Systematizing

[unixronin]

This post by ehintz got me thinking again about systematizing behaviors.  I have several that I'm immediately aware of off the top of my head:

1. When I'm in an environment with a lot of similar or identical objects (slats in a window blind, glasses in a cupboard, folds in a curtain, boards on a floor) I'll often go over and over them figuring out all the possible non-trivial ways to divide them into a repeating series of constant or alternating groups.  For example, a vertical blind with 29 slats can't be divided evenly, 29 being prime, but can be divided in the following "interesting" ways (among others):
• 1,6,1,6,1,6,1,6,1
• 1,2,4,1,2,4,1,2,4,1,2,4,1
• 1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1,3,1
• 1,3,7,3,1,3,7,3,1
• 4,1,4,1,4,1,4,1,4,1,4
• 9,1,9,1,9
• 7,4,7,4,7
• 5,7,5,7,5
• 2,5,2,1,2,5,2,1,2,5,2
• 1,13,1,13,1
• 3,10,3,10,3 (or 3,5,5,3,5,5,3)
2. If there's several possible logical ways to organize a collection of objects (or sort a list....  I've re-sorted this three times already), I sometimes have extreme difficulty deciding which way to organize them, and may abandon a particular scheme and start over several times before I finally settle on one.  (This is obviously related to the one above.)
3. Possibly systematizing:  If I'm playing a video game, and something that I do technically succeeds but doesn't go quite the way I intended it to (for instance, I achieve an objective, but get hit more or lose more units in the process than I think I should have), I may reload and replay that action over and over and over until I get it acceptably close to perfect.

Do you have any systematizing behaviors that you're aware of?

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

3) Can't eat things like M&M's, Skittles, Mike&Ike's without first seperating them into small piles of their constituent colors and being aware of how many their are of each, then eating them in a fashion so as to end up with equal numbers of each in a descending pattern, until there is only one of each color - then eat those according to preference, saving the best for last.

Oh yeah, I used to do that all the time with M&Ms and Refreshers.

4) Obsessive about tracking palindromic numbers on the car's odometer - as well as those numbers which, when inverted are the same

I do that too .... I noted with great amusement that I was 4.9 miles across the NH border from VT when my car's odometer rolled over to 94949.