May 29, 2008

• osaka moments

  In the anime Azumanga Daioh my favorite character by a large margin is “Osaka”. 
  
  Now most would describe Osaka as well… dumb. 
  She constantly seems out of focus, off the mark, and just very very
  slow. She takes a long time to respond to anything and her responses
  are often wildly inappropriate and totally incomprehensible to the
  people around her. The conversation will be about one thing and she’ll
  say something that has absolutely nothing to do with it. 
  
  While
  sitting in class she daydreams. Her mind wanders from random wild
  thought to random wild thought or odd fascination.  One day her head is
  lolling back and forth because she’s trying to follow those color spots
  that appear before her eyes sometimes. Another day she sits in the new
  classroom she just transferred into and in a moment of self examination
  she thinks about how in her previous school she was told she needs to
  focus and get it together.
  
  And she thinks..
  
  “Tomorrow I will get it together”
  
  “get it together”
  
  “get it together”
  
  “get it together”
  
  “get it together”
  
  “get it together”
  
  
  And thus goes her thoughts for that day.
  
  Hmm.
  So why do I like Osaka?   Well besides the fact that she is hilarious
  and the interactions between her and Chiyo are amongst the funniest
  parts of the series, there’s also the fact that, well, she reminds me
  of me!
  
  And of course I don’t think she’s dumb either.
  
  I’m just like her in a lot of
  ways.  I’ve always been a daydreamer. I often space out. Often my
  thought are well… off. I’m not thinking about what everyone else is
  thinking about or the thoughts I am having about the subject at hand
  are somewhat unusual.
  
  Unusual how you ask? 
  
  Well
  think about how Osaka dreams of detaching Chiyo’s pig tails off and
  connecting to them to her head and flying away. Or about how her pig
  tails are actually mind controlling devices that have taken over
  Chiyo’s personality?
  
  Yeah… it’s a little like that.
  
  Here’s
  a recent example. The other day I was at a dinner at a German
  restaurant.  Let me share with you a fragment of my wandering thoughts.
  It takes the form of an inner dialog.
  
  “You
  know, this really is an efficient seating arrangement for the side of
  the party. We’re all sitting together but effectively we are bifurcated
  into two groups due to nothing more than the size of the party. Why do
  we always use rectangular seating arrangements? Hmm… Is there a
  better way? Well let’s see, a Square works damn good for 4 people. Each
  entity can communicate comfortably with each of the other three
  persons. a 2×2 square is also really good. It isn’t quite as
  comfortable to communicate with the person directly next to you but nor
  is it particularly uncomfortable. So that gives each entity six people
  they can communicate with comfortable and 1 person with whom you can
  communicate semi-comfortably.  In addition since society tends to favor
  paired connections the 8-entity square is particularly effective.
  
  But
  a larger square. It starts to fall apart.  Because the other entities
  are too far away. In fact it starts to get really really bad. Even with
  just a 3×3 square seating arrangement, you end up with only 2 people
  you can communicate with effectively or semi-effectively.
  
  Comparatively
  a rectangular arrangement works a lot better for larger parties.  But
  it’s also unbalanced. It’s particularly effective for the people in the
  center but it kinda sucks for the people on the ends. Basically with a
  rectangle there’s diminishing returns. The person directly opposite
  you, you can communicate with with perfect effectiveness, or at least
  the best you can hope for from a basic physical seating arrangement.
  The person to the left and right of that person you can talk to really
  effectively. But for the persons to the left and the right of them it
  starts to get pretty darn hard to communicate with them, and to the
  left and right of them it’s basically impossible.  Also there’s a
  person to the immediate left and right of you with whom you can
  communicate semi-effectively, and there’s people to the left and right
  of them with whom it is bascially impossible to communicate with. 
  So… all told if you sit toward the middle of a rectangular seating
  arrangement you end up with 5-7 people with whom you can communicate.
  Not bad huh!
  
  But if you are on the ends
  you are sort of screwed. If it is a 1xN table then you not only get the
  benefits of paired seating but you can only communicate with about 4
  people comfortable. 2 are comfortable. 2 are less so. And you can maybe
  do 2 more if you have a loud voice.  And none of them are easy to
  communicate with as the person directly opposite you if you are in a
  middle seat.
  
  Still not too bad.
  
  If
  it is a 2xN rectangle then you get the paired seating but you can still
  only communicate with maybe 4 people but only one person is really a
  very comfortable communication point. But then you also have the
  disadvantage that the greatwer width of the table hurts everyone else’s
  communication capacity too. It’s no longer a near perfectcommunication
  situation talking to the person directly opposite you. Still good but
  not as great.  Similarly if you do a 3xN rectangle you get something
  similar to the 3×3 square and basically everybody is screwed.
  
  So
  why is it that it is considered a position of honor to sit at the had
  of the table? That makes no damned sense. The head of the table is the
  worst place to sit if you are interested in communicating with people!
  Of course if you want to avoid talking to people, I guess it’s a good
  place. But if you want a lot of possible communication points in order
  to create greater opportunity for you to communicate sitting at the
  head of the table is the worst. You should sit at the center.
  
  But
  let’s think about this more. Surely if we think outside of the box we
  can come up with a better seating arrangement that results in easier
  communication for larger parties. Can’t we?
  
  Well
  obviously the thing that immediately comes to mind is increasing the
  number of sides of the polyhedron in question. The idea is that each
  side can house one or more people and they are all at an angle from you
  so you can communicate with more people easily. If the 1 length sided
  triangle gives 3 people near-perfect communication and the 1×1 square
  gives 4 people near-perfect communication with everyone then maybe
  likewise a 1 length N-sided equilateral polygon would give N people
  near-perfect communication?
  
  And if you
  keep the polygon relatively small it does work pretty good. A hexagon
  or an octagon is quite possible.  Really the 2×2 square is just
  basically worse in every way than an octagon. (except for that
  society’s preference for human pairs aspect I spoke of earlier).
  
  And the obvious abstraction of that is the infinite sided circle.
  
  But
  the problem is you are constrained with how much space a human being
  takes up and how much distance people can communicate with one another
  easily.  You would need a super tiny circle to house a million people
  such that they could communicate with one antoher easily, and that
  would just be impossible for a million people to sit at!
  
  In practice again, 8 or so people in a circle is about the limit you manage comfortably. And usually 4 or 6 is more natural.
  
  So
  damn it what do you do if you want 10 or more people to be able to talk
  easily amongst one another! Is a rectangle the only option?
  
  Hmmm. Time to think out of the box. A star pattern? Some sort of parabolic arrangement?  Hmmm…
  
  I
  know! We need to change the parameters of the question! Why  should the
  table be the only parameter we can change? What if we instead… change
  the chairs! Rotating chairs!
  
  The wheel has
  been around a long time right? It isn’t hard to do. So what if we have
  circular seating arrangements where everyone is seated at a rotating
  chair. And then you situate the circles all like around one another and
  create a sort of a mesh.  Then if the tables have a radius such that
  you can communicate with oh say 7 other people,  and you can rotate and
  access up to say 4 or 5 other tables too then everyone can communicate
  with upwards to 35 people! That’d be sooo cool!
  
  But
  there are problems with that too. First of all not everyone can
  communicate with everyone. It works great for large hosts maximizing
  communication points but if you are still a relatively small group it’s
  not so great. You can reduce the radius of the circles to make it more
  effective though.
  
  Another problem is that
  there are again people on the ends who will get screwed. In teh center
  of the arrangement you get a lot of people you can talk with but on the
  ends rotating just puts you face to face with a wall. We can put
  televisions or windows or something on those walls so that they are
  entertained still but that doesn’t solve the problem at hand.
  
  Hmmm,
  maybe if we could do something 4th dimensional so that if you are on the
  ends rotating puts you in contact with the people on the other side of
  the room that would work? We can simulate that with computer monitors
  surrounding the room… computer monitors… hmmm…   Let’s come back to that later.
  
  There’s
  another more obvious problem with the rotating chairs problem is How do
  you seat people!?!? If you imagine it, it’s going to look something
  like a kind of mesh. Like a net or like those plastic rings that hold
  soda bottles. In other words its all tables with chairs as islands in
  the middle. How do your restaurant patrons take their seats?
  
  Hmm.
  Well the easiest would be to just have everyone jump up and run across
  the tables to take their seats. That’d be fun!  But it might be a
  little disruptive. Lots of broken dishes might result.  another option
  might be to have like tubular shoots and have people like piped into
  their chairs from above or below. That might be expensive to manage
  though. Maybe just fire station poles that you slide down… That might
  work.
  
  Another possibility would be to
  design the tables with a series of interlocking gates so that sections
  of the tables can be lifted up to create a walking path. Yes… that’d
  probably be easiest. Also helps with the serving of the food and
  whatnot.
  
  Serving of the food might still
  be a problem though. You’d have to keep moving plates and stuff to lift
  up sections of the table so that people can walk through… hmmm…
  
  Maybe
  we need to eliminate this whole servers walking around issue entirely.
  We pipe people in through the fireman’s poles and then serve food… on
  conveyor belts! Yes! That’d work. The food just sort of travels from
  the kitchen directly to the customer’s seating. You can add an
  automated ordering system using computers at each seat or you could
  just have the people write down their order and put it on the conveyor
  belt and have it get shipped that way back to the kitchen.
  
  Overall it’d be a lot of trouble but I think it could really work well.
  
  But is there an easier way.
  
  think outside the box…
  
  think outside the box…
  
  Oh
  yes of course! We need to stop thinking so dang physically.  This is
  the virtual era. The problem isn’t that the tables and chairs are
  designed inffectively for maximal communication. Rather the real
  problem is that there is a natural limit to what distance with which a
  human being can naturally communicate comfortably with one another. 
  Eliminate that natural weakness and you solve the problem.
  
  Well
  we could genetically engineer people to have super hearing and eyesight
  and x-ray vision and teach everyone to be able to throw their voice
  across the room but that’s probably a bit difficult.
  
  Oh but there’s such an easier way.
  
  Head Sets! 
  
  As
  you enter the restaurant why not give everyone a headset with
  microphone and ear phones and visual displays and some controls.
  Basically you can use this headset to display anyone in your party and
  you can talk into the microphone to talk directly to that person. No
  matter how far away they are in the room!  You can even select a group
  of people and communicate with them as a group.  It’d be cool!
  
  
  
  Actually if you think about it, if you did that, there’d be no reason
  to worry about seating anymore. In fact you can seat everyone at little
  single tables by themselves or in private booths or even private rooms
  completely shut off from the rest of the restaurant. In fact if you did
  the private rooms you could make the private rooms into total virtual
  reality studios  where all the walls are completely covered with
  monitors to create a virtual environment that you can fully control.
  And the images displayed together with holographic or 3d technology
  could make you feel like you are seated at a table comfortably with any
  set of people from the party you like. And what’s neat is because it’s
  virtual you aren’t constrained by physical constraints. So basically I
  could be seated at a a table with John, Jill and Jack at the exact same
  time as Jack is seated at a table with me, Ally, and Ann. Something
  that can’t possibly happen in the real world. Similarly you can have
  the people around shift and hcange rapidly throughout the course of
  your meal as you feel the urge to communicate with others. You can even
  open up private channels and communicate privately with individuals if
  you should so need.
  
  
  
  Of course that’s pretty excessive.   Head sets are a lot easier.
  
  
  
  But if you are using headsets, one wonders why you would even want to
  be constrained by tables and chairs at all. You can really start to go
  out crazy with restaurant designs. Your restaurant could just be an
  open glade with trees and plants and a river or a pond or something and
  you just sit wherever you want on the grass or on a log or something and use the headsets to do your order
  and communicating. Everyone finds a place to sit or stand or lie down
  that most suits them.
  
  
  
  Or for that matter… why have a restaurant at all? Everyone can just
  stay home and have their food delivered to them while using the virtual
  program that the restaurant pipes to each person’s headsets or computer
  or whatever to simulate the restaurant experience! So much cheaper for the restaurant! And would help save the environment too.
  
  
  
  And how cool would that be?
  
  
  
  And easier to deal with too…”
  
  
  
  That’s pretty much what I was thinking about. There was more along
  those lines but you get the gist of it. Basically a lot of random
  thoughts about restaurants, communication, and odd uses of modern
  technology. There were darker, more normal, more relevant, and more
  serious thoughts too to be sure, but the bulk of my time was spent
  distracting myself with these rambling thoughts.
  
  
  
  So sometimes people wonder when I’m quiet… what exactly am I thinking
  about. That’s understandable. You’re welcome to wonder and even to ask.
  
  
  
  But be warned…
  
  
  
  I might be having an Osaka moment! And you might be better off not knowing about that.
  

  • 12:04 pm
  • 1 Comment