Word of the Day
Effervescent (adj., eff-err-VESS-ent)
Fizzy and bubbly. Could be a drink. Could be a person. Could be a group of people. In any event, it's lively!
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Link of the Day
The Hidden Science of Elevators
You walk into a building. You need to go to the forty-eighth floor. After checking in at the front desk, you walk right towards the bank of elevators. There are six of them, three on each side facing each other. There is one button. You push it.
Which elevator shows up?
This is actually a really complicated problem, as this Popular Mechanics article examines:
Elevator engineers grapple with all these questions, and none of them are as simple as they seem. For example: clearly, an elevator should try to reduce travel time. But how should it prioritize your time? If you wait a minute instead of 20 seconds for a car to come, is that three times as bad, or perhaps six or even nine times worse?
Even the most basic of these goals isn't a given. Sometimes, it's actually better to make a passenger's ride longer. Imagine two scenarios, one in which your elevator takes 10 seconds to arrive and then one minute to reach your destination, and another in which each portion takes thirty seconds. Many people find waiting so painful that they'd prefer the first option, even though they'd reach their destination 10 seconds later (though people who feel claustrophobic in elevators would prefer to minimize time inside the car). Accordingly, some elevators optimize not for time, but for a customized "pain index," in which the computer system weighs the awfulness of each kind of delay.
This is a really fascinating dilemma and I, for one, welcome our new robot elevator control overlords.
ArticlesHow things workElevatorsVery complicated thingsUp up down down...To the pain!I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords