Elevator logistics, it turns out, have some serious theoretical issues to resolve.

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset.

Having elevators work well is not a trivial thing:

The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.

Even more interesting is the psychology of how humans place themselves in elevators:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.

This makes me remember a really funny SNL skit with David Schwimmer that I thought was subtly brilliant (pictured at top).

Schwimmer was in an elevator, and people kept coming in and standing…oddly. For instance, he stood in the middle when he was by himself, then dutifully moved to the corner when other people got in. But those people didn’t stand in the opposite corner as expected — they stood right next to him in his corner. In another instance, the only other passenger turned around and faced the back of the car. Schwimmer hesitated for a moment, then did the same.

It was fascinating in that it revealed some of the ingrained psychological and social frameworks we deal with daily and don’t even realize. I can’t find a video of it, but here’s a transcript of the skit, which includes the picture from this post.

I’m waiting for a bubble to burst over there. You can’t sustain this level of development forever.

Officially, Dec. 31 marks the end of the joint venture that teamed megaproject contractor Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority to build the dizzying array of underground highways, bridges, ramps and a new tunnel under Boston Harbor — all while the city remained open for business.

The project was so complex it’s been likened to performing open heart surgery on a patient while the patient is wide awake.

I’ve driven the Big Dig. It makes you feel like a prairie dog — you run in underground tunnels, just popping up above ground long enough to get your bearings, then you’re back down again.

There’s a nice sidebar in the article that shows all the construction techniques that were invented to make the Big Dig work. One of my favorites:

Tunnel Jacking: Part of the project called for a tunnel extension under an active Amtrak railroad. Project managers realized the soil was so unstable that the rail lines could collapse. Engineers built a gigantic concrete box open on both ends, froze the soil using hundreds of rods and nudged or jacked the box under the railroad a few feet at a time.

Because electricity is needed to make the ice, water is frozen in large silver tanks at night when power demands are low. The cool air emanating from the ice blocks is then piped through the building. At night the water is frozen again and the cycle repeated.

[…] Ice storage at Credit Suisse lowers the facility’s peak energy use by 900 kilowatts, and reduces overall electric usage by 2.15 million kilowatt-hours annually — enough to power about 200 homes, officials said.

Great quote here on the reliability of the system.

“When you make something mechanical, it can break, but a big block of ice … isn’t going to do anything but melt,” […]

Everything old is new again.

Developers of a 1,680-foot (512 meters) skyscraper still under construction in oil-rich Dubai has claimed that it has become the world’s tallest building, surpassing Taiwan’s Taipei 101 which has dominated the global skyline at 1,667 feet (508 meters) since 2004.

This means: no electricity, no garbage, no packaged products, no driving, no flying, etc. It’s pretty extreme.

I enjoy the blog and I respect what the guy is trying to do. It’s not for everyone, but it’s an interesting expirement.

Colin, the guy, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about what he’s doing. He said something in this piece that has totally stuck with me.

[we] feel entitled to heat our empty homes all day…

That has really hit me hard: I heat an empty house all day. This has really started to bother me. I mean, we could turn the thermostat down if we wanted, but we don’t. Additionally, there are other things in my house that are burning energy that need to be regulated other than just the thermostat.

Because of this, I’ve decided that my house needs “modes.” This correlates with the fact that there are different modes of activity in my house. At any given time, myself, my wife, and my three kids could be:

• All at home, all over the house
• Asleep in our bedrooms
• All in the basement for several hours every night
• Out of the house at school and work, but due back later
• Out of town for days at one of my son’s soccer tournaments

Each of these modes requires different heating, lighting, and water requirements. I want a quick way to put my house in a mode, and have the mechanics of my house react accordingly.

Example —

A couple of days a week, both my wife and I are out of house. I work, and Annie teaches preschool. I’d love it if, on the way out the door, my wife could press an “At Work” button. This would turn the thermostat down to 50 degrees and shut off all the lights in the house (more on this later) and selected outlets (the TV, the radio in the bathoom, etc.).

When Annie comes home, she could press the “Active” button which raises the thermostat (she can turn on lights as she needs them).

Later that night, after dinner, and after we all head down to the basement, we put the house in “Basement” mode. This localizes heat to the basement, and shuts off all the lights and selected outlets on the upper two levels of the house.

When we got to bed, we press the “Asleep” mode, which lowers the heat to 65 degrees, and shuts off all the lights and selected outlets.

The next day, when we leave for a soccer tournament, the put the house in “Out of Town” mode, which lowers the thermostat to 45 degrees, shuts off everything in the house, and turns off the water heaters.

(Now, I know that there is such a thing as timed thermostats, but we can’t make this work for us. Annie teaches part time so there’s no set schedule that we can wrap a timer around.)

If you think about it, there’s a lot of things you could wrap up into modes. For instance, “At Work,” “Asleep,” and “Out of Town” should probably turn the burglar alarm on. When you’re home, perhaps the answering machine picks up on four rings instead of two (and a big neon sign above your house says, “Come rob us, we’re not home…”).

Another idea: be able to change modes via your cell phone. So when you leave the office, you can switch the house to “Active” mode remotely so that it’s toasty warm when you get there (wussie).

So, that’s the idea. All you home automation junkies: how close is the do-it-yourself technology to this ideal? Could I make this happen now, if I wanted?

Now, a little more about light switches…

The light switch is a fundamentally broken device. It has two modes, and you have physically present at the device to change the mode. This is stupid.

Don Norman, in his book “The Design of Everyday Things” solved this problem for his research lab. They had a central console that would allow them to turn lights on and off around the lab, or turn them all off at once.

While my house modes idea is neat, I would settle for something even more realistic: the ability to turn the lights off in my house en masse. On the way out the door every morning, or before I go to bed, all I want to do is press a button that says, “Shut off all the friggin’ lights in the house.”

Is that too much to ask?

This famous New Yorker article, published two decades after the problem was found and fixed, explained what happened and how they fixed it.

[…] in the spirit of intellectual play, he wanted to see if they were just as strong in winds hitting from forty-five degrees. His new calculations surprised him. In four of the eight chevrons in each tier, a quartering wind increased the swain by forty per cent. Under normal circumstances, the wind braces would have absorbed the extra load without so much as a tremor. But the circumstances were not normal. A few weeks before, during a meeting in his office, LeMessurier had learned of a crucial change in the way the braces were joined.

A good story about a guy that screwed up and admitted it rather than tried to cover it up.

Anyway, a good article here about several different projects involving Atlantis-like coolness.

[...] we tend to forget about the seas below and another once-popular 21st century prediction: that one day we'll be living on and under the oceans.

The idea isn't so far-fetched. As Earth gets increasingly crowded and polluted, some 225 million square miles of prime real estate representing 71 percent of the planet's surface is largely unused. It's remarkable considering the oceans promise plenty of living space, fresh seafood, entertainment, and desalinized water. Surely, technology can make this happen.

Turns out, it can and it soon will -- if not quite the way we first imagined. But before diving into what the near future holds, let's resurface what the distant past once promised.

We've talked about a lot of these before, particularly Hydropolis.

The overhaul, to begin next year, will double the canal's capacity by adding a third set of locks that are 40 percent longer and 60 percent wider than the current ones. Constructed by the United States in 1914, the canal these days is congested and too small to handle the world's largest container vessels and tankers.

I just watched an Extreme Engineering a few weeks ago about this exact thing. The width of the canal has been a huge issue, as tankers have been constructed for years now to fit exactly within the confines of the canal.

There's even terminology for it: a Panamax class tanker is one that's the maximum dimensions possible for the canal -- 106 ft. across, 965 ft. long, and sitting no more than 39 ft. in the water. When you consider that the biggest ship in the world -- the Jahre Viking -- is 229 ft. wide, over 1,500 feet long, and sits 69 ft. in the water, you get an idea how this can be a problem. Compared to ships on this scale, you actually have to be pretty small to fit through the canal.

Just for giggles after that show, I went looking for the canal on Google Maps. I didn't type anything in, I just browsed for it, and managed to find it. There's a big lake in the narrowest part of Panama called Gatun Lake -- it's tough to miss. Ships pass through this lake from one side of Panama to the other. It takes about 10 hours to make the crossing, and relatively little of that time is spent in the actual locks.

As luck would have it, a massive tanker was navigating the southern locks when the Google Maps picture was taken, and you can see very clearly just how tight the fit really is. (Actually, it wasn't luck. Given that about 35 ships a day pass through, it would have been lucky to find a moment when there wasn't a ship in the locks.)

All right, let's finish this baby up with a relevant palindrome, shall we?

A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama.

Awesome.

I hadn't heard about this place until a friend forwarded a message with photos about it, and sure enough, it's real. I can't even imagine what it would take to create and maintain a 6,000 ton snow base and an indoor temperature of -1°C to -2°C when the temperature outside is nearing 50°C, but they do it, year-round.

Surprisingly, the cost isn't terribly high; I priced two adults for a full day pass on my birthday (as if that's gonna happen!) and it's only US$75.50. That's comparable to the same day passes Terry Peak. While Terry Peak isn't open year round, it's much, much easier to get to.

Google Maps link
skidubai.com

(And remember the "2." You see, the Earth itself is "Biosphere 1," so this was named "Biosphere 2" since it was, like...the second. I didn't get that at the time. I thought there was another one of these greenhouse-thingies lying around somewhere.)

Looks like Biosphere 2, the world's largest terrarium, may soon be history. Reporter Joseph Barrios of the morning daily broke the news last week that Fairfield Homes is making a deal to buy the Biosphere's spectacular 1,600 acres to develop a master-planned community. Evidently, a three-acre simulation of the planet isn't a selling point for buyers of luxury homes these days.

Did anything ever come of that project? I remember it being very cool and futuristic, but did we really learn anything. Or was it just an excuse for Pauly Shore to make another movie?

Shippers bringing toys or furniture from China to ports on the East Coast of the USA sometimes must loiter for days before transiting the 50-mile route. The largest cargo carriers, known as "post-Panamax" ships, are too wide to fit through the 92-year-old canal at all.

[...] the canal authority is proposing a $5.25 billion project that would double the canal's capacity by adding a deeper, wider third lane.

According to the article, a typical container ship will pay $65,000 in fees to get through the canal. It's based on size, because in 1936, some guy paid 36-cents to swim it.

The engineering firm designing the thing is way overbuilding it; it will be able to hold up to 72 million pounds, to deal with the people load, the wind load, possible seismic activity, and of course the occasional jerk who feels the need to jump up & down on the end of the thing to see if he can make it bounce.

The Skywalk is slated to open this August, but the park is having trouble finding someone willing to write an insurance policy to cover it.

Pull a favorite book from your library shelf and watch a cabinet section recess to reveal a hidden passageway. Twist a candlestick and your fireplace rotates, granting access to a hidden room. Custom-designed switches allow you to activate your automated feature any way you wish.

Cheesy Flash site, but a cool concept. Be sure to check out the videos.

Via Boing Boing.

No matter which of the two floors I'm on when entering the elevator, there's only logical button to push. Why must I choose a floor at all?

He's right. There should just be a button labeled "Go."