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| date | 2000-12-07:16:42 |
| Humans |
Some people need lessons in how to stand in line. Lines and queues are new things--our ancestors didn't spend much of their time lining up to get their slice of the tribe's kill. Only with the advent of the very high population densities made possible by the efficiency of industrial capitalism and very low service quality made possible by the inefficiency of government intervention in the markets has waiting in lines become common, and that's only happened in the past few hundred years, although I'm willing to bet that a good many Romans spent a lot of times in lines as well. I sometimes argue that humans have clearly been using fire for long enough that we've evolved over that time, as we have come to like the smell of wood smoke, something most animals are not too keen on. Lines haven't been around long enough, nor has selection been strong enough, for anything comparable to happen, unfortunately. So most of us don't like waiting in line, and lacking any "queuing instinct" some of us just aren't very good at it. The most important thing about a line is that the concept LINE refers in this context to a continuous, linear collection of people. It seems that there are a goodly number of people out there who aren't quite clear on this concept. Most of them get linearity, but a huge number don't seem to understand continuity. Thus I find that the typical line has a few people hanging around near the end, frequently staring intently off in some irrelevant direction, and it is impossible to tell if they are in the queue or not. In these cases, which happen to me once every week or so, although I don't join that many lines, I calmly interrupt their rapt meditation of the infinite and ask, "Excuse me, is this the end of the line?" or "Excuse me, are you in the line?" They inevitably say no. I've never quite had the courage to ask them why, if they apparently have nothing to do with the line, they are standing so near to it. They often have several other people standing near them who haven't recognized this sort of social deficiancy, and think they are in fact standing in line. I generally let those people enter the line ahead of me, although lately I've been a good deal less sympathetic as I've encountered this behavior more often. Today I was standing in a line where there was a person two people ahead of me who seemed to feel that the appropriate gap between him and the next person was two or three meters, for reasons I was not able to ascertain. I'm sure the person behind him waited for a long while, not sure if she was in the line or not, unwilling to ask. And I've been in situations where multiple, parallel lines have formed, particularly for outdoor toilets at fairs and the like, and the people at the head of the line I'm in decide to be "polite" to people in other lines and let them go first. I was in this situation once while carrying one of my children who needed to go real bad and finally had to tell the "polite" people at the head of the line to please take their turn so I could take mine. Rather than this having the desired effect, they simply let me go past them, leaving everyone else in the same predicatment. If I hadn't been standing right behind them I'm not sure what I've done, but as they spoke only French and my spoken French is dismal I wasn't going to hang around and argue with them. So here are some notes on line ettiquette as I understand it: 1) Stand within an arm's length of the person ahead of you. If you aren't standing within an arm's length, the continuity critierion is broken and you are not longer part of the line, and anyone should feel comfortable getting in the line at the end--that is to say, right behind the person who is standing five or ten feet away from you, who is part of the line, which you are not. 2) When you get to the head of the line, take your turn. For every person you are "polite" to from another line, you are being rude to everyone behind you. 3) If you are waiting in line for something that requires you to make a choice, think about your choic while you are waiting. I'm always amazed by people who get to the head of a line and apparently have no clue why they are there, what they want to do, who they are, or anything else. There is a general law of lines that you will always spend more time in slow lines than fast ones, and so you will always spend more time in lines behind slow, confused and rude people than behind considerate people. |
| Play |
A couple of times in the past few years I've tried to build a skating rink in the back yard. In doing so, I've discovered a few things about the thermodynamics of water. Many people, myself formerly included, think that water freezes in cold weather. I have established emprically that this is not so. I've actually come to believe that the stuff we see around us in ponds and ditches that freeze is Hillary Putnam's XYZ from his counter-Earth. The stuff in ponds and lakes freezes. Water doesn't. My house is on a well, so the water coming out of the tap is probably about 50 F (10 C). Spraying water at this temperature over a surface about ten feet wide and thirty feet long, onto a plastic sheet with upturned edges, results in a pool of liquid that will do anything except freeze. Mostly, it will run away through tiny pinholes in the plastic sheet, but I'm pretty sure a lot of it evaporates too. The evaporation rate of water at -10 C (15 F or so) is such that a few hundred gallons of water can evaporate in a few hours. The freezing rate is such that the stuff can stay there for days without freezing, except to the extent that a very thin skin of ice will form, preventing any further freezing while the rest of the water flows away through the pinholes. One might think that flow rate has something to do with this. But I've tried cutting down the flow rate, and found that the only place water will freeze is in the hose, where the flow rate is highest. Spread out on the plastic sheet, on the ground, it remains liquid more-or-less indefinitely. I think what is actually going on is that I'm having to cool down the ground, which is probably only frozen a few inches deep. So when I spray water around it warms up those few inches, and then I have a high film coefficient between the ground and the air, and the dampened earth itself becomes a pretty good conductor of heat, so in fact rather than trying to cool down a few gallons of water I'm actually trying to cool down a very large thermal resevoir. Ponds and the like don't have this problem because they have been cooling for months as the temperature has dropped, so they are already in thermal equilibrium with the soil around them. Also, they don't have any pinhole leaks. This suggests that all that is required is persistance, which I have plenty of. |