Mark's Pages

November 12, 2009:

The stress of parking lots. Brownian motion: cars, shoppers with baskets, kids with iPods, coming from anywhere, turning at random in their own peculiar zig-zags impossible to predict.

Inefficiency of panhandlers. If you're on the corner where cars turn to exit, you'll only ever have physical access to the first two stopped at red lights; and of those two, only ever the right-side passengers, if any. Calculate the number of physically possible targets per hour and divide by some reasonable constant of donations per target to arrive at a total realistic daily income that can't be more than ten dollars for twelve hours work. It would be more likely to canvass the lot for fallen coins.