Plus, when mowing a lawn, you often want to leave a nice pattern, so you cant just go for pure efficiency.
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
> “(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
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.
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.
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.
https://genius.com/The-all-american-rejects-move-along-lyric...
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.
And mowing is meditative... some of the time. Until I encounter a yellowjacket nest.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
> 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!
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
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.