Last rant of the year. Don’t worry, I will get bored soon. Happy New Year…
<rant>
This is an oversimplification, but just deal with it. To paraphrase Eric Idle, every day we rotate once on the axis of the earth. In order to make one complete rotation in a day, we must travel at roughly 900 miles per hour. The earth, in it’s yearly trip around the sun, travels through space at roughly 18.5 miles/second, or 66,600 mph. And, our solar system is whizzing around the centre of the milky way galaxy at roughly a million miles/day, or 40,000 mph. This means that, at any given moment, you are moving (in various directions at the same time) at roughly 107,500 miles per hour.
The reason you don’t notice anything is that you and everything around you are travelling at the same speed, and in identical directions, so the fact that everything is moving becomes irrelevant. We are stationary in regards to each other, in regards to the couch, and the TV, or whatever. It is only when there is a difference in speed (or direction) that we end up having problems.
If you start running at, say, 5 mph, and you run into a patio door that you forgot to open, the fact that you were travelling at 107,505 mph and the door was travelling at 107,500 mph isn’t really the issue. It is the fact that there is a difference between the two speeds. It was a small difference (only 0.00465%,) but it is more than enough to cause an owie or a boo-boo.
Let’s say that I was going to throw a rock at your head, and you were going to try to run away. Off you go, running at 10 mph, because you are scared, and that is about as fast as you can run. I have a couple of options at my disposal: I could throw the rock after you, throwing it at, say, 20mph, which is fast enough to overtake you and your head; or, I could appear in front of you, lob it slowly across the path that you are following, and let you run into it. The result is the same in both instances – you get hit in the head with a rock at 10mph, even though the rock is travelling at two very different speeds in those examples. The only real difference is whether my rock hits you in the back of the head, or the front. Anyway, I digress…
The main point of this is that, it is not the speed itself that creates havoc, it is the difference in speeds. The greater this difference, the greater the potential for disaster.
So, knowing this, why in the hell would any sane, or even partially sane, person try to merge onto a highway at any speed other than the one that everyone else on the highway is going? Remember, it is all about the difference in speed. If you merge at a slower speed than the traffic on the highway, you are not being safe, or careful, you have just made yourself the rock that was lobbed at your head in the above example. Everybody else has to now react to you to protect themselves. You see, the on-ramps are cleverly designed as a runway. They allow you to get your sorry ass up to the speed of the traffic you are going to merge with. If used correctly, you just fit with the traffic, and can slide into the flow with very little adjustment from anyone around you. It is like magic.
Live the magic…
Damn.
P.S. And don’t give me any crap about speed limits only being limits, and that you don’t have to travel at that speed. While this is technically true, in reality it just a lame excuse for you to be dangerous to the world around you without feeling bad about it. Stop it. Let it go. Live the magic…
</rant>