Integer overflow

[simont]

I went into town at lunchtime to run errands, and parked in Lion Yard. Rather to my surprise, this was a completely different car park from the one I parked in last time I went to Lion Yard: the Grand Arcade building project has evidently progressed to the stage where they can activate the new piece of car park and (presumably) shut down the old one to start refurbishing that.

It's mostly just a car park, but it has one or two notable oddities in its design. Firstly, even its lowest floor is a long way up in the air, and access is via an extremely long helical ramp which guarantees that by the time you get up to the car park itself you won't have the faintest idea how you're oriented relative to the shops, and hence you don't know which set of lifts to use to avoid having to walk round the entire outside of the building to get to where you really wanted to be. There seemed to be a dearth of useful signs to tell you what was where; perhaps they're going to put those up later.

Secondly, and most delightfully, there's a pair of adjacent lifts on the south side. One is labelled ‘South Lift, Levels 2 – 4’. The other sign, and I had to stare at this for a couple of minutes before I convinced myself that it really said what I thought I was seeing, reads ‘South Lift, Levels 2 – -1’. Really. Two to minus one. On a huge, beautifully presented, professional-looking sign, and moreover on a sign ten metres away from one that makes sense. To add to the visual jar, the dash and the minus sign are at different heights, which is presumably just a question of how the font they were using happened to be designed.

I'm quite tempted to go back with a camera and take a photo of it before they realise and correct it.

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Surely a "grand" arcade would be 1023 floors? You know your engineering is getting good when its exponential increase outstrips that of the size of your standard integers. (For reference, a car park 4294967295 floors high would reach something like 1/3 of the way to the orbit of mars. Of course, you might introduce some kind of fractal squeezing to fit an endless carpark in a finite height, but then some buggers going to come along and Hilbert you up :))

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure going up a spiral ramp that goes a third of the way to Mars would make anybody too dizzy to park! Not to mention e.g. the lack of air, and all that.

Still, shoppers would be even more inclined to buy things in chain stores then.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I calculate you'd experience about 6G at the top, climbing mightn't be necessary. But that wasn't as insane as I expected it was, I'm not sure if I multiplied correctly. The *building* I'm sure would be destroyed though.