Have you priced textbooks lately? $1.2 million is only 5 or 6 books.

Like any tool, roundabouts have to be used in appropriate situations. I used to work in traffic engineering, and adding roundabouts (or signals and stop sings, for that matter) requires careful study and the meeting of certain criteria (called warrants). Warrants include such things as daily vehicle volume, peak hourly volumes, pedistrian volumes, and delay times. In the right place, roundabouts allow traffic to flow better than a signal and with greater safety. Head-on and t-bone collisions (the two most dangerous types of traffic accidents) are virtually eliminated. The accidents that do happen will be at a lower speed and a gentler angle.

All of that said, there is always the problem of the unwritten "political" warrant. The mayor wants a stop sign (or signal or roundabout) here, so one is going in even if it is worse for the traffic. Of course, there are also fads to put in roundabouts (or what have you). Some of the roundabouts are going to be unwarranted or conditions will change. Roundabouts work best when applied correctly.

That's actually been a bit of a problem with roundabouts in the US. I used to work in traffic engineering and we got a presentation on some proposed ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) rules to make roundabout intersections navigable by pedestrians. They wanted each approach of the roundabout to have a crosswalk and a signal--which completely negates the purpose of the roundabout. I've been out of the field for a few years, so I don't know what things look like now, but it is a problem and people are thinking about it.

My wife works as a doctor at 3 hospitals. Between the three, she has something like 17 passwords to access various computer systems. She also has to change them every 30 to 90 days and she may not even work at two of the hospitals for some months at a time. How is anyone without a photographic memory supposed to keep track of all of those logins? That's not to say my wife writes passwords on a post-it (she'd need her own desk for that), but it explains such behavior. Password policies that require frequent changes result in weak passwords (password1 this month, then password2, etc.)

iCarumba!

At the Cincinnati History Museum, I overheard one of the docents and an older man discussing this station (or its 500kW predecessor). They said people in the area could hear the station on cots, screen doors, and most anything sufficiently large and conductive.

I just ran out to my driveway and shot the UPS man.
Now I have to dig another shallow grave in the backyard. I just finished re-sodding too.