Slashdot Mirror
The Traveling Salesman Problem Meets Starbucks
Call Me Black Cloud writes "John 'Winter' Smith, a contract computer programmer, is living the traveling salesman problem. His personal quest is to visit every company-owned Starbucks and he's not doing too badly. After 7 years he's hit over 4,000 locations in the United States and 167 in Britain and Japan. What motivates him? That's one for the professionals to answer, but since Starbucks opens an average of 10 stores per week it doesn't look like Winter will be stopping any time soon. His website offers insight into why he does this ('to be different') and has pictures of the 4000+ Starbucks he's visited."
Before Slashdot = 60,293 visitors since December 2003.
After Slashdot today = 90,000+ (estimated)? Any takers?
One of the great unanswered questions.
10 * 52 * 100
in 2104 we'll have over, what, 58-60,000 starbucks?
YES!
Casual Games/Downloads
...then we can follow his lead a la ant algorithms.
The Army reading list
Just wondering if he's been keeping track of the health effects of going to Starbuck's so offten...
Among the paramedics at work they are known as Fourbucks, on acount of their prices. ;P
he would have written a computer program to keep track of all the starbucks, and visit them in the chronological order that they were opened, and have that program keep track of all the messy details of any that closed or moved, etc.
(yes, a douglas adams reference to the infinitely prolongued guy who insulted the universe in alphabetical order)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Visiting every starbucks to be different is like visiting every taxidermist's shop because it's the cool thing to do and all the kids are doing it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wouldn't want to mention this:
I'm scheduled for a short interview on CNN Headline News Thusday, July 8, at approximately 7:45 PM EDT.
Gotta love that Headline News. Ever since the merger they avoid any type of real news like the plague. And the average age of the news presenters is, what, 13?
Casual Games/Downloads
I was under the impression that the traveling salesman problem had to do with finding the most efficient (i.e. shortest) route to traverse a *finite* amount of points...how is this the same?
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
an absolute, nailed on "please let me bear your children" hit with the ladies.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Let's see... 4000 stores, multiplied by an average of $8 per cup of coffee, comes to what?
What's really important, though, is how many Starbucks he has seen across the street from another Starbucks.
What motivates him?
Caffeine, obviously.
Golfing Mongolia: A 2.3-Million-Yard Par 11,880 (free NYTimes reg. required)
Here in Portland, we firebomb new Starbucks facilities. Fuck you and your corporate coffee. Quit Walmarting the good old coffee shops out of existence.
They've just opened another one across the street from the tiny espresso shack I love to frequent in the mornings. If she ends up going under because of it, I think I might get in the mood for a little firebombing myself...
is actually somewhat interesting. The original logo is (in my opinion) better than the one they use for the rest of the country. It's basically a naked mermaid. Now all you see in their logo is her face. The original logo is also brown, not green. I visited Seattle a few months, and personally I think they should have stuck with the old stuff (then again, it kinda makes them look like UPS).
Moderation Insight
Oh wait ... a handful of /.ers are now doing this!!!
While the traditionl travelling salesman problem is NPC and anyone who has taken a proper CS track will have heard of it and studied it to death, are there any proofs, algorithims for it when the graph is adding new nodes?
/. and gett 12.50 an hour)
The biggest thing wrong right now is that when you add a new Vertex to the graph it could change the shortest path between two other verticies.
Damn I knew I shouldn't have picked up the coffee of the day on my lunch break.(Right now my job is testing the wireless network in several areas so I am wandering around with a laptop surfing
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Presumably his camera has some serious jitter correction built in...
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Also, the name he goes by is simply "Winter". The only reason he has the "John Smith" in his name is because too many things (like the DMV) break when presented with a single name.
He is also a fairly good tournament Scrabble player. Because the National Scrabble Association's database can't handle single names either, he's registered as "Winter ZXQKJ".
What a sad indictment of society that people have some desperate need to be different and decide that the best way to satisfy that urge is to do something completely pointless like purchase products at every store of a multinational conglomerate. How exactly is becoming a complete and utter corporate slave a demonstration of how unique you are? I'd be much more impressed if this guy was attempting to visit every NON-Starbucks coffee shop. But that wouldn't garner him headlines, would it?
Let's face it: this guy doesn't want to be different, he wants to be famous, in his own pathetic way. You want to be different? How about volunteering for your local chapter of the non-profit organization of your choice? Not too many people do that. If that's not different enough for you, how about starting your own non-profit organization? Even fewer people do that. Hell, as long as you have this need to show everyone how different you are, might as well make it something that can benefit someone other than Starbuck's shareholders. Of course, none of these causes would get him a mention on slashdot, or the evening news, or anything else.
Call me a party-poorer but when I see stories about people following such pathetic attempts at gaining recognition, it makes me want to retch.
GMD
watch this
This chap is a freak, nuff said.
NEXT >
I'm no psychologist, but I do wonder why people are driven to collect things, and, very often, they are driven to the point of mental illness. For example, people went nuts over those McDonalds Beanie Babies a while ago. Trash cans were filled with Happy Meals discarded uneaten, because people wanted only that 15-cent imported toy. Visiting every Starbucks is no different, where a person spends personal resources just playing catch-up to someone else's marketing scheme. I wish people were more resistent to this "collector's disease."
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Is this a test sir?
Anything you order is free sir. Don't worry, it's clean sir.
Your sure this isn't a test, sir? You were in here last Tuesday, standing right where you are now. You asked, "how good is security?" It's excellent sir, tight as a drum.
You said if anyone came asking, we'd have to mod him down, even you. This is a powerful gesture, sir.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Did anyone read what his hit counter said when the article was first posted?
/. effect in RealTime!
I saw it at 64105 at 11:21 CST.
I hit reload and it's up over 65K now.
Watching the
do() || do_not();
I can understand this.
I, myself, have a desire to visit every McDonalds on the face fo the planet.
But first I have to buy a bulldozer, and a cargo plane to carry it between continents...
"Starbucks of Topeka, Kansas? Starbucks #2046 of Topeka, Kansas?
"Err... Yes"
"You're a jerk, Starbucks. A real kneebiter."
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
I think it was Whirlpool who made a middle of the road washer and dryer set. They didn't sell very well, so they upped the price over 1 grand each and they sold like crazy.
I think this is the same phenomenon we are seeing with Starbucks coffee, and the proliferation of legion's of coffee related drinks ending with chino or latte.
Well, he has had 7 years
2555 days
Thats an average of 1.5655577299412915851272015655577 starbucks per day.
Opening 10 per week, and he is hitting 10.958904109589041095890410958899 per week.
They have 8000 stores now.
I calculate about 13 more years, and he should be able to enter maintenance.
Therefore, he is ahead of the curve.
I spent a while surfing his site which suprisingly wasn't /.'d into oblivion. After about 5 minutes I was convinced the guy is brilliant.
This is an amazing and important piece of work. The sheer volume of pictures, the sheer enormity of this effort is so impressive that I think this has to go down as one of those pieces of art/documentary/social commentary/lark that if it's preserved, people will look back on in 50 or 100 years (maybe less , maybe more) and just find terribly facinating.
First of all, just the pictures of all the architecture of locations in all 50 states alone is amazing. It's absolutely insane once you realize how much revenue and commerce Starbucks generates (all politics and love and hate of the company aside, it's just amazing when you see them all in one web site). Thes buildings had to be constructure, outfitted, opened, etc. The record of all these buildings, all these locations is like a mini snapshot of the whole U.S. from coast to coast and then world wide as well. It's an amazing piece of compare and contrast, and an amazing document.
Coming at it from the other side, I think the guy is a great artist also. This definitely qualifies as art in my mind, bordering on journalism, bordering on madness which is where a lot of great art comes from. Think of how many stories each state/city/area of a city/district tell about this experience, picture him going from store to store documenting this, etc. It's an endless story, he could write a book about it. Others have mentioned on here how comedians like Lewis Black have also seized on the sheer crazyness of the Starbucks phenomenon. Artists bring these issues into focus for people and the number of people critizing him here make me feel even stronger about the fact that he's doing something cool.
Winter is alright in my book. I don't think he's ruining the environment by travelling , I don't think he's a nut and don't think it's a waste of time. It's actually quite an important piece of work. Congratulations man.
He sounds like he'd get on very well with Dave Gorman, who, after a drunken bet, made it his goal to find 52 other people named Dave Gorman, and also got a bit obsessed with Googlewhacking.
Also Danny Wallace who after having bet Dave Gorman to find 52 Dave Gorman's got it into his head that he needed 1000 people to join him , without actually knowing what they were joining (there are now over 8000 joinees).
And then of course there is the inimitable Tony Hawks (not Tony Hawk) who needed to win a bet that he could hitch-hike around the entire coast of Ireland with a refridgerator.
All of their books are highly recommended (especially Join Me, which is the funniest book I've ever read.
FarFarAway in Shrek-2 has twin Farbucks :)
.. to :)
Closer to the end of the movie, when that baked
thing walks to the castle, patrons of one of the
shops escape in horror across the street
another Farbucks. Kinda takes a couple of seconds
to realize that and it makes it twice as funny
3.243F6A8885A308D313
"...and if you walk to the end of the block, there sits a Starbucks. And directly across the street -- in the exact same building as that Starbucks -- there is... another Starbucks. There is a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks! And ladies and gentlemen, THAT is the end of the universe."
Breakfast served all day!
In English, you can end sentences with prepositions. The rule saying you can't was made up by scholars in previous centuries who thought English was derived from Latin (it isn't at all), and also thought that any deviation from Latin grammar was an error (and even if English came from Latin, why the hell would that be true?) Linguistics was not well understood then, so scholars thought that it ought to be possible to translate word-for-word from Latin to English.
Specifically, in English, you ask many questions by moving the object (often "what") to the front of the sentence, and leaving nothing in its place. (Examples: "You are doing what?" goes to "What are you doing?", and "You are talking about what?" goes to "What are you talking about?")
This can indeed leave a preposition at the end of the sentence. Moving the preposition as well is also allowed, but is much less common. (Any English speaker would find "About what are you talking?" to sound stilted.) The preposition at the end of the sentence still has a referent, it's just in another place, and this kind of movement occurs in many languages, as any linguistics course will tell you.
The only reason you couldn't do this in Latin is because the preposition was PART OF THE WORD, so of course you had to move it with the word. It's a lot like split infinitives, another classic grammatical non-error: Caesar couldn't have split an infinitive if he had tried.
And so your post had no point except to be elitist about a point whose only basis is in discredited 19th-century linguistics. Don't you feel special?
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
So he just got out of Seattle?
Is that something like a Tim Horton's?
:)
??!?!