Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

The space pen affair is a well known urban myth, see for example http://io9.com/5838635/the-million-dollar-space-pen-hoax

The second example is funny but it is a classic example of misdirection. It is made out to be about mathematics but has got nothing to with it. How exactly is that about overthinking something?

The third example is a ingenious solution by the author himself, a solution that is the product of thinking hard about coming up with a simple solution - hardly a case of whatever the opposite of overthinking is. If anything it is the opposite - just slice it up into 12 bites and take a small piece each of the last bit. If it's a mathematical question a mathematical approach seems more than reasonable.

All these examples seem to me to be weak examples of overthinking.

Here is a much better example of overthinking in my opinion, The Centipede's Dilemma:

A centipede was happy – quite!

Until a toad in fun

Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"

This raised her doubts to such a pitch,

She fell exhausted in the ditch

Not knowing how to run.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipedes_dilemma

The part about the string made me smile a bit, because I guess there aren't too many climbers on Quora. As any salty old trad climber knows, it only takes a couple of wraps around an object before the rope (or string in this case) becomes fixed to the object.

So unless you're lucky, the process would actually look like: take string, make space between thumb and index finger, wrap some number of ... oh, darn, it didn't come out even at all ... rats, can't move my fingers ... OK, start over, let's make the fingers a little farther apart ... wait, rats, didn't get 11 even wraps that time either ...

(I experimented with this before posting my comment, just in case.)

Or you could, y'know, take the string, measure the circumference, divide by 11. Or, you could throw away the string, take the diameter of pizza -- which is written in black marker on a tin or cardboard round and displayed on the wall at every pizza joint I've ever been to, I think -- and multiply by 3 and divide by 11 and space your cuts about that far apart.

There's a lot of good stuff out there on the benefits of "thinking like a child" -- learning to clear your mind of the preconceptions and opinions and expectations that we tend to develop as we get older. I don't think this post was a step in that direction, though.

or just loop the string over 1 finger 11 times?

I think the string thing is inaccurate enough (try it!) that you might as well just eye-ball it. If accuracy mattered, I would make a paper circle of about the size of the pizza, divide into twelve (sixteen would work too) slices, remove one (or five), and adjust the spaces between them until they looked about equal. Then slice between the paper pieces. If I were in a pizza shop, I'd probably just use actual pizza slices.

Since the string is of a fixed length, that only works if you finger's diameter is 1/11 of the pizza's diameter.

He means hanging from the finger, not tightly wrapped.

Even more simple.. cut in 12 pieces, throw away one and rearrange the pieces.

That was what I answered on Quora. But there is a simpler solution; baking a rectangular pizza and cutting rectangular pieces.

You guys are still overthinking it. The real answer is to tell the customer to go to hell.

LOL.

You're no fun... Not one of the people that sends little messages like "draw me a dinosaur" on their delivery tips, huh?

It is made out to be about mathematics but has got nothing to with it.

Well, as I understood it Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem ultimately also came down to counting doughnut holes in things which you wouldn't normally regard as doughnuts, so there is some mathematics there. But yes, you would "normally" expect the mathematician to cut the pizza into five slices (which look like four, he explains, because one of them is a point), and rearrange them smoothly across the plane without collisions into two whole pizzas identical to the first, which he can do with the Axiom of Choice (see the "Banach Tarski Paradox" for the 3D case).

"Repeating this process ten times," says the mathematician, "you have the trivial partition of the original pizza into eleven identical pizzas."

Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem ultimately also came down to counting doughnut holes in things which you wouldn't normally regard as doughnuts

No...

Ok, only did a few minutes research but intuitively it doesn't make sense to me that ballpoint pens a) work in space but b) don't work upside down. There wouldn't be an upside down in space because of 0 gravity.

Unless the author means upside down on earth?

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