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.
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