Monday, May 24, 2021

A crack in the dam wall?

Glancing at the list of my blog posts, neatly organised by year, reveals a distinctly non-Fibonacci-like sequence. 

There is the great gushing of 2006 to 2009 (236 in total, between 40 and 76 per year), the just more than one a month 2010, the teetering single digits of 2011-2015 (5,6,5,0,3) and then a series of 1s and 0s. One in 2016, one in 2017, none in 2018, one in 2019, none in 2020 and, prior to the publishing of this post, one in 2021. 

So hear we stanned, in a year with 2 posts, the most since 2015. The world was a very different place then! Well, not really. But anyway, the point is, this could be the start of something. A change in the sequence. A crack in the dam wall, signalling a Great New Gushing to rival that of those early heady days. 

Can any other body parts be used as an adverb like heady? Brainy? Army? Someone can be leggy. But not legsy, but yes handsy (ugh). 

yoUtubE has recommended me:

  1. highlights of the Lakers-Suns (should really be Suns-Lakers, Suns are hosting) Game 1. I'm trying to cut back my NBA consumption, specially since The Dubs carked it.
  2. copyBest relaxing piano studio ghibli, which is fair enough as the kids have been listening to it at bedtime.
  3. interview with a catatonic schizophrenic. i'm not sure why.
  4. daniel dennett: arguments for atheism. i watched a daniel dennett clip a while back, iwas reminded of him because i stumbled across this awesome 80s video doco thing made about the mind and Hofstadter, and i think Dennett's in there somewhere. at any rate they co-produced the great the Mind's I. not really interested in the arguments for atheism bit, but i do like dan. 
  5. obviously the recommendations continue forever (has anyone checked that?) but the one that stood out, number 7 i believe, is Most Humiliating Goals That SHOCKED The World. What can you say about this. it's got five classic clickbait tropes. 
    1. Most (not quite or very or least)
    2. Humiliating (the witnessing of shame is a powerful hermodisiac*)
    3. shocked (another emotion that leaves our brains soaking wet with dopamine)
    4. all caps baby
    5. the world (not the eastern hemisphere, the county etc)

 And so we come to the point, as if there ever were one: persuasion

So sayeth Dr Sue Knight, when we try to persuade someone to do something or believe something**, we use arguments - we put forward reasons - in an effort to convince. (we live in an age of reason, even when they're bad the powers that be still feel compelled to at least appear to have valid reasons)

Certain kinds of bad arguments are often more persuasive than appeals to reason and truth. When it comes to persuasion, fallacious arguments very often succeed where good arguments fail (so true!)

Advertisers, politicians and probably all of us at one time or another capitalise on this fact (again, very true!). dammit we know we are hoodwinking folks, and not respecting their right to make an evidence-based decision (not sure this is a right or where this comes from, but seems legit)

we may be convinced we are right and that it is in everyone's interests to adopt our point of view (hmm). we may just be brazenly trying to advance our interests (getting closer to the heart of it)

regardless, when we knowingly employ fallacious arguments we would seem to be guilty of attempting to deceive. 

it is inevitable that we all will, at times, fall victim to such deceit on the part of others (big hmm. and also to ourselves!) 

Thanks Dr Knight, you make some great points. it's a sobering thought indeed to reflect on how many times i've been bamboozled, or attempted to hoodwink some poor schmuck.

and of course we return to the esteemed Tim Finn, whose track persuasion is not one of my favourites. but i've been listening the hell out of his brother's band's temple of low men. good stuff.

*If aphrodisiac is after Aphrodite, goddess of love, then hermodisiac is after Hermes, god of screens and the internet 

** note that believing is contrasted here with doing, but why can't believing be something we do? What are you up to? I've been believing.

Thursday, February 18, 2021

 The true meaning of the Fibonacci sequence

I have been asking my daughter about math. She doesn't particularly like it, somewhat to my disappointment but of course also much to my fatherly understanding. But I do. And she's just started high school, which to my eyes represents a six year long chance for me to relive my glory days of math. Sure, I peaked in my first or second year of university, but high school is where math came together in my head. So of course I am keen to find out what she's being taught, and see if I can jog my memory, help her out and reconnect with maths. 

Well, the first bit of homework was not too bad. Some inexplicably finely printed (okay, explicable - budgets are tight these days) questions to do with order of operators (x and / before + and -), add the brackets to make the equation correct, fill in the missing number to make the equation correct etc. I found a mistake in an otherwise flawless set of answers. And was even able to help her with a question from another set that had been stumping her. 

But then this evening, just before bedtime, she informed me (well, I may have asked her first) that her latest assignment was to find out the significance of the Fibonacci sequence. An ultra-quick aside, for those unfamiliar. The Fibonacci sequence goes:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, ...

Get it? To get the next number in the sequence, just add the previous two numbers. The first two numbers just are. The rest can be deduced from that simple rule. 

Well, I knew this sequence. I've read about it many times, it is quite a pleasing pattern and it also relates to the spiral shape of shells. Or something. I told her this, including the "or something" part, and said we should be able to help her. I was sure I could find something on my bookshelf that would include a little description of the Fibonacci sequence and its significance. 

The first book I tried was Morris Kline's Mathematics in Western Culture. I've yet to read it but now that I've stumbled upon it, I might just give it ago. I checked the index but found no entry for Fibonacci. The next book was Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot. Hofstadter's indices (indexes?) are tours de force and I knew that if he'd discussed it then I'd find it in the index. Sadly, no. Undeterred I moved five spots to the left and picked up Gödel, Escher, Bach. Goddamn jackpot [h/t Carl Weathers].

There were multiple references to the Fibonacci sequence and an entirely separate reference to Leonardo of Pisa. Satisfied that the mission was accomplished, I handed the book to my daughter and encouraged her to inquire within.

Some minutes later, after putting one of my other daughters to bed, I sought the eldest out only to be told in no uncertain terms that the answer was not within. Yes the Fibonacci sequence was in there, but there was nothing about its meaning. Its significance. Really? Surely that couldn't be. My daughter assured me she had checked each and every instance listed in the index, and had even skimmed the preceding and following pages to be sure. 

Alas, I had to send her to bed without an answer.  Of course, I would not be suffering the same fate, so I made my way back to the bookshelf and set out to find a book that dished the dirt on the true meaning of Fibonacci's numbers. A couple of other Hofstadter books? Nope. Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea? Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale? Nope, nope. Increasingly desperate, I turned to Barrow's Impossibility and Book of Nothing. Nothing, impossible! What about John Allen Paulos' Innumeracy? Uh-uh. My prized copy of Feynman's Lectures on Physics (Vol. 1) ? Why would it be in there, of course no. I kept trying, because there had to be something on my shelf that went into this famous little sequence, right? I did not hold much hope when I picked up H.G. Wells' A Short History of the World and I was not disappointed (because I didn't have hope, not because it was in there). I must have tried a few more, but my heart wasn't really in it any more by that point. If only I still had Silver's beautiful The Ascent of Science. Why did I get rid of that? Surely it would have been in there. 

Of course the sadness was that what had once been beautiful - a search through well worn pages of some old favourites on my bookshelf, in service of the next generation of mathematicians - was on a path to becoming an abomination. A google search. I could already see the millions of results, all to be ignored in favour of a pithy summary placed handily at the top (or is it top right?) of the search results. Not even using Duck Duck Go could right this wrong.  Wikipedia wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. It's one of the success stories of the internet, seemingly. If we had a real encyclopaedia (both my parents did when I was a child), we'd have gone to it. What's so different? 

But it felt like a real blow. Like there's no knowledge and no progress without giving in to that damn machine, without staring at that godforsaken screen, without mindlessly consuming those first few algorithm-generated crumbs. Defeat. Ah, maybe there's no shame in just looking it up. Bah! I'm not defeated yet!

I read through Hofstadter's entries on the sequence, in both GEB and I Am a Strange Loop. He talks about the significance of the sequences, alright, but in rather different terms. He speaks of the meaning they had for a young Kurt Gödel, and the derivation (algorithm) of the sequence, and its complement. He talks about the fact that after considerable struggle, mathematicians were able to show that there was a reason (possibly even a darn good one) that 8 and 144 were the only perfect cube and perfect square in the entire sequence.

All of that was significant. All of that had plenty of meaning. But it wasn't going to cut it for my daughter. She needed to have some string of text from some random [modern usage here, my apologies] website that said 'Fibonacci's number is famous for appearing in many natural forms such as the Nautilus shell and ' ... well, I can't think of the other examples. 

Hang on, what if I try it in R, the open source free programming language? Why yes, I can create a variable containing the Fibonacci sequence and plot it and the meaning will reveal itself to me! I don't have to be defeated by the internet (forget for a moment that R was obtained via the internet). Dammit, I can't see any patterns. What am I doing wrong? Should I be plotting alternating numbers? Rotating the graph? Using squares. This is hopeless.

My mind turned to graph paper. Perhaps I could sneak into my daughter's room without waking her, find her maths workbook, and start making my own plots. Surely I'd eventually stumble on the secret of the Fibonacci sequence that way? No, that was too farfetched. There was no way around it. I would have to 'search it up'.

*

**

***

*****

********

*************

*********************

 

The true meaning of the Fibonacci sequence is defeat. Machine over 'Mo Sapiens. Screen over page. School over Dad. Instant gratification over effort. A perfectly average diamond in a jewelry store over a gem in a trashcan (h/t Lin Yutang via Raymond Smullyan via our old friends Hofstadter and Dennett). Homogenisation over individual difference. 

But was all really lost? I had tried, hadn't I? I had resisted. I had fought. Is it not better to have searched and not found than to have never searched at all? Couldn't this small striving be a seed, a harbinger of things to come? A role model even, to my digital native daughters? That might be going too far. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the whole process immensely. It may not have amounted to a hill of beans, but it meant something to me. Grazie, Leonardo!

Monday, June 10, 2019

Sit down and shut up




They gathered around the fire. It crackled as they sat, waiting. Stars flooded the night sky. The elder spoke.

“This is a story from long ago. It tells us about what’s coming.”

~~~

Andrew woke up. Queens of the Stone Age was playing on his two-versions-behind iPhone, severing him from a sleep he’d entered reluctantly, finally, after his laptop had died.

“Ugh.”

He skimmed through his messages, notifications, mentions, the latest scores, the news. He got out of bed and moved through the house, some family members stirring, others still fast asleep. Singlet, shorts, sneakers. Out the door, trying not to creak it too much. Shoes on, out the gate, set the Fitbit timer on.

Slowly Andrew began to wake up as he moved down the street, up the gentle hill that lead out of his cul de sac. What was that dream? It was still fresh in his mind. He could heard the voice but the lasting impression was the fire and the stars, the small group gathered around it. He struggled to recall the details, retracing his dream steps in vain. He pondered its meaning for a moment, then moved on, resolving to take the kids camping some time soon.

He worked his way around the suburb and up and down his to do list, acknowledging other runners, trying to maintain his pace. He wondered if he enjoyed running, and if wondering about it was a sign he didn’t. He was glad to live in such a beautiful place. How he was able to live for so long in a dirty, noisy, concrete jungle, he couldn’t understand. Priorities change, but then why had Roberta’s parents moved to a spot that was only minutes from heavy industry? Sure, it was picturesque, but still… He approached his home, sped up, and stopped the timer a few metres before reaching the gate.

Slowing down, he started to gather his breath. It had never really cooled down overnight, and the rising sun was already hot. He remembered something he’d heard recently, during some heatwave or another. Hot days are bad enough, but it’s the hot nights that are a real killer, depriving people of the respite they badly need – and usually get – when the sun goes down.

Shoes off. His wife was waiting with a kiss as he entered the front door.

“Sorry, gotta run. Oh, it’s hot out here! Great, I’m gonna be covered in sweat by the time I get to the station.”

“You want a lift?”

“It’s fine, I need the exercise. Have a good day.” And with that she was gone.

Bess was nearby, carrying a poster she’d drawn and coloured in, that said “Be RESILIENT and BUONCE back”, with a girl bouncing a ball on it.

He leaned in for a cuddle.

“Eww Dad you’re all sweaty! You’ll wreck my poster!”

“Sorry! Maybe you wanna come for a run with me next time?”

“I’d love to!”

“C’mon, we need to get you ready for school. Have you eaten breakfast?”

Mornings were relentless. Life was relentless. Still, they seemed to manage ok.

~~~

“I want to listen to Electric Car!”

“No! I want Fragments of Time.”

“Bess asked first, you can have yours after, Joe.”

“Yay!”

“Stop gloating.”

“Bloody potholes,” Andrew muttered to himself.

“Where?” Joe looked out the window.

“Why are there potholes, Dad?”

“I dunno. Roads wear out over time, so we have to keep fixing them. You can’t just stop when the road is built. You have to maintain it, keep it in good condition, repair it – ”

“Are you talking about roadworks?” Bess interrupted. “I hate roadworks. They make us late.”

“Well if Dad had gotten out the door on time...” Andrew gave Joe a quick and pointed glance. “Well it’s Bess’ fault too,” Joe continued. “It took her 10 minutes to brush her teeth!”

“You always pick on me!”

“C’mon you two, let’s try and pretend we like each other for a little while. What have you got on at school today?”

“We’re doing that working bee in the school garden – “

“My gloves!”

“Damn it! It’s ok, I’ll go back.”

“But then we’ll be even later! We’ll be able to borrow some. Mr Tan said they have spares.”

“But I want mine! The ones at school are all old and dirty!” Bess started to cry. Andrew turned the
blinker on and turned off the highway.

“Dad, you always give in to her!”

~~~

Andrew was a sustainability officer with Council. After dropping the kids off at school he pulled into the carpark, checking his emails on his phone while he walked over to the office. “Bastards’ve left without me,” he thought, glancing around at the empty desks. He spotted Lisa heading out, mug in hand.

“Morning. They’ve just left. You coming?”

“Hang on, I’ll just grab my cup.”

They walked off together, and found the others at the café, some seated, some still waiting for their order.

Andrew collected his soy flat white and joined the others at the table. It was covered with ceramic cups and keepcups of all shapes and sizes. They were talking about a conference.

“How was it?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot that was on. Were there any good speakers?”

“It was actually really good. I caught up with Peter Gray, he gave a good talk. He spoke about this citizen science trial they’re running. The highlight was probably – hang on, I wrote down her name… Vera… Likovska? I think. I can’t read my own writing. I’ll have to Google her. Her talk was called “ – she started to chuckle – “Crush Sustainability.“

“That’s what our unit should be called.”

“As in – we crushed it? We killed it, like, we did it well? Or crush as in destroy sustainability?”

“Crush as in destroy! She stood up there and kinda said we’re all wasting our time.”

“Wow, what do you mean. Like, us? Council?”

“Yeah, but no, more than that. She started off by saying Game Over. We’ve lost. She blew a whistle!”

“Oh my god, how pretentious!”

“What a classic!”

“She was saying that we’re in the sustainability business, and business is booming. There’s more sustainability officers now than ever, more grant money, more policies and legislation. But that the game to achieve sustainability is over.”

“What?”

“Wow. That’s a bit harsh.”

“She might be right.”

“Did she have a solution?”

“Where was she from again?”

“I’m not sure, she might have been from the uni. Ah, no, she didn’t really give any advice. But she was just really eloquent and compelling. It was a little bit depressing, but actually I mostly felt energised after. Like, you hear so many talks, we’re doing this, we’re doing that, we’re going to achieve this, reduce that... And she was like: Nuh. We’re not!”

“So what was her point? That we’re losing the sustainability game?”

“Well I –“ everyone looked at Andrew – “I don’t necessarily think we’re winning, but I think we’re actually moving, kind of moving in the right direction. Even though there’s a lot to be depressed about, there’s also a lot to be optimistic about. You shoulda heard my kids talking about their veggie garden at school.”

“We’ve got a community garden just down the road from us. It’s really lovely. Not sure it would feed many people though.”

“It’s funny you say moving in the right direction. She was talking about how there was once an election campaign where the slogan was “There’s lots to do, but we’re heading in the right direction”. She said it was smart because there weren’t any promises about when we’d arrive at wherever it was we were heading towards. She said for us it’s worse than that: we have no idea where we’re even trying to get to.”

Again, silence. It was hard to tell whether the silence was disapproval, the sound of thoughts being provoked or just morning grogginess.

“What does she think is the right direction? Or destination?”

“Her words were ‘We have no idea what sustainability looks like.’ ”

“Right…”

“But isn’t it just the sum of all the things we do? Y’know, like recycling, better materials, better design, green energy…”

“She wasn’t disagreeing with all the sustainability things we do, she just said that they’re not making an impact. Not really. That it’s a drop in the ocean.”

Andrew’s colleague went on.

“All the sustainability action is just repeatedly and massively swamped by all the other things we do – she said sustainability is a bug in the windshield of progress. Commerce and politics and day to day crap, running the house and staring at screens – they suck up about 99% of our collective energy and time, and do 99% of our damage. Meanwhile no one can say what sustainability actually is – what it would mean for all of us, collectively and individually, to live sustainably.”

“That reminds me of our changing define definition of health – it’s not just the absence of illness any more, right? I think the positive psychology movement might have had something to do with it, at least in terms of mental health. Basically saying that most of what we know is from people with broken brains –  you know, tamping rods exploded into their skull, hemispheres severed, that kind of thing – and that’s been incredibly productive, but that it has limits and it might actually be useful to consider what good psychological health is, you know, other than just not being sick.”

“Interesting.”

“So what does sustainability look like?”

“She didn’t say. She just said it’s time to shut the sustainability enterprise down.”

“That definitely sounds depressing”

“Who invited her?”

“I don’t mind being provoked, but I’m not sure that message is a productive one”

“Well, like I said, I should have been depressed by what she said but it was actually kind of good. Like giving yourself permission to not just go along with everything for a change. Like waking up from a dream.”

Andrew thought back to his dream.

“I’d better get back. I’ve got a report to write on e-waste.”

“I’ve got a meeting with the Department about the new bushfire communications campaign.”

“I hope it goes well.”

“Alrighty, better get back to it.”

~~~

On the way back home from school, Bess and Joe were talking about their working bee.

“ – and Marta fell over and scratched her knee, but she got to pick the first passionfruit – ”

“Yum, did you get any?”

“Yeah. It was yummy.”

“Did you save any for me?”

“No!”

“Isn’t it great that you get to have a garden, and work on it, at school?”

“Yeah!”

“I guess,” Joe said. “It was satisfying. But I got all hot and sticky and dirty. I‘d rather have been in the air conditioned library reading books.”

“Fair enough.”

~~~

That night, after the chaos of homework, school lunches, bathing, dinner, washing up and bedtime, after they’d finished with their phones and watched an episode of Bird Box, after they’d postponed their weekly family catchup meeting, Andrew recounted some of the coffee conversation to Roberta.

“We don’t even know what sustainability looks like!” he said.

“You should look that woman from the conference up” Roberta said, yawning, before rolling over and falling asleep.

Andrew lay there alone with his thoughts. He felt the flicker of an impulse to pick up his phone. To watch something, do something. He could even turn it into a positive experience by googling the conference speaker. But he forced his hand away from the phone, back to bed. He set the alarm on his phone and switched it to flight mode. He looked out the window and smiled to see a few stars, straining against the smog and light pollution.

~~~

The air was cold, despite the radiant heat from the fire. The elder spoke softly.

“I’m going to tell you a story. From the old times. You need to listen.”

Andrew couldn’t hear her properly, or was it that he couldn’t understand? Somehow, a long time passed, and the flames were gone and there was darkness, and he was alone. A miraculous, vast silence rang out in front of him, inside of him. And then his alarm went off.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

A Man Arrives

And so it has come to this. A man has arrived at a high station in life.

There is some time for reflecting on the journey that brought him here. And some time to admire the view from these stately surrounds.

But a man is obliged to carry out his duties from this high station and leave those other tasks to the chroniclers of history, of which this man is one, incidentally.

From this position of power and privilege, of opportunity and responsibility, a man may make himself comfortable and settle in for the long haul.

He expects ups and downs, slings and arrows, 300 megaton warheads and spitballs that visit those in this high station.

A man in a station such as this might just have the opportunity to enter some other even higher stations. From which higher stations yet may become available.

How long does it take to get used to such?

A man now acts.

Friday, February 19, 2016

5 year strategy for making promises

They say there is a time and a place for everything. Who knew they were talking about multiverses?

It makes one shake one's head and tilt the pelvis backwards.

Some say that there's a parallel universe where some important decision you took - e.g. what to order in the food court in Chinatown - actually went another way. And every other parameter in the whole fucking universe remained constant. Only now, things are unfolding in dizzily different directions, all because you ordered chicken laksa instead of vegie laksa. I mean, the vegetables they give you are often terrible, but then the chicken is often weird too. I think maybe it's an egret.

But there's a parallel universe where I'm not depressed. Where life spat in my eye, but I laughed uncontrollably, then for 10 minutes controllably, then uncontrollably again, and so on in alternating recurrence FOR EVER. What a universe that would be.

But there's just too many to catalogue. Certainly in excess of 1,00,0.

The thing is, each passerby that I try to tell my life story to just looks at me with irritation. Except those folks selling things. They're so full of beans. They're jumping up and down and dancing. They go to shake my hand. I take it and hold on a moment too long. Yes, God yes I do want to hear about this cooling out study opportunity. But first, may I share with you... my life story. It won't take long. Only... my whole life!

In fact it would take much longer than that, as any half sane jackass could tell you. I mean, you can spend half an hour just telling someone about that time you wiped your ass 7 straight times and never once did clean tissue emerge. When in reality, that portion of your life took only 4-6 minutes. And so it can take a damn long time to tell your life's story. Maybe even the length of the life of the universe! But not the multiverse, because those are different stories.

Have you tried narrative therapy? I think they read you fairy tales. I love reading my kids fairy tales. At times we're lying there, and one of them will transform into a werewolf. They're crouching on the bed, very long of torso, at least 2/3 of the bed length, dark, sweaty, dirty hair. Breath that smells like dog. Some stray hand dangling out of the corner of their mouth. They HOOOOWWWLLLL at the moon, and bump their head on the bunk.

Then I'm back at uni, in those smoke filled lecture theatres. It's hard to believe that every student used to bring their own smoke machine into the theatre. It was incredibly atmospheric, but I couldn't see the screen at all. I pull out my DNA Ray Gun and survey the room. Makenzi from Botany has more life forms on her than Dane from the Lower Middle North Shore. Neither of them can tell me how to treat cancer.

It was a love story, a love story between two screens. I had been worried that my wife and I were drifting apart - literally, not figuratively. She would retreat to her room, eyes fixed to that blasted eyephone screen. I would flee to my room, one eye glued to my laptop screen, the other bluetacked to it, as I had run out of glue. Those were some of the most addictive times of my life. God I discovered so much. She watched so many documentaries. But we recognised that we had a problem. Fortunately our screens solved the problem for us, by beginning a passionate love affair. It started innocently, when I placed a condom over my wife's phone and rested it gently on my keyboard and then firmly closed the laptop cover. But before long, these two screens were inseparable. They were photographed for TMZ, they planned nuptials. So different, such different backgrounds. Wrong side of the tracks and all that jazz. But they found a way, which in this day and age is pretty much par for the course. In all days and ages it's been par for the course, finding a way just means not breaking up. Y'know. And I'm happy to say they were legally married - in the ACT, which allows weird shit like that. 

"I'll never love another"
"How can you know that?"
"I just do"
"But how can you? You really can't know that"
"Fine you might be right but I felt like saying it, doesn't that count for something?"
"Why not just say 'I hope I never love another?'"
"Because that is unromantic as all get in"
"Fool me you kiss"

Until she discovered that it wasn't a possum eating the chicken food. Pressing down on the lever. It was a person. Making possum sounds. Oh shit that is so weird and scary. This person was crawling past their bedroom window every single night at about midnight, crawling into the chicken coop, growling like a possum, opening the chicken feeder lid and then moving on. So scary. It really doesn't pay to entertain the full weirdness of the world too much. That shit'll burst your dam.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Public sector fairytales

The Loafer, the Neighbour and the Passers By

Once there was a loafer. He did his share of work, but he did more than his share of loafing, if that's possible.

The loafer's work was desk-based, and not just desk-based, but desktop computer-based. As such, his preferred method of loafing was grazing on a varied diet of websites, including but not limited to media outlets, blogs, discussion fora and twitter accounts.

Now, the loafer lived, err sorry, worked in an open plan office. Open plan offices had desks but no walls (and by extension, no doors, for you cannot have a door without a wall). However, para-walls were built from desk partitions, extensions of the desk that rose upwards two or three feet and gave the appearance of a wall while the occupant was seated.

Within open plan offices there were two kinds of desk (and computer screens) - those in sight of the eyes of passers by and those not thus exposed. The loafer sat at a desk and computer screen that were indeed in sight of passers by. However, the loafer was at the more favourable of two other types of desk - those that give warning of the imminent arrival of passers by and those that do not.

If it so happened that the loafer noticed an incoming passer by, which happened a dozen or more times a day, and the loafer happened to be loafing, which also happened a dozen or more times a day, he was able to quickly close, minimise, or switch from the internet browser tab to which he'd been attending (depending on a complex constellation of factors such as unread length of article, ease of relocating the tab, the presence of other work-related tabs, the presence of other active programs and the existence of other activities on a second screen or separate laptop) before the passer by was able to see that the loafer was indeed loafing.

The passer by had not a clue that the loafer had been loafing, and the loafer needed only wait a moment for the passer by to pass by, whereupon he could resume loafing.

Seated on the other side of the loafer's partition was a fellow worker who also did his share of working, but struggled to fill his share of loafing. While seated at his desk, he had no view of the loafer, the loafer's desk or the loafer's computer screen. However, he did have a view of oncoming passers by. He also had an observant nature.

Over time, the loafer's neighbour began to notice that sometimes when a passer by approached, a single mouse click could be heard from the loafer's side of the partition. Further, most of the time this mouse click was accompanied by a second mouse click some 5 to 10 seconds after the passer by had disappeared.

The neighbour approached the loafer with his theory, which I'm sure you can guess, and which the loafer confirmed with a mixture of surprise and shame.

For some time afterwards, the loafer's telltale mouseclick was nowhere to be heard when people passed by.

The neighbour at first assumed that the loafer had ceased loafing. But as time passed, and with the neighbour himself unable to resist loafing from time to time, he decided this was not possible.

The neighbour at first suspected that the loafer was somehow obscuring the noise of the mouse click, but ruled that out as being technically implausible. He then realised that there were other means of obscuring non-work related websites, such as by keyboard shortcuts or (much less likely) switching the monitor off or (very much less likely) throwing some kind of garment over the screen.

Even more diabolically, the neighbour wondered, could the loafer be employing a random mixture of mouseclicks, keyboard shortcuts and screen switch offs, so as to evade detection by the neighbour?

At last, the neighbour could take it no longer, and confronted the loafer. How had he been obscuring his loafing?

They both glanced at the loafer's screen, upon which a sports website was loaded, and the loafer said that he hadn't been obscuring anything. 

All of which goes to show, somehow, that

it is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all

Monday, March 02, 2015

On Time

Who was the first ever person to be on time?

Who was the first ever person to be late?

And what were those situations? Some caveman, agreed to meet a cavewoman at sundown? He got there at sundown and she got there at sunup?

Or did it happen much later? Much, much later, in fact? Indeed could it have been, that prior to about 200 BC, no one had ever been late or on time? I'll have to check with literature and folk tales of the time, but I wouldn't rule out this daring, breathtaking hypothesis.

And an argument, if not in favour of this, then surely not against it, is that I can't think of a single Aesop's fable about promptness or tardiness. I know, I know, the hare and the tortoise. To which I'd reply: are you sure that's by Aesop? And even if it were, it's not really about punctuality. It's a race, dammit. People have been racing since they were bacteria, at least chasing and chasing ain't far off racing, I should think (as my daughter likes to say).

And what is with being late and on time (preferably not at the same time)?

I'm generally pretty good with being on time, but I'll cut it fine a-sometimes.

There's the cut it fine crew, then those that do complete lateness blowouts. 30 minutes, an hour, even more. Of course by specifying those times it's clear I'm not talking about a contract to build a spaceship of the sea or anything of that scale.

And some are late, until they phone their meeter, then they're on time again, but will often then become late again for a second time!

And it's far less of a thing to be early. Far less spoken about, really. Underrated, even?

So it's something about people's attitude to their own time, and other people's time. Is it a possession? Something to keep, guard, use? A currency, something to spend or save? Is it a dimension, something to move around in? I think that each and every one of us has our own peculiar perception of time and the role we have to play in maintaining some kind of mastery over it. Or not.

And so I propose to found the Journal of Lateness, accompanied by the Blog of Lateness, and the hip reality show My Lateness Rules. We must document, catalogue and study this phenomenon until the cows come home, on time or not.

ps there may be a spinoff Journal of Cancellation