Lateral with Tom Scott 52: Square-eyed dogs
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Oct 6, 2023 The podcast discusses competitive instincts, taxes on the Lotus Super 7 kit car, pets and their behavior towards televisions, and solving a puzzle about album titles.
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Crash Tests Use Percentile Dummies
- Crash-test dummies represent specific percentiles to test safety across body sizes.
- Modern standards include 5% female and 95% male dummies to reveal size-specific risks.
Seeing Crash Dummies Up Close
- Joe Hanson visited a crash-testing facility and saw dummies labelled as the 50th percentile male.
- He noted historical shifts where a 1960s 50th-percentile male is now closer to today's 50th-percentile female.
Lotus Outsmarted Export Tax Rules
- Lotus avoided export tax by sending disassembly-style instructions instead of assembly instructions.
- Recipients had to read the manual backwards to rebuild the Super 7, so shipments were treated differently for tax purposes.