When geeks mate

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

It’s kinda hard to describe, but I’ll give it a shot.

Let’s say I have a bag of Skittles. I dump the bag out and separate the flavors. I find I have 15 orange, 12 grape, 12 strawberry, 9 lemon, and 8 green.

Green is the lowest number, so I make 5 piles of each flavor, 8 in each pile. This leaves me 7 orange, 4 grape, 4 strawberry, and 1 lemon.

Lemon is now the lowest number, so I separate 1 from each of the remaining 4 colors and set the aside in their own little piles. Now I have 6 orange, 3 grape, and 3 strawberry.

I separate the remaining flavors into piles of 3, leaving me with 3 orange.

So I eat the 3 leftover orange Skittles first. Then I go backwards in the order I made the piles: The piles of 3 grape, strawberry, and orange. Then the set of lemon, orange, grape, and strawberry. And finally the piles of 8 that I had originally separated.

If someone comes along and takes a Skittle or two form any of them piles, I rearrange them again. It’s sad I know, but this is the only thing I do this about. M&M, Reeses Pieces, whatever I eat all jumbled up, but Skittles have to be separated.

My BiL saw me do this once and that upcoming Christmas bought me a one-pound bag of Skittles just to watch me separate them.

22

You, sir, are a freak.

23

If I am eating Skittles or M&Ms or anything like it, and I have a space to do it, I arrange the piles by color. I make sure that whichever is the smallest pile has an even number; if there are 7 I eat one, to make six. Then I arrange all the other piles and make sure they are even too, eating a few if I must to accomplish that; once they are even, I eat them two at a time, one on each side of my mouth. I start with the biggest pile and eat until all the piles are equal, and after that, I eat them in whatever order I feel like. But there must be two for each bite.

And if I don’t get my shoes tied JUST RIGHT I have to retie them until they’re right. I don’t understand the people who can just tie and go; they must feel the same, or something horrible is going to happen to me.

I don’t know about full-blown OCD but I admit I have some tendencies towards it…

24

Wow, Crunchy Frog, are we related?

Okay, I don’t do exactly the same thing. What I do is separate the colors, eat all the leftovers so that I’ll have the same number in every pile, and then make patterns out of them.

For me, though, this is true of M&Ms, Skittles, whatever.

I also can’t see a pile of coins without making patterns out of it.

25

Interesting thread. A question… How do you guys place a new roll of toilet paper in the holder? Does the next-to-be-used section hang from the front or the back? I’ve noticed that here in NZ and Oz that in most houses they hang the TP so that it pulls from the back, except in hotels. I attribute the hotel bit to the fact that most Auckland hotel housekeepers are from the northern hemisphere, i.e. Indians, Thais, etc… The home bit is attributable, I guess, to a similar fact that water goes down a sink drain in a counter clockwise direction in one hemisphere and clockwise and the other.

26

my word! Crunchy Frog, that’s exactly what I do! only i make sure no one ever ever catches me.

any of you ever read up on temperament theory? Libertarian had a great thread for Melancholies a long while back… lots of interesting “dorky” rituals including CD organization… but they are all quite necessary steps!

I think I just found a bunch of melancholy geeks like me!

27

Welcome delfinpl. There is only one right way to hang the ole TP… the paper must hang from the front of the roll. Anything other than this is just plain wrong. Anything else you’d like to know. :smiley:

28

Damnit! I just got settled in and now I gotta run down to the market just for skittles? Last night, same thing, only it was Sonic onion rings. Why do you people keep doing this to me?

Oh yeah. Speaking of rings, how does a geek approach the concept of organizing with a 2nd keyring attatched to the 1st keyring? I’m wondering just how complicated this could get.

And by the way when I eat my skittles I just lean back with a big 'ol yawn and pour. No muss, no fuss.

29

Then you’re just doing it wrong. :wink:

30

But it tastes so right…

31

I’ll have to ask erislover to come in and explain his system. He made a fascinating comment in my LiveJournal about it.

32

So how do you sort your Sonic onion rings? :smiley:

33

Crunchy Frog, As I was eating my bag of skittles (inhaling might better describe it), I gave some serious thought to your particular methodology of skittle consumption.

I thought back to my youth when my math teacher touted to no end the value of mathematics in everyday life and told stories about how one day in the distant future, we would all look back upon our understanding of these principles as having furthered our lives and opened new doors to us. Having read your post concerning skittles I am beginning to see how this could indeed be true. That is not to say that I actually have an understanding of math but I do feel that I have a firm grasp of what math is, and I am fairly certain that it is math which you are using to further your enjoyment of skittles.

But here is my problem (not a story problem, mind you). See, I believe that there are certain things in life which should NOT involve complex processes involving the manipulation of numbers and or formulaic equations. Eating skittles happens to be one of these things. I reserve the use of higher level math (in my case, higher math being anything above and beyond computing how many 99 cent cheeseburgers I can get with my 5 bucks and still have enough left over for some skittles) for more important things, like deducing my approximate chances of getting laid based on the number of available women in a room. This can get quite complex when you take into account the varying levels of horniness of any males in the room. As I said higher math. I try to use it sparingly so as not to tax my mind unduly. Other situations such as determining how many beers will be left in my fridge after a group of friends drop by can be considerably more complex. But back to my point.

I cannot convince myself by any stretch of my mind (I can easily do this because my brain does not completely fill my cranium, in fact I once contemplated the idea of turning my head into a mobile gumball dispenser) that my math teacher was referring to the consumption of candy when he pontificated upon the wonderous uses of mathematics that life would unfold for us. In fact I think he would be appalled at your trivial use of it. You don’t have to take my word for it, I have his number so that you can call him and ask if your particular application of algebra is acceptable. I can save you this step however, because I already know what he would say. He would say "Kids. Kids! KIDS! WE DO NOT ALLOW FIREWORKS DISPLAYS IN THE CLASSROM!!! NOW SOMEBODY PLEASE EXTINGUISH THAT CAT!!! Wait. That’s not what he would tell you. I forget the rest of what he taught us, I was too busy setting Tina’s hair on fire. Perhaps you will have to call him after all.

But in the meantime could you please restrict your use of mathematics to more appropriate things such as those which I mentioned earlier. At least until you have Mr. Anderson’s permission to continue counting your skittles…

Thanks.

34

I place them in a rather unruly pile to one side of my Sonic Burger and slightly to the right and in front of my jumbo sized Coke. Then one by one, I slide them through a puddle of fry sauce (which is slightly to the left of the rings, though not too close to my burger) and into my mouth. Throughout this process I count the rings and carefully compare the final number to my last such experiment. As for the sorting, I’m not exactly sure how that goes as I leave this for the most part, to my digestive system. Generally everything comes out just fine.

35

YOU PLAY THE SPELLING GAME!

My family does this.

“How do you spell ‘instantly’?”
“Well, it helps if you start real fast.”

“How do you spell random?”
“W-G-C-E-K…”

36

What flavor is green? Lime?

37

Pfft. Pfft, I say.
Have you ever seen him wearing a giant Daffy Duck head? I have. Only then can you truly say what a freak he is.

:smiley:

38

Tchah. This one is simple–the result invariably converges to zero. Properly speaking:



    n
   Lim (beer(f)) = 0
   f=0

Where f is the number of friends visiting and n is any nonzero integer.

Unc, Crunchy may be a freak (he did voluntarily watch Travesty: Earth, after all), but at least he’s an entertaining freak. :slight_smile:

39

Not so quick Balance you’ve forgotten to factor in the oh so convienent corner market.

40

Of course it’s correct to hang the TP so that it goes over instead of under. But it’s a temptation for cats and small children who sometimes swat at the roll and discover the fun of unrolling the whole thing. So maybe there ought to be allowances for some people. Maybe they could apply for some kind of building code variance or Papal indulgence.