Lectures
What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
The course moves through four arguments, three weeks each: measuring a queue honestly (weeks 1–3), choosing and defending an ordering rule (weeks 4–6), deciding what a system can honestly promise the person waiting inside it (weeks 7–9), and defending a full redesign under pressure (weeks 10–12). Each lecture below builds on the one before it and feeds that same week’s Queue Lab.
When does waiting begin?
FILE / WEEK 01Opens the course claim — a queue is a design decision, not an absence of service — and introduces the SlopU Office of Everything as the case the semester returns to.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
What does an average hide?
FILE / WEEK 02Why a single average wait time can be true and still misleading, and what it hides about who actually waits the longest.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Why does one slow case change the queue?
FILE / WEEK 03How a single unusually long case reshapes everyone else's wait while it is happening, not only the average calculated afterwards.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Is first come, first served fair?
FILE / WEEK 04The Office of Everything's only rule examined on its own terms — what first come, first served actually rewards, and what it costs.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Should the shortest task go first?
FILE / WEEK 05Shortest-job-first as the Office's proposed answer to last week's complaint, and the starvation risk it introduces in return.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Who gets to be urgent?
FILE / WEEK 06The Office introduces a Priority Lane, and this lecture asks who declares urgency, who checks the declaration, and who pays for it.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
What can the system honestly promise?
FILE / WEEK 07Moving from choosing an ordering rule to deciding what a queue can truthfully tell someone about how long they will wait.
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
When is a queue actually stuck?
FILE / WEEK 08Telling a slow queue apart from a stopped one, using only what a person waiting inside it could actually observe.
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
What does cancellation cost?
FILE / WEEK 09People who leave a queue before being served disappear from its wait-time records — this lecture asks what that does to every number the course has computed so far.
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Who benefits from the current rule?
FILE / WEEK 10Auditing the Priority Lane introduced in week 6 against a released synthetic dataset of its usage, rather than its stated intent.
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
How does the system fail under pressure?
FILE / WEEK 11The Office of Everything's worst day, and identifying which specific design decision from earlier weeks is most responsible for its collapse.
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
Can you defend the queue you designed?
FILE / WEEK 12Bringing twelve weeks of the Office of Everything together into one redesign, and preparing to defend it against direct questioning.
Week 12 · 10 May 2027