communication. community. cognition.
Posts tagged game theory
Can’t you JUST be my neighbor?
Oct 6th
Can't you JUST be my neighbor?
Fred Rogers said it best:
So, let’s make the most of this beautiful day.
Since we’re together we might as well say:
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won’t you be my neighbor?
Neighbors are fantastic. There’s much appeal in moving up to a better neighborhood, where you have more room and better schools and people like the people you want to be. Good neighbors can be great sounding boards, and are awesome about picking up your mail when you’re on vacation. They do great work on their lawns, and inspire everyone to keep the property values up.
But they don’t have to be your bestest friend. More >
Attack the Puzzle
Nov 30th
How do you attack a jigsaw puzzle?
Odds are, you are constantly staring at the box it came in, looking for the bigger picture. You’re probably searching through the pieces, separating the edges and isolating those all-important four corner pieces.
Then, you start matching similar colors, and jamming and wedging whatever fits.
Not my wife’s Aunt Marjorie.
She’s more organized than that.
She has developed her own system, classifying the pieces by general shape. There are “pieces with two outies and two innies,” and “three-outie one-innies,” and “stars.” Some pieces have the odd “foot” in them.
Marjorie has them all laid out by shape, because when she needs a foot to fill a gap, she doesn’t want to look through a bunch of three-outies.
After separating the pieces by general shape, she lays them out on cardboard palettes, where she can at a glance spot the color she needs from the sheet.
It’s odd to me to see four palettes of puzzle pieces stacked on top of each other — but it works for her.
I can’t say whose system is more efficient, because I don’t know how long she spends sorting and organizing her palettes. I can say that her method is more efficient for her, and she has a lot more experience putting puzzles together.
It’s definitely something to keep in mind, that we often just jump into tasks and projects the same way we’ve always done, and never thought about the existence of a better way. Likewise, we never really benchmark the cost of organization and structure, to be sure it is providing value.
