theory that it's more efficient for delivery trucks to make only right hand turns (for the UK, left hand turns, of course) even if it would result in a longer route. It was confirmed. The extra fuel used and time wasted idling at left turns more than made up for the shorter distance.

One thing they did miss on that one though was I wish they'd done what the big delivery firms actually do though. All they did was replace the left hand turns with three rights but still delivered in the same order each time. What happens in the real world is the companies use software with their mapping and GPS systems to redirect the route to eliminate as many right turns as possible while also finding the most efficient delivery order. But still, they did find that all rights was better than waiting at the lights.

I miss Mythbusters

That might not work as well in the UK because there's no left turn on red.

On a related note, I found my 4th roundabout in Houston the other day. I thought there were only three. Finding an unexpected roundabout in Houston can be a shocking situation. Oh, and this one acts like an actual roundabout and not just a "traffic circle".

What's the difference?

The more well known ones in Houston have yield signs and even traffic lights that detract from the utility of a true roundabout. They don't flow as well. They're basically just confusing intersections.

Here's a local article about the confusion that roundabout has caused.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/moveit/4660312.html

This http://wikimapia.org/#lat=51.5584399&lon=-0.0558677&z=17&l=0&m=b used to be a perfectly good roundabout, until they put traffic lights on it. Traffic lights? On a ing roundabout?

This http://wikimapia.org/#lat=51.53066&lon=-0.293648&z=15&l=0&m=b however also has traffic lights on it but it's a different matter because it's not really a roundabout - it's too bloody big. It varies between four and eight lanes wide! The Wikipedia article about it says that it's been described as the scariest junction in Britain, which is a very sad comment on British drivers because the Hanger Lane Gyratory is a piece of cake. You just follow some simple rules that everyone gets taught when they're learning to drive, and it's very, very well signed.

The Lea Bridge roundabout with its traffic lights, on the other hand, is a complete 'mare.

Burglar, nearly caught in the act, leaves his cell phone charging in a house he's burgling.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/02/AR2011020206010_2.html?sid=ST2011020303630

Brilliant. Florida passed a law that prohibits:

||An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices; providing an effective date.|| (Slow loading article: http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=10369 )

Folks in Florida are 'almost' as bad as Texans about electing ideological, anti-science idiots. Well, it's paying off now. They've effectively outlawed sex altogether.

Oh, wait... while your partner can't be a member of the animal kingdom, I suppose that it's OK to have sex with any plant or inanimate object of your choice.

Quick, buy rubber futures and shares in companies that manufacture blowup dolls

Oh, this is just hilarious.

OK, so I'm on twitter. I don't tweet much, mostly I just use it to catch news and opinions and to find out what the Mythbusters and other interesting folks are doing.

I occasionally look over at the list of trending phrases and hash tags. Just now I saw that the phrase "Ugly Americans" is trending. Now, my thought is, "Hey, that's cool, the season premier of Comedy Central's cartoon Ugly Americans is on tonight, let's see what folks are saying about it."

Well, there's a storm of ignorance happening on twitter right now. All those American folks that haven't seen or heard of the show are freaking out because they think Europeans are calling them ugly. All the Bieber fans are freaking out because somehow they think he's somehow connected (and they repeat each others' tweets and now he is connected. All the Canadians are freaking out because they're mad that the Europeans don't realize that Bieber is Canadian. All the folks, like me, who realize what's going on are laughing our asses off.

Here's one of my favorites:

itsReema_
Ugly Americans is trending. That's really sad. I'm not American but I mean where do all the hot celebrities come from? Seriously.

Here's yet another example of our institutional paranoia in action in the US. A high school kid plays a harmless prank on the last day of school in a little town outside Indianapolis. He left a blow up doll in a girls restroom. He's now facing the possibility of a felony record and nearly a decade in prison.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43654978/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

Remember just a few years ago when the entire city of Boston was practically petrified in fear, shut down completely as bomb squads raced from one end of town to the other. The reason? LED signs with cartoon characters flipping the bird stuck to some bridges.

In that case they threatened to prosecute the "culprits", a small upstart advertising company, under terrorism charges. (The Cartoon Network and film company for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force film paid a reported $1 million to make the case go away.)

I can understand the concern, but how is it right to prosecute people, not on their actions but on the over-reactions of law enforcement and city or school officials? In both cases there was NO intent to incite terror. How can a person be responsible for someone else confusing a situation. If they had placed things that were built to LOOK like bombs, I could completely understand but the proverbial "reasonable person" would not confuse a sex doll or an LED sign with a bomb. Even if all they saw was a box, your first assumption shouldn't be "IT'S A BOMB!" We're letting our paranoia get the better of us. The world is not as nearly as scary as we think it is.