Who wants to hear a GA Tech nerd story?
 

As sent to me by the individual...

Well, let me tell you about my ASDL experience at Lenox Mall.

So there I was, trying to buy a pair of pants. Talk about a thoroughly confusing experience! Do I want boot cut, or relaxed fit? What's the difference between wrinkle free, wrinkle resistant, no wrinkles, no iron, and never iron? After interviews were conducted with subject matter experts, I realized that the term subject matter experts can sometimes be misleading.

I tried to bring sixteen pairs of pants into the fitting room, and he informed me that I could only bring five. I told him that five cases was simply not enough to explore the combinatorial options space of his selections. He said, "the rule is you can only bring five" and I said "well, I need to run sixteen cases to build an appropriate model to make my purchase today." The salesman thought I was a little slow because I didn't seem to be catching on.

He didn't seem to understand. Fortunately, I had my computer in the trunk, so I brought it out and tried to explain it to him.

I said, "there must be at least 27 million ways to buy a pair of pants." and he said, "huh? We only have ten options." And I said, "how did you go from the nearly infinite space of combinations to only ten, and why did you pick those ten?" Because as you know, it's a pet peeve of someone's when we say "there are three options" without explaining how we arrived at those three. A simple morphological matrix (attached) reveals that there are in fact over 27 million ways to buy a pair of pants. I merely highlighted the cells for the pants that I wanted and said "I want THESE." They don't have those...

Using JMP, I made a DOE that could make a reasonable model of the pants problem with only two trips to the fitting room, which naturally minimized the expenditure of my valuable time inside the store.

For some reason, I was not asked to leave comments on their website describing my satisfaction with my purchase today...

Pat

too bad you are not Khamis. you'd never would have had this problem.

As you can see, the world would be a much more efficient place without pants.

Please tell me why one would do this just to buy a pair of pants?

They didn't... they wrote this after the fact to be funny to other nerds.

I hope the other nerds got a kick out of this... I didn't.

Ah, ok. Well it is funny that he tried to bring 16 pairs of pants into a dressing room :lol:

You'd be surprised. One of our professors showed us a similar matrix he used to select the car he bought. The kid who sent the e-mail supposed made one to select his wife. Both significantly more complex than the one I posted mind you.

Yeah, but did he really walk out to the car to get the laptop to show it to the salesman? Highly unlikely, but makes for a good story.

I certainly wouldn't put it past him. I hope he didn't though.

I must not be a nerd. Yay!

JC you dont need pants in hotlanta!!

And what is this guy's major?

And, does he grow up to be a highway engineer, and is his process the reason our highway system is so screwed up these days? j/k