Why some people mow a lawn better than others
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
Plus, when mowing a lawn, you often want to leave a nice pattern, so you cant just go for pure efficiency.
How is this any more or less valid a use of time vs. mini-golf?
(The "real" analogous problems are things like optimizing factories or delivery routes, and the way they are solved is by programming a computer to, but this is a toy version.)
Copying another comment I made earlier
When I was laid off a couple months ago, the first thing I did was go out and mow my lawn. One hour of simple, clean labor, with clear progress, goals, and solitude. It helped me stay out of a bad mental frame, and when I finished I went inside and sent out a few hundred applications
Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time that wasn't spent on finding a new job working on my yard. Fixing sprinklers, cleaning up the edges of the grass, turning, peating, and mulching garden beds, and more
While this job search period took longer than any of my past ones, and ostensibly should have been more stressful, it wasn't. Is that because I spent most of the downtime working outdoors? Probably, who knows? It was certainly a better use of my time than sitting indoors moping
Every wo/man and their dog is telling me to knock it down, have a bobcat to clear the yard and start fresh.
I enjoy the work of clearing a yard by hand, and slowly cleaning the place up.
I miss running an excavator, all the time.
Though going to war with pests is… less stress relieving sometimes.
But mowing the lawn is nice. It's like doing a giant coloring page with a big thick marker.
The past couple of years I've lived in a place with no lawn to mow and I miss it.
Unenjoyable, and my electric motor’s batteries die twice as fast in the heat, so I have to do it two days in a row instead of being able to get it over with. But I don’t hate it quite enough to blow hundreds of dollars on extra batteries or to pay someone else to do it.
Gets me outside and moving, accomplishes something tangible, can catch up on a podcast or two or just get lost in my thoughts, often leads to fixing other odds and ends around the house I've put off.
Most of my yard (not tiny, but not big either) is clover/legumes now, and I only mow it once it’s seeded and matured, to encourage a new flush of flowers for the bees/flies/beetles and such. As a bonus the clover tends to push out the catsear too.
I’m also fond of my mint patch, and all the little mint moths fluttering about it.
I am currently doing weekly shots in an attempt to fix the issue.
Not when its >100F and >30%RH and a bright sun in the sky.
At least with the extreme heat the grass doesn't grow quite as fast.
you might want something more native to those conditions that doesnt take much upkeep
In the morning the grass is still wet and sticky. By the time you can mow it properly, the sun is blaring down on top of this. The afternoon time is worst as things have heated up considerably. When the sun is out of the way, the mosquitos come out and make it even more unenjoyable.
https://genius.com/The-all-american-rejects-move-along-lyric...
> “(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
Sometimes efficiency is not the point.
My wife finally convinced me to just do the online, recurring payment every month. I definitely miss the physical act of walking the check to the tiny town bank every month.
Vonnegut definitely resonates.
I'll drive all the way to the city, to visit a store to buy a pair of pants or something (what I'm buying doesn't matter)
My wife doesn't understand why I don't just buy them online. I know my size, I know the style I want, and I know the company sells em online. But it's not about the item. It's about tossing on a podcast, or seeing something new, or even just getting mad at someone in traffic for cutting me off.
The journey is often more important than the destination
And mowing is meditative... some of the time. Until I encounter a yellowjacket nest.
> Sarah also did something that appeared a bit unnatural. Instead of simply continuing straight a few times, she intuitively and preemptively turned in a snake-like pattern. This highlighted a key difference between real-life mowing and our simplified game, an approach that strong mowers exploited. Sarah, an avid gamer, seemed to recognize this strategy immediately.
I have also played a lot of ChuChu Rocket!
This can heavily be mitigated through technique. If you walk straight and just turn? Yeah, the corner is missed. If you explicitly come to a stop and do your best to do a full 90-degree turn before moving? The only curve there is going to come from the shape of the blade, and is almost guaranteed to be a tighter curve than just walking and turning without stopping.
Yes, it takes longer. But if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right, even if it takes twice as long, no?
This is debatable, but either way it is the opposite of the purpose of this article, which is about 'efficiency' in mowing.
Also, even if you do it very carefully, and walk a perfect 90 degree turn, you are still going to have an arc. You wont mow the whole 'square' like in the game.
Even when it comes to mowing, different people have different goals. I live out in the country, and tall grass means bugs and ticks, so my mowing tries to strike a balance of short grass near the home and the property edges to stop the ticks, medium grass most everything else because we like to let the clover grow, and tall grass, un-mowed for years on some spots, to allow an ecosystem where we still get monarchs and nightly fireflies.
Totally understandable if suburban folk have different goals, but either way, 100% agreed that efficiency is a secondary goal at best.
Genuine question, I thought monarch larvae predominantly feed on milkweeds? Do you get milkweeds occurring naturally in your grass? Or are they feeding on something else?
They should say more clearly up front what is the definition of efficiency.
If they want people to think of a particular metaphor, but there are critical differences, those differences must be clarified up front. It seems the person designing the game/test has never really mowed actual lawns (at least lawns s/he actually cared about).
I took the approach of efficiency meaning minimizing turns to save time.
Instead their definition of efficiency is fewest moves. Their "optimum" has many more turns than many other paths, so would be far more inefficient use of time (and apparently nevermind that path also lacks the necessary overlap to do a good job of actually mowing a lawn).
It was also unclear up front that the squares with rocks/features could not be mowed into, but this is unrealistic, as you need to mow around the feature edges not merely the square nearest them.
Overall, it is a less-than-good choice of metaphor for the test, and with the poor explanation of what "efficient" means by his measure, it is not the slightest bit surprising many got different results, "sub-optimal" by the page's standard.
It seems the test itself is so sub-optimal so the results are meaningless — ench test-taker's goals were likely significantly different from the goals the test-maker assumed.
Something like delivering newspapers would be a better problem I think - although I suppose you then you get into optimizations like preferring right-hand turns, etc. I wonder what would be the most simple and intuitive demonstration of the traveling salesman problem.
The other is, if you are like me and don't really have a "lawn" so much as a large yard and a weed season, so just discharge where it lands, is optimizing the discharge path, you don't want to discharge into unmowed grass(it builds up and makes things hard) so the optimal path turns into a spiral, fences also interfere with the discharge, so the optimal spiral is inside out, but you never quite know where the center is so to avoid an awkward edge you go outside in with a reverse path around the fence. and what appear to be inefficient passes(not cutting to full width or doubling a pass) to reduce extra turns into straight lines.
There may be a fun idle game in all of this.
I just want shorter grass asap. Not going to lie on my death bed bemoaning not mowing enough.
If it were up to me, my yard would be a prairie restoration tax deduction, but alas, neighbors.
chances are that the grass is bot native for you
I used to think that the line patterns mowed into grass were a purely aesthetic thing.
It turns out, the lines are mowed in a rotation to prevent wearing out the grass and causing damage. First you mow length-wise, then width-wise, then diagonally, finally diagonally in the opposite direction, before cycling through again.
Useless information for you today.
Well there's your problem right there.
I dont think it was "don't hurt the grass while you cut it" or "mow it four times in one sitting".
I feel you're dealing with a different level of lawn mowing if you're towing a mower, not pushing one.
From that perspective, it's like someone going over their strategies to avoid overloading their car's suspension when they're buying groceries. That's not a "thought and attention" scenario, that's a "why do you have half a ton of groceries" scenario.
They don't mean do all those cuts each time you mow. You mow the grass in one direction one day, and then a few days later when it needs cut again, you mow a different pattern.
People like that golf course look and I'd get nice tips for doing it.
Ohh, you're one of those neighbours. Once every two weeks is plenty.
I live in the PNW where the grass grows crazy fast in the spring, and I use a reel mower since my yard is small. It needs to be done regularly, and I'm not even a "lawn guy".
But then, I also like my lawn to look just a bit "shaggy" instead of clean-cut all the time, so it's possible I'm in a bit of a minority here.
I mow my garden between one to two weeks, according to the time of the year and sometimes I stop in June, if it stops raining like in 2022 and this year.
- The direction you mow leaves a pattern that I generally try to stay parallel to, and mow alongside, and go for long strips even if I have to do a bit of running over already-mowed parts
- I may go diagonal at times
- I've never had a yard that's a maze of rocks
- If there's a small patch I need to mow around, like a garden, I'll likely do a circle around that and use the edge of that mow line as a new edge
I'd bet the vast majority of people who did the game input a series of moves that doesn't reflect that closely to what they'd do in real life.
I kinda guessed they would score it the way they did - the number of squares you traveled through, but at the same time I was half aware of doing what I would do in real life which is to minimize the number of direction changes, not distance traveled.
* You need to pick up dog poo, dog toys, kids toys and clothes pegs
* You need to move the trampoline and mow that part and put it back.
* Some of the grass is so thick you need to whipersnap it first.
I have a different definition of optimal to this game.
The less time I spent in Alabama heat, the better.
Hence why I went for the irregular strange part on the lower left first, and then the more regular part on the right. That's the weird rain collection, herb garden, thing we have at the back.
I prefer to work in lands after I have cut the headlands. Reduces turning stress on the grass and acknowledges that the machine (the one I own, but the design is common) is optimized for use in one direction.
(yes it looks uglier that way - and yes I think of mowing the lawn as a chore)
For example, most people in the world (outside the USA in particular) have never mowed a lawn. I live in a city of 3.5 million and essentially no one has a lawn.
When you really mow a lawn terrain matters. Most lawns are not flat. One goes on lines of equal height not up and down a hill.
Edges are different than the interior part of the lawn, particularly if they abut flower beds, curbs, etc.
Re passing a given spot is sometimes an efficient way to mow it properly. Particularly in dead ends and odd corners. Etc.
The difference is that usually homes in latin america have big fences and gates at front, so lawns are private spaces, and not the private as property but not in the privacy sense as in America.
There's a life lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure!
I’m usually a huge fan of Pudding, but this completely misses the mark.
As soon as I read this, I immediately thought of the puzzle in the last gym of the Gen 3 Pokémon games (Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald). It was a big ice platform that cracked after stepping on it once, and backtracking meant falling through the ice and having to start all over again.
I wonder how the optimal path changes if turns are penalized as well as steps - in real life turning a lawnmower takes a lot more effort than moving the same spot twice in a straight line.
Please, no! At least for any kind of suburban environment or denser. Don't contribute to the heat island effect.
Just plant some native perennial plants that don't really require maintenance.
And for the love of everything sacred in this world, please plant the maximum number of trees your location allows. This world needs more trees.
1. It doesn't take into consideration the extra effort of turning/changing directions or the added efficiency of forward momentum in a straight line.
2. The cognitive load of keeping track of the sections left in a algorithmic path as opposed to a simple top to down or left to right approach.
3. The lawnmover/vacuum probably has to be returned to storage at the starting point so there's going some backtracking in that case in the optimal solution.
Pure genius and nerd snipe marksmanship.
Did you know multi-robot exploration pretty much as laid out in Exapunks has loose but well studied bounds on number of agents, bits of information, and exploration steps?
For example, one agent with only one pebble cannot explore all graphs?
Disappointments aside, this reminds me of how engaging the old game Flow Free was!
no comment on the results or the premise of are people good at mowing or just good at playing "snake"
i would be very curious to see if this same result held up when you also factor things like turn effort or "prioritize the longest straight lines bc they look cool"
Surprising how good the average person is. I got the median 91% eff. Or 5 off.
I still haven't managed to get it back to a nice, easy to mow lawn yet. 8(
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11119-023-10033-9
Turns out, when you get a lawnmower on top of a steel toed boot, you get a _lot_ of sparks.
www.flymo.com
And since then I never had to do it again.
their ideal path leaves you at the other side of the yard.
Mowing a lawn is about creating straight even lines not optimal routes.
In the nude.
If somebody reports it, the city can and will come tear it out and charge me for the work.
"Ownership" is a funny thing.
Is there supposed to be more content than this?
... If JavaScript is required to view more content than this, why?
By "asked people to mow it" they're talking about the visitors to the site. It's interactive.
It's somewhat a mistake not to have "skip to results" in the actual html. On the other hand, it makes sense they want to force people to see the landing page first. And unless they want to add a whole rendered fallback the results page isn't going to be super functional without javascript.
The noscript version needs a button and a big box with an X. And even then the button would only be half-functional so I understand skipping it. It mostly just needs a "missing content" warning.
https://files.catbox.moe/8nxbo5.png
The logos at the bottom are images from the page footer.
Read the next sentence. You have to click the button to get there.
> There is also no button.
I keep saying the button is broken and I says it needs to show up on noscript. How can I be clearer?
You can try understanding that it is not acceptable for the page to look like this with JavaScript disabled. There is no good reason why the "next sentence" can't just appear on the page, using the same technology (HTML) that the opening paragraph uses.
So are you going to admit your initial reaction was wrong here? Despite how this page could be improved (a warning and a partial conclusions view with javascript off), the core purpose of the javascript is to let you play the game and watch replays, something that is very basic automation and impractical to do without code.
I will not admit my reaction was wrong, because it was not wrong. If a submission is titled "Why some people mow a lawn better than others", it is completely reasonable to expect a JavaScript-disabled version of the page to display text which describes why some people mow a lawn better than others.
I did not click the submission title to watch replays, or even simple media animations. I clicked it expecting a theory of lawn-mowing to be conveyed.
But offering it is not egregiously unnecessary. The javascript, while flawed, is there for a valid reason.
> I did not click the submission title to watch replays, or even simple media animations. I clicked it expecting a theory of lawn-mowing to be conveyed.
They use the replays to convey it. Insisting on pure text is another layer of unreasonable insistence on how to do things.
No, I'm not. If I don't have JavaScript enabled, then I don't see the post-game content.
> But offering it is not egregiously unnecessary.
It hasn't been offered to me.
What is egregiously unnecessary is the requirement to enable JavaScript in order to read plain text explaining the conclusion. Because when one has actual conclusions, presenting them in plain text is trivial; doing it any other way is what requires additional effort.
> Insisting on pure text is another layer of unreasonable insistence on how to do things.
No, it is not. It is the most basic and fundamental principle of how the WWW works.
I meant the reader in general.
> It hasn't been offered to me.
The game has been offered to you. You are actively refusing the offer. Using javascript to make that offer is not a bad thing. The problem is not having a fallback that warns you.
Which simplifies to: The site uses javascript for a valid reason. It's valid even though you don't want it.
> Because when one has actual conclusions, presenting them in plain text is trivial; doing it any other way is what requires additional effort.
> No, it is not. It is the most basic and fundamental principle of how the WWW works.
Do you get this mad at videos? Some things are fundamentally not text.
Progressive enhancement is a general purpose strategy, not a requirement for every situation.
Again, this is the text that is shown to me:
> You’ve probably done something like mow a lawn or vacuum a rug hundreds of times without thinking much about it. Some part of your brain works out a route that’s usually good enough to get the job done. People are actually pretty good at this, and better than you’d guess for a problem that is hard for computers. We wanted to see it for ourselves, so we built a lawn and asked people to mow it.
What part of this mentions that the lawn they "built" is actually a simulation in a game? What part mentions that they would now like me to play it? What part says anything whatsoever about what they learned from having people play the game?
> You are actively refusing the offer. Using javascript to make that offer is not a bad thing.
No. Not having JavaScript is the default. It is expected that people can make the offer in a way that doesn't require JavaScript, because the point of making the offer is to justify the existence of the JavaScript.
> a valid reason.
It is not possible that there is "a valid reason" to use JavaScript to make an offer to use JavaScript. That is pure chicken and egg.
The way you make the offer is to use text to convey what the purpose of the JavaScript is.
> Do you get this mad at videos?
If it's configured to autoplay, and consists of someone droning over irrelevant imagery saying something that would have been better presented as plain text? Hell yes. Why wouldn't I?
The fact that you can't see the offer without javascript is a flaw. But the offer is there. And everyone else told you about it so you know, and have known for days.
> Not having JavaScript is the default.
Ojectively not true.
> the point of making the offer is to justify the existence of the JavaScript
That's a contorted way to phrase it that isn't right. The justification is the game and replays, whether or not you actually see the offer.
> It is not possible that there is "a valid reason" to use JavaScript to make an offer to use JavaScript. That is pure chicken and egg.
Ah, that's why you contorted it that way. Good news, the chicken and egg justification is not what's happening.
> If it's configured to autoplay, and consists of someone droning over irrelevant imagery saying something that would have been better presented as plain text? Hell yes. Why wouldn't I?
No, not those details you came up with. No autoplay. The imagery in the video is central to how they explain it. If someone did a text version it would be fundamentally a different explanation.
Would you object just as hard, or accept it being a video?
This mower thing would also lose something significant as pure text.
However, here in the U.S. my iPhone immediately tosses these messages into spam. The same with Google Voice. I've not given out my actual phone number to anyone, and if someone requires it, I give them the GV number. If they don't accept that number they don't get my business (I think that has happened like three times in the past decade).
General rule of thumb: ignore random messages, calls, and emails. If you have doubts/worries, look up the official number for the company/service and call that.