“Now, children, check out this vintage car. How old do you think it is?”<\/p>\n
“It was made before 2015, Miss!”<\/p>\n
“That’s right, Garl. Why don’t you tell the rest of the class how you knew that.”<\/p>\n
“Because it still has an old Go lever, Miss!”<\/p>\n
“That’s right! That Go foot-lever used to be called the ‘accelerator pedal’. The military made sure that manufacturers removed those from cars after the Usability Wars of 2015. Can anyone guess what pressing the accelerator pedal down to, say, half-way would do?”<\/p>\n
“Miss! Miss! Did it get you halfway to your destination?”<\/p>\n
“No, Hrum. Tools weren’t goal-oriented back then – even the expensive, sophisticated ones, like cars. The drivers had to adapt to the abilities of the car. Who wants to have another try?”<\/p>\n
“Did it make the car go half of its maximum speed, Miss?”<\/p>\n
“Good try, Kwel. Getting closer!”<\/p>\n
“Ooh! Halfway must be stop! Further down is forward, further up is reverse!”<\/p>\n
“Nice thinking, Kwel! But that might be tricky find the stop position in a hurry. Anyone else?”<\/p>\n
“Hmmm… it’s called an ‘accelerator pedal’, right? So it must accelerate at half of its maximum acceleration? Taking your foot off the accelerator would mean cruise at the current speed! To slow down you’d hit the stop lever!”<\/p>\n
“The stop lever is called the ‘brake pedal’, Laos, and I’m afraid the ‘accelerator pedal’ is poorly named. Some people called it a ‘throttle’ instead – does that help?”<\/p>\n
“Throttle, Miss? But surely a throttle would slow you down?”<\/p>\n
“Okay, let me explain, children. The pedal controlled the amount of fuel to the engine. But it wasn’t that simple. Halfway didn’t mean half of the maximum amount of fuel was getting through. The amount of fuel actually getting through the throttle was related to the accelerator position and<\/em> the speed of the car… no wait… the speed of the engine<\/em> which is related to the speed of the car, but depends on the gear selected. So then the amount of fuel that reaches the engine affects the final speed (depending on the level of drag, which is proportional to the square of the velocity) and<\/em> it also affects the acceleration to get to that speed.”<\/p>\n “Wow, that must have been hard to pilot, Miss.”<\/p>\n “Yes, it was – it took lots of practise before the relationship became clear. But people didn’t realise back then that there might be a better way. They just used the same systems their parents, and their parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents’ parents used.”<\/p>\n “And is that how the Usability Wars started?”<\/p>\n “No, no that wasn’t the only reason. But it played a small part.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “People didn’t realise back then that there might be a better way. They just used the same systems their parents, and their parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents’ parents used.”<\/p>\n “And is that how the Usability Wars started?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25,21,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-observation","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}