Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Dr Glass had been idling in unmoving traffic for several minutes. The stream of traffic was unable to enter the roundabout, which was full of unyielding cars in an unbroken stream. Roadworks and other bewilderments had somehow combined to create a solid stream of traffic cutting off this entry to the roundabout, creating an immovable backlog. The phone map showed a solid red line creeping ever farther through the town as the queue of cars lengthened and froze up.

My eight -year-old child is staging battles

Okay, can we talk about how good these illustrations are?

In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn’t even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he “just used his free will.”