2006-05-10 - 7:25 a.m.
I grew you a cat.
On Men, Women, spatial object rotation, and biscut joinery.
When you use biscut joinery in your cabinetwork, you have to do quite a bit of spatial object rotation in your head. That is, you need to take an object that is laying out flat and backwards, and mentally rotate it and align it correctly in your head, so you know where to cut the biscut slots.
Sometimes you can have the parts of a cabinet laying next to each other in the correct alignment, but there is no way to have everything laying that way, so with every cabinet box you make you have to do at least one rotation of the parts in your head.
So anyway, there I was with 9 cabinet parts, with three rotations, back to back, and then front to back, and then a separate set of front to back rotations for the shelves. And I was thinking to myself about an article I had read in Scientific American, the article was actually about the disparity between men and women in mathematics and science fields, but part of the article was about the actual differences in the way men and women�s brain works.
The article mentioned that women often have difficulty rotating objects in their imagination. For example, when reading a map women often have to physically rotate the map when they turn a corner so that they are still moving in the same �direction� Some men also have trouble with this, but the article said that overall there is a clear separation between men and women on this particular ability.
I was thinking about all this while I was building this cabinet, the idea that many women would have a difficult time building a cabinet this way because you constantly have to rotate the parts in your imagination...
I�m sure you have figured out where this is heading by now, and don�t worry,
I�ll be able to fix the cabinet.
-Justus
