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firstwords 's review for:
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
by Tom Vanderbilt
I'm going to disagree with many other reviews and put this at 1 star. I could not get past chapter 1.
a prologue to a book will often try to do one or two things. It may seek to whet your appetite as a reader, or it may introduce the premise of the book. Ideally, the author wants both.
In the prologue the author notes that in the United States only the passenger side mirror is convex, whereas in Europe both mirrors are convex, and says this is wrong. "Both cannot be optimal." That right there is incorrect. The width of the vehicle, the width of the lane, the speed at which vehicles travel, all of these things may differ between environments and make one system optimal in one place and another system optimal in another. For example, if I drive my car around 7 miles per hour entirely surrounded by pedestrians it would make a lot of sense for me to have convex mirrors. In fact, vehicles like buses have exactly this. If I am driving at 100 miles an hour with only other similarly paced cars around me and lanes that are each 20 feet wide, convex mirrors make no sense.
This weak-way-out writing, plus the frequent use just in the prologue and chapter 1 of phrases like "studies have shown" or " one study said that" are the mark of Pop journalism, not scientific writing.
if you do not care to learn, and do not care about the scientific method, then pick this up.
a prologue to a book will often try to do one or two things. It may seek to whet your appetite as a reader, or it may introduce the premise of the book. Ideally, the author wants both.
In the prologue the author notes that in the United States only the passenger side mirror is convex, whereas in Europe both mirrors are convex, and says this is wrong. "Both cannot be optimal." That right there is incorrect. The width of the vehicle, the width of the lane, the speed at which vehicles travel, all of these things may differ between environments and make one system optimal in one place and another system optimal in another. For example, if I drive my car around 7 miles per hour entirely surrounded by pedestrians it would make a lot of sense for me to have convex mirrors. In fact, vehicles like buses have exactly this. If I am driving at 100 miles an hour with only other similarly paced cars around me and lanes that are each 20 feet wide, convex mirrors make no sense.
This weak-way-out writing, plus the frequent use just in the prologue and chapter 1 of phrases like "studies have shown" or " one study said that" are the mark of Pop journalism, not scientific writing.
if you do not care to learn, and do not care about the scientific method, then pick this up.