Two Bits, No Pieces

[firstfrost]

• Today at work, I wanted to mail a box. Unfortunately for me, my box was slightly too heavy for the 5-pound scale in the mail room. I asked Oliver if he had a bigger scale (because he can usually be counted upon to have one of almost everything except scissors), and he thought he used to, but had disposed of it, maybe in the basement shower room? We both went on quests around the building for scales - Hardware Services had one, but it started at -4 pounds and I was a little suspicious of it - but Oliver couldn't find his, and the only other postage scale, in the basement mail room was also 5 pounds. Bah! Quest thwarted!
  
  Oliver suggested: put it on both postage scales. Oh! Hey! Yes, of course that would work! And, I'm sure if you had presented it to me as a logic puzzle (You have a 6-pound box, and two five-pound scales: how do you weigh it?) I would have gotten the answer. But I would never have thought of it under actual circumstances. One of umpteen reasons why Oliver is great. :)
  
  
• Exercise bicycle update: Being tired is kind of like being bored. If I am sufficiently distracted, I don't notice so much that I'm tired. However, I seem to have to distract two timelines, not just one. Watching TV is insufficiently distracting (which is why I normally knit while watching TV). Audiobook plus iTouch game is sufficient.

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

The two scales were the same height. But I don't think you can just reset a non-digital scale to -1 pound - it's a physical constraint in addition to a readout issue.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Yeah; I just checked the ten-pound scale in this room and couldn't reset the zero below negative three ounces. So the two-state solution is probably the best for Israel-Palestine two-scale solution is probably the best for this problem.

Figuring out the response function for the minus-four scale would be more complicated. I expect most people would find it tedious, but it sounds oddly amusing to me.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

It's true, reading -4 shouldn't automatically rule out the other scale, and it was almost certainly a constant rather than a multiplier - it was a really old-style bathroom scale that went up to 200; there was likely a dial somewhere to adjust the zero. But for a bathroom scale, in addition to its precision being off by 4, I was not really confident of its accuracy. But I left that out for the purposes of making the anecdote shorter. :)