- Traffic Calculus
Can you tell me how steeply a curve slopes on the side of a hill at any given time of the day? Or do you know the average altitude of a plane’s journey and the effect of the number of peanuts you dropped while you fell asleep? To be perfectly honest with you if I took a poll of 2000 people I would be hard pressed to find 2 or 3 people who cared about the answer to these questions. And rightly so, there is probably no other class that has been ditched more in school than a Calculus Class. Really, who cares?
In this next three part series I will introduce to you something you have perhaps never thought about, let alone used in your efforts to increase traffic to your site, shopping-cart or blog. This first part being the introduction to Traffic Calculus! a computational method to drive traffic. I will show you why you should care about the answers to such questions as mentioned above and how you can use this understanding to help you compete against fierce competition, no matter what industry you are from.
Why Traffic Calculus Matters!
When you return home from work or from wherever and it’s been raining all day long, what would it be like if your basement was always flooded? And if you don’t have a basement you find that the first level of your home was always flooded after the rain. I am sure it wouldn’t take you long to either find a solution to get rid of the water or just MOVE. Did you know that it is because of calculus that you don’t have to put up with such annoying problems. You see, if your driveway was not properly sloped or slanted in such a way where the water runs away from the house, you would in fact, be putting up with a difficult situation.
If calculus wasn’t used when you took that plane ride to visit your family or just to get away, you can be assured that you would have never gotten to your destination. I mean NEVER! Somebody has to understand this stuff because without it we would all be in sorry shape. We’ll just leave that stuff to the Zenos who take controversial positioning and put it into some mathematical philsophy and come up with some wild answer that say’s ” all motion is impossible.”
Let’s now begin to look at the concept of Traffic Calculus. Even if you are unfamilar or let’s just say unaware, Zeno believed that in a race between a tortoise (turtle) and Achilles, that no matter how small the turtle is, that if you give it a head start that Achilles would never be able to close the gap. Umm, that’s quite interesting, don’t you think? We are talking about a turtle here, aren’t we? A turtle (a little old turtle). Could a turtle quite possibly win any race unless it was against another turtle?
The Battle Shall Not be Won Unless You Care
We will come back to Zeno’s argument in a moment, in the meantime, let me just share with you a brief story. I’ll be real brief. Years ago when I was a teenager I won a trip to London, England, (while living in the States). It would be my first time ever traveling abroad. I was young with not a care in the world. Didn’t care when we got there or even how we got there. Getting there was all that mattered. A plane it was, and suddenly, out of nowhere, we heard and announcement come over the PA System “PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS, for the next 30 minutes we will be experiencing a little turbulence.” Forgive me, but I didn’t know what that was. The plane suddenly nose-dived and dropped 800 feet, swhoooshhhhhhh. The stewardess tried to keep us all calm but we were all, anything but calm. I have never been so scared in my life. Does the pilot know anything about Traffic Calculus?
The battle shall not be won unless we care. Interestingly, there was more turbulence than we had all expected, the pilot was in a real battle and if he didn’t care about the more than 400 plus lives that were on that plane we would have gone down baby. Plain and simple, down. There is a real moral to this story. When we care about the things that seem so unimportant it makes life worth living. At that time I knew nothing about Traffic Calulus, nothing at all, but I can tell you I am glad that pilot did.