Unlike in similar countries, the pandemic brought some bad news on the roads for the US.

Unlike in most peer countries, American roadway deaths surged during the pandemic and have barely receded since. Pedestrian and cyclist fatalities recently hit their highest levels in 40 years, but U.S. transportation officials continue to ignore key contributing factors.

One of the causes for the increased accident rate may be the proliferation of touch screen controls that can lead to more distracted driving.

As I explained in a 2021 Slate article, the trend toward car touch screens has been a dangerous one for road safety. Those who drove in the 1990s will remember using buttons and knobs to change the radio or adjust the air conditioning without looking down from the steering wheel.

Despite their name, touch screens rely on a driver’s eyes as much as her fingers to navigate—and every second that she is looking at a screen is a second that she isn’t looking at the road ahead. Navigating through various levels of menus to reach a desired control can be particularly dangerous; one study by the AAA Foundation concluded that infotainment touch screens can distract a driver for up to 40 seconds, long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph.

“The irony is that everyone basically accepts that it’s dangerous to use your phone while driving,” said Farah. “Yet no one complains about what we’re doing instead, which is fundamentally using an iPad while driving. If you’re paying between $40,000 and $300,000 for a car, you’re getting an iPad built onto the dashboard.”

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On hot days, if one parks one’s car in the sun for any length of time, the temperature inside can rise to values much higher than the ambient temperature, making the interior extremely hot to the touch. This is another example of the greenhouse effect, similar to what is heating up the Earth.

It’s only early April, but we’ve already had our first report of an infant found in a hot car in Tucson.  We talk about this every Spring and Summer in Arizona: the dangers of cars heating up in the sun.

Afternoon temperatures are about 20 to 25 degrees lower now than they will be in June, but it’s still hot enough to raise the temperature up to 120 degrees in about 45 minutes.

The air inside the car heats up so fast because of the “greenhouse effect”.  Here’s what it means:
Incoming solar radiation, known as “shortwave radiation”, shines through the windows and is absorbed in the car’s interior.

The heat released from the interior is known as “longwave radiation”, and is much weaker than the shortwave radiation.  The heat becomes trapped inside the car.  Heat continues to enter the car, but struggles to exit.

It only takes 10 to 15 minutes for a car in direct sun light to heat up above 100 degrees when it’s 80 degrees outside, even if the window is cracked.  When the air temperature climbs above 100 degrees here in June, the temperature inside a car can soar above 150 degrees to 170 degrees in less than an hour.

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In his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote that the Guide says that: “Space … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Although I am aware that space is big, evidence of its vastness still continues to surprise me. Just yesterday, I was listening to a news report about the launching of a rocket to study three of the moons of Jupiter. I was startled when they said that it will take eight years for it to get there. Somehow, the fact that Jupiter is part of the same planetary system as the Earth made it seem like a nearby neighbor, farther than the Moon but not by that much. But if the distance to Jupiter is so much greater than what I intuitively felt, you can understand why interstellar distances seem almost inconceivable.

It is hard to comprehend things that are outside our human scale: the vary small, the very fast, deep time, and deep space. We have developed methods to get some idea of what things are like under those conditions but they are still not intuitive.

Sri Lanka has a lot of snakes, many species of which, like cobras, are venomous. There is also a lot of folklore surrounding them and many of them likely originated as tales made up to scare the daylights out of children, like ghost stories. I vividly recall one story that was told about the Russel’s viper. The story was that if anyone in your household encountered a viper and killed it (and killing a poisonous snake was often the chosen method of getting rid of them), then seven other vipers would come to your home and they would hang like a chain from the rafters of the roof if your house did not have a ceiling or from a fixture, each one clasping the tail of the other, until they lowest one reached you where you were sleeping and bit you. Needless to say, that story was enough to give small children sleepless nights.

As children, we did not question the validity of this preposterous theory and the fact that it seemed like it required a lot of coordination and hard work by the vipers just to get at you when they could instead easily have have waited for you by hiding in the grass or under some furniture until you passed by before striking, even allowing for the improbability that there existed some kind of viper committee that organized these revenge attacks and recruited members to carry them out, like some kind of commando snake strike force. There was something so frightening about the idea of snakes slowly lowering themselves down from the roof at night while you slept that it banished any critical inquiry.
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Maria Konnikova looked at the research done by anthropologists on the sizes of social groupings. The research initially studied why non-human primates spent so much time on grooming one another but then got extended to humans.

[I]n the nineteen-eighties, the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis (now known as the Social Brain Hypothesis) had just been introduced into anthropological and primatology discourse. It held that primates have large brains because they live in socially complex societies: the larger the group, the larger the brain. Thus, from the size of an animal’s neocortex, the frontal lobe in particular, you could theoretically predict the group size for that animal.

Looking at his grooming data, [anthropologist and psychologist Robin] Dunbar made the mental leap to humans. “We also had humans in our data set so it occurred to me to look to see what size group that relationship might predict for humans,” he told me recently. Dunbar did the math, using a ratio of neocortical volume to total brain volume and mean group size, and came up with a number. Judging from the size of an average human brain, the number of people the average person could have in her social group was a hundred and fifty. Anything beyond that would be too complicated to handle at optimal processing levels.

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