I wonder if there are categorizable styles for toweling off.

Every time I exit a shower, bath, or pool, I dry myself off in a consistent, particular manner. How did this come about? Do other people use their towels in as a consistent manner as I do? I hope so, because then we can compare towel-usage with heat maps. 

I use three sizes of towels: a bath sheet (60″ × 35″), a bath towel (52″ × 27″) and a hand towel (30″ × 16″). I was curious not only how I was using the towel, but if changing towel size changed the usage pattern. So, I took three showers and dried myself off once with each towel.

The darker areas indicate higher use. The patterns represent both sides of the towel, in aggregate.

Bath Sheet (60″ × 35″):

Bath Towel (52″ × 27″):

Hand Towel (30″ × 16″):

From the maps, we can see I’m a very symmetric towel user, with a focus on the center. I also tend not to evenly utilize my towel’s drying power.

Perhaps I could optimize.

How do you use your towel?

(more…)

I wonder what the exchange rate is on Dunbar’s number.

Popularized by Tipping Point, Dunbar’s number suggests that there’s a limit to social cognition. Roughly speaking, 150 people can form a tight social group; any larger and closeness suffers. Inasmuch, we sacrifice intimacy and trade familiarity for breadth. Is there an optimal social mix?

I’m not critiquing Dunbar’s accuracy or claiming we cap our friendships at 150 people. (My 800 Facebook “friends” might think ill of me for saying so.) But, I inherently feel a physical limit to my intimate capacity: it’s impossibly difficult to know — to really know — a certain number of people. 

To achieve such feats in friendship, I trade intimacy for connectivity. There are ten people I have always been close with (family included), and another twenty or so that are close friends. Call it thirty.

Using 150 as a benchmark, this leaves 120 slots. Using my 800 Facebook-friends as an indicator of my extended network, this means that 800 fit into those 120 intimate slots. Very roughly speaking, I trade one close friend for 6.67 acquaintances.

By comparison, consider someone like Gary Vaynerchuk or Robert Scoble. Assume each has thirty close friends. Both hit the 5,000-friend limit on Facebook. That’s at least 42 acquaintances per close friend slot. That’s a lot of people. Both are connected to thousands more.

I wonder at what point, between the 800 I have and the 5,000 (and more) they have, can they not keep track of, let alone remember, those acquaintances.

What if I were to try to know — to really know — those 800 people I’m connected with. How far could I get?

Or would I just lose intimacy with everyone?

Is that what we’re doing to ourselves?

More: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes

Jews need love too– but some sure do have a funny way of going about finding it.

In Times Square hangs a huge billboard advertising JDate, a jewish-only online dating service. It’s like match.com, but for Jews.

Singles create profiles to describe themselves, their perfect date, and what they expect out of a relationship. They include pictures, yiddish phrases, and statistics including religious denomination and astrological sign to woo potential mates. Though users are asked for a user name, many men and women opt to use their unique serial numbers, a number assigned during signup, in lieu of a name to identify themselves.

Let’s read that again.

Though users are asked for a user name, many men and women opt to use their unique serial numbers, a number assigned during signup, in lieu of a name to identify themselves.

To boot, user numbers are unique, assigned, and permanent. You’d think for a cultural group so greatly affected by the holocaust, certain members would be more aware of the irony. 

At least you can change your phone number.

–

Notes: The author identifies culturally as Jewish. The author is not on JDate. Friends of the author, over dinner, noted that it was hard to remember girls that used JDate-assigned numbers instead of user names. The author remarked how funny that seemed in historical contexts. Laughter ensued. Promises were made to produce a blog post. The author makes no apology.

More: Spark Networks (LOV), the parent company of JDate, uses the same technology for other niche dating sites such as aptly-named Interracial Singles, Big Beautiful Woman Personals Plus, and Indian Matrimonial Network. These names are so wonderfully descriptive.

Does precise writing stifle creativity?

As a species, we communicate primarily through writing. Literacy has no doubt improved learning, but does the act of translating thoughts into words harden cognition and narrow our creative abilities?

For me, thinking is seldom linear: imagine shmoo-shaped colors, textures, and emotions rubbing, tugging, and mixing in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Somehow, that system produces a communicable idea. 

Whenever someone asks me a question, I immediately have a pinging sensation. Then, somehow I translate that into a response. Ask me again and there’s less pinging, but you’ll get the same or similar response (and perhaps a hint of irritation). It’s like my brain has created a record of the question and a shortcut for me to make thinking easier. 

I shall call it learning.

The problem is that precise writing is rigid. (Ignore creative writing, poetry, and other artful forms for the moment.) So, if we communicate our thoughts primarily with rigid tools, over time our brains create shortcuts and scaffolding that promotes rigid thinking, making things easier.

See the problem?

Thankfully, not all communication is verbal. Artists (as writers categorize them) use movement, imagery, sound, void, touch, emotion, and all sorts of sensory to (as they say) express themselves. So do athletes. (Not so much the mathletes.)

Generally, artists who excel visually, aurally, and spatially come up short linguistically. They’re called “creatives”, and their expressive mediums are far less rigid; but, that doesn’t mean they’re not useful for precise communication. 

But, that’s another post for another day.