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The Mathematics of Lawn Mowing
Hugh Pickens writes "I enjoy mowing my six-acre lawn with my John Deere 757 zero-turn every week, and over the course of the last five years of mowing I have come up with my own most efficient method of getting the job done which takes me about three hours. While completing my task this morning, I decided after I finished to research the subject to discover if there is a method for determining the most efficient path for mowing, and found that Australians Bunkard Polster and Marty Ross wrote last summer about an elegant mathematical presentation of the problem of mowing an irregularly shaped area as efficiently as possible. First we simplify our golf course mowing problem by covering the course with an array of circles with each circle radius equal to the width of the mower disc. Connecting the centers of the circles produces an equilateral triangular grid, with vertices at the circle centers. Following a path consisting of grid edges, there will necessarily be a fair amount of overlap so the statement of the problem is to minimize the overlap by minimizing the number of vertices that are visited more than once which Polster and Ross say is easily achieved by well-known computer search algorithms. Any other tips from Slashdot readers?"
... hire someone to mow it for you. :)
Sheep?
The 'optimal' solution has the mower finishing in the middle of the lawn, which is usually not where you want to leave it parked.
Six acres isn't a lawn, it's a field... anyone else get the impression this guy just wanted a reason to say "I have a six acre lawn"?
The best solution: don't mow it.
Why the hell do you have 6 acres of grass? Plant some trees for christs sake.
It's called peace and quite. Some crazy Americans believe that having enough space around you so that you cannot hear or see your neighbours is a good thing. Then, when YOU are ready to interact with people you simply go to some public space and interact. Just because some Americans don't want to live like rats in a city does not make them crazy. Some people don't mind the screaming kid next door, or the barking dog down the street but some do. Also, it's not a question of how much resources each person uses, it's a question of how many people are using them. No amount of conservation will offset unrestrained population growth.
Well let's see: when I was a little boy we went unsupervised all the time. Violent crime has gone steadily down since I was a kid so why are people are more afraid of letting their kids play unsupervised? Just because we've been trained to fear danger more and more doesn't mean that we or our kids are actually in more danger.
And also, one of the perks of living in a neighbourhood where the families are acquainted with each other is that even when your eyes are not on your kid, other neighbours' eyes are, and if something goes wrong you can count on them to help your kid if needed (with the understanding that you do the same for your neighbour's kid). I'm not a Christian by any means, but "love thy neighbour" was a good practical piece of advice.
The people using the parks will act much less like assholes if they know each other. This is what community is all about. People behave better to those they know than those they don't know. It's the Golden Rule in action.
As for the condition of your parks, might I suggest a modest tax increase, sufficient to allow the municipality to maintain the parks? And failing that, a neighbourhood park maintenance co-op group?
Using your shitty parks as an excuse not to get to know your neighbours, when getting to know them is the best, cheapest solution to your shitty-park problem betrays a shocking lack of reasoning on your part. And yet you're not stupid (presumably). Have we come so far in our hyper-individualistic culture that we can't even see neighbourliness as a possible solution to our problems? Even the problems that were created by hyper-individualism in the first place?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I hate to intrude on your little fantasy with reality but there are plenty of public parks in the USA. When folks are referencing 6 acre plots of land for their home they are generally in rural areas. Such areas commonly have natural fields, woods, etc nearby so public parks are less of a necessity.
Perhaps you should consider that many people outside the US are misinformed regarding life in the US, just as many in the US are misinformed about life outside the US.