Rocket Science

I won’t be the first, nor the last, to say that the movie industry really needs to figure out distribution of high-quality digital movies to consumers. As it stands now, consumers are hampered by an odd mixture of sales practice that governs when, how and in what format movies are available. Basically, I want to be able to get movies when, where and how I want them–and I’m willing to pay a reasonable cost.

The nature of technology has reduced the cost of distribution from a few dollars (to press and package a movie on DVD) to nearly nothing (in bandwidth to distribute a movie over the Web).

(Ok that’s a gross over-simplification since DVD distribution includes storage, delivery, shelf space, etc. But that’s not really what I think I need to pay for. I’m not your average consumer, I buy what I want based on interest, knowledge of what’s been shown in theaters and maybe a little Web-research, not just what’s presented to me at a store or on a shelf. Having to go to a store and walk the aisle to browse for a movie (to rent or buy) is not something I really do–it’s rather arcane these days. In fact, it’s why companies like Blockbuster are having problems. Also I used what I perceive as the costs for DVD duplication and not Blu-Ray which has higher manufacturing costs for which I don’t have an order of magnitude estimate.)

So, how do I want to purchase/rent movies? It’s a little complicated. Maybe…

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Today, tickets to Blizzcon 2009 went on sale at 10am PDT. I hopped into line a couple minutes after 10am (figuring they’d be a little late, turns out they weren’t). While watching my place in queue drop from over 12,800, I got to thinking…I wonder how Blizzard’s handling the load/queue this year. (2008, which I didn’t try to get tickets to, was the year of the dreaded failoc.) So I started Googling about, I didn’t find the tech they are using this year, mostly because I got distracted by these two sets of articles.

Single line grocery store queues are more efficient than individual lines for each register (from Opitimization at Checkout). And also a NY Times article on A Long Line for a Shorter Wait at the Supermarket. You can do the math yourself, but I’m willing to be an experimentalist in this one. Though I have yet to visit a supermarket using this system.

Grocery store lines lead to me wondering about why the other lane always seems to move faster when driving in traffic. While I didn’t find a post on that…I did find another couple of interesting sites. Starting with this NPR story on Navigating The Science (And Sociology) Of ‘Traffic’ and the author’s website for the book. After reading the excerpt about merging “late”, I recalled hearing the same thing (from my friend Flora I think). So, this I’ve tried, and it does seem to work better, certainly for me individually. It “feels” that the author’s right a “zipper” would be more efficient–assuming drivers would let others merge, and folks didn’t try to game/beat the system. But then many things come down to that.

Last night while reheating leftovers I was reminded that, yes, Virginia…I am a rocket scientist.

So, where I used to live in Providence, UT was something like 4,700 feet in elevation. Where I live now in Lexington, MA its like 250 feet.

One of the tricks I use with some leftovers is to use steam to heat them up, it keeps meat from getting too dried out when reheating things in the microwave. Can you see where this is going yet?

So yes, I expected the water to boil faster here, but I didn’t realize how much faster it would actually be. What used to take 5-10 minutes to boil was like 1 minute now. (The heat was ostensibly set to the same amount.) Hrm, I’m going to have to pay more attention (or resist the urge to use “medium” heat) more now.

Thankfully I really couldn’t set off the smoke detectors with steam…

Well, that’s sorta what this post is about. So, yes I know the sun rises in the east, and sets in the west. Before I moved to Utah, I lived for 32 years in places where the ocean was right there, just west of me…not to the east. I realized a couple weeks ago one of the things that was confusing me living on the East coast is that the Atlantic Ocean is the east…not the west…

Yes, I am a rocket scientist sometimes.

So, all this time I thought I had comments turned on for my posts…wrong! Oops. So if you happen to have a comment about overly perfumed detergents, cool elevator features, or even want to laugh at my aversion to mint chocolate chip ice cream you can now do so.

There’s a reason I titled this site…Rocket Science.

(Update: I found a reversed Я to use in the post from Wikipedia – Faux Cyrillic.)