no... after you...

My office overlooks the college’s courtyard, which one enters from either building through a revolving door at each end. Sometimes I just stare out my window and watch people go through the revolving doors, and I’m becoming very interested in the instantaneous little “social contract” that happens between people as they approach a revolving door from opposite sides. ”Are you going first? Am I going first? Are we going to go through at the same time?” Because you have to adjust your pace just a tiny bit to make sure the process goes smoothly. And I’ve seldom seen the process break down... like when you wind up doing the Sidewalk Shuffle with someone because you can’t decide who is going to pass on which side. I’ve never seen anybody get themselves crushed or be forced to stop moving altogether while waiting for the other person. It’s very interesting.

And the whole thing makes me want to do really geeky things like wire up motion detectors to measure the speeds of people as they approach revolving doors, or to model the whole process with a computer program. Some part of me thinks that there must be underlying principle that could be applied to data packet transmission or nuclear scattering or... something.

It’s a horrible thing to be a science nerd sometimes.

D.