Save a Plastic Bag, Help Destroy the World

I was at the supermarket the other day and my curiosity was tweaked by a sign near the checkout counter: “Save a Plastic Bag, Help Save the World.” The idea, of course, is that if we throw away fewer plastic bags, nature will benefit. Many such small virtuous actions can, in congregate, impart an enormous benefit.

Also underlying the slogan is another idea, which is generally unexpressed explicitly yet a part of our collective folk psychology, that good behavior leads to a virtuous circle: doing one good deed puts us in a beneficial mindset that leads us to do more good deeds. Just yesterday I saw a TV idea that neatly summed up this idea. On a split screen, it showed a woman taking two different paths in the course of her day. On the left side, she had an unhealthy breakfast, and proceeded to make more unhealthy eating choices throughout the day, had no energy, came home from work exhausted, watched TV, and was basically a loser. On the other side of the screen, she started out her day with the advertiser’s nutritious snack bar, proceeded to eat healthily throughout the day, exercised, and went out after work and had fun with her awesome friends. The difference in the two outcomes was all down to that single, simple decision at breakfast: to be a winner, or a slob?

Unfortunately, as psychological research has shown, human behavior doesn’t work like that at all. On the contrary: single, small acts of virtuous behavior actually predispose us to behave worse. Continue reading Save a Plastic Bag, Help Destroy the World

Unsafe At Any Speed

A late night last night. I was on assignment for Popular Mechanics, covering the debut of Paul Stender’s latest jet-powered contraption. Paul is best known as the guy who invented the jet-powered outhouse and the jet-powered schoolbus, but he’s done quite a few other vehicles as well — in fact, every winter he tends to brew up at least one new example of vehicular insanity in his Brownsville, IN, workshop in preparation for the upcoming drag-race and airshow season. Seen here is the “Urban Legend,” a ’67 Impala that’s been outfitted with a jet engine on its roof that Paul estimates will boost the car’s top speed from about 130 to about 250 mph. Note that he doesn’t achieve anything like that in this clip; the car, still a work in progress, suffered some major problems with the afterburner. Hopefully Paul will get the kinks worked out and will return to Morocco in September for a full-power run that hopefully the chest-pounding noise and fire of a full jet-car experience. I’ll be writing about the project in more detail in an upcoming issue of Popular Mechanics.

Surrounded by Wildfire, Should You Run or Fight?

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This gripping video (via Gawker) depicts a group of young Russian men attempting to drive through one of the wildfires currently raging across their country. Fortunately, they survived — though, it seems, just barely, thanks to a timely decision on the driver’s part.

If you found yourself in that situation, how would you react? If unexpectedly found yourself in a life-or-death crisis and had to make a decision that would either save your life or end it, how can you ensure that you would make the right one?

That was not a rhetorical question for people in the state of Victoria, Australia, during February and March, 2009. For five weeks catastrophic brush fires swept across the state amid record-breaking temperatures and drought. Government policy held that when fire threatened a neighborhood, homeowners were to make a choice: either stay and fight to save their houses, or evacuate early. They were explicitly instructed not to wait until the flames were close. Trying to run from a wildfire is the surest way to die in it.

The choice given to the people made sense in strictly rational terms. But can people be expected to make rational decisions when they’re surrounded by 1200 degree flames raging four stories high? Shortly after the Victoria fire’s most lethal day, I talked to a survivor and heard his incredible story, which I included in Extreme Fear. Here’s an excerpt: Continue reading Surrounded by Wildfire, Should You Run or Fight?

Flying Cars, A Very Old Dream

I must confess, I have a soft spot for strange aircraft designs. Thus I was happy to see today’s Popular Mechanics post about the age-old quest for the flying car. The story says that the dream is “almost 70 years old,” but it’s even older than that. As the site Roadable Times points out, aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss designed a flying car, the Curtiss Autoplane, back in 1917, and patented it in 1919. It was a crazy dream then, and it’s a crazy dream today.

Readers Set Me Straight: The Love Parade Tragedy

Since I wrote about the stampede at Germany’s Love Parade on Saturday, a clearer picture of the event has emerged. Eyewitnesses, including some readers of this blog, have stated that the deaths were not due to a panicked stampede, but rather to the simple force of human bodies pressing forward into a dead-end space. Writes Keith Martin:

It wasn’t fear. It was necessity. I was in there. It was poor planning and far too many people. We were all stuck in a tunnel… NO WAY OUT. There was a mile long line of people behind us and when the venue filled, they simply closed the gates. We had nowhere to go and people kept pushing. Once exhaustion/dehydration set in people could no longer stand or remain conscious so they would collapse and people would fall on them and a body pile would assemble, with those at the body never getting back up. It wasnt fear… People had no choice but to crush each other.

Reader Mats writes:

I also was there, and have to agree with Keith. There was no panic and no stampede, there was just a slow grind as the enclosed area filled up with more and more people, and the ones in front were told to move back again against the people coming in, and people falling trying to climb out… I was in the crowd well before the big crush happened – I was into the festival area at 15:00 – but even then the crowd was intense and I saw with my own eyes a lifeless body being carried out on a stretcher from the tunnel. Ironically, the first thing I did when getting into the entrance area was what you recommend, taking note of exits and escape routes with the intention of getting out ASAP – only to find there was not a single one. There was really no way out, not from the entrance area, the festival area or from the crowd. Even if the entrance had worked, in my mind there is no question there would be an equal incident on the actual parade grounds – even there every single exit was locked down and not opened before the disaster was a fact.

I was careful to point out in my original post that the psychology of panic is only half the story when it comes to crowd stampedes; once the mass shoving is underway, the question of automatic versus deliberate action becomes irrelevant. In the case of the Duisburg tragedy, it seems that what happened wasn’t really the result of a stampede at all, in the strict sense, but rather a kind of slow-motion build up of pressure onto a crowd with no avenue for escape. At any rate, an investigation into the incident is currently underway, so hopefully in due time fuller answers will emerge.

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Warning: Flying Cars May Appear Closer than They Are

Popular Mechanics has an opinion piece up on its website about why I don’t think the latest iteration of that long dreamed-of machine, the flying car, is all it’s cracked up to be:

We’ve covered the Terrafugia “Transition” flying car here before – as we wrote back in October, the two-seater aircraft has four wheels and four wheels that fold up so that it can be driven on the road. It also has a talent for attracting national publicity. The latest round came after the Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA) issued a decision that seemed a major milestone in Terrafugia’s march to the marketplace. As the Discovery Channel reported in its article “Flying Car Gets FAA Approval,”

The Federal Aviation Administration has just removed a major hurdle from the path of a vehicle that may well be the first commercially viable flying car. The agency has agreed to classify the Terrafugia Transition as a Light Sport Aircraft [LSA], even though the vehicle is 120 pounds too heavy to qualify for that class.

At first reading, this seemed to imply that the FAA had agreed to certify the “Transition.” This indeed would be a newsworthy accomplishment for Terrafugia, and a major milestone in making roadable airplanes a reality.  But it also sounded a bit unlikely to us. Continue reading Warning: Flying Cars May Appear Closer than They Are

Behind the Love Parade Tragedy: The Psychology of Stampedes

Terrible news today from the German city of Duisburg, where a summer carnival called the “Love Parade” has been stricken by tragedy. According to breaking news reports, a crowd of revelers inside a tunnel became overcrowded and panicked, causing a stampede that has left at least 15 dead.

There are multiple layers of dark irony in this kind of needless death — for one thing, that a gathering called together in the name of peace could result in such a horrific toll; for another, that in the 21st century simple fear by itself is able to cause mass casualties. But that’s the paradox of terror: a response that evolved to keep us safe can itself pose a terrible danger, rising up at the most inappropriate times. If anything, the advent of modern technology seems to have left us even more vulnerable to fatal stampedes, as mass transportation and instant communication make it easier to bring large crowds together. But this kind of tragedy has a long history. Continue reading Behind the Love Parade Tragedy: The Psychology of Stampedes

How to Trick People into Thinking You're Intelligent

Smart people have it good. Sure, they might get beat up in high school, but once they reach adulthood, it’s the brainiacs who get the the hottest girls, the biggest paychecks, the Nobel prizes and the whatnot. This is a problem for the 50 percent of us who are below average intelligence, as well as all the rest who just aren’t all that bright. Not an insurmountable problem, though. All you have to do is figure out how to make other people think that you’re smart. Just follow these steps. Continue reading How to Trick People into Thinking You're Intelligent

When Summer Fun Turns Deadly Serious

I was in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado yesterday, whitewater rafting on the Arkansas River with a highly experienced outfitter called KODI Rafting. We were to start the day with a seven-mile run down the Numbers rapids, a continuous stretch of Class III and Class IV whitewater that takes about two hours to complete. It’s a challenging stretch of water that demands an aggressive approach. People can and do get hurt.

As we rode to the put-in on a former schoolbus, the head guide gave us a run-down of what to do if we fell out of the boat: one, immediately swim for the boat and try to get back in. Two, if you get separated from the boat, lift your feet up and point them downstream so that you can ward off rocks. And so on. It was all very solid and reasonable advice. But having spent the last few years studying the human fear response, I found myself wondering: if any of us novice rafters winds up in the drink, are we going to remember any of this advice amid our rising panic? Continue reading When Summer Fun Turns Deadly Serious

I Want My Inflatable Airplane

From the good folks at AvWeb, a story about the Swiss ultralight design that’s something like a cross between a hang glider and a powered parachute — and also bears a family resemblance to my ultimate fantasy aircraft, the Goodyear Inflatoplane. This was an otherwise conventional airplane which happened to have wings and a fusalage made out of inflatable rubber. The idea was that if one of your pilots bailed out behind enemy lines you could drop this to him and he could blow it up and fly it to safety. (Then, presumably, use it as a pool toy once he’d gotten back home.) Like many of the coolest ideas in aviation, it was a long way from practical. Here’s what it looked like:

If nothing else, one imagines that the crashes would be less than catastrophic.