The requirements for the solution are usually nonnegotiable. Whether it is “get home from the airport now” or “cut the golf ball”. The decision of what to do is made, the requirements are frozen, the problem goes into the implementation phase or how to do it, the engineers get to strangle the philosophers which is generally a good idea anyway if you want to get things done instead of just talking about them.
Then it is about what you have, and choosing the tradeoffs. Here, rather annoyingly often, only one choice turns to be viable enough to count as a non-Hobson choice, despite being suboptimal. Then it counts as a forced choice.
Requirements can be revisited, but it is generally a good idea only when there are no choices left in the implementation phase.
When I was a kid, we believed that cutting the center of the golf ball would cause an explosion. I guess I was still a little nervous watching this video…
I was told the same thing! I had a chipped golf ball that I was slowly picking apart and my mother took it away because she said it’d blow up in my face. She really believed that. And I thought, If the damn things are so explosive then hitting them as hard as you can with a hard wooden or metal rod must be a really bad idea.
Better would be to give you goggles, teach you that it is a good idea to wear them when handling stuff where there is maybe some stored energy inside. But parents are like that, mothers especially…
Seeing the wide array of colors available on the inside of modern golf balls makes me want to wander over to the nearest golf course and roam the perimeter for “lost” balls to carefully dismantle. Much better than the giant rubber band and tiny, not very bouncy ball that were inside golf balls when I was a kid. I didn’t have a pocket knife, though, I removed the shell the slow way by using the sidewalk as a giant piece of sandpaper.
Y’all probably believed it when the big kids told you that ink would squirt out of that little hole in the fire alarm handle if you pulled the alarm, too. I installed one of those as my bathroom light switch in a party house I once inhabited. The little hole had a hex head set screw in it. No ink bladder. I had to tell that to so many party guests!
The ones i remember had a black-ball core wrapped up with a single strand of elastic. Perfect for a fly-catapult (your fingers as the supports and a bent paper clip for ammo.
I remember rolling my dad’s car over the inner black ball and it burst, revealing a gooey, white substance.
Never did find out what that stuff was.
They told us that the white powder used to make the lines on the athletic field would eat your shoes if you stepped on it. I can’t tell you how many years that one stuck with me.
