The Golden Ratio: Fun-to-Fuss
Applied Math For All Your Travels
Free weekend alert! Waiting for the precise moment that the morning jolt of caffeine took full effect, I rolled up the garage door. Streets were calm. My head was not. Nevertheless, it was time to give the all-clear.
We were off to the race track with some our best candidates for the upcoming weekend. Despite the fact that my buddy, Wes, and I had gotten an early start that morning rolling out our best ideas, the traffic up ahead was atrocious. Throttled roars stabbed through the dark acrid air building up over the stop-and-go traffic. These big engines weren’t meant to idle.
Somewhere in all that congestion lurked the soon-to-be-crowned grand champion that no amount of careful forethought and analysis could predict in advance.
Finally, we arrived at the gates. The oversized banner out front proudly advertised the long legacy of the event: Demolition Derby of Dumb Ideas LXIII.
One after another, our pet projects proudly rolled into the arena to the chorus of giant roars in our heads. We were ready. We were stoked!
The green flag fell and mayhem instantly rose. Around and around the arena sped our best contenders, spinning faster and faster with each passing minute jockeying for position. Half-baked ideas tipped sideways and rolled off into heaps of junk. Some wildly careened offtrack and jumped the side banks. Others spun circles, collided and went up in big blazes of glory. The biggest losers were crushed, or even worse, buried.
Carnage everywhere, the field was getting small. With weak underbellies exposed, only the sturdiest would make it through. There could only be one victor.
Absolute Brilliance, the heavy favorite, waited deep in the shadows out behind the arena before slinking up to the gates. For this particular contest, the time had finally come to make her big reveal. Long established rules had allowed well-built, heavily armored latecomers into the final laps.
As was customary, before skidding off into the fray, sponsorship was announced over the loudspeaker: “Zion National Park. The Narrows. Blitzkrieg Speed Hike.” The ground shook with a deep rumbling as Absolute Brilliance revved up her massive engine. The crowd fell silent. This wasn’t going to be pretty.
It only took a single word to come falling out of the loudspeaker to sputter that big bad engine. “Really?” Wes muttered disappointedly. Despite my speakerphone being turned all the way up, I could barely hear him. After a long pregnant pause, inflected with a suppressed sigh and a quiet “huh…” tacked on for dramatic effect, Absolute Brilliance belched out a few clouds of dark smoke and stalled out with a sharp bang and a hiss.
“That’s a really long way, especially for me,” added Wes who lived down in the San Francisco Bay Area, even further from the proposed far-flung destination. Only 8 hours of driving each way for me but a significantly longer 13 to 14 hours for him, with the balance through dauntingly heavy California weekend traffic.
Bring out the tow truck! Absolute Brilliance was finished. It had hit me at first sputter. I’d forgotten to apply “The Golden Ratio.” Oops. Sorry, dude. My bad!
Back at the shop, before building my grand project, I had ignored the most important rule. Otherwise known as the “Fun-to-Fuss Ratio,” I’d learned by trial-and-error the importance of using the metric to test drive ideas before sending my best out to the meet. Knowing and remembering how and when to use this ratio had been a vital first step in considering, let alone committing, to anything.
When it comes to travel, at least for my tastes, what I’ve found is that the success and satisfaction of most any outing hinges heavily on the calculated value of The Golden Ratio. “Math on a weekend?!?” you ask incredulously. “Really?” you mutter disappointedly. “Huh…”
But before you tune out, just take a peek. It’s super simple. No need for linear algebra, vector analysis, or differential equations. No, not even a Taylor series. All you need are the math skills you learned in elementary school plus a bit of common sense.
In its simplest form, The Golden Ratio may be expressed as:
Expanding further,
and
Equation 3 must also include the complementary inverse terms for the trip back home.
Finally, the Conservation of Time principal shall always be observed:
For more meaningful results, a quick reference lookup table provides guidance for the calculated value.
Wow, was this engineered?
Back to the derby for some applied math. For Zion, we were probably getting close to 44 hours of Fuss, which included all the customary round trip factors in Equation 3. For this trip, four hours of sleep per night would count as Time Not Having Fun because slumbering was just going to get in the way of our main objective.
With only 60 hours of Total Time to play with, we’d only be left with 16 hours of Time Having Fun per a rearranged Equation 4:
Applying Equation 1 above,
Success? What was I thinking?! Failure was all but guaranteed. Even without glancing at the lookup table, I knew that this was a spectacular crash and burn.
Absolute Brilliance, you need some work. Your harsh judgment, Wes, was well deserved. My apologies. The fancy paint job got me all excited.
My fellow minimalist ultralight travelers, The Golden Ratio is easy to pack and use for all your adventures. It weighs nothing, is simple in form, and can be applied to all kinds of things whether they be small daily outings, sightseeing tours, special events, long epic adventures, or even entire vacations themselves. Its versatility ranges from the most mundane domestic activities to far-flung international travel destinations across the globe. Quite simply, the fun-to-fuss factor can make or break a trip.
Move over Visa. Make room for The Golden Ratio. Don’t leave home without it.
This post is dedicated to the late Dr. Edward Schroeder of the UC Davis Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. Professor Schroeder was instrumental to my appreciation of engineering fundamentals, kindly offering his support and mentoring over the course of my collegiate studies. While overseas, I received the sad news that Ed had passed away. As the notice stated, Dr. Schroeder “encouraged his students to reach their fullest potential, combining high expectations with genuine care for their individual journeys.” So well put. I will also always remember Ed’s big infectious smile with a sense of humor seemingly always lurking close beneath the surface. As Ed liked to travel, my best guess is that he would have appreciated the finer points of the fun-to-fuss factor. May your Golden Ratios be forever high, Ed, wherever those great big clean rivers may take you as you float out past distant horizons.