9 years ago: Falling Down

May 13, 2004, on this blog: Falling Down

Simple brute force is useless for most of the problems we confront in life. What follows is a top-of-the-head list of potentially frustrating situations or tasks in which the attempt to employ brute force is guaranteed to fail:

* driving in rush hour traffic

* card tricks

* hitting a curveball

* throwing a curveball

* origami

* turning just the one page in a book or magazine instead of the two or three pages that seem to be stuck together

* ditto for coffee filters

* putting

* threading a needle

* nation-building and promoting democracy.