60 m/h * 5280 ft/m * 1/60 h/min * 1/60 min/sec = 88 ft/sec.
“In the head math” rounded 5280 to 6000 to make all come out even. 100 ft/sec is decently close (for most things).
What brought that up? The concept of “following distance” while driving. Distance is important, but it’s a second order effect. What matters is time.
There are lower bounds on reaction time due to our biology. Nerves are not fiber optic cables or even wires. Nerve impulses are not light beams. Shit happens significantly before we are aware of it. And then we need to decide what to do about it. And then tell our body what to do. It all takes time.
I’m doing some rounding here, but this isn’t far wrong. It takes 100msec to become aware of something (brake lights!). Assuming there is no cognitive load or novelty involved in processing it, it takes another 100msec do anything about it (shift foot, press brake). At 60 mph that’s 22 feet before anything at all happens. At 30 mph, it’s only 11 feet. It’s not distance. It’s time.
Reaction time is, for the most part, hardwired. One can speed it up a bit, especially while young. It slows down as you age (trust me).
Training doesn’t help, for the most part. Training reduces the cognitive load and the reaction to novelty.
I’m a “freeze” person. When faced with the surprising unknown, I neither fight nor flee. I freeze while my brain desperately tries to figure out what’s going on. That can be trained out. I’ve just never had any reason to bother.
Cognitive load is similar. There’s a reason “train as you mean to fight” is a thing. You’re not faced with novelty. You don’t have to think about what to do.
I really wanted to write down the feet-per-second of 60 miles-per-hour. I’ve done 100 fps guestimate in my head any number of times, but I’ve never figured it out and written it down before.
But of course this has to do with my book. If my intrepid pack of werewolves is going to become over-powered, what is happening to them?
Biological improvements are usually handled by “grade” in RPG settings. For whatever reason, this was stolen from test grades (hence the name). It’s stupid because if one starts at “F”, one is limited to F,E,D,C,B,A and then one runs out of letters. As opposed to going the other way, which adds 20 more letters before one runs out. In any case, as one progresses up the grades, one’s biology becomes more and more system-y and less and less human-y.
This will improve reaction times. It doesn’t reduce cognitive load, but it does allow faster processing of the same load. Combined with training, there’s a two-fer: Less work done faster.
One side-effect, which is occasionally mentioned but usually ignored, is the frame-jacking effect. If your nervous system becomes twice as fast, your “it happened, I saw it” time will get cut in half. This doubles the frame rate of the input. The processing of that data also speeds up, perhaps not quite doubling. You would be experiencing twice as much reality in the same amount of time, which would make everything seem slower.
You could cut your following distance in half and still have the same amount of subjective time to react. Driving at 60 mph would be the same as driving 30 mph is now.
What else would change?
Would you be able to talk faster? Maybe. There are limits on the rate of change of vibration. A lot faster would “smear” it because you’re changing the tension in your vocal cords faster than the air flowing over them can react to the change. How much faster would probably depend on the pitch of your voice. Long (bass) vocal cords would smear sooner than short (alto) vocal cords. Falsetto could reduce the smear effect.
Would the pitch of everything you hear shift? A 60Hz tone is still a 60Hz tone regardless of the sampling rate. Red doesn’t shift into blue just because the frame rate goes up.
88 feet per second! It is now carved into my memory.
Marked Up 