Dirty Air

I’m a NASCAR fan. A lot of people look at NASCAR races and wonder why in the world anyone would want to watch it, except for crashes. It just looks like a lot of “go fast, turn left.” The people in front are the people with the fastest cars. What more could there be to it?

Well, a few things.

Air

In normal experience, you drive on a road.

In NASCAR, you are driving on two surfaces. You are driving on the track surface, but at least as importantly you are driving through the air. Because at close to 200MPH, the force of the air against your car is massive.

As you drive, you create an invisible wake in the air, like a speedboat does in the water. You can choose where to put that wake. You can slow down other cars by putting it in inconvenient places. You can speed up your own car-and make it harder to steer without losing control-by driving inside someone else’s ‘dirty air’.

But you can’t see air. So until you watch racing for long enough to appreciate what’s happening to the air, and what the drivers are doing with it, there’s something really important that is literally and figuratively invisible.

Variables

Most people will never drive a car so quickly that using the breaks will cause them to lose control. NASCAR stock cars are almost always operating at the edge of what they are capable of doing. The edge of what the engine can do without overheating. The edge of how fast the tires can accelerate, break, or turn without losing traction.

At the edges, small things matter a lot: The temperature of the track; how many times your tires have warmed up and cooled down; the air pressure in your tires; the temperature of your tires; the weight of the fuel in your car; the amount of tread left on your tires. Not to mention how many other cars are nearby, dirtying your air. All of these things are constantly changing, and need to be adjusted for.

And none of them is obvious when you watch cars going around on a track. So to the uninitiated, it looks repetitive. But drivers will almost never see the same lap twice.

Pit Strategy and Fuel Mileage

Races have unforeseen circumstances. If there is a yellow flag, and cars slow down for safety purposes, all the cars that are still on the lead lap are going to be lined up nose to tail at the restart. As a result, whether to take a pit stop, and how much time to spend replacing tires and fuel, is a strategy choice. This is where a lot wagered can result in a lot gained.

And races can be won on fuel mileage, which happens more often than you would think. In these cases, you can win a race by driving slower, going the same distance on less fuel, and thereby finishing faster than people who needed to refuel that one extra time. If that’s your strategy, “dirty air” is your friend.

And all of these calculations have to be made over and over again as the context of the race changes. But the factors involved are difficult to see.

With all these critical parts of how races work invisible to the viewer, it’s not surprising that NASCAR racing is something that a lot of people will never pick up.

What does all this have to do with Computational Law?

A lot of people look at a NASCAR race, and don’t understand what is happening, because so much of what is happening is literally invisible. If your job was to convince people that NASCAR was interesting to watch, how would you do it? The people you are trying to persuade have no direct experience of the things that make it interesting, and no easy way of gaining that experience without actually doing the thing that they have no interest in doing, which is watching races.

If your job was to convince people who draft laws for a living that “Rules as Code”-writing those laws in a computer language-is a good idea, how would you do it? It involves tools and techniques and benefits that most of them will never have encountered in the real world.

That’s the task I have set for myself on Thursday, when I will give a presentation to the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice’s 2020 Legislative Drafting Conference. In thinking about how best to achieve that objective, I’ve been thinking of what got me interested in NASCAR.

It’s not because someone sat me down and said “OK, this is how the air goes off of one car’s hood and onto the other car’s spoiler.” Those things came later. What started it out was that I saw my Dad having fun. Seeing Dad enjoy racing, and wanting to share that feeling with him, is what made me pay attention long enough for him to teach me what was going on.

My Plan for Thursday

I’m going to talk for 10 minutes, and do a demo of Blawx for 10 minutes. But I can’t explain what Rules as Code is, and how it works, and why legislative drafters might care, in just 20 minutes.

Maybe what I can do-and what might be more helpful anyway-is let the attendees see someone who is genuinely excited about Rules as Code. And give them the opportunity to learn more if that’s a feeling they want to share.

That I know I can do.

I am a lawyer at Round Table Law, I teach “Coding the Law” at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, and I’m a senior researcher at the Singapore Management University Centre for Computational Law. Computational Law Diary is a series of posts on what I’m thinking about in the computational law world. They are my own opinion, and do not reflect the opinions of the Centre, the Research Programme, SMU, U of A, or anyone else.