Except the team in the first season who used it episode one and won.
Oh, and the team in the third season who used it episode one and made it to the finals (but didn’t win).
Not that the ATC’s have great chances but playing the FF now isn’t going to hurt them.
First two technical questions.
Why is the travelling direction on AR always eastward? Most people find it easier to travel west, getting to bed later and arising later. Are the producers trying to make the teams as cranky as possible?
Did anyone catch the name of the place the teams trying to get to first in Venice? I thought I heard one team say “Campo Pirini”. The closest I can find on the map I have is “Campo Carmini”. I have been to Venice recently, and wanted to follow the action closely. I think their first clue as they got off the train was to find “Ponte Guglia”. I don’t find this, but I do see a “Ponte delle Guglie” a little nortwest of the Stazione. If anyone knows of a good on-line map that shows where they were, would you post it please?
I have another question that I have thought about watching several previous AR seasons. In general I wonder if one can learn anything about real life from the artificial world of TV. In specific, it concerns the behavior of people on AR. Everyone acts worse when she is tired, stressed, and in a foreign place. The editing that happens in a TV show might show just this, rather than a random and more representative sampling of a person’s behavior.
However, those bad incidents caught on tape are not staged. Some things I have seen on AR remind me of fights I had while traveling with my ex-wife. When talking about these later, it seemed that I gave these incidents more weight than she did.
Do you think AR shows people under artificial, stressed circumstances and thus the viewers get a distorted picture of the contestants’ character, or do you think people’s “true nature” comes out under pressure? I believe I lean toward the latter philosophy. Compare John Vito/Jill vs. Flo/Zack in AR3.
Outside of the artificial environment of TV, do people judge others by how wonderful they are when they are nice and happy, how they act on average, or how horrible they are when they are bad?
Is there a Psychological consensus on the benefits of judging a person by a certain standard?
Imagine your relationship with somebody being plotted (simplistically) with a vertical dimension of good/bad, and a horizontal dimension that is time. A relationship that never changes is a horizontal line; a relationship with ups and down (a perfectly periodic one) would look like a sine wave. Say a man is comparing two different women he is thinking about marrying. Woman X varies a lot. Occasionally she will praise you profusely. Occasionally she will criticize you severely. On average she is has a measurement of 0, with a high of +100 and a low of -100. Woman Z varies less, with high of +20 and low of -25. The man wonders who he will be happier with.
Do you think that a) This analysis is too simple to be meaningful. b) Your choice of which you prefer is your own taste: neither is objectively better. c) X is better d) Y is better?
I would be interested in a reference from the Psychology of interpersonal-relations that discusses these kinds of questions.
djbdjb - I can’t help you, but must commend you on one the most impressive tangential hijacks I’ve ever seen.
Hard to explain why I like the NFL chicks…maybe because everyone keeps screwing them over, and they’re always in danger of losing, and I always tend to root for the underdog anyway? Plus, they’re kinda cute. 
I think it’s them or the ATC’s who will be out next week, though.