x10 by Waldo Cheerio, The Found Walrus, David
June 10th, 2009 11:10 PMFor those of you with reasonable bandwidth, enjoy this video-telling of our task:
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For those without, we have kindly attended to your sad, static medium:
Introduction
Waldo and the Walrus went out for the day to rumble sea lions and generally clown around with the Pacific. When they returned, there was a big plate of cookies at Walrus's house, without any apparent explanation for their presence. Hungry and logical, we ate them, and discovered at the bottom of the plate a note.
"Hope you enjoyed the cookies. Now make me a sandwich. -The Dormouse". It was on! Our original mischievous intent to give him a sandwich with a response note gently nestled within became a quest to give to him a sandwich unlike none he had tasted before. Just as rapidly, the plan to deliver a pastrami sandwich on raisin bread with cottage cheese drove us to a different oddity of ingredients. We would make a sandwich alright, but one scaled down for the Dormouse. While we were at it, we ought to make a normal sized sandwich for the guy who lives at the Dormouse's address.
On that basis we had to pick ingredients which vary wildly in size. Our first challenge was locating quail eggs at nine pm in Los Angeles. Walrus called a friend of hers who works at a local sushi restaurant to see if she could glean one quail egg, but her friend thought she wanted many of them for her biology experimenting and balked. Frantic calls ensued to every market in the area, starting with the Japanese cuisine markets. Most people responded with disbelief compounded with incomprehension, but eventually Waldo found the single venue which carried quail eggs and was still open. They seemed faintly puzzled by our request ("What do you mean you want to buy as few quail eggs as possible?")
We set off and purchased a wild assortment of items guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of even the most stolid and phlegmatic cashier, which in fact it did (What on earth could anyone want with a lone kumquat?). Prominent in our list was four cans of Starbucks double-shot espresso. These were to form the most technologically challenging part of our task - a mini camping stove. Quail eggs are surprisngly cheap for such a weird item ($2.50 for eight, in case you were wondering).
Back at HQ Waldo and the Walrus set to work.
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Area1 = 10 * Area2
Walrus diligently measured the bread and cut slices that had an area of 35 square inches... and slices of 3.5 square inches in area. Admittedly this made the large sandwich less of a home-made brown-bagger, and more of a deli-champion-no-really-lets-just-split-one sandwich. Thankfully all our measuring kept the contents proportional, so it wasn't a deli-"its-a-cow-between-two-crackers" sandwich. You know, the sort of sandwich where they ask you if you want anything else with the sandwich, and you say "some more slices of bread, and other hungry people". The littler sandwich had a deifnite hors d'œuvre reputation preceding it though, beginning as it did with a slice of toasted baguette.
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Cross-section1 = 10 * C2
We got a little carried away with the different measures of scale.
Tomatoes, citrus, and eggs were selected among the haul for pairs 10X as small a profile at the equator. The sliced tomatoes lined up nicely on their respective area-proportional breads despite their different shapes, which was hoped for but unexpected... 
...---'''The eggs had to wait.'''---...
Our ocherous foodstuffs, having no place on a sandwich, were used merely to decorate each plate with a ring of 10X citruses.
Length1 = 10 * Length2
we used a stick of butter that was 10X smaller on every side, so 1000X smaller by volume...
(precision!)Volume1 = 10 * Volume2
precisely 10X as much apple juice - 40 teaspoons versus 4The Eggs -- Frying To Scale
While we *could* have just fried the quail egg on a normal stove in a normal pan, we decided that wouldn't do. Instead, the aforementioned Starbucks cans would become our 1/10th size gas burner, with a spoon as our frying pan.
To do so, we punched holes in the tops of an empty Starbucks can.
Then Waldo set about cutting up two cans...
with an Exactoknife, 
a ruler,
and The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.You can find mechanical instructions for an "Aluminum Can Stove" in a dozen places online, so we'll avoid the how-to bit, and just skip to where our experience differed. Clearly Starbucks cans aren't proportional to your regular aluminum can, so I just had to eyeball the measurements. This turned out to be a bad idea, as precision engineering is called for, if not understood by the people describing the process, if you want your stove to work.
The full sized ones can boil a gallon pot of water in about 6 minutes, and weigh almost nothing, so hikers and campers love these things. I (Waldo) hoped for something perhaps as spectacular when it came time to fry our quail egg in a spoon, but didn't yet understand the pre-heating and internal-pressure fiddly bits of the process, and we were underwhelmed by the performance of the stove. We only ended up getting anywhere when the Walrus philosophically dumped fuel into the burner until it overflowed, then lit what was essentially a standing pool of alcohol. As it turns out, this was kind of what we needed to do. The stove doesn't work unless you heat it up first to get the alcohol evaporating, and by golly lighting the whole rig and adjacent sidewalk on fire; that'll heat anything up pretty quick.
Rubbing Alcohol was sufficient in the smaller stove, although probably took more initial heating than another fuel might have before becoming self-sufficient. Also, the point of that middle ring is to reduce the size of the air chamber under the holes for the jets, so gas-pressure can build up faster under the jets. This is useless if you don't (A) make sure the inner wall is taller than the sides of the stove itself, so when you squeeze it together the inner wall is flush with the top and bottom; (B) fill the stove with fuel above the height of the slots you cut out of the bottom of that inner wall, sealing off the inner and outer air chambers; and (C) put a quarter or something over the central holes you pour the fuel through to keep the fumes from getting out through the central air chamber too.
In any case, the egg fried very quickly in the spoon once we had a flame going, and final assembly was accomplished concurrently with watching the stove burn out. We quickly put the meals before the Dormouse, and were treated to an appetite for the meal at approximately 1/10th speed (featured in the video above).
As for why we had a spoon with its handle in an S-shape... the Walrus accidentally attended a New Age-y parapsychology party some time ago. Spoons, man. They bend.
17 vote(s)
Ben Yamiin
5
Bex.
5
teucer
5
Kommando
5
done
5
MonkeyBoy Dan
2
Peter Garnett
5
Poisøn Lake
5
Burn Unit
4
Rin Brooker
5
Jellybean of Thark
3
Loki
5
Beetle bomb
5
Amithy Ilexa
5
artmouse
5
APR dreamlands
3
Idøntity matrix
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Terms
dedicationtothetask, votelater, sandwich, spoon, math, big, tiny, cooking23 comment(s)
I suppose it depends on whether or not you think that ANY sandwich is a mundane/common object, it being part of a class of common obects i.e. sandwiches, that come in a wide variety of sizes:-
English High Tea sandwiches, considered by many to be the Platonic ideal
Classic American Hero sandwich, MANFOOD
Trying to define a 'standard' size of sandwich from which to scale up or down seems a little silly.
In any case, I'm voting based on this praxis' fulfilling the spirit of the task in a creative way both in process and result, rather than a legalistic compliance with the letter of the instructions.
Also, FIRE! FIRE ! FIRE! YEAH!
Now that I'm awake and have thought a little more about it, I think I don't care what size the original sandwich was, I just want to see a sandwich that is ten times bigger or smaller than whatever that model "common or mundane" sandwich is. If it's a giant hero sandwich that's a foot long, then I want to see a ten foot sandwich! or a 1.2" replica of that hero. Do you see my point? I want to see this level of awesome dedication to make something that is truly a multiple of 10 of the original item. Maybe I'm influenced by what I would do (or what's stopped me from attempting this), which is an incredible scale. Because the task is called x10 for a reason. Getting something ten times bigger (or smaller) than the original would be AMAZING! I was so ready to see something AMAZING when I clicked this praxis open last night.
Waldo, Walrus, I love you guys, tell me I'm wrong. Convince me this is great.
It is ten times bigger, Lincoln. As it would be a ten foot sandwich compared to a 1-foot sandwich if you made it in bread of the same width and height. If you choose to scale width and height too, however, the monster sandwich would be 10x10x10 times bigger, so you´d be flagged.
(I'm unconvinced about the tomatoes and eggs, guys, because you´re saying 10x circumference. That would mean a cherry tomato vs a tomato the size of a watermelon. You really mean area too, right?)
I find the whole thing altogether lovely, on top of accurate. And I haven´t watched the video yet.
Cheers.
I guess I'm not making myself clear.
My main question is what was the original common or mundane object?
Was it that giant sandwich? Is the little one the power of ten less?
Is it the small one? Is the big one a power of ten bigger?
Which is the original sandwich?
I think the original sandwich should be common or mundane, but both sandwiches here are neither common nor mundane.
Am I making myself clear?
Hello?
Is this thing on?
For what it's worth, I see what you mean here - the source object (a sandwich) is neither 10x smaller nor 10x larger than either of the objects here (a tiny sandwich and a huge sandwich), and while one of those is 10x the size of the other, neither is normal enough to qualify as the source object due to their sizes. I'm not sure how this complexity factors into my own interpretation/grading of the completion, but I can understand why you'd be hung up about it.
Ah, oh. I guess amazing can come from subleties like that.
I'd say the source object is the larger sandwich, which is not ridiculously huge for a deli/restaurant sandwich (i.e. whole meal sandwich) and the small one is 10x-1 the size.
The idea was to make the person a hearty two-egg sandwich, and the player a mouse-sized sandwich.
P.S. Good catch Susy, should've been cross-section, not circumference. C1 in our notes was ambiguous. Also, no worries Lincoln, I don't think this is a task I'll sell as exemplary; more experimental. Tried new things, less planning, different write-up, had lots of fun with it, good times with Dormouse. Think of it as a teaching/learning praxis.
Lincoln, if the task proof doesn't have it in there for you, I don't think you should feel obligated to vote for it, or hope that something would come in comments to change that opinion.
One thing that makes this task for me would be the necessary presence of the two items. Especially a sandwich. Even if it was a gigantic 10x10x10 sandwich, I'd be sort of bored because I can look in the variety section of any small town newspaper and see them trying to break a guinness world record for sandwiches or giant omelet or giant waffle cone or whatever. That's awesome, but not necessarily this task.
What excited me was seeing the process of doing the small one alongside the process of doing the large one. So we have a sense of the required effort to complete the task, not to complete a really big sandwich.
This is not said to convince Lincoln, about whom I don't actually care if I "win over" or whatever. Just an observation.
wow, at first i was wondering what the hell was going on, but 1/10th everything, 1/10th size stove, 1/10th sips, 1/10th bites of orange.
thats dedication. pedantic adherence to the task.
5 points.
Vote for awesome tasking and for bending spoons.
The task calls for some power of ten. There are a lot of ways to interpret it, and we went for all of the easy ones. I am really excited about this task too, and didn't want to just see three people flounder around with poor units to poor results. Grover's big hamburger looks about 100 times bigger to a side than the little one, and 1,000,000 times more massive for it, which is a valid scale of 10. So, too, would a hamburger 31.6 times bigger to a side, having 1000X the area, and 31,600X the volume and mass, in some sense fit the definition of the task. Whether the little one quite cuts a 1/10th scale from a normal burger runs into the same questions as our little sandwich.
The way I see it though, someone was going to have to cover the different meanings of 10X as big. It's called the Delian problem. We also got to try our hand first at the problems of scaling things normally invariant in size. What are the properties of a sandwich (size of egg yolk, size of bubbles in the bread, how you cook it) that you can scale, and can you scale them consistently? Can you get the ingredients to fit together, or structurally does it fall apart, or become overwhelmed by bread...
I don't think we close to shplanked here, but for a four hour turn-around on a Saturday evening I'm damn pleased with the result, it was a lot of fun, tasted great, and I think future completions will be better for it.
I actually would enjoy seeing some of the even weirder interpretations of 10X, like taking a sandwich and *only* stretching it 10X in one direction. A sandwich 20 inches thick, which is most of a loaf of bread vertically, a huge thick cut of meat, most of a couple tomatoes...
Presumably I can't convince anyone else to make a sandwich though, but scaling a 3D thing in a stretchy 1-dimensional way could be bunches of fun.
i want to have your guys' children. i want to have your guys' parents. hell, lets just start with the second cousins and work our way inward.
Walrus hopes for retroactive relations!
Sad to miss you in SF. Who let you go to Africa?
Nicely done.
Were I to encounter the big sandwich on its own, I'd probably remark, "say, that's a pretty big sandwich." It's therefore a tad bit less mundane than an unremarkable sandwich, but a sandwich is by its nature more than mundane enough for me.
And the ingredient and burner detail is great.
I have a bad habit of getting into my head what a task means, and running with an idea, and forgetting what the original text of the task was. The mundane object part was checked off our mental check-list once we hit sandwich, and we didn't think of it again. I would reward greater task discipline in future completions, but I am glad you liked it.
The video experiment was fun too, but as much as I love SF0 to an obscure rock soundtrack, I don't think the effort pays off when we don't have enough pictures and video documentation to tell the whole story in that medium. I guess my plan to submit some video-only praxis in the future just isn't going to work; I couldn't bear to lose Loki.
I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed in this.
I love the work that went into it, I love the attention to scale...
But.
A sandwich is about 6 inches across.
A big sandwich would have to be 60 inches across, and the small one a little over half an inch.
I understand that your two sandwiches were in proportions on a scale of ten of one another, but neither of the sandwiches here is "a common or mundane object".
I'm gonna have to sleep on this before I decide how or if I vote.