As you mention, the FM-1 blew up thanks to the plethora of different firmware options that suddenly appeared, and it’s interesting that Behringer just announced new units (Kick and Ignite) with open firmware too.
For quite a long period in my 20s I would buy very worthy intellectual non-fiction books (based on reviews or recommendations) and then struggle to make headway with them. In retrospect, I think I was just usually too tired from work and life to have the mental energy to focus.
I then read an article by (IIRC) Irvine Welsh, the nub of which was ‘just read something’ - and reading fiction rather than non-fiction, and even trashy fiction rather than worthy fiction, was immeasurably better than not reading at all.
It was like I was given permission to not have to try and be intellectual and serious: (or pretentious?) and I’ve never looked back. Amongst many others, and to my surprise, I found I enjoy (what one might call) mid-level science-fiction and have happily worked through quite a lot now.
I don't read nearly as much as I should but I do listen to a lot of audiobooks. My wife scoffs at my collection, a lot of spy or military thrillers like Mitch Rapp and Jack Ryan (The Company is one of my favorites) but also Bobiverse and Expanse are great. Meanwhile she buys lots of books but reads none of them. Audiobooks aren't a perfect substitute for reading but they do stop me from doomscrolling or listening to stupid podcasts.
As for podcasts, Hardcore History and Blowback are my favorites that aren't political junk. I know people have their opinions on pop history media but it's interesting content and entertaining.
Basically telling a story from history and explaining what went wrong and why. Some of the stories are dramatised with professional actors and sound effects.
- Reading helps hone your ability to focus your attention on one thing for sustained periods.
- Getting back into the habit of reading by reading "trashy" or otherwise easy books can serve as a stepping stone to reading more difficult or rewarding books. This worked for me when I fell out of the reading habit for a while and was bouncing off books that I wanted to read that were less immediately engaging.
I would also say that while I agree that being alone with your mind is quite healthy and something we would all ideally make time for, I don't think that it's the alternative most people are opting for over reading.
Although everyone’s experience varies a little - for me, the prep is quite miserable, not because of the obvious, but because I feel very dehydrated/hung over for hours during it. Conversely, a friend who has relatively regular colonoscopies doesn’t share this at all.
(It doesn’t change your point, but amusingly) I’m 97% sure I caught my first COVID infection from… the admin/consenting clinic visit prior to a colonoscopy. :)
...that and - combined with clickbaity headlines that are, sometimes, not all that newsworthy... ugh... i actually do filter 'Tesla' from my RSS feeds because it is that bad...
For PCB quotes yes, but this kind of thing can be gamed by competitors. I think this is why there isn't great price info for many brick and mortar and online shops now..
Which is more important? Blocking competitors from gaming your price quotes, or making the buying experience instantly better for every single customer and potential customer?
Most of the ones (for cnc and sheet metal at least) I’ve used do an estimate while you poke around and select options and then you send it for a final validation and quote.
If you're deliberately creating additional inconvenience to potential customers to handle your own resource/scaling issues... that's a 'you problem', and you need to figure out a better way to run things, or customers will just run to competitors who've already done so.
Yeah mostly we just haven't got around to it as the burning fire is always increasing capacity vs demand. Defo agree we should not require login though!
Rational people act according to the incentives they’re provided. If that incentive is “follow these new instructions/directives or you’ll lose your job” (or worse?) it takes an especially principled person to object.
Appending the ‘big’ from e.g. Big Tobacco/Pharma/Sugar to unlikely things is one of my favourite occasional jokes. I especially appreciate the double joke with Big Bird :)
Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
Pretty much all large public transit authorities already collect all sorts of data about requirements and usage, and have scientists/engineers on payroll to optimize the network within the economic and political constraints these systems operate in.
I know my city has that data, but it doesn't help if you optimize for the wrong thing. AFAICT the highest priority is that "everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop", resulting in serpentine routes the article decries.
"everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop" is a political choice. It might result in a system that is not optimal from the perspective of a different metric. If you think that different metric would serve people better, go advocate for it politically. But realize that whatever metric gets adopted will still be a political choice. There is no escaping that.
Of course, as you say in the OP, one can certainly encourage the public to use simulations based on publicly made-available data as a guide during these political discussions to convince people that a certain metric is better than others.
Not much. People plan for the lowest common denominator. If service levels surge during certain days or hours that's great, but people don't want to get burned by a period of thin service. Imagine if Fedex said overnight mail could no longer be delivered on Thursdays in certain towns. You'd have to remember to check if today's Wednesday and if the recipient's town is a low service zone. Or you could just switch to a more consistently available network like UPS.
Most transit is already biased to the 9-5 with thin nighttime service. As such most people uber back from the bar than wait for the 30 min owl bus service.
The interesting thing with transit is that optimal may not be the most optimal. E.g. your model might suggest half mile stop frequencies. Seems good, until the public comment period and all the old folks who take the line show up and ask their particular stop not be displaced.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.
Buses can stop every other block, but in practice, they rarely do. Most bus routes that I've taken are neither full nor busy with passengers at every stop. Certainly not all day long. Most bus routes can get away with bypassing several miles' worth of stops at a time. Passengers tend to cluster around certain spots at certain times. Even the main routes have busy times, as well as quiet times in long stretches.
By building in the capability to stop very frequently, they can serve the most people and every area in the route, equally. But day to day, hour to hour, they are definintely bypassing stops, and I can name at least 3 bus routes where the vehicle will certainly reach the speed limit of 45mph or so in-between.
Depends on bus usage in your city. Mine is pretty high so it stops every stop. I’ve had bus trips that were 50 stops a leg and people are stopping at every one. That is a lot of delay right there. Doesn’t even get better at night; service pattern contracts then so ridership per bus is still high enough even at those hours. There ought to be more express service offerings that would skip over local stops.
Bus speed is also reduced by people scanning tickets etc. THe simple answer is to skip the charade about pretending public transport is a business and concentrate on moving people and safety.
Bus always has longer dwell time than rail in general. The biggest time sink I see is in disabled passenger operations. Ramp has to come down, passenger goes in, then the bus operator has to leave their cockpit to lift up the disabled area seats to be flush to the wall, and hook in the tiedown straps in the wheelchair, before returning back to the cockpit, closing their door, buckling in, raising ramp again, and finally going.
For trains there is of course no difference in dwell time between disabled and able bodied passengers. Not sure how this issue gets solved with bus if the issue is they are too rocky to not have the chairs strapped down. BRT platforms would solve the ramp issue with flush floor boarding but you still have the strapping down delay.
Ticketing systems slow both bus and trains. I remember the gov spent $500M on TownHall in Sydney just to rework the entrance/exit pathways to improve efficiency.
How many years will it take to get the money from tickets to payback the renovation costs ?
Like many things public transport, stop trying to make it a business and make it a service for the public.
(source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry).
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much).
You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general.
The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home.
- once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned.
On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel.
The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus.
In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week,
and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string
(so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
UPDATE, for some reason edit did not work. (source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry).
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much). You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general. The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home. - once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
UPDATE: an example of the differences in the setups:
Typically, Europe and US will fund/run buses/public transport differently.
in US, traditionally, you would task a company with running the whole
operation: Both plan the services to be provided,
and then implement/deploy/operate them.
So they would both decide the structure of the bus services to be offered,
and then do the actual operations of the same plan.
in Europe/many parts, they instead divide like this:
A public transport authority designs the structure of the services to be operated
(this many buses, running these roads, at these intervals,
and ALSO _at these times_).
The 'times' part is important, because it determines which transfers are possible
(between two lines).
That package will then be tendered to private companies, who bid on running those planned operations;
they are then paid by the public transport authority, what they offered to operate for in the contract.
These two structures give wildly different transport structures and operations structures.
In the european model, it leads to very complex timetables,
where bus services are trimmed to the perceived demand - every week, hour, day where
the demand is perceived to be less, is cut from the planned timetables.
So when you look at the time tables, you need to check complex date periods
for whether the bus you want is operating today or not.
The reasoning is of course, that since the transport authority must pay for each trip serviced,
they try to cut any trip they don't "need".
Contrast that to the american, "older" model, with a full-service operator.
They already have their money, and are already running and out on the roads with their equipment.
To them, it doesnt matter much, whether they run 5 additional trips between 22:30 and 23:30 or not;
they already paid the costs of having a driver present, and bought the buses,
so once they are running, might as well keep them running
(a similar thing in the middle of the day, in the lull.)
I of course "prefer" the european model, but I can see the issues it causes too (it makes things more complex but
better trimmed and fitted.)
As an example, these differences made it so we had difficulty offering the same planning software
for europeans and americans, because the planners simply needed different tools for their scenarios.
I live in Helsinki, where there is a good tram and bus network. Every now and again a major road will be dug up, in the city center, and trams often get rerouted for a few months to work around that.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
The best answer for many problems, is to avoid the action in the first place. Just because you can do it doesnt mean you should do it, and public transport is mostly thought to serve commuting.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
due to how hard it is to change the networks, I think there's a lot of inefficient route design. if you look at SEPTA in Philadelphia, they're in the middle of realigning a lot of their bus routes for the first time in 60 yrs and ridership has increased noticeably since they started.
Well, there is some of that. It's not near as much as you might guess. Predictable transit is very helpful because people plan their life around it. What the data you're looking at will show where the bottlenecks are, and yes, you can remove a few bottlenecks and make people's life a little bit better, but it's not going to be a major change because of major change will not show up in the data until well after it's made.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
It is and it makes my point exactly. People have arranged their lives around the east west line they live on. They wouldn't accept a job on a different east-west line even though as a crow flies it's not far - Getting there is not easy.
The question that we cannot answer for Manhattan data is what if Manhattan added a few North South lines or I can think of hundreds of different things that Manhattan could do. I don't live there and I haven't studied the data in depth so I couldn't tell you what is a good useful thing for Manhattan to do. But I can tell you that there are lines that would over the next few decades greatly change how people in Manhattan and the rest of the city live. Unfortunately, Manhattan is particularly bad about the costs and so they can't even afford to remove the obvious bottlenecks much less a whole new line that would over time be make the city much better.
No wait - Manhattan only has N-S lines (well, Manhattan is tilted, so more precisely, only has "Avenue-parallel" lines). There are no E-W ("Street-parallel") lines because it is too narrow.
You might explore "gray" semi-formal bus networks. Where the on-the-table gap is sufficient to fund businesses. And where the efforts to shut them down, provide insights into mechanisms, incentives, and interests, around that inefficiency.
Same. It rankles when I have to - usually because of some sort of antiquated approach to bureaucracy, like contracts or CDAs that demand a wet signature (despite then accepting an emailed poor quality scan of said wet signature).
This new paradigm makes me happy.
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