How scientists identify each other

I surprised myself last night by the way I picked up on a tiny conversational cue and identified a fellow scientist. Bill Callahan, when I asked, described himself as a social scientist. We met at Americano for the Cleveland Weblogger Meetup Group.

We were playing a round of Thinkrs & Drinkrs, with some profound questions and some less so, and this question came up: why to people in Cleveland drive so slow? On the face of it, the question seems frivolous, but on the other hand, there's got to be a reason, right? (My first thought was that it's the potholes.) Bill's response was that most people are probably depressed about layoffs at work, and depressed about their post-holiday finances at home, so they--and I forget the exact work he used--expand the time they spend in their cars between the two places.

One of the things that gets hammered into a scientist's mind during their technical training is the idea of incompressibility - certain things don't grow or shrink, they just move around or change form. The laws of conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, and thermodynamics embody this principle. I hadn't thought about it until now, but time, too, is incompressible. If you take time out of one activity, you have to put it into another one. The way Bill put it is exactly the way a physicist would.

To address Bill's meaning as well as his delivery, the theory is somewhat at odds with my idea of slowness as engagement. Depressed people should drive faster so they don't have time to think, right? But maybe just driving the car is enough. With the radio on.

...

By the way, next time you're at Americano, have Carla make you her French 75. It's gin, red vermouth, lemon syrup, and champagne, with a twist. Really nice.

3 comments:

  1. Evan used to quote Repo Man thusly: "The more you drive the stupider you get."
    Does that appear to have any bearing on the Cleveland situation?

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  2. Driving is (or can be) a zen-like activity. I noticed this on my vacations, which more & more became about driving rather than being at any single place. In between cities, I would fall into what I call "the rapture of the road". Come to think of it, Joni Mitchell called it "the refuge of the road". The radio is on, or music, or nothing at all, and attention goes from what's ahead to glances at either side and behind, occasionally to the instrument panel. I'd watch traffic around me & predict who was going to do what [with surprising accuracy - it's a gestalt thing]. The feeling of motion is enveloping. It's like magic, being inside this mechanical cocoon that protects me & takes me anywhere I want.

    It's harder to achieve this state intra-city, because I tend to feel more pressure to get to places because things need to be done. However, the recent spike in gas prices (& a number of speeding tickets) caused me to revise my driving style - slower, using the cruise control as much as possible - and I've found I can almost get there. On the highway, I mean; surface streets are FAR too annoying.

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  3. I just thought of something. The other day I saw a Caddy with huge rims - are those out of fashion yet? - and I thought, HOW? With the road conditions in this town, those wheels should have been pounded square by now. So maybe the preponderance of fashion wheelwear makes Cleveland drivers slow.

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