This week, Adam, Norm, and Rebecca talk about a recent camping trip, the perils of teaching teenagers to drive, and pilot lessons from the best parents ever.
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Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
…this is last week’s video? er, two weeks ago! The video says 8/9/16 on it… oh, the audio player/link is correct, though.
YouTube has the correct current video.
Happy Birthday Norm!!
Being in the Arctic Circle it’ll be your longest birthday ever, make it a good one.
Just in case you’re too lazy to search….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJZZa24_Ixc
Yeah looks like it was. The right one was linked down below though too.
Happy Birthday Norm!
I did a “Defensive Driving” class that was taught by 5 or 6 part time police that were kinda retired, all of whom were absolutely beautiful people. We got to drive around in old police cruisers(Ford Crown Vic’s).
The most memorable lesson was essentially where they would put you in perceived danger, but in a way that kept you are absolutely calm and in the moment. My favorite was last minute braking. They would take you up to 60 miles per hour and have a cone in the middle of the test area, and just before you hit it the officer in the passenger seat would yell “left!” or “right!” and you would then stomp on the brakes and jerk the wheel(more accurately would be described as preforming a half turn on the steering wheel without removing your hands, making an X out of your arms) in that direction. This would result in you veering(on purpose) out of the way of the cone. It was incredibly simple, but the point of which was to train your brain to instinctively do it if something suddenly becomes a threat to your safety(like a car rear ending another or breaking without notice). The sudden instructions were meant to simulate the split second reasoning that is needed in such a situation. You need to be aware of everything in your vicinity so you know not to hit them. We did this drill more than a couple times.
Like Adam, this training actually saved me from seriously injuring myself and my family a couple years later. We were taking a road trip and I was going 70 mph on the free way. It was the around 2 or 3 in the morning, so it was pretty dark and we, perhaps irresponsibly, were pretty tired. I looked down at my speedometer to make sure I was still going the speed limit, and when I looked back up at the road I saw a decent sized deer right in our lane maybe 40 yards away. I had my hands relaxed at the bottom of the steering wheel, but moments after I saw the danger, my hands snapped to 3 and 9 on the wheel and executed a left half turn of the wheel until the insides of my elbows on each arm touched and after we were around the deer, performed the opposite movement to straighten the car out. My heart was racing and I felt like I had just avoided death narrowly. We pulled over at the next exit and took a break for everyone’s nerves to calm down. My father was sleeping in the passenger seat at the time of the incident so he didn’t even see what happened until we were already moving, so naturally he thought we were crashing the car as he woke.
It wasn’t til after the I realized that in the moment I had complete control over the situation. I knew that there were no cars around that I could hit and I knew exactly what I needed to do. To the three others in the car, it looked like I was going to crash the car, and were actually pretty mad at me for what I had done without realizing what would have happened had I did nothing.
All in all I would say that the training probably saved our lives. I don’t mean to sound like I am bragging about it, but it was honestly one of the proudest moments of my life even if the people who witnessed it thought I was going to kill them. I would recommend driving training to everyone! It is fun, informative, a great conversation topic and might just save your life some day!
Also sorry for the long post, just thought it would be a appropriate story to share.
What is with all the hate for rebecca on the youtube comments ?
A few years ago, she had an unpleasant experience with someone at an atheist-convention. She shared her experience online, as a minor point in an unrelated video, and there was some fairly heated, but minor debate… as you might expect the normal rules of women speaking up about harassment and receiving threats of sexualized violence in an effort to disprove sexism still apply.
A while later Richard Dawkins, being his usual self, wrote a post in which he contrasted her experience with the various plights and suffering of women in islamic societies, ridiculing her for having experienced the incident as threatening. Obviously, Rebecca never put her experience in that context, and he got a lot of shit for implying she did and for calling her out by name using the tired, lazy fallacy of relative privation. But as you also might expect, this poured a lot of fuel on the earlier flames. Ever since then, she’s had a special knack for riling up MRAs and their ilk.
Street Survival training put on by the BMW Clubs of America is in my opinion one of the best teenage driving skills training you can get.
PlaidWalker: This type of accident-avoidance training is mandatory in Norway. You go on a closed course and the course is made slick. During winter this happens naturally, during the summer months they spray the track, parts of which are covered in steel plate, with oil.
The track has lines going across it, on these lines there are various human and animal foam-figures with motors to drive them back and forth. The instructor in the passenger seat has the remote control to drive these figures into the road, at which point you have to avoid them. IIRC the course was about 1.5 hours per student, plus theory. You gradually drive faster and faster until it is no longer possible to avoid the figures, and you drill several avoidance maneuvers until you can do them calmly and effectively. You also disable the emergency brake assist at one point, to simulate older vehicles.
Great fun, and has saved me a lot over the years. It taught you what the right technique was, so that when you experience difficult driving conditions and near-accidents, you correct properly. After a few winters it becomes second nature. This past january I was driving a large, rented truck filled with heavy machinery and went sideways on the road going down a mountain. I’d instinctively corrected and was back to straight before my conscious mind even knew what was happening.
That is awesome! I wish we had that here since our winters in (Michigan/Northern US) get pretty bad some years. I actual chose to take divers training in the winter, so that it was all that I knew how to drive in. Makes for better drivers in my opinion.
Thanks for sharing! I have never heard of that before.
If you ever get a chance to drive a Skidcar do it they give a great idea what it feels like to drive on ice without the danger.
http://www.skidcar.com
Happy Birthday Norm!
Hello Tested Team! Let me start by saying I love love love all the content you guys put out. I commute for a couple hours a day to and from work and keeping up on Tested is one way that I stay sane. In the past there have been episodes where Adam fields fan questions.. I would be delighted to have a question answered and was wondering where I could potentially queue a question or two?? Again, thanks for putting so much good on the web!
p.s. Happy birthday Norm!
I never did a defensive driving or “stunt driving” course, but living in an area with snowy winters, I often practised on snowed-over parking lots and back-country roads to deliberately drift the car with the handbrake and learn how to stabilise it, drift around corners, etc. The great thing about practising on snow is that you can drift at low speed (20-30km/h) and without ruining the tyres. Gravel roads also work and are a lot of fun, but a bit harsher on the car. I think an occasional go-kart race is also good practice, even though it’s a bit different than a full-size car.
This has saved me many times when I hit black ice or unexpected snow patches. Also, once when it started raining after a long dry period with lots of dust on the road, the wet dust/mud turned the road as slippery as ice – at some point I had the wheels locked with the brakes, sliding down the road for 100 meters without slowing down, and the tyres had no sign of wear afterwards. Fortunately managed to stop eventually without hitting a tree.
I found it funny in those situations, as the car started veering and drifting out of control, that I found myself basically watching my hands do corrections on the steering wheel, all automatically – I didn’t really think about it or even consciously know what I was doing, just happily observing that whatever my muscle memory came up with seemed to work just fine… I definitely think that lots of practice in safe conditions really helps!
I tried to do the survey but I just get ‘The server refused the connection’.
Here in Finland we have a similar mandatory course as part of drivers ed, except you do it twice. The first time is in driving school before you get your license, the second 6 months to 2 years after you’ve got your first (temporary) license. The second one is usually done with your own vehicle so you can learn how it handles in extreme conditions, after which you can get your permanent license.
for the record – exactly how many hipsters can you run over before you get a $50 ticket – ASKING for a friend.
Hi tested I’m a Realy big fan and love the videos
Wow, yeah. Fuck the internet.
It’s the Will Smith show, featuring Adam and Norm. The goal is to see if you can get a word in edgewise.
Let me suggest that Tested viable comments on YouTube.
Honestly, what if YouTube just turned the frickin’ comments off altogether. Was it NPR that just did that recently? Disabled user comments on their journalists articles?
At first I was a little put off by the move, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
It’s hard to imagine what you would truly miss if there were no comments on YouTube.
It isn’t just that the comments are full of vitriol, but the fact that it is almost impossible to moderate them in any meaningful way. Pewdiepie famously disabled his comments a couple of years ago, in frustration with the lack of tools he was given to deal with the spam and nonsense.
YouTube allow you to let a whitelist of other users write subtitles for videos, but even though their comment section has been known as a cesspool and a punchline for years, have failed to set up a way for channels to let more than one person moderate their comment-sections. For someone like Pewdiepie, who gets millions of comments every day, that becomes an impossible task.
I will not even read the comments on YouTube (or most other places) it just makes me mad, so I don’t read them.
Happy Birthday Norm, and congratulations on getting married! I am so happy for you!!! 🙂
I have enjoyed hearing Rebecca in these podcasts. Now i have to go and find out about her work other work. Get Rebecca onto this is only a test as well.
What was Adam drinking? I couldn’t make it out.
Bundaberg ginger beer. I guess he must have gotten a taste for it while he was on tour in Australia? It’s the best ginger beer there is in my opinion 🙂
Mmmm, ginger beer. I’ll look for it, thanks!
Can I get permission to link to this podcast and include a screen shot of it? Here is the story. I own a franchise of Velofix, a mobile bicycle repair business. Of course, I loved Adam’s rant about bike lanes and want to point that out on our facebook page. When I paused the video player after hearing Adam’s rant, I was delighted to see a Velofix ad appeared on the right side of the screen. Great timing! I grabbed a screen shot and can send it to you for approval. Thanks.
I really like Still Untitled. Its a great podcast! Here recently though with the addition of Summone and now Guest Rebecca, G– D— has been said a few times. Its kinda concerning. Usually the podcast is fairly clean. I hope the language cleans back up some. I understand that the podcast is not for kids, and I get that. I just hope the team will clean it back up a little when it comes to their word choice.
Thanks guys!
Rebecca was a terrific addition to this episode. Every time a woman has been included on the show, it’s been great to listen to. Keep up the great work!