The Pryor Week #2: Quantity vs Quality vs Rocks vs Paper

Hey peeps, hope you had a great week!

Here’s what I did:

• Got way too artsy with my new phone camera ☝️. I have many more of these. But if a pic falls in the iPhone of JJ, does it get a view?

• Did my ‘daily’ teading about 4 times, not quite there yet but it’s better than the previous week. It’s also damn cold out, as this official government advisory can attest to:

  

• I don’t think I’m allowed to come back to Canada after saying that.

• Had an extremely frustrating experience with my Kindle and Amazon customer support. Wasted a good 3-4 hours of prime writing time solving an issue. Even funnier, this happened:

J.J. Pryor @JJPryor1

They say to truly test your patience is to watch a loved one try to navigate a new computer program you already know. Today I have learned it is instead dealing with Amazon customer service and the useless bot-written tech-help websites we call the internet. I have become rage

Snarky bitter Tweet, the usual floth from me.

But then, almost instantly after:

Lol. Amazing. A bot replying to a complaint about a bot. Botception.

I weep for our future.

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This Week’s Pryor Learnings

#1. Sound it out

Take the sound “helico” and then say “pterodactyl.” Now say it all together without the “odactyl” at the end and you have the unused but proper pronunciation of helicopter. It came from Greek’s “helix” (ἕλιξ) and “pteron” (πτερόν) and means whirl wing. Neat.

#2. Laugh it out

A study showed we aren’t very funny people when we’re alone. Apparently, we laugh about 30x more often when we’re hanging out with other people compared to twiddling our thumbs in silence in a dark basement crying into a pillow—or whatever it is you people do when you’re alone.

#3. Break it out

“Meta” (Facebook’s new ‘hey, please forget how we caused democracy to fall’ new name) is now finally facing an antitrust lawsuit from the FTC. Why? Probably because they occupy 70% of all social media in the states now (somehow…):

And they own Instagram, too.

And Whatsapp.

And Occulus.

And Giphy.

And several US senators and congress people.

“Meta” means “beyond” in Greek. It remains to be seen if they’re beyond the reach of the government, but at least we’re about to find out.

#4. Pump it out

I saw this little passage from the book Art & Fear this week, I think it’s awesome.

Re. Quantity vs Quality argument and why Quantity will always win.

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

I can certainly relate to the overplanning part, do you?

#5. Cut it out

I’ve been intermittently going down a rock-paper-scissors rabbit hole. Why intermittently? Because I should probably be working. So why do I keep going back? Because this stupid game is stupid crazy.

A few facts:

• It probably originated in China more than 2200 years ago (when I first came to Asia, I was surprised they played it here, ignorantly thinking locals learned it from American movies)

• They’re several “Rock Paper Scissors” associations around the world (wtf?)

• There’s a physical hand robot developed just to kick the shit out of humans in this game—and it has a 100% win rate cuz it cheats, that dirty snake

• There are game-theory-based strategies to massively up your Rock throwing game if you’re curious.

• Lizards love it too—From Wikipedia: “The common side-blotched lizard exhibits a rock paper scissors pattern in its mating strategies. Of its three throat color types of males, "orange beats blue, blue beats yellow, and yellow beats orange" in competition for females, which is similar to the rules of rock-paper-scissors.” Hot.

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That’s it! Thanks, everyone.

J.J. Pryor

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