Hostel Shower Science
Here’s a familiar experience*: you come back from a long day in the hills, everyone piles into the showers, and nobody can get them to the right temperature. Every time you fiddle with the taps to get it right, it affects the temperature your neighbours are getting, who fiddle with their taps, which affects your temperature, and so on ad infinitum.
Annoying, certainly, but have you ever tried to build a mathematical model of what’s going on? No? Well, now you don’t have to because two intrepid economists have done the work for you. Taking a shower in Youth Hostels: risks and delights of heterogeneity is a paper published by Christina Matzke and Damien Challet in 2008 (and brought to my attention by the people at Improbable Research). They describe their research thus:
Tuning one’s shower in some hotels may turn into a challenging co-ordination game with imperfect information. The temperature sensitivity increases with the number of agents, making the problem possibly unlearnable. Because there is in practice a finite number of possible tap positions, identical agents are unlikely to reach even approximately their favorite water temperature. Heterogeneity allows some agents to reach much better temperatures, at the cost of higher risk.
So now you know. What I think they conclude is that if everyone picks the same tap settings and sticks to them, that achieves a stable result that’s better than a wildly fluctuating temperature even if it isn’t your ideal choice, but really your guess is as good as mine.
* Note: Dodgy showers have become an increasingly unfamiliar problem in YHA hostels in recent years – I can’t remember the last time I had a bad one. Just one good result of the money spent on hostels recently.
Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane, snow is glistening… At this time of year many of us yearn to be out walking in a winter wonderland, instead of trudging round the shops listening to naff Christmas songs. But how can we stop a snowy day out in the hills ending with a less than festive call to mountain rescue?