The Mu

Around here, escalating is what you do when you don’t like the answer you’re getting from an employee so you raise the issue with their boss. An escalator is a rarely-used pejorative describing someone who constantly “goes over your head” to get things done. But this post is about moving stairs, not the office-politics species of escalator.

Common escalator etiquette is to stand to the right and allow people in a hurry to walk past you on the left. This is ingrained in urban culture. Newcomers sometimes fail to realize this unwritten rule. So the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) wrote it down: they put signs on all escalators several years ago that simply stated the phrase: “Stand right, walk left”.

Today the escalator industry and various safety experts have declared that you’re always supposed to stand on an escalator. You’re never supposed to walk. The TTC will now be removing all their helpful little signs. They acknowledge that last year over 100 people were hurt on escalators, and most of those injuries were caused by people rushing past and knocking others down.

So I guess the new rule is: Stand right, stand left. Chill out.

I was just reading an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s book about Albert Einstein. It is fascinating to see how the brilliant man ascribed two things to God: the orderliness of the universe and the unknown.

When Einstein’s theories reached their boundaries, the unexplained part could most easily be given over to a deity. And with each new observation that Einstein made, he basically concluded that there was so much sense and order to the way things were, that whoever was in charge of the whole universe could not have made it any other way.