Pat Your Head And Rub Your Tummy
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
There’s an online right-brain-versus-left-brain test (the Stroop Effect test) that shows the names of colours written in a different colour, and you have to say the colour of the text, rather than the colour that’s written down. There’s something about the counter-intuitiveness of this that I find quite appealing*.
This ampersand has a little of that quality about it, with the parentheses print (ampersands and parentheses – how could it possibly be anything other than wonderful. All is needs is unnecessary italics...
The other thing I like about it is the way the parentheses remind me a little of feather icing... I think it would go perfectly with swirled peanut butter brownies...
A bit like those this-and-that features that Oh Joy! does – I love those, and think finding the combinations is always so clever. I do wonder how she does it – is there a column of highly distinctive items awaiting a perfect match to leap out while down the rabbit-hole, or is there a process of systematically searching for, say, “turquoise laser cut” and seeing what comes up? It feels a little like the online version of playing pairs – remembering seeing it’s one thing, but finding it again can be entirely something else...
* It’s also appealing because, after doing the sorts of logic / numeracy / feel-like-you’re-back-in-school-and-experience-counts-for-nothing sort of tests common to pre-employment aptitude assessments, any sorts of measures that are a bit interesting, and not just a “what comes next” or some sort of hell-begotten mental arithmetic are appealing. A squadron of organisational psychologists can give chapter and verse on the usefulness and validity of those tests, but I just don’t see the point of them. If somebody has all the right experience and you get on well with them and have a good feeling about it, then hire them for heaven’s sake – are you really going to take your second choice instead because they don’t know how many dots should go in a hexagon? And, while I’m on a roll here, I also don’t think that testing whether somebody knows how many dots should go in a hexagon is the slightest bit useful in predicting whether they will be lazy, inefficient, know one end of a computer from the other, or just be a pain to have around. Just for my two cents’ worth, anyway...
