I’m not concerned about the optimal packing of 17 squares, I’m talking about the waffle in the picture, which visually appears to have plenty of room for 25 squares. I’m guessing it’s hard to get a waffle to the exact specifications of a complicated mathematical model, given its composition and construction. But just look at it with your eyes, there is very obviously enough room on that bottom row for two more squares. And if squares still work they way they did when I first learned about them as a young child, that makes room for 25 total small squares. 🤷‍♂️

Maybe you couldn’t, I absolutely could. The space just looks smaller because there’s a diagonal square butting into it. Doesn’t matter anyway, making the squares smaller was my original comment that sparked this conversation, so I’m right both ways.

Yeah I know, but it’s terrible waffle design, there’s big flat chunks without syrup squares. It’s a huge amount of wasted area unable to hold syrup in any meaningful volume. It’s sad, really.

Edit: not to mention the waffle in the picture is clearly big enough to hold 25 squares the same size as those pictured! I thought these memes were supposed to be scientific…

Good point. Pesky square-cube law gets me again. Having done three minutes of research on Wikipedia pages I didn’t fully understand, I think changing the square divots to spherical ones will give us the smallest surface area-to-volume ratio.

Idk what you mean about constant grid line thickness, but if that’s your sticking point, stop assuming it. The waffle in the post certainly doesn’t have it. Regardless, you’re incorrect, more squares = more surface area, smaller squares = more squares. If you shrunk a billiards ball to the size of a golf ball, which one would have more surface area?

Decrease the size of the squares and you could get waaaay more surface area.

Whoa, haven’t thought about iGoogle in a minute. I spent the majority of my high school Desktop Publishing class playing Super Mario 2 on an emulator in iGoogle. The only drawback (besides not paying enough attention and being bad with computers now) was that it would refresh randomly, so I had to speed run to get as far as I could before it happened.

Ain’t no stroke gonna slow you down, keep up the amazing work!

There truly couldn’t be much of a downside to these technologies.

What you mean to say is “We don’t know what the downside will be untill these technologies are implemented and used for a long time and then studied.” Otherwise you sound like the well-intentioned-but-unhinged chemist that accidentally starts the zombie apocalypse at the beginning of the movie.