space travel and time

In the classic scifi movie Planet of the Apes, the shocking plot twist is(wait... you haven't seen the movie?! But I'm about to spoil the ending! Quick! Look away!) that the strange planet they are exploring is Earth, millions of years in the future. Humans have lost the power of speech and are nothing more than animals. Apes rule the world. They shouldn't have been so surprised to find themselves there, because this happens all the time in science fiction. Hapless astronauts in Twilight Zone episodes, space travellers in many scifi books, and even the comedy series Red Dwarf, are based on the premise that the characters wake up millions of years in the future. Typically, this is done through the magic of cryogenic freezing- not yet perfected, sadly - in combination with Einstein's Law of Special Relativity, which says, if I may paraphrase the great man somewhat, that the faster you go, the more time slows down.
Therefore, if you get in a spaceship and cruise around for a couple of years at speeds approaching the speed of light, when you parachute back into home, you'll find that everyone you know is dead, and monkeys rule the earth. Or something like that.
That's the theory that launched a thousand paperbacks.
And in principle, it's perfectly valid. Time slows down the faster you are moving. We don't notice it ourselves because everything around us is moving so slowly. But clocks run slightly faster at the equator than at the north or south pole because of the rapid spinning of the Earth. So an astronaut travelling at, say, half the speed of light would be very well preserved.
What this neat theory of space travel doesn't take into account is that the atmosphere shields us from radiation. Travelling through space means being exposed to harmful cosmic rays, which may age you just as fast, or faster, than if you had stayed on Earth..
So a jaunt to Alpha Centauri and back might only seem like a stroll down the shop, but it will age you by several lifetimes. So much for the science fiction of space travel. But that doesn't detract from Planet of The Apes, or any other story based on the premise of the returning astronaut.
To quote my father, "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."

when technologies collide

On the interstate the other day, I was trying to change lanes when a large white Ford SUV moved up and blocked my way. I braked, pulled in behind, and the Ford in front slowed down. Then the driver braked suddenly, then sped up. I needed to take the next exit. I was glad about that, because I could be free of this idiotic driver. But at the last minute, with no indicator, the car in front also exited. As we came up to a set of traffic lights, I pulled beside the Ford SUV out of sheer curiosity. What sort of maniac was behind the wheel? What deranged menace would I see there?
It was a well-dressed woman in her forties, talking on her cellphone.
And this is what I have found time after time: erratic driving, dangerous driving, even aggressive driving, is usually done by a very normal person whose mind is elsewhere. You might ask, well if their mind is elsewhere, who is doing the driving?
Yes, you might well ask indeed. And the answer is far from comforting. Because while that woman was talking on the phone, her cerebrum was entirely engaged, leaving her cerebellum to do the driving. Yes, that's right. The much-vaunted cerebrum, that mammalian triumph of nature, was busy, so all the important decisions were left to a part of the brain that we have in common with lizards.
It would be stretching a point to say that you might as well leave a lizard to do the driving, but not by much. The cerebellum does skilled, co-ordinated activity, but it's the cerebrum that makes higher level decisions. The cerebrum also provides feedback, monitoring, and adjustment.
Unfortunately, cellphone conversations chew up a lot of cerebral resources, leaving just a few morsels of attention for the task of driving. That's okay, because that's when the automatic processes kick in. They take over at other times, too.
Have you ever arrived home from work, only to realise that you don't remember the journey home at all? The reason is that the pathway home is so well-known, and the sequence of movements to follow it so overlearned, that there is really nothing for your cerebrum to do except sit back and enjoy the ride. Let the lizard drive for a while. And if you call someone up and talk to them, so much the better: conversation makes a trip pass quickly.
The problem comes when you're not driving on that route between home and work, that you've driven maybe thousands of times. The problem comes on pathways that are not so overlearned that they are burned deeply into your neural pathways, and where you have to make judgements, decisions, adjustments. If you talk on the phone, you're depriving the driving task of resources that it probably needs. One study on this topic found that talking on a phone while driving produced a performace drop that was equivalent to a blood-alcohol reading of .05. That roughly doubles the chances of a car accident.
So it seems, two of humanity's greatest inventions, the car and the phone, can't get along. One needs our attention to protect us from danger. The other demands our attention to fulfil our need for society.
This is why 'hands-free' phones don't improve driver safety. It's not holding the phone to your ear that's the problem. It's what's going on in your head. The conversation is keeping you in a constant state of maximum cognitive load. You don't have cognitive overload as such - that would be unpleasant - just a nice warm feeling of having your brain completely entertained, while leaving that boring 'driving' stuff to the chauffeur.
One question remains. What about passengers? Surely that would be as dangerous, talking to someone next to you. But when we are talking to someone who is physically next to us, it's very different to talking to someone who is at an arbitrary location at an arbitrary distance. You share context- the here and now- and that makes talking so much easier. You can also give subtle non-verbals, chortles, hand-gestures, and so on, that enrich the message and make it more easily understood. When you're getting the message through a tiny earpiece, it is so much harder to figure out what the person is saying, and what they really mean. Much is lost in the transmission. Because of this, it is more cognitive effort to reconstruct and understand what the other person is saying.
My father is someone who loves to talk to people face-to-face, but hates phone conversations. I used to think that this was just some idiosyncracy, but now, I think he's probably not alone. There are probably many people who secretly don't like talking on the phone. The message is stripped of some of its meaning, its nuance. It is harder to interpret. It takes more mental effort. All in all, it's just not as high-quality an interaction as a face-to face-conversation.
We can use the technology, but it comes at a cost- mental resources. Most of the time, this doesn't matter. But when we're driving, it quietly saps our attention, degrading our performance at a high-stakes, high-risk task. Before we know it, we're driving erratically and unpredictably, increasing the stress of the drivers around us (except for the other drivers that are also talking on the phone). "Lizard-brained driver" would not be too far from the truth.
Of course, when I drive and talk on the phone, I'm perfectly safe!

brains, luck and self-perception

Believing that you can get smarter makes you smarter
Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) performed an experiment:

They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed — a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ's malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence

I guess this has to be scored as a win for the 'believe in yourself' and the 'power of positive thinking' advocates. It's a field of self-help gurus and snake-oil salesmen, but there it is: the scientific data. It's time to put aside prejudice and concede that maybe there is perhaps some credibility in the idea. Data trumps intuition.
In a related vein, there is a researcher in Britain, Richard Wiseman, who believes that luck is real. He doesn't mean in a metaphysical sense, and he's not talking about winning at roulette. Rather, he describes luck as a personality characteristic. If you believe you're lucky, then you are more attuned to random opportunities in your environment. You spend more cognitive effort looking for them and have more sophisticated schemas for them, and therefore more will come to your attention.
With all these random opportunities, you'll conclude that you're a lucky person, just as you thought! Wiseman has written a book on the topic called The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles where he outlines the characteristics of the "lucky" personality. An interesting idea, isn't it?