Actually, if you get the windshield and transparent side-panel options, you'll be mostly fine. I drove a Honda S2000 (and later S2000 CR) for 10 years, and the top was pretty much always down (or off), even in driving rain and light snow. You simply don't get wet at > 30mph, and the occasional stoplight isn't a big deal. Stop and go traffic starts to suck though.

I also got a ride in a 300hp supercharged Atom. It was just around the block but I thought it was going to break my spine with the acceleration, cornering grip and braking distance. I was actually honestly scared.

"It's been one culture that's been blowing shit up over and over again"

Americans?

This is really fucking reprehensible on Mahers part. He's an American and an atheist. See how quickly he takes responsibility for drone strikes, wire-tapping, dropping atomic bombs on civilians. How about the Stalinist purges?

Know what he'd say? I don't support that (except maybe the drone strikes, because fuck brown people, amirite?). I'm not part of that.

SO WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU PUTTING 9/11 ON A FUCKING KID WHO PROBABLY WASN'T EVEN BORN?

Hey, ya know what? Maybe we should be careful. Maybe we should treat the kind of people who commit mass killings in the US with a degree of caution. So let's start with locking up the white males, 'cos those motherfuckers seem to go on shooting sprees with depressing regularity.

Ugh, seriously, fuck Maher. That was fucking disgusting to watch.

The absolutely mind blowing thing about that segment is the end.

The Atom they had there was around £30k.

The ONLY car that was faster than it was a £500,000 Ferrari Enzo (and there's only about 400 of them ever made).

It was faster than cars 10 times it's price.

You do in NZ. There was a company importing them to NZ a few years ago. Seems to be gone now, but it was around NZ$80k for one. I'm pretty comfortable, but I do not have that kinda change lying around.

Plus, I would also need to be very rich so I could afford to keep it after my wife divorced me for wasting so much money

Also I fear I may have been unfaithful to my beloved atom. I have been having lustful thoughts about a Tesla!

And now i know what exactly an Ariel Atom is

I've been in an Atom. Not the V8 or even the 300bhp supercharged version. Just the regular 2L version.

And it is TERRIFYINGLY fast. The acceleration is unbelievable. I wasn't driving, but I sat there grinning like an idiot and laughing like a madman the entire time. One of my best experiences ever.

If I ever get suddenly rich, the Atom will be the first thing I buy.

I've only seen 1 Atom in person. It sits much lower than it seems from any pictures/video. Surprised it doesn't have paddle shifters.

The Slingshot seems to also be fun, but at an actually affordable price (half the price of a T-Rex even). I'm not sure if it requires a motorcycle license though, since it's titled as such.

Atoms are insane.

A Corvette Z06 has around 505hp "stock" giving 355 BHP per ton, a 600hp modified would be around 420 BHP per ton.

If that's (and I'm fairly sure it is, by the sound) An Atom V8 500, it's pushing 863 BHP per ton. 20 BHP per ton more than a Hennessey Venom GT. The Bugatti 16.4 GS Vitesse is 594 BHP per ton, and if it's "just" an Atom 300 SC, it'll be grunting out 545 BHP per ton.

So, if it's a V8 like I believe it is, the power to weight ratio is double the 'vette's.

The Atom V8 is easily in the "Superbike" area of performance. Not bad for a car that is completely legal on almost every road on the planet.

*Figures from http://www.autosnout.com/Cars-Bhp-Per-Ton-List.php

Look like the Atom driver simply knew the track better or was a better driver. Vette looked cautious.

Your video, Ariel atom on Nurburgring VS Corvette Z06 600HP, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Your video, The Birth of Helium Atoms, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Runner here (at least before my knees decided enough's enough).

My road route took me past a house where a toy some-such-or-other breed routinely chased me and came close to nipping at my heels. One day my knees weren't the only thing that decided enough was enough. Stopped, turned around, looked at the pesky atom, and ROARED. I'd like to think I'm a kind guy, but in all honesty, the other option of trying to score a field goal on imaginary 40-yard uprights was a very very close second. Runners will understand.

Anyways, I didn't, but it was very satisfying to see that little pest leave a vapour trail on its way back to its old-lady owner, who tried to comfort it against the big bad normally harmless passerby.

Do NOT train your dog to do what these people did. Might look cute, but is not.

I was thinking the same thing. We had a good deal of choice of what classes to take. I didn't take Lit, but I did do the basic English classes, where we read some Shakespeare and the like, but not to the degree the Lit students did. I didn't do any complex math classes either, I did Algebra. But then I also did Applied Business, or whatever it was called. I did Civics with the base History classes. I did Home Economics in 9th grade, not a required class, but an elective. Woodshop was another example of an elective class. Have they removed electives from schools? If not then it's this dude's own fault for not choosing the proper electives. If they are gone and all that is taught is the core, then there may be too much core.

I got to disagree with the video's premise that Math, History and the cores aren't needed. Do you need Calculus, no but you should graduate with a strong understanding of basic Algebra. History is important to, though I'm not sure the methods used are effective, route memorization of facts and dates for tests, rather than a general understanding of history and how to avoid the same mistakes. Teaching for tests period is a problem... Lit isn't important and should remain an elective, but having read some of the "classics" is important too, even if it is just a quick Cliff Notes sort of version of it (do they still have Cliff Notes?) Actually a Cliff Notes rundown of lots of the "classics" would probably be better than what most English classes do, while encouraging students to read more modern what they want fare for reports and the like. I didn't take Biology, but basic Science understanding is important, problem is it's politicized and rather than stick with the facts, too many people want to introduce at the very least doubt about the facts if not introduce ideological ideas that contradict the facts and are based on a misunderstanding of what the facts actually say... due to a messed up literal reading (well when it's convenient to take literal, other times things are dismissed as "literary" or "poetic" be it about the Earth not moving or bats being birds and on and on) of one particular bronze age book.

Also you can't teach people who to vote for... you gain understanding of the issues in History and Civics... so...

How to move away from testing is a tricky thing. You need to prove you have an understanding of how to form an Algebraic formula and to solve one. You need to prove you understand the issue(s) of the Civil War and the basic era (I'm not convinced you need to remember exact dates, know it was the 1860s), same with the other wars. What was one's nation's involvement in the World Wars and what caused those wars in the first place, and again basic era, if you don't know the exact year of the bombing of Pearl Harbor or D-Day or the dropping of the atomic bombs, okay, but a basic close approximation of the years. For English you need to prove you can write and read, and a basic understanding of literature, not details of classic books, but narrative structure etc. There should perhaps be more time spent on critical thinking and how to vet sources. You need to have a basic enough understanding of science not to dismiss things as "just a theory" which proves you don't know what theory means in science, and don't ask ridiculous questions like "if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys" instead you should be able to answer that. You should be able to answer properly if somebody notes that CO2 is good for plants or that compact fluorescent have mercury in them so they aren't better for the environment than older bulbs.

How does one prove these things without tests? That's the question. And it needs to be Federally standardized to a degree to ensure that you don't have lose districts teaching that the Civil War wasn't about slavery nearly at all, rather than the fact it was the primary reason, or that Evolution is "just a theory", or deny the slaughter of the Native Americans or interment of Japanese Americans. You need to insure that all students are getting the same basics, and insure they have a good range of choices for electives. It's the basics though that basically need tested for, and I personally can't figure out a way to prove a student knows say what caused the Civil War or that they know what Evolution actually is, or how to form an Algebraic formula to solve a real life problem without a test.

A computer big enough to accurately calculate the position and properties of every "particle" (and ever decreasing subdivisions of energy and matter) would need to be the size of the universe in the first place. We can't even simulate enough particles in an n-body simulation to match the number of stars in a galaxy, let alone individual molecules, or shall we go further and say atoms, or further and say protons, neutrons and electrons? And that's for ONE galaxy amongst hundreds of billions in the OBSERVABLE universe... using only ONE force - gravity!

The guy has a great point about the Big Bang - a billion billion galaxies worth of matter and energy created in a split second from nothing? Doesn't sound like like the conservation of energy that is so fundamental to physics, right? But that's no reason to throw out hundreds of years of evidence and research which has proven conservation of energy to be true since then. The big bang makes the most sense given what we see today... if you want to propose a better theory, it has to make more sense than the Big Bang theory. Saying that the big bang doesn't make sense is not an appropriate starting point for a new theory, and doesn't lead to "so therefore we're in a simulation."

And it's not good enough to appeal to simplicity like @robdot is doing - basically saying that everything we see could very easily be an illusion for our benefit. That's an argument for God, in my opinion... just like how religious fanatics say "it was God's will for this to happen" we'd instead say "well, that's what the simulation wanted to show us" and call it a day. Furthermore if the manifestations of physical laws out there in the universe are illusions, they are at least consistent illusions that we can calculate and predict. And in that case, what is the difference to our lives whether we call it "reality" or "simulation" or "computer"? It it still what we always knew it was. If something created our universe and allowed it to run like a simulation, it is almost certainly intangible to us and for all intents and purposes meaningless too, because we can't touch, feel, see or understand it on any level.

This is one of the topics i asked of my favourite professor - how can we trust what we see if it could be faked, and what exists beyond our universe? His answer was, if i have to doubt what i see, i might as well not do anything at all, and if you want an answer to the second question talk to a philosopher. This is a philosophical discussion, not a scientific one. The scientific method doesn't care what you call the place you live in nor "who" we think "created" it. You can't hope to understand anything if you don't base it on the evidence you have. You certainly can't form a theory on the basis that all evidence is untrustworthy.

Might be interesting to compare and contrast how we in the US have handled our laundry list of "bad things we've done in the past" compared to, say, Germany.

I know that the Nazi flag and other imagery are outright banned / censored in Germany. From what I understand, WW2 history taught in schools in Germany is handled very carefully, if not largely glossed over.

In the US, the only bit of history that gets treatment similar to that (in my experience/opinion) is the Vietnam war. I know my High School history classes definitely glossed over it and didn't want to get into any details about why, how, or whether or not we should have been in the war at all.

Compare that to WW2, which was covered in pretty great detail. Very much including actively encouraging students to consider their own thoughts on controversial things like dropping not just one but two atomic bombs on Japan.

The Civil War is also covered much more openly and honestly. I don't think I can recall anyone ever seriously suggesting that the single, most important root cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery. Other umbrella labels like "states rights" might be referred to as the impetus, but yes, any and all of those things really boil down to slavery.



One thing that scares me about the German approach (sweep under the rug and don't talk about it) is that it sort of all too conveniently ignores the reality that these terrible things were done by people who were (disturbingly) not very different from us. OK, Hitler himself might have been a 1 in a million or 1 in a billion combination of evil, crazy, and powerful. But Joe Average from today ... not so different from Hans Average from 1930s Germany.

Celebrating one's heritage and past is OK, sometimes even good. Especially when one can honestly own and try to understand the bad along with the good. I think it is OK to appreciate the Confederate flag, along with historical figures like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is possible to accept that their core motivations were done in support of a very bad and evil institution (slavery), but to still respect or even admire their accomplishments as human beings. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves too, but we are willing to look beyond that when considering his legacy.

Maybe the Confederate flag is tied too closely to the institution of slavery for it ever to be uncoupled from that. Maybe a government that prides itself on being democratic should consider that that connection creates a conflict with many of its constituents. But I hope we never sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened.