12 ms·
The Cube Rule (2017)
- tromp 5y agoIsn't the pumpkin pie slice an example of a missing type, that has starch on two adjacent sides of the cube?!
- bentcorner 5y agoRather I think Key Lime Pie is misclassified, it is just bent toast arrayed in a circle.
- FredPret 5y agoThis is why the internet is wonderful
- ivolimmen 5y agoThis is why building software is hard. If people can't classify food in a simple manner who does one expect a software developer to classify it correctly?
- breadbreadbread 5y agoI hate the cube rule of food. I know its mostly a joke about taxonomy but some people take it so seriously. Categorization is highly contextual and fluid and any attempt to be authoritative or argumentative about it bothers me. IDGAS if a hot dog is a sandwich I just want a hot dog
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- breadbreadbread 5y agoI do like some of the corner case resolutions tho. Calling a slice of pie, "Bent Toast" tickles me.
- Tade0 5y agoMany a coffee were spilled by Italians gesturing furiously while reading this.
- a_t48 5y agoHold up now, potatoes are starch, mashed potatoes should be (1) Toast.
- justsomehnguy 5y agoI guess my "poor man's" lasagna (pour some boiled pasta/penne/fusili in the bowl, slap some grated cheese on the top, repeat until run out of pasta or cheese) is a (7) Cake then.
- _carbyau_ 5y agoThere is a key word of structural. Mashed potatoes don't really have a supporting structure.
- _kst_ 5y agoApparently I've been making mashed potatoes wrong.
- depaya 5y agoWhat about shepherd's pie?
- mcphage 5y agoToast upside-down, I guess?
- tillinghast 5y agoFloating Toast
- tillinghast 5y agoAlso, a pie slice is "Side Taco" (not "taco on its side").
- _carbyau_ 5y agoThere is a similar dish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_floater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_floater
- lalaithion 5y agoThe idea that we should classify food by shape is clearly erroneous. Our food classifications should be based on method of eating, not by shape! A sandwich is any food that uses a carbohydrate to protect your hands from a messier food, so that you can eat it at a card table without getting your hands dirty (a la the origin myth). Let's go through the things here: Pizza: Yes Sushi: Mostly no (the carbs don't protect you from the insides, the seaweed does) Pumpkin pie: No (unless eaten with hands, without falling apart) Quesadilla: Yes Toast sandwich: No (inside is not messier) Victoria sponge: No (eaten with fork) Hot dog: Yes Sub sandwich: Yes Slice of pie: No (unless eaten with hands) Falafel wrap: Yes Pigs in a blanket: Yes Enchilada: No (the one pictured has cheese and sauce on the outside) Quiche: No (unless eaten with hands) Cheesecake: No (unless eaten with hands) Soup bowl: No (I'd love to see you try) Falafel pita: Yes Deep dish pizza: If eaten with hands Salad in a bread bowl: No Key lime pie: No (unless eaten with hands) Calzone: Yes Corn dog: No (if held with stick) Pie (whole): No (good luck) Dumplings: Yes (unless they have sauce on them) Pop tarts: Yes Uncrustables: Yes This is the best and most accurate method that actually provides a strict definition that lines up with my intuitions—the cube rule is fun, but you're really gonna claim that a subway sandwich isn't a sandwich?
- frogulis 5y agoBig fan of this, if only because it supports the claim that a taco and a hotdog are sandwiches. The cube rule also tells us that makizushi (probably the most popular kind of sushi here in Aus) is not sushi, which seems like a pretty big weakness.
- mekkkkkk 5y agoWhat is makizushi? Is that some local variant of maki? Traditional maki (with seaweed on the outside) seems to be sushi indeed. California rolls though (inverted maki, rice on the outside) are arguably salads.
- js2 5y ago> A sandwich is any food that uses a carbohydrate to protect your hands from a messier food. Open-Faced Turkey Sandwich enters the chat.
- philosopher1234 5y agoWe must somehow account for the feeling of food. Hot dogs don't feel like sandwhiches, they feel different. Why is that? The cube rule gives us an answer to "are hot dogs sandwhiches", but it doesn't give us an answer to "why does it seem so wrong to call hot dogs sandwhiches?" I think we intuitively know the following: * Subs are sandwhiches * Ice cream sandwhiches are sandwhiches, kind of (but they're not lunch). * Burritos, hot dogs, and tacos are not sandwhiches. But can we generate a list of rules based on the qualities of the things themselves that explain this? Maybe, I don't know. But maybe this condition isn't a consequence of the things themselves, so much as it is of our collective associations and connotations to sandwhich. Picnics, lunch, cafeterias, Subway. Mom packing our lunch box. Maybe 'sandwhich' isn't located out there, in the world, but at the intersection of many places in our minds.
- mcphage 5y agoCheck out Prototype Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory which gives a better way to reason about these types of questions than trying to list properties. And also helps you recognize that words don't match up to classic sets—the answer to "is X a sandwich" may be yes, or no, or almost anything in between.
- wcerfgba 5y agoReminds me of Soup-Salad-Sandwich space: http://sandwichspace.xyz/ http://sandwichspace.xyz/ Classifying mashed potatoes as a salad and then a salad as nachos is hilarious, but not very useful. I find Soup-Salad-Sandwich to be a better classification, although it is also incomplete. How do you classify ice cream, sorbet, or mashed potatoes? These foods are too solid to be a soup, but they don't have any structure like a sandwich, and they are also homogeneous unlike a salad. Also kebabs.
- thematrixturtle 5y agoI see chili dogs come in at {0.3,0.2,0.75}, but now I'm curious what {0.5,0.5,0.5} in the SSS space would look like. Something like niangpi, perhaps? Cold starchy noodles with chunks of wheat gluten (bread), served in a soupy sauce of chilli, vinegar, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linxia_Hui_Autonomous_Prefecture#/media/File:5658-Linxia-City-niang-pi.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linxia_Hui_Autonomous_Prefectu...
- niccl 5y agoWhat would an AI come up with? something for the ingnobels, perhaps?
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- omnicognate 5y agoHotdog being a taco is definitely appealing, but I can't take this seriously when nigiri sushi is classed as 1/toast rather than 4/sushi.
- lisper 5y agoIt gets better. On the cube-rule taxonomy, steak is a kind of salad, and salad is a kind of nacho.
- andybak 5y agoIsn't the choice of cartesian axes creating a false distinction here? Where does a tetrahedral snack with a missing face fit? I think a pure topological approach would be more robust. Count the holes and edges.
- chadcmulligan 5y agoThis is a great idea, then menus could be organised by their topological equivalences, instead of arbitrary entree, etc. So donuts and coffee would be in the one section as nature intended.
- gustavorg 5y agoYes but in the category of the calzones the photo of an actual calzone is missing!
- draw_down 5y ago
- Jap2-0 5y agoThis is clearly inferior to Salad Theory.[0] [0] https://saladtheory.github.io/ https://saladtheory.github.io/
- fantasticshower 5y agoWhat if we classify based on which direction the food can squeeze out and make a mess? Sandwich (any direction) Burrito (depends on how well you wrap it but blow out through the backend typical) Sriracha (only into your eyes) Etc.
- parksy 5y agoI find the cube rule to be naïve in its ignorance of topological spaces. A sandwich is just a cross section of mobius toast. A wrap is just toast projected onto a cylinder. A calzone is just toast projected onto a sphere. Everything is toast! Why can't people see this! *walks off into the distance muttering obscenities*
- function_seven 5y ago> mobius toast This is absurd. If you drop a slice of peanut butter mobius toast on the ground, how does it land? What sort of toaster must I buy to take mobius bread and toast it? I don't like the implications here, and reject all projection-based arguments. Too dangerous.
- parksy 5y agoSomewhere deep underground, in a high-tech laboratory, a group of scientists lean over a slice of toast levitating in some Contact-esque structure... "Dr Gibbons! The zero-point readings are off the scale! We've done it!" The toast briefly flickers into a pizza, then a burrito, then back to being a piece of toast. His brows furrow. "No. This can't be. Shut it down! Delete the files! No one can ever learn of this!"
- na85 5y agoStartup idea: Toastamak. Breads contained by magnetic field and toasted by high energy plasma. We'll ship the breads with QR-code DRM of course. Subscription model.
- parksy 5y ago"Are you tired of waking up late? Rushing out the door without breakfast, again? Overdue for your fondue? Then you need Toastamak! Our patented quasispace manifold uses space age technology to fetch hot, fresh toast and toastlike products from the interdimensional superposition of spacetime itself. Need it yesterday? No problem! Toastamak's causality-preserving temporal inversion matrix will make ruined dinner parties a thing of the past. Literally!" (Toastamak products contain no user servicable parts. Only to be used on bread and bread-derivatives. No warranty or liability accepted for breeding-based temporal anomalies. Fusion cells not included.)
- sparkplug94 5y agoI actually wrote an article about this a couple weeks ago. https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/is-a-hot-dog-a-sandwich-defining?s=w https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/is-a-hot-dog-a-sandwich... My contention is that the definition-first approach to defining sandwich is wrong, and that we should use PCA/unsupervised learning first to cluster sandwich-like objects into distinctive groups, which we can then name.
- kelvin0 5y agoCan't wait for more HN food hackery, this is truly repugnant, smile and wave!
- morepork 5y agoI don't think this will ever end, according to the cube rule: Pizza is toast A stack of pancakes is toast as syrup/butter is on top Nigiri sushi is not sushi, but is toast? Steamed pork buns are calzone Pita pockets are soup/salad w/ bread bowl
- nine_k 5y agoI love this page because it reminds me of the good parts of the "Web 1.0". - Full of content. - Whimsical while staying on topic. - Uses design elements freely, to best represent the content, instead of pouring the content into a design mold. - Colorful and easy to read. - Obviously made by a fan, for the love of the topic.
- xerox13ster 5y agoI appreciate this page quite a bit less than you because I found it absolutely unnecessary to have an entire page of blank space between items blown up so large that they cannot fit in my full-screen viewport on desktop. I tried to zoom and the page completely ignored it. It is one of the worst perpetrators of this I have experienced on the web and a pox on anyone that ignores browser controls on their site!
- threatripper 5y agoI second this opinion. It looks like a bad PowerPoint presentation but neither mousewheel, arrows or page-up/down consistently jumps between pages.
- IshKebab 5y agoHa yeah I tried all of those too - clearly a presentation but there's no way to view it sanely! I wonder if this is exported from some tool?
- quickthrower2 5y agoIt sort of looks like a powerpoint presentation dumped to PDF. But that is not an insult - it is a very nice a fun format, ideal for the attention deficit age we live in.
- xbar 5y agoClose. Except Rice is clearly a Muffin.
- 0xBABAD00C 5y agoGiven that ribose is a carb inside larger non-carb structures such as RNA, it makes our genetic code, and us humans as a whole, a nacho by the cube rule. I'm ok with it.
- mekkkkkk 5y agoWell of course. That is one of the primary benefits of the cube rule. Finally we can all be that which we desire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOsWfzzvlkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOsWfzzvlkU
- mikeurbach 5y agoI used to go very deep on philosophical discussions about the nature of sandwiches with my friends. I’m still digesting the cube rule, but here’s what we came up with: Every sandwich has an axis. The axis is through the filling. You can roughly divide all sandwiches based on whether you eat along the axis (what we called axially), or around it (what we called radially). A burrito is consumed axially, while a crunchwrap supreme is consumed radially. Hope this is interesting, we’ve found pretty much every sandwich can be classified as radial or axial, which seemed like an achievement.
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- Groxx 5y agoSo what would a breaded thing count as? Like a chicken or fish stick? It wasn't "filled" in any direction. At the extreme you could have a breaded, fried donut hole - a sphere that had bread deposited onto it (i.e. the donut hole is the filling of the sandwich), no axis at any stage, and you eat it from all directions equally.
- simne 5y agoWell, I for a long time working on idea, to register AI algorithms as NFTs, which will make legally valid decisions on such questions, so human fuzziness will not affect life.
- nostoc 5y agoIt is unnacceptable that what is preached as a universal food categorization system doesn't even attempt to categorize rice.
- Sporktacular 5y agoI love that steak is now a form of salad. It's just sensible really.
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- devin 5y agoPrediction: this thread will contain a thousand onanistic replies which trend toward nihilism. Embrace the cube rule. You need not spend cycles debating the true nature of a taco. Give thanks.
- TheDudeMan 5y agoSteak is salad? Works for me.
- gunshai 5y agoNo wonder people get into about OOP
- Groxx 5y agoI personally combine toast/taco/bowl because the boundaries are far too vague, they're essentially the same thing. Flatten a taco, and now it's a toast? Nonsense! It was toast all along! Same with that soggy-bottomed quiche that can't support itself or its family! And then I add "nacho" as its own top-tier category instead of some weird optional DLC at the end, i.e. "bread surrounded by non-bread". So you have calzones and anti-calzones. Croutons in salads count as soup / nacho / anti-calzones, as do (non-filled) noodles of effectively all kinds - they're all bread with stuff on the outside. Which brings us to the logical conclusion that the world is a nacho.
- _ZeD_ 5y agosooo... is "normal" pasta dishes (no ravioli) just nachos? btw: lasagna sheets are not "structural" - so again nachos?
- GlennS 5y agoToday I learned that there is another type of pigs-in-blankets. To me pigs-in-blanket are sausages wrapped in bacon, not in bread/pastry.
- davbryn1 5y agoWe call sausages wrapped in pastry Sausage Rolls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausage_roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausage_roll in the UK
- cph123 5y agoI love sausage rolls!
- kakkun 5y agoFor me, it was always a pancake wrapped around a breakfast sausage. Took me about 20 years to learn that it wasn't the most common definition. It was just something served by the breakfast place my parents took me when I was little.
- nicbou 5y agoSeeing the typical HN comments applied to something this silly is the highlight of my morning.
- enriquto 5y agoBLT and foodstuffs with "soft bread" or other mock breads are not sandwiches for me. A sandwich must be made with real bread like a baguette. Fake breads like hamburger buns, sliced white bread, dry toasts, tortillas and the like are not sandwichogenic.
- quickthrower2 5y agoWikipedia just gets it right as usual. "A sandwich is a food typically consisting of vegetables, sliced cheese or meat, placed on or between slices of bread, or more generally any dish wherein bread serves as a container or wrapper for another food type" But the real question: are monads a sandwich?
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- michaelcampbell 5y agoI found the website unreadable, but the first few pages (ie. the first few words) were interesting.
- BatmansMom 5y agoBro youre so wrong the website is sick
- blindmute 5y agoI think it's interesting that this discussion is the closest many people come to philosophical discussions. It requires thinking precisely in an abstract way beyond what a lot of average Joes normally do. These sites and threads are reminiscent of Platonic dialogues, discussing the form of this or that. I think it's great.