Regruntled.com

A German company has an interesting product. On the one hand, it’s aimed at outdoorsy, health-conscious back-packers and campers. On the other hand, it’s total junk food. And the can! Isn’t that just an invitation to litter? Is someone who eats a cheeseburger out of a can really going to carry the can back to civilization? Whatever happened to the old freeze-dried, vacuum-packed pouches of beef stroganoff?

I found a review by someone who actually bought and ate one of these things:

I’m not sick and I say I would eat this thing again if it weren’t so expensive.
And I relly must say that this propably is faaaar better when you’re many kilometers away from civilization on top of some mountain and you can whip out a cheeseburger with nearly the same quality as a McDonald’s cheeseburger while your friend eats dry bread or power bars.

 

Shankar Vedantam, in the Washington Post, cites an analysis of Presidential speeches:

The study found that in the first three years after a new president takes office, his speeches displayed higher levels of complexity compared with addresses in the fourth year in office. In the first three speeches, presidents were more likely to acknowledge other points of view, potential pitfalls and unintended consequences. In the fourth year, however — as they were about to run for reelection — the complexity of their speeches plunged.

“Low complexity wins elections,” said psychologist Lucian Gideon Conway III of the University of Montana at Missoula, who published his analysis of the presidential speeches in the journal Political Psychology. “People like simple answers, and someone saying, ‘I don’t have all the answers and here are five possibilities’ is a hard sell compared to someone who says, ‘I have a plan and it is going to work and my opponent is completely wrong.’ “

I would add a couple of observations. First, advertising is aimed at the subconscious mind, not the conscious, rational mind. Nuance is lost on the id. Second, most of the communication between politicians and voters is via television, a medium that encourages short attention spans. A message has to be simple to fit into a ten-second sound bite or a thirty-second commercial.

An article in the Atlantic, The Autumn of the Multitaskers, has some interesting observations about multitasking. The theme is that multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.

My hunch is that when we look back on it someday, at our juggling of electronic lives and the array of subtly different personas that each one encourages (we’re terse when texting, freewheeling on the phone, and in some middle state while e-mailing), the spectacle will appear as quaint and stylized as those scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Such scenes were, for a time, cinematic shorthand for the frenzy of modern life, but then communications technology changed, and those operators lost their jobs.

To us.

Multitasking is the antithesis of “flow”, of peak experience. For example, I can’t do a sudoku and watch television at the same time. I can’t watch television and do a sudoku during the commercials. Either the television interferes with the sudoku or the sudoku interferes with the television and I don’t enjoy either one. (I think the reason that movies are so much more satisfying in a theater than on television is that television deliberately breaks the viewer’s focus every few minutes.)

Finally, for a more direct experience:

These images are all from the same sudoku, except that the colors have been isolated, showing, for example, all the red squares, then all the blue squares, etc. (With a numeric sudoku, this is like showing all the ones, then all the twos, then all the threes.) Occasionally you’ll see an image of the full sudoku, with all the colors filled in.There are 46,656 different patterns for a single color, or a single digit, in a sudoku. Yes, I counted them. Yes, I have a complete list. Note that each pattern, by itself, meets the sudoku criteria:

• Exactly one square in each row
• Exactly one square in each column
• Exactly one square in each 3-by-3 block

You can think of a sudoku as a sort of jigsaw puzzle. Suppose you have a box with 46,656 different pieces in it. To make a sudoku, all you have to do is find 9 of those pieces, any 9, that will fill up a 9-by-9 grid without overlapping or spilling outside the edges. Since each piece, individually, meets the sudoku criteria, any group of 9 pieces that fit together will, collectively, meet the sudoku criteria.

There are 1,046,724,517,021,560,845,728,968,107,999,437,741,056,000 different ways to pick 9 pieces from a box of 46,656. Of these, only a tiny fraction, a mere 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960, will fit together and form a sudoku. No, I don’t have a list.

If you have a sudoku, you can turn it clockwise 90 degrees, and it’s still a sudoku, and in a sense it is the same sudoku. Or you can swap all the sevens and fives and it still has the same structure. So that 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 counts a lot of sudokus more than once. If you eliminate all the double counting and consider only sudokus that are structurally different, there are 5,472,730,538 different sudokus. Five and a half billion. This is a much more manageable number. It is less, for example, than the number of people on the planet. No, I don’t have a list. But I could. It would fit on a 500 gigabyte hard drive.

 

Late afternoon, looking west towards downtown… it looked like a splotch of rainbow in the sky. Ordinarily, you only see rainbows when you’re looking away from the sun. This was close to the sun, close enough to make it difficult to see. Tinted windows helped quite a bit with the glare.

Wikipedia says it’s a “sun dog”, caused by sunlight refracting through ice crystals in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. The geometry says the sun dog will be 22 degrees away from the sun. There was a faint sun dog 22 degrees on the opposite side.

Thanks to Mari for the photos, and for being the only one in the office with a digital camera. Here’s a shot to put it all into context. The sun is behind the curtain to the left. You can see the cirrus clouds that caused the sun dog. There are some spots and streaks on the tinted window, and the faint vertical line by the sun dog is probably a reflection. Not the best conditions for photography, but without the tinted window, there was so much glare that it was hard to see the sun dog at all.

 

Here’s another fractal image. Wikipedia says:

The Buddhabrot is a special rendering of the Mandelbrot set which, when traditionally oriented, resembles to some extent certain depictions of the Buddha. When viewed upside-down, it vaguely resembles a human face with large, triangular glasses or goggles over its eyes.

Kent Rogowski turns teddy bears inside out.

Bears, is a series of portraits of the most unusual sort: ordinary teddy bears that have been turned inside out and restuffed. Each animal’s appearance is determined by the necessities of the manufacturing process. Simple patterns and devices never meant to be seen are now prominent physical characteristics, giving each one a distinctly quirky personality: their fasteners become eyes, their seams become scars, and their stuffing creeps out in the most unexpected places. Together these images form a topology of strange yet oddly familiar creatures. They are at once hideous yet cuddly, disturbing yet endearing, absurd yet adorable, while offering a metaphor for us all to consider. These bears, which have lived and loved and lost as much as their owners, have suffered and endured through it all. It is by virtue of revealing their inner core might we better understand our own.

I would add: “cruel yet pretentious“.

 

Jennifer Maestre is a sculptor who works with pencils… hundreds and hundreds of sharpened pencil nubs. She has an online gallery, and there is an interview at Reuben Miller’s blog.