I have been a supporter of cameras at traffic lights to catch people who run red lights. It seemed like an impartial way to catch offenders who indulged in this dangerous practice because the camera did not care about your gender, age, ethnicity, class, type of car, or other factors that might cause a traffic police officer to decide whether to issue a ticket or not. Furthermore, it seems like a waste of time to have police hanging around at intersections doing something that a machine could do better when they could be doing more important things like preventing crime or catching criminals.
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Ever since the Jules Verne classic novel Around the World in 80 Days and subsequent film celebrated the achievement of circling the globe, the idea has appealed to people trying to recreate a similar challenge in different forms. Mark Beaumont is planning to cycle around the globe in 80 days, which would be 43 days less than the current record. This requires him to cycle 240 miles a day, which he plans to do in four four-hour shifts per day.
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Most people are familiar with the dramatic story of how Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity made a surprising prediction that was spectacularly confirmed and thus enabled his counter-intuitive idea to become the accepted view. The story goes that he predicted that the path of light would be bent by the presence of a strong gravitational field. Arthur Eddington then measured that bending during a solar eclipse and got a result that agreed with Einstein’s prediction, thus providing strong support for the revolutionary idea that space was curved by matter and that light followed that curved path. Part of the dramatic appeal of this story, as recounted in the folklore, is that Einstein’s prediction that light would be bent by the Sun seemed to be utterly novel and thus its confirmation carried much greater impact than it would have otherwise.
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There is a strong belief among athletes and sports fans that sometimes athletes enter ‘the zone’, or have a ‘hot streak’ where it seems they can do no wrong or at least perform much better than they usually do and thus have a much greater chance of success at hitting the ball or shooting a basket than at other times. There is a kind of plausibility story built around this idea. When you achieve success, it makes you feel good and confident and that sense of assurance may lead to a greater focus and thus better performance whereas failure may lead to greater nervousness and second-guessing of oneself that could prove harmful in fast-moving actions sports.
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