When I was a kid, I loved the magazine Popular Mechanics. In addition to articles on futuristic cars and planes, they always had articles on how things worked, and I seem to recall mechanically oriented projects that were always just outside my abilities. As time went on, I realized that my mechanical abilities were limited indeed, so I moved on to the more cerebral Scientific American and mathematics. These days, I am always amazed when I see Popular Mechanics in bookstores: it is like a blast from the 60s.
Blake Nicholson of the University of Michigan wrote me to point out that a recent article in the magazine has a heavy OR focus. In an article on Improving Air Travel, one of the ten possible improvements, changing boarding strategies, is explicitly an OR approach. A few of the other suggestions, including re-pricing landing slots to encourage better spreading of planes and the use of RFID in luggage tracking, are also OR approaches to air travel problems.
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