↑ A source of much peeving, especially as I interface with more standardized tests these days. Why? Here's a hypothetically random yet oddly specific example: stack a nail, a bottle, a laptop computer, nine eggs, and a book all on top of each other... Sounds hard? Logical difficulty-wise, it's as 3rd grade as the Aesopian small river ferry boat and the puzzle of get the bag of grain to the other side — along with the goat who will eat the grain, the duck, and the fox who'll eat the duck, etc... Most people quickly realize that they can place all nine eggs on the surface of the book, the laptop on top of that, then the bottle and nail — not hard any way (although you could make it it harder: a more "advanced" solution might involve nailing the book and opening the laptop or cracking the eggs into the bottle). Why am I seething with peeving? Because this is supposed to use both the real life knowledge and the 3D spatial manipulation parts of your brain, yet as an outside-of-the-box thinker I feel insulted by the artificial limitations: what are we stacking this ON? Do you assume it's a table? ...more importantly, WHY THE FUCK are we making an abominable stack out of all this? HOW the hell did I end up with these items in the first place? WHERE did my laptop charger cord go? WHO took those eggs out of the refrigerator (are they chicken eggs or ostrich eggs?) and why aren't they still in the carton? The absurdity of it all! So much in the "real world" has to go wrong before I'd end up in this silly stacking situation, that I'm sure I'd have bigger problems. As a puzzle, it really shows nothing, other than to what extent you're willing to accept rigid and artificial situations at face value — you're "definitely not" being held hostage by some sadistic puzzle making researcher in this scenario, and throwing the eggs at the researcher and smashing the bottle into an improvised weapon in an attempt to escape from this research facility would be futile, now wouldn't it? Good... Now, have I got a puzzle for you... Muawhahaha!
(Don't think too hard about this. But testing artificial scenarios like this bespeaks a kind of artificial intelligence rather than quantifiably measuring anything useful — if they won't stop foisting this kind of artificial logic on the school kids, at least stop using this shit in job interviews! Sigh. How did I get so peeved about this? I do feel better now [/peevedrant]
