Hannah quotes and a little on OCD
Me: Do you happen to have anything I could use to draw a moustache?
Hannah: No, I don't. But maybe Yasha in his great stash of stashes might have some makeup. (pause) For staches.
Hannah: When my brother was little, he used to want to be a garbage compactor when he grows up. I'm not sure if he wanted to be the truck itself or the operator. [...long discussion about vehicles and drivers ensues, involving Thomas the train engine]
Yasha: Thomas definitely has his own volition, and an independent operator who's a human being.
Me: That would be cool -- to have your own free will, but just in case you need one you also have an operator.
Hannah: (wistful) Oh man, I have so many operators...
Hannah: (after I point out that she eats M&M's in such a way that there's always as close as possible to the same number of every color):
Yeah. But I really can't eat M&M's. When there's the same number of every color there's no way to decide which color to start with. I can't start with the same color every time because that's uneven. But I can't start with different colors every time -- that's uneven in a different way!
[We convince her to well-order her M&M's -- put the M&M's in a line and eat them from the end one at a time -- this is what I do with menus]
Hannah: I feel like I have to order them in a way that looks random. And it takes some mental effort to remember to take them from the end... [But this way seemed to have something to it -- Hannah repeated it the next time she ate M&M's].
---
After the conversation about M&M's we compared OCD's. Yasha has trouble throwing things away. I mentally rearrange letters in books to make consonants and vowels alternate in a satisfying pattern. It's fun being crazy when everyone around you is crazy. But maybe more people are crazy than you'd think -- afterwards I talked to my cousin Anna (who needs a blog -- I'm looking at you:). She seemed surprised at our reaction -- "Is there any other way of eating M&M's??"
posted by Dmitry @ 12:37 AM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
“I can’t start with the same color every time because that's uneven.”
To break these ties fairly, assume that each M&M is poisoned with probability p > 0, and at each step, if you’re still alive, eat an M&M of the color that’s least likely to have (first) killed you so far. In the limit as p → 0, the sequence of M&Ms you eat approaches a limit (up to permutation of colors) that’s a some kind of morbid generalization of the Thue-Morse sequence.
2 colors: 0110100110010110100101100110100110010110011010010110100110010110
3 colors: 0122102100121200210211202100121022010211202100121022010211201200
4 colors: 0123321032100123213003120312213013200231203113023102201301233210
5 colors: 0123443210432100123423140041321043223401342011024302413314201432
6 colors: 0123455432105432100123453241500514231054233245014253011035240351
Huh, apparently the sequences for 3,4,5,6 colors turn out to be eventually periodic (with periods 54,192,500,864). I wasn’t expecting that.
Aah! Incorrect!
"It's possible that Yasha has a makeup stash, in his stash of all stashes."
streetsweeper != garbage compacter.
Anyone else lost here?
This is, after all, a blog about the happenings at the Mirror Maze. Getting lost is a matter of course :-)
Too true.
I have no particular preference on M&Ms, but smarties (the Canadian ones) must always be sorted, and eaten to get to even numbers, EXCEPT that the red ones must be eaten last (because that is what the commercials always said to do). After that there is clearly colour preference: brown is boring ad gets eaten first, then pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, and finally all the red ones.
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