Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Heisenberg Uncertainty Parcels

Yesterday evening I went onto UPS' website to find out the shipping status of an Oxford shirt I ordered (it was in Illinois somewhere) and noticed some copy for a tracking service they offer called Quantum View.
From their FAQs I haven't been able to learn much about why Quantum View is called that. (Are the quanta in question amounts of packages? Amounts of shipping information?) However, to me -- not that I think I'm representative of the average UPS customer -- it immediately calls to mind quantum mechanics. Which in turn makes me believe that Quantum View has absolutely no chance of definitively telling me where my package is and where it is going. Would it only be able to tell me a definitive arrival date at the expense of accurately describing its present location? Would the UPS site just show me a probability cloud overlaid on a U.S. map, centered on the Midwest?
At any rate, Quantum View seems to be aimed at businesses that do a lot of shipping, so all my questions are probably moot.
Those are my only thoughts related to UPS at the moment, except that when they used a song by The Postal Service in an ad campaign a little while back I thought it was a sort of veiled attempt to usurp the status of our government-provided mail carrier.

2 Comments:

Blogger Jack said...

I think there's an hour-and-ten-minute whiteboard lecture that explains the mathematics behind that.

Tangentially related comment: I've always thought the guy from the whiteboard ads looks like Alfred Schnittke.

6/18/2008 9:37 PM  
Blogger nate said...

Well, that's probably not a common reaction, but I can't say I disagree.

6/19/2008 1:37 AM  

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