Skip to main content

Shape sorters are wonderful

Small children often have those clever little toys where they have to push different shapes through holes in the side of a container. Each hole is cunningly crafted so only the right shape can be passed through. If a toy designer can manage this trick, why can't car manufacturers?

The reason I ask is because I did something very stupid yesterday. I was on the way to give a seminar in Manchester. Quite near my destination, with plenty of time, I thought I'd fill up the car with fuel, so I could head off straight for home after the lunchtime event. Thinking through my presentation, I went through those habitual motions of pumping 40 litres of petrol into the tank. As I put the nozzle back in its holster, my stomach seemed to drop out of my body. The car I'd just filled up with 40 litres of lead-free petrol was a diesel car.

The strangest moment of that day was going to pay for the petrol that I neither wanted nor could use. It just seemed really weird.

As it happened, for a disaster, it all worked out quite well. The seminar was for a police force, who were able to get me off the motorway service station to the location and back using the service entrance, cutting a great chunk off the time it would have taken otherwise. The AA were brilliant, turning up on time and taking me to a garage that pumped out the tank. Okay, I lost about 3 hours and a bit of cash for the pump-out, but it could have been a lot worse. And everyone was really nice about it, not laughing at me at all, really.

I was stupid. I was distracted. But I'm still inclined to blame the car makers. If the manufacturer of a child's toy can design something with five different shapes that won't go in the other holes, why couldn't they have set a standard for filling tanks with nozzles that similarly won't go in the wrong type of tank? It would have been trivial. But bad design has let stupidity like mine flourish. Both the AA man and the garage said they deal with at least three cases a week. Good design should make the default action the right action. That's certainly not the case here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope