Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Ben: Our Chaotic Washing Machine

IMG_0324One of the interesting things about living in a foreign country, is that all the little things that are so mindless back home, suddenly become incredibly difficult when you are trying to do them through a language barrier. For example, washing clothes. You wouldn't think that washing clothes would be all that difficult. After all you just chuck the clothes in, make sure your water isn't too hot or too cold and come back in an hour for some nice smelling garments. Unless of course your washing machine's button panel happens to look like this

As a result Catie and I have been losing our minds (and our always even tempers) trying to puzzle out how to get the thing to simply wash a load of clothes. We finally decided to take a break and go eat some meat on a stick (more on that latter), but before we did I managed to find this bit of information about our washing machine (a Goldstar Chaos machine).

Goldstar Co. created a "chaotic washing machine" in 1993. It was the world's first consumer product to exploit "chaos theory", which holds that there are identifiable and predictable movements in nonlinear systems. This washing machine is supposed to produce cleaner and less tangled clothes. The key to the chaotic motion is a small pulsator (which stirs the water) that rises and falls randomly as the main pulsator rotates.

That's right, not only is our machine label in Korean, but it is also the worlds first (and probably only) washing machine built upon the principle of the “chaos theory.” I personally believe that they also decided to apply the chaos theory to their button labeling scheme. Which would explain why everytime you push a button instead of a “identifiable and predictable response” the machine instead responds chaotically and randomly (all math fiends, please now feel free to tell me how very poor my understanding is of chaos theory).

- ben

3 comments:

  1. Where can I get one of these marvelous machines? Have you tested it for worm holes? I know sometimes you can get caught in these at sub-warp speeds.

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  2. You only won't it to do a 40 degree wash, not fly.Far to complicated for me also.

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  3. Hahaha. I know, right? Thankfully, we have it figured out, but for pete's sake, did it have to be so complicated? I think the main problem in the end was that American machines mostly just have a couple buttons and dials and this thing had, like, a screen. It was an adventure! Like everything here. Thanks for commenting. :)

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