Quantified Self
It's made me way more excited about ferris wheels, subways, car washes, waterslides, and store entrances that have double doors with a divider in the middle.
It's made me way more excited about ferris wheels, subways, car washes, waterslides, and store entrances that have double doors with a divider in the middle.
Cueball embraces the quantified self, a popular philosophy promoting monitoring yourself with devices and data in the hope of helping your well-being. He does so in a unique and absurdly humorous way, with help from a smart watch or handheld mobile device. Randall's caption indicates he is interested in the quantified self for unusual quantities.
Typically, fitness apps and wearable devices will track the number of steps that users take and distances walked or run, along with other measurements such as heart rate, blood oxygenation level, blood pressure, and mood. This is to encourage users to be more physically active. However, Cueball has chosen to track a modified version of this metric, in which his path is post-processed by contracting it as much as possible without it passing through anything solid. Ordinarily, people begin and end their days in bed; in this case, it can get 'caught' where Cueball has passed through topological tunnels. (See 2658: Coffee Cup Holes and 2625: Field Topology for details.) In the comic strip, we see that, over the course of his week, Cueball has looped through his house thrice and crossed under two highway overpasses, a highway sign, and apparently the St. Louis Gateway Arch before almost returning home.
This comic appeared two days after Google's announcement that Maps Directions will be sortable by sustainability, along with their support of self-quantification for sustainability when shopping for automobiles, used goods, and food.[1] This is noteworthy because of tech industry discussions between employees and executives comparing sharply increased profits and productivity from work-from-home to the value of coastal region commercial office space holdings and leases, relative to scope 3 emissions.[2][3][4][5][6][7]
An "imaginary thread" connecting a person to where they came from (as portrayed in this comic, distinct from a mystical silver cord or red thread of fate) has been attested to by people experiencing obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD.)[8][9] See also 100: Family Circus and below for further elaboration.
The title text mentions several things that would make the red path longer: passing one way through a tube such as a water slide; a tunnel, such as a subway or car wash; riding on a ferris wheel, or entering a building through one door and exiting another. In all cases the imaginary string would be "captured" and make the total distance longer.
OCD interpretation
The quantity Cueball measures can be recognized as a specific type of OCD where people feel like they have an imaginary string connecting them to where they come from.[actual citation needed] This is similar to describing 4-D paths in Minkowski space relative to the observer's frame of reference.
As they move around, that string gets entangled and they feel the urge to untangle it. When they enter a car, they feel the need to exit the car from the same door, to avoid that the string gets trapped by forever passing through the car. When they enter a building, they feel they need to exit using the same staircases and doorway(s), to avoid entangling the string in the building. Some situations, like turning around a lamp post, are OK because you can imagine removing the loop over the top of the lamp post, such that it is not really entangled.
Cueball tries a new approach to deal with this OCD by integrating it in his quantified self. He defines precisely how to measure the length of the imaginary string, reduced to its minimum, and chooses this as a quantity to monitor. Unlike most people with this OCD, who feel the urge to minimize the length, Cueball takes the opposite stance trying to maximize the (optimally minimal) length of the string. By defining as a target to achieve a given length every day, he creates a drive to embrace situations that entangle the string. This drive opposes the natural compulsion to avoid them and hopefully cancels it. The joke of the title text is that Cueball now becomes overly interested in all the things that are disturbing for people with the OCD.