This blog post fascinates me.
Here's a guy who doesn't want to bother calculating the tip on his restaurant check, even though he probably has a palm pilot or laptop or cell phone out during dinner (judging by the importance of wifi access) and could easily use the calculator in said device.
So he rounds everything to even dollars, only to realize that he could be using those precious cents digits to communicate a wealth of information to himself about each meal. Simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication are too much to bother with, but binary/decimal conversions are de rigeur, apparently.
No less remarkable is his discovery that restaurants seem to be pretty lax about the total you write on your receipt.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I particularly enjoyed the description of the method as "A low-bandwidth, high-latency, high-cost, and unreliable data channel". I'm certain that it's not that he thinks that is the best way to retain data about the drinks at a restaurant. It's all a matter of what you care about. He doesn't care about tip calculation, so he doesn't waste energy on it. But what he does care about is data manipulation and bit usage. The unused bits bother him, and so he found some useful information to take advantage of the bits that were getting used anyway.
Even when he abandoned his rating system, he's still using those bits, because he wants to see them used. Just repeating the dollar amount doesn't count as using them, because that information was already transmitted, instead, he's using it to test the waitressing system.
I love how he calls it a "checksum."
where do you find links like this???
Post a Comment