I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
I'm not sure I get your title. Are you saying there is something nonsensical in this statement?
ReplyDelete(I thought you were going to say, "If you go 0mph, you don't pay anything in fuel costs.")
Incidentally, this is why the Democratic congresswoman yesterday wanted to lower federal speed limit.
Actually, I think there are just state speed limits, but the federal gov't withholds highway funds or something to get its way. Or at least, it did that in the past.
ReplyDeleteIt says you spend ten cents more per gallon of fuel -- implying driving faster drives your fuel price up!
ReplyDeleteEh, OK fair enough. But I think they were trying to put it in terms the average motorist would understand. Do you want them to say, "Assuming you don't change your destinations, then by driving an extra 5mph you consume an extra x gallons per 100 miles, which translates into an extra $y spent per 100 miles traveled"?
ReplyDeleteIf they said that nobody would have any idea how much money that translated into. So you're right, rather than saying, "You will use 2.5% more gallons per trip," they instead say, "You will spend 10 cents more per gallon."
Oops I should have said, "...they will have no idea how big a deal that extra $y per 100 miles is, since they don't know what the baseline is without doing some math and looking up their fuel efficiency in their driver's manual."
ReplyDeleteArrrgghhhhh!
ReplyDelete