[alwa]

What cool work! I wish I had this transformative sensation more often: of the quick, clear shift in my thinking after someone’s careful study of a familiar problem results in convincing models simple enough for a non-expert to wrap their mind around.

If this interests you, some prior context on “crowd crush” might too. John Seabrook, writing in the New Yorker in 2011 (in response to the “Black Friday” crushing deaths at US Wal-Marts), engagingly profiled examples from the past few decades of this category of disaster (in the US and Europe). Along the way he traces a few shifts in thinking about such crowd behavior, from “mob psychology” to Paul Wertheimer‘s colorful observational studies to Dirk Helbing’s fluid-dynamical modeling.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/07/crush-point

https://archive.is/b1Flz