Bruce Schneier, a security expert who likes to look towards nature for innovative examples of security, mentioned this problem which was found on Slashdot:
Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open — you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can’t get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
I don’t know if this story is really true, but it sounds true, which is good enough for a blog.
Okay, it doesn’t even have to sound true, it just has to help prove a point.
Anyway, the point (as identified by Schneier) is, despite the glib statement by the park ranger, that the average tourist – who, on a zoological scale, is very smart – will not be willing to spend very long to figure out a trashcan. A bear – even a smarter than average one – is not very smart compared to a human, but he or she will spend hours trying to figure out how to open a trashcan (what else does a bear have to do? Protest the pope?). Thus, you have two competing factors: How can you make a trashcan simple enough so that a lazy tourist doesn’t just leave his trash out but complex enough that a hungry bear with plenty of spare time can’t figure it out through trial and error?
I love engineering problems where you have to find the balance of two requirements that are at odds with each other. My favorite is the gun: if it ever fires when you don’t want it to, you could die; if it ever fails to fire when you want it to, you could die.
Now lets see if I’ve got this right…
Smart Bear = Dumb Ass Tourist
Lets correct the equation down to the most common denominator…
Bear = Dumb Ass
Now lets bring it into down to earth, easy to understand, un-adulterated language…
50 percent of world(Human) Population
is equal to – Dumb Ass
Other 50 Percent can be divided by 2 in equal shares to Super evil and Super Lazy, of which reminds me why I am a Conservative in the 1st place.
I create software for personal financial planners, who are, in general, smarter than the average person. I still have to spend a substantial minority of my time making sure that they don’t provide absolutely absurd inputs. For example, I always use a combo box for the marginal federal tax rate, not so much to make sure that what they choose is one of the six actual tax brackets as to assure that their input isn’t something like “Henry Aaron.” In many ways, it would be easier to write software for bears.
That park ranger’s in the wrong business. H.L. Mencken lives!!
Being a Wyoming native, I can swear that story is not only true, but it doesn’t even stratch the moronic surface. What’s funny is that the closer the license plate origin is to Mass., the dumber the tourist. Sad, but true.
“I don’t know if this story is really true, but it sounds true, which is good enough for a blog.”
Frank, I can always count on you for a chuckle 🙂
The modern corollary is airline security. As in: How do you make sure the terrorists aren’t able to sneak their weapons on board an airplane, while also minimizing the delays and intrusive nature of the screening process? For all the justifiable complaints against the TSA (and they are legion), the TSA is facing an unwinnable mandate.
I’ve seen the “bear-proof” trash cans in Big Bend National Park, so I can buy the story. I haven’t seen dumb-ass tourists who couldn’t figure out how to open the cans, but that is only because I was there to see the bears.
“For all the justifiable complaints against the TSA (and they are legion), the TSA is facing an unwinnable mandate”
This is because they are fighting the wrong battle. Instead of looking for weapons (and with my ninja skills, anything can be a weapon…especially my lethal hands) they need to look for terrorist.
And trying to make them nervose while standing in line just isn’t going to do it.
The obvious corollary to this is that it’s impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.
…Instead of looking for weapons (and with my ninja skills, anything can be a weapon…especially my lethal hands) they need to look for terrorist….
I take it that you’re advocating the use of profiling as a means to find the terrorists. I’m wondering just how this would work. I realize that most of the world’s current-day terrorists are Arab Muslim males, but you’d miss John Walker Lindh, the Russian Black Widows (caucasian women), and the various Indonesian and other Asian Muslim terrorists. And setting aside the Muslim terrorist angle, a system relying on profiling would allow a Timothy McVeigh to get through.
Profiling can, at best, be only part of airline screening. The rest of us are going to have to put up with it.
And the really sad thing about these bear proof dumpsters in Yosemite is that it’s not just the visitors (the official term we use for tourists) who can’t seem to use these things correctly…the concessionaries can’t either. It’s their job and responsibility to ensure the trash gets placed in the dumpsters where they belong and to lock it after themselves. It seems this is something they are incapable of doing (but then, what can you expect from a company that calls itself the DNC?) When giving campfire programs to visitors in Wawona about bears, I played a game, who is smarter the bears or the humans? Without any prompting, the visitors all unanimously declared BEARS! And they were, sadly, correct.