I just got back from a week with the family at Disney World. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The surface part of my mind was completely taken in by the sensation of being in the jungle (at Animal Kingdom) and in a variety of countries (Epcot), while my analytic self was taken with admiration at how well run it was: the depth of architecture, landscaping, design, marketing, and business operations. Like looking at an Impressionist painting from far enough to see the light, and then close enough to apprehend its construction.

The behavior of a capitalist engine when exposed to a huge revenue flux, like the behavior of various geometries in a high-speed wind tunnel, is awe-inspiring in its use of these forces to compute optimal solutions to complex problems, and in the energies it directs against them. When we walked into Typhoon Lagoon, a cheerful employee asked us our zip code, and afterwards, my son asked me why. I explained to him my guess that it was so that they could calculate the sensitivity of regional turnout to marketing dollars. “But that’s an experiment”, he said, “that would take years!” Exactly.