strttn
Joined 12 years ago
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Dec 1
Recent submissions
Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
One could argue that this does help everyone when it's particularly busy because it reduces the glut of people waiting to get on the bottom of the escalator, which can slow you down even if you want to walk up.
I suppose from TFL's point of view, the average time take is exactly what they want to optimise too because it everyone through the system quickest.
Personally, I really like walking and I guess I'd be a bit frustrated at not being able to even if it was for the good of the whole. Or even for me personally (time-wise)
Comment · 11 years ago
I'm always really impressed by the "Japanese" diagonal wrapping technique.
Professional at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qi8ZXUH_wY
Technique explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQM8KKP-3Oo
Comment · 11 years ago
I think this thread is a bit of a showcase of the best things about HN.
It's a place where someone without existing distribution can get what they've made in front of people.
The members decide whether it's interesting or not so it can avoid getting buried.
The OP gets lots of cynicism free advice and even offers of hosting and domain names.
Everyone can have a bit of a chat about the tech used to build it.
We all can learn things from the comments and advice given.
Well done HN! :)
Comment · 11 years ago
The thing I love about these old illustrations that predict the future from long ago in the past is not what they get right but what they get wrong.
They focus on a singular aspect of future technology but due to the limitations of their imagination aren't able to predict other entirely new revolutionary technologies and so default to their current ways of interacting with the new tech.
So for example, they predict the cross-continent visible and audio interaction but use the large unwieldy gramophone style microphone to capture the speech being unable to imagine capturing audio from a tiny electronic device.
In other examples I've seen [1], you see a farmer with his auto-farming machinery but he's using enormous levers to interact with it. And then there's the frequent use cast iron to build some of this "future tech" when of course, not much is made from cast iron these days.
It makes me wonder what things we literally can't imagine about the future now. Or how different technologies that we can imagine could come together to produce entirely new things.
[1] http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year...
Comment · 11 years ago
Chubby Checker FTW.
Comment · 11 years ago
Taking measurements will usually prompt questions of "how do I change the results over time?" So, although the difficulty of improving the thing doesn't change; the chance of taking action to improve the thing does change for the better.
Measurements will usually encourage attention and effort to change in a way that non-measured things are unlikely to.
On that basis, I'd argue that even things that are very difficult to measure quantitatively would benefit if a suitable proxy was found that could be measured.
Of course, you do have to be careful that your proxy is suitable!
Agreed that they do present an opportunity to get a little exercise though, which would be missed in the "everyone stand" world.