Saturday, July 26

Not that any of you will know . . .

This question has been rolling around my brain for months. There is a beer commercial, for Michelob Ultra as it turns out, which indicates that "Your life has more than one dimension, so should your beer." I understand that my life has "more than one dimension". It has 3 physical dimensions (or 4 depending on how you want to count them) but really it's a metaphor in that my life has various, somewhat independent aspects.

[Aside: now I am currently considering whether or not different activities in my life could truly be considered orthogonal, and thereby constitute different dimensions. It seems to me that orthogonality should be a requirement of multi-dimensionality, though perhaps they need only be linearly independent. This is going to require more thought.]

Anyway, what I can't figure out is what it could possibly mean for a beverage to have "more than on dimension." I've never had any beer, let alone Michelob Ultra, and I realize that most, if not all, of my readers can't intelligently comment on beer, but still: what could this possibly mean?

How many dimensions does milk have? Kool-Aid? Could orange juice possibly be multi-dimensional, one for the liquid and one for the pulp?

And now, as a first for my blog, I present you with a beer commercial:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you have two aspects which are linearly independent then there are components of those aspects which are orthogonal, no?

In any case, if one expresses the taste of the beer as a vector measured in some kind of taste-space, then to have more dimensions would imply that other beers are contained in a subspace of that taste-space which Michelob breaks out from.

Of course the more likely case is that they did no such analysis and are simply committing fraud.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ben said...

That wasn't me... Anyways, I think that this is a plain misnomer. I think that what the beer company is referring to are dynamics, not dimensions.

This is an example of pop culture dumbing up our country - oh wait, it's beer!

Clark said...

Ben #1: You are correct that if they're linearly independent, they have components which are orthogonal. A set of linearly independent vectors will define a space as well as the same number of orthogonal vectors. (But the details are a bit messier.)

On the whole, I think it's fabulous that this post spawned a comment including the phrase "taste-space".

Ben #2: (I deleted the duplicate post by Ben #1) Don't worry, I don't think any of us really thought that you had suddenly turned your thoughts to matters of orthogonality. Ben #1 is a different, much nerdier Ben.

Alex said...

Beer is nasty, no matter what dimension you drink it in. :)