A Place for my Head

I know I haven't posted lately - truthfully, I often don't find my life interesting enough to share. I guess you'll have to be happy with what meager offerings I can produce.

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I think about weird things. This is probably an understatement. I'm sure that most people have strange things running through their heads, but I am an engineer. We think about the world in a different way than normal people.

Let me give you an example. I was driving toward a traffic light the other day and it was green. My first thought was, "I hope I make it before it turns orange". Then I started thinking of several scenarios. It could turn orange while I had enough time to stop, or while I didn't have enough time to stop. It could turn orange while I could still make it under, or while I couldn't still make it under. And there are overlaps. Let me make a chart (because that's how I think):

That is how my brain works. I think of random stuff like this all the time. Here's another example:

I was eating some cereal one morning and started wondering if was going to go stale because I always have two boxes open and tend to run out of milk for days at a time. Let's call the milkless period a "drought". A drought is wasted open time that just causes open boxes to go stale even more. I always rotate between cereals - one day it's Multi-Grain Cheerios (MGC), the next day it's Sugary Cereal X (like Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, etc). So I always have one box of sugary and one box of MGC open at all times (except when I finish one).

I was trying to figure out the shelf-time of each cereal so I knew which ones were more likely to go bad. So I defined a system where "one box-time" meant "the average length of time it would take me to eat one box of cereal if that was the only one I was eating, excluding droughts". You can see that since I'm always rotating cereals, it takes me about two box-times to finish one box of cereal, more if there's a drought. Furthermore, since I usually have two boxes of sugary and two boxes of MGC in my cabinets (so that there's no shortage when one runs out), each box can spend a maximum of four box-times in my cabinets (two while closed and two while open), plus droughts. However, they're only getting stale when they're open (or at least the process happens more quickly in that case), so the best thing I could do is rotate cereals on a box-level, not on a daily basis. Then I would reduce the open time to one box-time instead of two. It would also eliminate the possibility of having two boxes open during a drought.

From there I kinda lost my train of thought because the only thing I learned was that I would have to rotate on a box-level to decrease staleness, and I don't really want to do that. But you get the idea - I often break down simple problems into overly complex ideas to try and figure things out on a more exact level. It's a blessing and a curse, I think.