Pessimality

[simont]

There are many tasks which it's possible to learn how to do much more quickly and efficiently after you've done them a few times.

So doing such a thing once isn't too bad: it may be frustrating and fiddly because you don't really know how to do it properly, but you only have to do it once so it's at least over quickly. And doing it lots of times isn't too bad either: after a few floundering attempts, you get into the proper swing of it, and it becomes easy and satisfying from then on.

But somewhere in between, there is an absolutely pessimal number of times to have to do the task: just at the point where you have the insight which tells you how to do it really efficiently and how you could have saved 85% of the time you'd spent up until now, you've suddenly finished and have no opportunity to use that knowledge.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

Agreed.

A few months ago, in China, I discovered that ten is precisely the wrong number of PICs to program in-circuit.

[simont]

Last night I discovered that if you have a need to draw a dodecahedron on paper, label the vertices, and identify the five sets of face diagonals which form cubes, then five is exactly the wrong number of these to search for. Unfortunately, five is unavoidably the number of the damn things there are.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah :)

You *might* be able to come up with an algorithm[1] to do it, which would be useful again. Though next time you'd probably have to go through five iterations before being able to use it. But by this argument you come up with a general algorithm for everything, and never do anything.

[1] Dogbert: My algorithm tells us which people to cut from the company to improve efficiency.
Dilbert: I thought you were just firing the people with the highest salaries?
Dogbert: OK, maybe "algorithm" is an overstatement.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

Since this is a well-known fact, can you not just find the info online or in a book? Or did you have a masochistic desire to do the hard work yourself? There's even an Escher picture of it, I think, although it wouldn't be called anything useful. But it's pretty :-)

[simont]

I decided searching for a webpage or book which gave the exact sets of vertices and their interrelation would be slower than drawing a diagram and figuring it out from first principles. There would undoubtedly have been any number of webpages which talked about the concept in general, or showed pretty ray-traced pictures without labelled vertices and without the back side of the solid visible, and sifting through all those for the right one sounded like a longer job than just drawing a diagram and reading vertex letters off it for ten minutes.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

heh fair enough

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

Hmm. When you've found four, isn't the other one rather easy by symmetry considerations? Obviously not, I guess, since if it were you wouldn't have had that experience...

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

JOOI, why is that?

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Were you spying on me assembling flat pack chests-of-drawers last night?

[simont]

No, I was discovering my own entirely different illustration of this principle.

But, hmm, since you mention chests of drawers. I have one, which is rubbish; one thing I want to do after the immediate moving faff is over is to replace it with a better one. So if you've just bought some, are they any good, and if so where did you get them? In particular, do they have proper runners for the drawers, or do they do it the cheap way and just rely on pieces of plastic glued to the chest sliding through grooves on the outside of the drawers? My current one is the latter type, and the pieces of plastic keep falling off or warping or breaking.

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

They've got proper runners and seem pretty sturdy so far. I got Malm ones from Ikea: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/categories/series/07468/

[simont]

Aha, thanks. That could easily be just what I want, although I'll have to double-check the measurements once I find out how much space I really have in my new bedroom...

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what we have (well, to be precise, we have two of those, one in birch and one in oak, and two of the four-drawer ones too). What isn't obvious from that picture is that the top drawer is split into two smaller drawers - it's obvious if you, you know, COUNT the drawers, but it doesn't show up well in that particular image.

[simont]

It was perfectly clear to me from that image, and in fact that was one of the reasons I like the look of it – the chest of drawers it'd be replacing has the top drawer split in two as well, so I wouldn't have to rethink where I keep everything :-)

[deerfold.livejournal.com]

Why did I read that as a flat-chested pack of drawers?

I need my Holiday. Must make it to the end of today.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

That's exactly the trough I'm sitting in with regards to TEM at the moment.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

It's a common problem in interface design: the Occasional User.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think maths should totally be redesigned :)

[angoel.livejournal.com]

It has been. I think you're still using the legacy interface, though.

[senji.livejournal.com]

The New World Order interface isn't supported or documented, so it doesn't get much use I'm afraid.