swishism

This might sound like a kinda of number geek thing, but relax it’s not (I’m not good at Math).  In fact it’s more to do with  a story about the evil spy-ware I found on my ailing laptop last week (OK, so it’s still a bit geeky, but more about that in Pt. 2)

Examples abound of creative people relying on heuristics, but lets start with geometry. I just tweeted about the best dance routine I’d seen in less than 4 square feet (see left).

Now, there are no rules for how to do this, how do you pack a routine in a space like this? It reminds me of the bag-packing heuristic, which explains why we put large items into a bag before the smaller ones, when we have odd shaped items. We do it, not because its guaranteed to work, but because there is no fixed answer, no fixed rules for how to solve these kinds of problem. You just have to do it. Importantly, this could be dismissed as common sense, but then how many routines are there like this?

swishism entry heurisitic, intuition, trial and error