“The first thing to happen is that all of the couples start fighting. It was amazing to watch, like a ripple across the crowd of couples finding some reason to blame each other, or to get impatient about something unrelated ("stop breathing so loud!").” - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

What a great story! - Amit Patel

Great story. I love the human mapreduce she ran to group the passengers by locale. She demonstrates that it's sometimes worth a high startup cost (the coffees) if it reduces overall execution time. (BTW, I'm surprised the passengers were willing to accept Starbucks from a stranger, given the swine flu hysteria). - Doug Beeferman

For those who are wondering, yes, Catspaw is this smart at work too. :-) It got me thinking -- wouldn't all rebooking go faster if it were batched in that way? That is, if people were called up 5 or 10 at a time by destination? And if so, why don't the airlines do it? - Daniel Dulitz

Thing is, I don't think she actually saved that much time. In a situation like that, ticket agents (once they show up) can rebook people very quickly -- they have the defaults already set up -- and they already have to identify each passenger individually and print them a ticket, so having them sorted by destination is a small win at best. What she mainly accomplished was crowd pacification, which is important, and definitely something the airlines could do much better -- but it's hard to do anything when you're in a situation where the main problem is that you don't actually have any people on site. - ⓞnor