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Dimensions 1, 8 & 24 have universally optimal configurations; 3 is a zoo readable me, , on spheres. i actually remember going off on an insane tangent about the sphere packing problem. it was 2016 or so; i was on the porch with a cigarette. the original source, to me, was a passage from neal stephonson's book "cryptonomicon," which featured an extended passage about the optimum consumption of captain crunch cereal; how it was ship-shaped to satisfy marketing but effectively spheroid for packaging purposes. the "what is the optimal way to cram a number of spheres into a space?" is one of my favorite fings, really. it seems so simple at first, but, no, it's nuts. a very fascinating . |
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Randy takes the red box and holds it securely between his knees with the handy stay closed tab pointing away from him. Using both hands in unison he carefully works his fingertips underneath the flap, trying to achieve equal pressure on each side, paying special attention to places where too much glue was laid down by the gluing machine. For a few long, tense moments, nothing at all happens, and an ignorant or impatient observer might suppose that Randy is getting nowhere. But then the entire flap pops open in an instant as the entire glue front gives way. Randy hates it when the box top gets bent or, worst of all possible words, torn. The lower flap is merely tacked down with a couple of small glue spots and Randy pulls it back to reveal a translucent, inflated sac. The halogen down light recessed in the ceiling shines through the cloudy material of the sac to reveal gold everywhere the glint of gold. Randy rotates the box ninety degrees and holds it between his knees so its long axis is pointed at the television set, then grips the top of the sac and carefully parts its heat sealed seam, which purrs as it gives way. Removal of the somewhat milky plastic barrier causes the individual nuggets of Cap'n Crunch to resolve, under the halogen light, with a kind of preternatural crispness and definition that makes the roof of Randy's mouth glow and throb in trepidation. |
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On the TV, the dancing instructors have finished demonstrating the basic steps. It is almost painful to watch them doing the compulsories, because when they do, they must willfully forget everything they know about advanced ballroom dancing, and dance like persons who have suffered strokes, or major brain injuries, that have wiped out not only the parts of their brain responsible for fine motor skills but also blown every panel in the aesthetic discretion module. They must, in other words, dance the way their beginning pupils like Randy dance. The gold nuggets of Cap'n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in half Tiny fragments spall away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World class cereal eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap'n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds. |
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At this point in the videotape he always wonders if he's inadvertently set his beer down on the fast forward button, or something, because the dancers go straight from their vicious Randy parody into something that obviously qualifies as advanced dancing. Randy knows that the steps they are doing are nominally the same as the basic steps demonstrated earlier, but he's damned if he can tell which is which, once they go into their creative mode. There is no recognizable transition, and that is what pisses Randy off, and has always pissed him off, about dancing lessons. Any moron can learn to trudge through the basic steps. That takes all of half an hour. But when that half hour is over, dancing instructors always expect you'll take flight and go through one of those miraculous time lapse transitions that happen only in Broadway musicals and begin dancing brilliantly. Randy supposes that people who are lousy at math feel the same way: the instructor writes a few simple equations on the board, and ten minutes later he's deriving the speed of light in a vacuum. He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when cold milk and Cap'n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute each other's essential natures: two Platonic ideals separated by a boundary a molecule wide. |
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Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon handle, the polished stainless steel fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole milk, because otherwise why bother? Anything less is indistinguishable from water, and besides he thinks that the fat in whole milk acts as some kind of a buffer that retards the dissolution into slime process. The giant spoon goes into his mouth before the milk in the bowl has even had time to seek its own level. A few drips come off the bottom and are caught by his freshly washed goatee (still trying to find the right balance between beardedness and vulnerability, Randy has allowed one of these to grow). Randy sets the milk pod down, grabs a fluffy napkin, lifts it to his chin, and uses a pinching motion to sort of lift the drops of milk from his whiskers rather than smashing and smearing them down into the beard. Meanwhile all his concentration is fixed on the interior of his mouth, which naturally he cannot see, but which he can imagine in three dimensions as if zooming through it in a virtual reality display. Here is where a novice would lose his cool and simply chomp down. A few of the nuggets would explode between his molars, but then his jaw would snap shut and drive all of the unshattered nuggets straight up into his palate where their armor of razor sharp dextrose crystals would inflict massive collateral damage, turning the rest of the meal into a sort of pain hazed death march and rendering him Novocain mute for three days. But Randy has, over time, worked out a really fiendish Cap'n Crunch eating strategy that revolves around playing the nuggets' most deadly features against each other. The nuggets themselves are pillow shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests. |
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Now, with a flake type of cereal, Randy's strategy would never work. But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard to pin down striated pillow formation. The important thing, for Randy's purposes, is that the individual pieces of Cap'n Crunch are, to a very rough approximation, shaped kind of like molars. The strategy, then, is to make the Cap'n Crunch chew itself by grinding the nuggets together in the center of the oral cavity, like stones in a lapidary tumbler. Like advanced ballroom dancing, verbal explanations (or for that matter watching videotapes) only goes so far and then your body just has to learn the moves. By the time he has eaten a satisfactory amount of Cap'n Crunch (about a third of a 25 ounce box) and reached the bottom of his beer bottle, Randy has convinced himself that this whole dance thing is a practical joke. When he reaches the hotel, Amy and Doug Shaftoe will be waiting for him with mischievous smiles. They will tell him they were just teasing and then take him into the bar to talk him down. Randy puts on the last few bits of his suit. Any delaying tactics are acceptable at this point, so he checks his e mail. |
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The sphere packing problem was referenced on Nigga Turtles (soon to be shadow banned by oligopoly tube if not already) when michaelangelo (probably) said "then... we're gonna pack your mouth full of nuts" to April on the telephone. |
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truly, this math is everywhere |
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