Queues
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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.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
