More True Stories From College.
I'm British. I know how to queue.
That's one of my favorite lines from HHGG. And it nicely brings us to today's topic. Every time I pick what I think is the "short" line at the grocery store or a fast food restaurant or the entrance to Disneyland, and then it turns out that the people in front of you are retardedly slow, I think back to a particular Operations Research class. The esteemed demi-god, Dr. Coleman, was introducing the topic of queuing and talking about the different types of queues (single queue, single-server; single queue, multi-server; multi-queue, multi-server) and how you can predict the average wait time if you know the arrival probability and distribution and the average process time. This is used to determine how many cash registers you need open, or how many people you need working the car wash. Fascinating stuff.
But as usual, Tom was goofing off in the back with Ildy and drew a hilarious picture of what happens whenever he gets in line at a multi-queue, multi-server system. It went something like this:
Every time this happens to me (like today at the grocery store when the lady in front of me wanted to cash a check and the clerk had to take her to the special customer service check-cashing area and shut down the register for about five minutes, after I had already unloaded my stuff), I think of Tom, Ildy, and that OR class.
Some of us spent our OR time wisely and on useful things--like sleep.
ReplyDeleteDr. Coleman is one of the coolest teachers ever. In ORII, I finished the final and was at Francis Hall talking to a classmate about the test. He began discussing the last problem. I thought he was insane. Then I realized that I had not turned the last page of the test over, and had therefore missed all of the last page test questions. I looked at my watch. There were two minutes of testing time left. I ran back to Cosmas and attempted to explain that I had unknowingly missed the last page of problems. It didn't matter to Dr. C that I had been discussing the test with another student (which is much frowned upon); he just silently handed me my test and gave me ten minutes to buzz through those problems. I admittedly had no clue what I was doing, but wrote down a bunch of formulas. They must have been the correct ones, or maybe Dr. C took extreme pity on me, but at any rate, he gave me an A on the test and in the class. Need I mention that I slept during EVERY ORII class?? I couldn't help it. It was at 4:15pm, right when my body just decided to shut down. I probably slept more in that class than I did each night. Man, college life is tough. It's teachers like Dr. C that make it cool though.
The picture in this blog post made the Murloc gurgle with glee!
ReplyDelete~RlrlrlRLRLLRLGRLGRLGlglglglgl!~
Does the image processing ability of this monitor/video card arrangement prevent me from reading the captions on the diagram? Or is the image just too small to see?
ReplyDeleteWell, firstly, you might want to try clicking on the picture to view the larger image.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, if you're using a crap-tacular browser like IE 6, then you might want to go to Tools - Internet Options, and under the Advanced tab, go to the Multimedia section and uncheck "Enable Automatic Image Resizing" because that automatically make the image unreadable, for your convenience.
Or you could just use a decent browser like FireFox, which allows you to flip back and forth from scaled to full-size image just by clicking on it.
Tom forgot to add "mother with two hysterically screaming children who while she was shopping had added $100 worth of merchandise to the basket while she wasn't looking which she won't realize until the clerk has already rung up her total, and will all have to be un-purchased with the assistance of the manager who is busy elsewhere" to the line.
ReplyDeleteAnd would you be that mother or are your children far too well behaved?
ReplyDelete