Unstructured

Today I had a long conversation with my favorite co-conspirator at work about the concept of a comprehensive list of human skills, and how such a thing could be used as the basis for a tool that would help you identify the right person to do a job you had--and it could be any job, from debugging code for a meteorological simulation, to figuring out what that noise your car is making means, to roofing your house, to separating your stuck Lego bricks. If you could completely characterize someone's skill set and the skills necessary (both in terms of technical know-how and social capabilities), then in theory you could find someone who perfectly matched your stuff-doing needs.

Unsurprisingly, this got me thinking about what my own personal skill list would look like (knitting, crocheting, neuroscience, note-taking, reading for comprehension, understanding people's underlying motivations, flirting, and swing dancing would all be on there in various places), which got me thinking about the nature of intelligence, which got me thinking about IQ tests. Which brings us to today's thingaday.

You know those questions on IQ tests where they show you a flat diagram, and then ask, "if this was folded at the indicated creases, which of the following three-dimensional shapes would the folding produce?"

I decided to do that with fabric.



I took those pieces (well, except for three of the really square ones, because it was already taking longer than I expected and I decided to leave those out) and sewed them together along their edges until I ended up with just a small hole left, then turned it inside out, stuffed it, and sewed off that last hole. It turned out that if you folded up those bits of fabric along the seams, the resultant three-dimensional shape would be this:


I think I am going to call him George.

Don't judge George.

It's not his fault.

Incidentally, using one hand to run the foot pedal while the other hand guides the fabric is a pretty suboptimal sewing machine usage arrangement. Surprisingly, though, it is not so suboptimal that I am motivated to acquire a desk.