One of the options that came with my new car (I bought one that they had on the lot) was an "Eight-Way Power Driver's Seat." As a physicist, I thought this sounded pretty exciting, because, you know, we appear to live in a three-dimensional world, and to get eight directions of adjustability would need to involve an extra spatial dimension or two, and that would be big news. Cancel the LHC, and everybody rush to the nearest Ford plant!
After a bit of experimentation with the car, I can report that we still have only three spatial dimensions. The eight adjustments are:
- Move the entire seat up
- Move the entire seat down
- Move the entire seat forward
- Move the entire seat backward
- Tilt the bottom of the seat forward
- Tilt the bottom of the seat backward
- Tilt the back of the seat forward
- Tilt the back of the seat backward
"But wait," you say, "that's really only four adjustments. After all, it wouldn't make any sense to be able to move the whole seat up if you couldn't also move it back down."
Yeah, well, that's why you don't have a high-paying job marketing automotive options.
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Actually, if they really wanted to get creative, I think they could come up with 12 different adjustments for a seat. They could do three dimensions for both the seat and the backrest, and the 3 Euler angles for both the seat and the backrest.
However, I suspect :-) some of those possibilities might be a bit uncomfortable.
Because if I did, the car commercials would advertise "...and power driver's seat with one rotational and two translational degrees of freedom."
Forget about marketing, I see a great future in automotive seat design. It appears as if there are two independently-adjustable parts -- bottom of the seat and back of the seat. Each could in principle undergo three translations and three rotations. (We'll leave out boosts, just out of modesty.) And they count each one twice!
So there is room here for the 24-way power driver's seat. Call the patent office.
I assumed that Ford's "Eight-Way Power Driver's Seat" was alluding to the "Noble Eightfold Path" of Buddhism, which describes the way to the end of human suffering.
(A comfy chair sounds like as good a place to start as anywhere....)
I thought the comfy chair was a torture device of the Spanish Inquisition...
You've all forgotten about the adjustable Lumbar support! That brings our potential adjustments to 26, I think...