The article's predicate is that rollercoasters have no purpose, but then seems to explain what their purpose is. There are far more things in the world that are "purposeless" than rollercoasters, if amusement is insufficient.<p>As someone who appreciates rollercoasters and psychoactive substances, I've made comparisons between them. A good ride will make you feel weightless one moment, four times heavier the next. You'll feel adrenalin, awe, fear, and catharsis, all neatly packaged in under five minutes, usually a good deal shorter than that, and with fewer contraindications.<p>Rollercoasters and psychedelics can be a great pairing, too, but your mileage may vary, of course.
Guy writes 10 bazillion sub-lit-crit words on rollercoasters, fails to mention Euler spirals and clothoids, where the beauty is, where maths guides and protects meat. A depressing lack of curiosity by the author.<p><a href="https://thatsmaths.com/2014/04/10/rollercoaster-loops/" rel="nofollow">https://thatsmaths.com/2014/04/10/rollercoaster-loops/</a>
> It produces no<p>As someone with kids. We now know that “senses” aren’t just things that we have that inform us about the world, there are also “sensory needs.”<p>From proprioception to vestibular and plenty other $5 words. This seems like a new development or at least a new acknowledgement and awareness is still growing.<p>So I would say that these devices produce sensory experiences.
One could also argue that a coaster is a transducer of sorts. It converts chemical energy into sound (screams of passengers) and is also a substance-free emetic [1].<p>When i was young my siblings and I were riding a low/mid intensity coaster. My brother and I are smiling and screaming, and we look at momentarily at some point backwards a couple of cars and we see our sister, looking completely unamused, staring indifferently out into the horizon. No smile, no frown. She seems like normal person now. But what does that say about a person!? Maybe it was an 8-10 year old power move.<p>1. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomiting#Emetics" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomiting#Emetics</a>
"Star Tours" at Disneyland doubled down on this uselessness factor. When it opened in 1987 I was fascinated, as a teen, and there were several demonstrations of the technology they were using, and principles they exploited, to make a roller-coaster ride out of a "room" that never traveled anywhere! It was a large-scale flight simulator, in fact; you cram people into the fuselage, shut the doors, and then toss them around with hydraulic actuators while showing them a film, and the combined sensations really convince people that they're in motion, flying through space, and being buffeted by battles and explosions.<p>The waiting in line part was even made fun by all the branded Star Wars animatronics. There was never a dull moment, even if it was two hours before you actually boarded the "ride".<p>But it was all completely fake, pseudo-futuristic, and based on a fictional universe of characters who don't exist, yet with all those layers of simulation, people paid good money and invested an entire day at the park to be hoodwinked and thereby entertained, and indeed, inspired to bond with friends, family, and significant others.
<p><pre><code> we ride on our ships, further than most
raiding and pillaging from North to South Coast
We steal only metal, like guns, tanks and toasters
and melt them all down, to make RollarCoasters
--Buckethead</code></pre>
>Horror stories, like pop music and alcohol, are designed first and foremost to make sex possible. Horror stories let young men place their arms across the shoulders of young women.<p>So much here to unpack about the author's world view in just two sentences. I think I'll stop reading here.
What a ridiculous piece. A rollercoaster is just like literality 100000 other things that are done just for the adrenaline/novelty maxing like video games, sports, scrolling tiktok or jumping into a pool of water over and over.<p>Play behaviour that carried over from kid to adult life to encourage developing oneself and exploring the environment, all traits that tech today exploit in benign and less benign ways.
>Rollercoasters are subject to multiple schemas of classification<p>Rollercoaster is one of my favorite answers to the game 20 questions for this reason.
Not sure about this. Isn't a ski lift in the same category? A machine strictly designed to give humans a thrill, not to do any other useful work otherwise. Where do you stop? A water park? A movie theater? Any form of motorized racing?
this is just basic thermodynamics, converting liquid capital energy into emotional energy which has monetary value to justify the loss of heat produced by the conversion cascade from liquid capital to revenue
> have no purpose ... produces no goods and facilitates no conversations<p>I would venture to say that by that metric, a great deal of human energy and effort is spent on creating things which have no purpose.
Yeah, it shows that the writer is a true rollercoaster afficionado. Basically, the technology of rollercoasters is pretty simple: converting potential energy into kinetic energy and back several times before friction has a chance to eat it up (while taking care to not exceed certain acceleration limits that would hurt the passengers or, in case of wooden coasters with "classic" rails, send the cars flying off the track). All the rest is just in our heads...