It can rub a reader the wrong way because it is written in a sarcastic tone to self-reflect on things the author did wrong or didn't do.
Every piece of "advice" and patronizing questioning, such as "You did that, right? Right?", is a self-reflection by the author on things she should have done but didn't do, and learned that the hard way. It is not meant to be a patronizing statement to the the reader, but it is rather self-depreciation.
> The proper safe answer to driving in snow is top quality snow tires, not chains. Chains is the worst possible idea. The chain laws are laws created by politicians who live in sunny Sacramento and have never seen snow and have no clue.
Although I understand the sentiment, and agree with the general idea, I must say that living in the mountains, I have encountered snow conditions on uncleared roads where I did not manage to get home due to the icy/slushy/snow depth mixtures encountered on relatively steep sections. I would probably have made it home with chains if I had them, and had bothered to put the on.
1) The Michelin is 120 euro tire, vs the 60 euro Barum
2) The test page says nothing about the test conditions in which the tires were tested.
3) The Michelin tire test explicitly states:
The testers explicitly recommended against standardizing cars with all-season tyres in Sweden, suggesting that drivers would be better served by dedicated summer tyres paired with proper winter tyres when the season changes, rather than this compromise solution that fell well short of true summer tyre performance.
That it should be possible for somebody with a reasonable understanding of car maintenance to actually fix or maintain their car instead of having a blob of proprietary nonsense only meant to lock you in and milk your wallet with mandatory dealer repairs and subscriptions.
Complexity is the reason your car doesn't drink fuel like people drink water and also the reason there's vastly less severe accidents than 60 years ago.
> If you double following distance, you halve the throughput. If you halve following distance, you double your throughput.
That postulate breaks down as soon as you move away from a laminar traffic assumption and include distracted drivers, lane changes, and weather influences. Which is why the wave theory model is important to understand the propagation of perturbations and their effect on maximum throughput.
> The throughput of a (full, i.e. rush-hour) road has nothing to do with speeds of people driving, and everything to do with following distance.
And yet, in the limit case of a bumper-to-bumper situation (or, in fluid dynamics parlance, an incompressible flow), the variable determining the change in mass flow-rate is the velocity of the medium. Mimetically, we could also look at ants. To ease congestion in a bumper-to-bumper situation, they accelerate.
YES to all! You're so close. Drivers do not accelerate in bumper-to-bumper the way ants do. They maintain a 2sec (or whatever they are trained) following time instead. Which therefore dictates velocity (car lengths per following time). Thus the limiter on flow-rate is actually following time!
The plot is trying to illustrate the solution to an equation that is quite similar to Burger's equation, with a strong dependency on space and time. That's not easy to do in a single, static image.
When the characteristics meet (when the lines overlap), you get a shock wave. Or, in the current context, a traffic collision.
Every piece of "advice" and patronizing questioning, such as "You did that, right? Right?", is a self-reflection by the author on things she should have done but didn't do, and learned that the hard way. It is not meant to be a patronizing statement to the the reader, but it is rather self-depreciation.
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