Airports are a necessary evil. I try to spend as little time in them as possible when flying, and I try to waste as little time as possible near them when picking up or dropping off somebody. It’s a pain. That’s why I was thrilled to read about some sanity at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. From the article:

By Thanksgiving, drivers can park on a lot on airport grounds, free of charge, until they get a call from their visitor, on the ground and waiting for pickup.

Brilliant! The existing design forced cars into an automotive holding pattern, circling a mile-long loop until the arriving party was ready to be picked up. There was nowhere to park, and idling at the baggage-claim doors for more than a few seconds produced quick rebukes from the airport police. The loop was a huge waste of fuel, and the extra traffic of people circling about made for irksome congestion.

The new system sounds wonderful. No more mindless looping. No more fumbling with cell phones while driving. No more well-intentioned-but-very-annoying reminders that “the white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only.”

I applaud the airport commission for a move that makes tremendous sense.

This afternoon I helped advance the collective knowledge of the world.  I participated in a psychology study.

Stanford has a storied history of psychology studies, such as the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.  Fortunately, the study I took part in was quite benign.

The two-part, web-based test took place in a small room in the psychology building.  The first part resembled the Age Project: I was shown photos of faces and was asked to judge their ages.  In the second part, I was shown a short video of two blue squares moving around the screen.  The one question I was asked about the video: did I think of the squares as people?  That association hadn’t crossed my mind, but I did think the video looked a bit like Pong.

Even though the proctor emphasized the second part of the study, I suspect that the first part was the focus of the research.  The follow-up questions were primarily about the faces.  Also, the face photos seemed odd in some hard-to articulate way.  I know that at least one of the face photos was shown twice, and some of the photos seemed to have strange proportions or non-matching features.  Maybe it was my imagination running wild in a desperate effort to discover the true thrust of the study.  Maybe what I perceived was real.

With studies, the true goal is often veiled to prevent bias, so I might never know the actual goal.  With luck, I will run across it in print someday.

Homework was made more interesting this evening when an earthquake (my first!) spiced things up.

I was sitting at my desk when I began to feel a vibration in the floor.  My first thought was that a large truck was driving by, but the noise was missing.  Several seconds elapsed before my mind clicked: it was an earthquake!

With the magnitude 5.6 tremor still in progress, I ran outside.  All of the non-Californians were giddy.  The natives couldn’t have cared less.

The midterm that I just completed was one of the most difficult exams I’ve ever taken.  I feel ill.

One can judge the difficulty of an exam by the number of people who leave before the allotted time is up.  Nobody left early.

We had just finished the meeting. Two hours of discussion, done. A handful of action items for each of the four of us, assigned. The meeting wasn’t unproductive, nor was it acrimonious, but we were all tired by the end. Suddenly, that all changed.

Our meeting was in the d.school: a large, open, stimulating place, similar in many respects to something at ideo. The odd meeting hour meant we had the place and all of the fun stuff in it to ourselves. The key to our rejuvenation was in the corner: a big pile of toys.

Nerf darts are fun! We each grabbed a Nerf gun, a target vest, and plenty of Nerf darts. Weapons loaded, we formed teams and began chasing each other around the vast d.school space. Darts and laughter filled the air. It was great!

When I have a company, each employee is going to be issued a Nerf weapons. It will be like 1999, but with profits!