Twisting Oreo Cookies, the Age of Average and a National Forest Road
Scientists decoding why twisting an Oreo unevenly splits the cream, an article about banality of everything and some pictures of a beautiful road in PNW!
A very interesting montage of images from a post I saw on hackernews titled - The Age of Average!
The author laments that
So, there you have it. The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.
But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.
The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.
I do agree that design aesthetic that is chosen these days is pretty similar across the brands and that leads to such similar results. Could this be because of globalization that we are all now privy to the types of technologies and manufacturing processes that available all across the world & the one that gets selected is the the optima & hence the common theme?
It’s also a byproduct of the age of social media and influencers deciding what’s cool and what’s not! Trends spread, as the social graph is terribly interconnected.
AI might also be contributing to increase of this phenomenon, models trained on large datasets, often bias towards the common theme/connection across them. This leads to overlooking the outliers due to sparsity in their representation in a dataset.
The author also ends on a optimistic note of how this is also the age of opportunity for someone who wants to stand out. I do agree with that sentiment. In world of AI generating code, images, videos, documentation & pretty much everything, you don’t have to be just average, be the square peg, the odd corner, and the bar raiser!
The odds of your content, your work, and your thoughts reaching the millions increases if you aren’t “average” & the simplest way of doing that is by not conforming. : P
When the world zigs. Zag.!
I came across this interesting article detailing what happens to the cream when you twist an Oreo cookie! MIT scientists wondered about why does the cream get stuck to single wafer when you twist an Oreo?
Rheometer(I am not making this name up) is a device used to measures stresses, strains and tension for a fluid. These scientists were able to twist the Oreo in varying degrees of torque, to understand how it could affect where the cream ends up.
They also built a custom rheometer, aptly named oreoeter, using 3-D printed parts and rubber bands to operate it. I love how hacky yet useful this device is, which is driven by dropping pennies on either sides to modulate the torque produced by the device!
Conclusion being, after trying different Oreos, most of the time, the cream stuck to one side because of the way they are manufactured. The cream is pushed onto one wafer, before pressing the other on top. This causes it to stick to first wafer a bit more!
Like every good paper, the scientists ended with a proposal. To increase the odds of creme sticking to both sides of the Oreo, they recommended using the printed side of the cookie for the cream, as it had a more rugged surface which might increase the chance of the creme staying on both the sides!
Unsolicited Recommendations:
Road: On a personal front, I was able to travel back to Seattle for a weekend, and managed to drive around the beautiful country side exploring my favorite part of the world!
In continuation of my promise of sharing good drives in this newsletter, I highly recommend this national forest road, which is a slight detour off I-90, that provides a picturesque river on the side, and multiple day camping spots for a chill afternoon. The route also has Trail Youth Coffee Home as a pit stop in North Bend, which IMO has the best coffee around that region! : )
The only gotcha being, that this road is heavily snowed out in winters and hence is closed for most of the duration of it!
Taste Buds : Amrakhand - a delightful dessert made of mangoes, yoghurt & saffron is a staple(?) for summers in Indian households!