Where does this happen? I had a weekly commute across southern Michigan on US 12. Every eight to ten miles, there was another town, and the road widened from two to four lanes, allowing easy passing of anyone I'd been "stuck" behind. I always calculated my time savings (miles to the next town, desired speed, current speed) from a pass before I even checked for oncoming traffic. It did wonders for my blood pressure. I saw way too many people trying over and over, and occasionally making a really risky choice, to pass someone who was doing 53 in a 55 when there were only a couple of miles to the next town. So I'm making this suggestion only that one think before acting. If you can pass safely, by all means, do so. I'm not going to hold you up.

Also, reflecting my status as a former math teacher, I adjusted the numbers to reflect freeway driving and to get a "nice" answer; I read once that the average freeway commute was about eight miles.

He's obviously in the pocket of Big Oil.

No he doesn't; the "You insensitive clod" is just a form of address (in Latin, we'd call it the vocative case), like "Dave, I thought I was a shoo-in for that job." His error was using "shoe-in" where he meant "shoo-in."

JFK has friggin' Galaga on the concourse. Too bad I don't travel with cash, but next time, I'll know.

I wish I could cite the study where I learned the overtaking statistic (I probably found it on the WashCycle blog), but the results were certainly consistent with my own experience. I've been buzzed, and once been bumped by a panel truck that probably thought it had completed its pass (although I was barely bruised), but I've never been hit from behind. It's the left cross that gets me every time. I have stopped signaling right turns when there's oncoming traffic waiting to turn left into the same street, because it seems as soon as they see my signal, they think they can beat me (I'm assuming they see me at all, of course), and keeping both hands on the bars gives me more control whatever they do.

Thanks for the critical eye on this. And, as I said, overtaking is the kind of interaction I'm least worried about, so it has very little bearing on my decision to wear a helmet. The risk (chance of the helmet making a difference) may be very low, but the reward in those few cases so high, that it's worth the minimal cost. The only times I've regretted wearing a helmet were on sixty-mile-plus rides where I could hardly keep my head up by the end due to neck fatigue.

Slows them down? Really? They can dismount it for the crit, right?

We already do the bright colors (I got jerseys in fluorescent green, fluorescent orange, fluorescent yellow, snow-blind white, and BSOD blue), but it just never occurred to me to have a flag. How 'bout I spray-paint a raccoon tail traffic-cone orange? Awesome.

One study has shown that cars overtaking and passing leave more room for cyclists not wearing helmets. However, being struck from behind is about the least likely kind of car-bike interaction (cars turning across a cyclist's path vastly predominates those statistics).

My wife is (likely) alive today due to her helmet (that is, she is alive, but likely wouldn't be but for the helmet). She left a helmet-shaped hole in the windshield of a driver who t-boned her while illegally driving in the shoulder.

I may never need my helmet, but I always wear it (well, almost; when I borrow hotel bikes in Europe, I don't bother).

Mod parent up!

Thank you. I knew there had to be a reason that was just escaping me (I'm in development, not IT) why, for example, the Library of Congress bibliographic database was offline.

I deliberately chose the CPI, which does include food and energy prices, rather than the so-called "core inflation rate," which excludes these (as they are more volatile). The core inflation rate is currently 1.8%, a bit higher than CPI, since gas prices have actually been dropping (and would have realized a lower real interest rate of 1%).

I don't believe I assumed that; one can deliberately put one's thumb in one's ass and leave it there. I do contend they refuse to learn math (my pre-teen, similarly, is wont to say, "Stop explaining! I don't want to learn!").

Keep in mind the real interest rate. Currently, the U.S. 10-year T-bill yields 2.8%, while inflation is 1.5%; that means the current real interest rate is a paltry 1.3%. Agreed, feeding money out to the banks via the Fed just feeds the banks. If, instead, the government actually used that same money to pay people to do stuff, a lot of stuff could get done, people could be put to useful work (repairing infrastructure, teaching kids, researching non-petroleum energy), increasing GDP, increasing tax receipts, and making it even easier to pay back those T-bills in the future.

However, that means the government (mainly Congress) needs to take its thumb out of its collective ass, learn some math, and commit to spending some money until we've got something more like full employment, with the economy running at or near potential. Right now, even with all the money the Fed pushes, very little private investment is happening (except in that casino we call the stock exchange and the shadow banking system); with returns this low, there's no crowding out. Resources are underutilized by private corporations (although, via the Tea Party in the House, the Chamber of Commerce screams, "Hey, I was gonna use that!" about any attempt to spend government money).

I'm only afraid that we've lost the best opportunity: It wasn't more than a year ago that the real interest rate was negative, expected to cost less to pay back than the money was worth at the moment (my wife bought a new car at an effective negative interest rate in May 2012), not even taking into account the increase in GDP and tax receipts.

Northwestern actually has a cadre of professional instructors, non-tenure-track, but not adjunct, either: These faculty are hired on a three- to five-year contract, with some benefits, and have no duties besides teaching. If they do that well, they can usually expect to have their contracts renewed. For many who love teaching and have less of an interest in (or, perhaps, little flair for) research, it's not a bad gig. Adjuncts, on the other hand, are the press gang of academia, paid by the credit hour, with no benefits and no security (as I mentioned in another response, a tenure-track faculty member might have an upper level class cancelled due to low enrollment and find him- or herself abruptly assigned to a "STAFF" intro course, and, hey, there go some adjunct's expected three credit hours that were supposed to pay the cable bill this fall).

This. Notice that one of the authors of the study is the president of Northwestern?

Additionally, tenure-track faculty may consider being assigned a freshman intro course a punishment (and, sometimes, it is). Sometimes, an upper-level class which the faculty member has put a lot of effort into preparing doesn't make some minimum enrollment, and they are assigned to an intro course with no time to prepare.

The study notes, but the media summaries rarely mention, that most of the gains were from lower-achieving students; the higher-achieving students saw no difference between the two classes of instructor. This should not be a surprise.