Mistakes we made along the way
Jared Diamond picks on agriculture as The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race:
Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.
Then I read this piece on misunderstood jobs in The Atlantic, in which a construction worker describes the paradox of human progress too well for me to not quote the whole thing:
It’s 95 degrees and the humidity is 80%. People don’t understand that. People see a man with a shovel in his hand working on a job site and think he’s lazy because he’s just standing there. What they don’t see is the struggle going on inside your brain. The part of you that has lived in the wild for millions of years is saying it’s too exhausting, it’s too hot, why don’t you go lay in the shade for a while. That part of your brain sees the shovel, sees the ditch, sees the pipe to be laid, and it doesn’t see how this is getting you food or sex. That other civilized part of you is saying, there is food and sex to be found in that ditch. You just need to hunch over that pipe for another 5 hours, and then for another three days, and then it’ll be this made up thing, Friday, and you’ll have this other made up thing, money. Then you can go out and eat and try to procure a mate.
You just need to clinch that shovel tightly for a little longer and you can get what you want. The little tribesman in your mind doesn’t understand this. Things were easier in his time. Sure you only lived to be 26, but if it was too hot you didn’t move, if some bit of fruit was too hard to reach you walked to the next tree and looked for lower fruit. There is no low hanging fruit left in this world though.
You hold that shovel and think if only I could bludgeon that little tribesman in my brain. Then I could be free to give myself to wage labor, free to force my body to do what it doesn’t want to. So when you see a man on the side of the road not moving just watching some machine manipulate earth, know that he may not be lazy, but just engaged in a struggle between a past that shaped us and a present that was made by us but not for us.
That last line is great, no? If I’m honest though, I’m just posting this out of my own little sense of laziness guilt, because today I visited this site’s admin page for the first time in so long that I actually had to log in. Bad sign.
I feel sorry for blogging. How could something so great just wither on the vine? There are vast prairies of abandoned blogs now. Without any specific decision, there’s been a mass migration to social networks, like tribesmen picking up and moving to cities overnight. It’s certainly not the worst decision in internet history but maybe it’s fair to say that it wasn’t given much consideration at the time. “Just imagine a band of savages,” Diamond writes, “exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep.” Progress isn’t deliberated upon, it’s magnetic. But once drawn in, you might find yourself living (in a shotgun shack) on a cheaply manufactured high-carb, high-fructose diet of realtime information. You’ve traded still pools of honest expression for rivers of pageviews and machine-generated timelines. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether we all made a little mistake with that.
Or maybe not. Maybe the super-accelerated infobahn of internet time just breeds early-onset blogging nostalgia, like how being a tweedy professorial New England type can lead you to be nostalgic about scratching around in the underbrush for berries and shit. Progress is having none of that. Progress tells you to shut up, grab the shovel, and dig.
Previously on Thoughtwax: Running, hunting.
Jerusalem
I’m unsure whether I should go, considering what happened last week, so I decide to ask the receptionist in my Tel Aviv hotel.
“Nowhere in the world is truly safe,” she tells me. “You can go outside and cross the street right now and be blown up. There’s nothing you can do about it.” I can’t decide whether to admire her stoicism or pity her cynicism.
Jerusalem is a combination of many things. The old city is tiny (barely a kilometer wide, less than a third of the size of Inis OÃrr) but it contains the holiest sites on Earth for Christians and Jews, and the third most holy for Muslims. These three sites are within a stone’s throw of each other: a couple of minutes from the Wailing Wall is the street through which Jesus dragged the cross, and behind it is the rock from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven. They are right next to each other, yet somehow there is no sign of tension. In fact, Jerusalem seems a microcosmic model of how different religions might coexist in harmony. Maybe it’s the calm eye of a stormy relationship. In any case, I am only here to observe.
To get to the Wailing Wall you have to pass through metal detectors manned by serious-looking Israelis. There is no security in the church which marks the spot where Christ was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead, but it is full of robed priests telling what you can’t do based on whether you’re Orthodox Christian or Roman Catholic. As non-Muslims we weren’t allowed into the Muslim quarter. Each was telling, I thought. Commerce fills in the tiny gaps between the holy sites, a warren of souks and markets.
For the duration of your time in Jerusalem it seems to make sense to just go along with everyone’s beliefs. There’s no need to qualify any historical claim or address any of the seemingly contradictory statements. Christ rose here, Muhammad ascended over there. Okay.
Everything has been built, sacked, rebuilt, and preserved, heaping layers of history. Near the entrance to the main Christian site is a smaller church, the Church of Saint Helena (she being of Constantinople and mother to Roman Emperor Constantine). Beneath that is a cistern, an underground manmade well, and a swarthy monk convinced us to squeeze down a stone stairway to get to it. It is said to be where Helena found the first fragments of the True Cross, and then the water from this cistern was used to build the main church above us.
Down in the near-dark of Helena’s cave two people stood at the edge of the water. One of them had a sheepskin draped over his bare shoulders. They were singing, and the noise echoed wonderfully off the rock and water. It sounded mournful and hymnal, in an Eastern-sounding minor scale and with wailing Thom Yorke harmonies. I don’t know what they were singing was about, but sometimes it’s fine not to understand or feel part of something, but instead to just observe.
This is my souvenir from Jerusalem, a recording of two people singing in a cistern under the city [MP3, 2 mins].
Jerusalem
I’m not sure if I should go, considering what happened last week, but so I decide to ask the receptionist in my Tel Aviv hotel. “Nowhere in the world is truly safe,” she tells me. “You might go outside and cross the street right now and a bomb might go off.” I can’t decide whether I admire her stoicism or pity her cynicism.
I talk to my friend George and we decide that we should go anyway. and it turns out we’re entirely right. Jerusalem is a strange and wonderful place, and although that might be said about anywhere that you don’t call home, it’s especially true here.It’s a rare combination of many things. The old city, enclosed by ramparts, is barely a kilometer wide, but it contains the holiest places on Earth for the three Abrahamic religions; Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Jerusalem if four thousand years old.
Scarcity breeds wonder. I think I saw it in Jerusalem, but I have no idea what to make of it.
Thailand
The highway from the airport cuts a cross section through Bangkok. High-rise offices and cranes silhouette the horizon; buzzing taxis swarm around overcrowded buses; massive ornate temples overlook tiny corrugated shacks; and crazy traffic jams, caused in part by the train line that crosses the highway, give you time to take it all in. The buildings that dominate the skyline are less than twenty years old, our taxi driver tells us as he zips between lanes. I ask if he likes the new buildings. He thinks on it for a while. “I like the mountains,” he says.
We spend a couple of days exploring Bangkok. We visit temples and night markets, Pad Thai kitchens and Khao San Road. We zoom around in gutsy little tuk-tuks, which is one of the most exhilerating things I’ve ever done while drunk. Bangkok is strange and beautiful, but it’s also crowded and smelly, and like most people who arrive there we’re just passing through, already thinking ahead to what we really came for.
We go north to Chiang Mai, Bangkok’s more relaxed, hip younger sister. On New Year’s eve we release paper lanterns into the night sky, adding to the hundreds already up there. People gather outside temples where young monks in orange robes help people to light their lanterns and beat huge drums. Fireworks rain around us down long after midnight. For hours on end a constant stream of glowing points drift upwards from all over the city and I’m sure that it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen.
New year’s morning we board a bus and head north again, to a small dusty town near the Burmese border called Chiang Dao. It’s not much more than a row of food stalls and shops along a single strip of asphalt. We see a sign for our accommodation, shoulder our rucksacks and decide to walk it. Shouldn’t be too far. After several miles and a couple of hand-drawn maps courtesy of the friendly locals we’re starting to regret the decision. Then a young family pulls up in a flatbed truck. (I don’t see a car the entire time we’re up north, only open-backed songthaew trucks and mopeds carrying up to four people at a time.) The family don’t speak English and we don’t speak Thai, but we all muddle through — the maps help — and hop into the back with their daughter. They drop us to our accommodation several miles away and drive back the way we came, waving as the go.
Thai people are incredibly kind, friendly, and happy. I’m not religious, but there are some aspects of the Buddhist approach that appeal. Religion seems to have left the Thais with a more constructive attitude to life than the baggage that many Irish have been left to work through.
We’ve arranged to do a three day jungle trek, where we plan to spend the local new year with a hill tribe, as long as the village shaman doesn’t decide to change it to another date at the last minute.
Getting sick is a constant worry in Thailand, and despite drinking only bottled water, avoiding fruit for the first few days, and washing our hands like we have OCD, I’m struck on the morning of the trek. Some kind of stomach bug. We decide to set off anyway, hoping that it will pass by the afternoon. A van drives us as far as it can, an hour up into the mountains and jungle where we meet our two guides. They are quiet and don’t speak any English, but we manage to communicate with them quite well via pidgin sign language.
We hike further uphill, and then down a rough path into a valley. There’s a village here. About fifty Lisu people live in a tidy huddle of huts, with their crops and animals scattered around. They are not big on talking, and neither are we, both of us knowing it would be redundant anyway. There’s no electricity or water, just people sitting in groups and working in the dark doorways of their homes. I rest in the shade of one hut, still hoping I’ll improve.
We move on, up the sides of hills and down narrow trails into valleys. But by the middle of the day I’m still getting sick and can’t even keep water down. I become even more exhausted and dehydrated. It’s 35°C and we are due to hike 15k the next day; I could never make it. We communicate with the guides, fingers walking across open palms, rubbing stomachs, nodding, shaking heads. Maybe I could… but no. They don’t want to take us any further and I can’t go on anyway. We have to turn back. The guides carry my gear for me and make me a bamboo walking stick. I’m really feeling terrible now. The walk back to the village is tough, and by the time we get there I’m struggling just to walk. I collapse onto the porch of a bamboo hut and sleep. We radio for a 4WD to come and bail us out. I’d rather not talk about it.
It takes a couple of days to get my strength back, and in the meantime Paula gets sick too. We spend two days recuperating in our little bungalow. Once I’m back on my feet I have a chance to explore the Chiang Dao countryside a bit. There’s been ecstatic but off-key music on the breeze for the last two nights, and I decide to track it down. I tramp into the nearby national park and eventually find the source: eight or so ridiculously drunk Thai men who have set up their karaoke machine in an old park gazebo. As soon as he spots me, the one wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt springs into action, furiously waving me over while pouring a large glass of whiskey. Again there’s a language gap, but karaoke and booze don’t require much conversation anyway. They turn out to be nice guys. I leave before it gets too dark to find my way back home.
We fly south to the islands, and the glorious prospect of being able to swim to escape the heat. But we land in Krabi amid torrents of rain and make the mistake of staying there to wait out the bad weather rather than head straight to the islands. With respect to any readers who may be from there, Krabi town is a shithole, and we spend the night plotting our exit in the only $2 box room we could find. Nearby there’s a notice warning that we’ll be charged for another night if we stain the bedding with chocolate, blood, or ink. Traveling always throws up moments like this, where you’re tired or grumpy or nervous, and we often choose forget about them in retrospect.
The next morning is clear and bright, and the next ten days are distinctly more entertaining. We spend most of our time on the island of Ko Lanta which is beautiful and quiet, and some on Ko Phi Phi, which is beautiful and ridiculously overcrowded. We ride mopeds across volcanic mountains to villages where sea gypsies build their houses on stilts in the sea. We go snorkeling at Ko Haa and see box fish, angel fish, fake clown fish, octopus, parrot fish, puffer fish, barracuda, black tipped sharks, sea cucumber, blue star fish, sea urchin, glowing coral and giant clams.
We follow a path and find a beach, empty apart from an elephant and his owner who join me in the water where the three of us swim together. We eat red curry, mango lassi, banana pancakes, and rum ice cream. We swim through a dark cave and emerge into a small beach hidden in the centre of the island.
Before we go home we spend a night on Ko Phi Phi Lee, and camp out on Maya Bay beach under the millions of stars. At night the plankton in the bay glow if you agitate the water, and so with the entire galaxy clearly visible overhead we wade into the still-warm darkness, and every movement in the water leaves an electric wake of flickering lights like bright blue fireflies just beneath the surface.
The Way Out
I didn’t want to leave that slightly grumpy post loitering around the top of the page for long, so I’ll just make a quick recommendation here to balance things out. The Books released their new album The Way Out last week, and it’s great: the epitome of the careful, exploratory type of making I was rambling on about. (The whole album is streaming here.)
To top it off, they’re running a track-by-track commentary every day on their blog, with loads of detail about what it’s like to make electronic music out of “krumhorns and sackbuts, viols, rebecs, and alpenhorns complete with cowbells in the background”. I’ve been going back to the album every day to listen to the music along with the commentary. Great idea.
Chasing a Sound in your Head
I just can’t get behind John’s post about attention to detail in Red Dead Redemption, a game I gave up on a couple of weeks ago. Being the first game I’ve spent time on in quite a while, a couple of aspects of the game design really jumped out at me.
From the very beginning I got frustrated with how many false conventions game designers now — alright then, these days — expect players to simply accept and overlook. It’s no wonder that many non-gamers can’t understand the attraction of videogames; many of the most popular (and thus most complex) games make very little logical sense. Instead they obey their own set of rules: the way things work in videogames.
When I started out playing RDR, I tried to interact with the many random passers-by on the street, or search about the ranch settlement for useful items that my character could collect. What did I discover?
Nothing.
The zombie-NPCs traipse around and spout prerecorded lines endlessly, and the entire world is simply made of the usual wallpaper thrown over polygons. If you removed the textures from the 3D objects in the game, it would leave an incredibly sparse and simple geometric world with little or no understanding of its own contents. I don’t mean it’s lacking visual fidelity. I mean it’s lacking semantic meaning. Everything solid is just solid, and it matters not whether it’s a tumbleweed or a rock. Geometric shapes are immovable, and lack any other characteristics. You run full tilt into walls and remain there, nose to the bricks and legs pumping helplessly, maybe with half your torso atomically merged into the wall. Everyone and everything in this world is a wind-up prop, and dumb as a rock.
If you’ve played a game in the last ten years this should be familiar. And that’s my problem. Technical limitations like collision detection algorithms and polygon counts end up defining the feel of a game. In the tug of war between pure authorship and material inertia, the way games are built is winning. Design becomes a slave to form, and the seams really start to show. It’s funny that I only noticed this having not played a game like this in a while. This particular game is from Rockstar, so it behaves exactly like Grand Theft Auto; in fact, it’s quite shocking how slavishly formulaic the whole thing is. Replace GTA’s cars with horses and you’re halfway there. One the one hand, this makes things instantly familiar. But my eyes had been unaccustomed to the bright light of modern sandbox games (I passed on GTA4), and I noticed how many little cracks your mind papers over once you’re already familiar with the language of the medium. Film works in exactly the same way, but we’re all even more attuned to filling in the gaps there (nobody gets confused when it’s daylight in one shot and nighttime in the next; you know that time has elapsed). We all speak, or at least understand, the language of edited moving images fluently.
In an way — and this is the opposite of what everyone else seems to have said about it — RDR is a hugely unambitious game. The developers obviously accepted the established conventions of third-person open world videogames, and tried to do something that could be considered being “big” within those confines. You could say this is fair enough, since this is the same studio that single-handedly invented the genre. But it’s pure quantity over quality. Sure, the maps are huge and the sunsets look amazing, but it all exists within this universe that’s fundamentally based only on shape and texture, and lacking any real-world properties or intelligence. A rock is uniquely a rock, so it should behave like one. Games that try to portray the real world might be better served coming up with a model of a real world, a small but internally consistent model that they can actually spend time developing.
It’s clear how the game was made. The developers started with a framework: there are locations and characters within it and some basic interactions (things spurt blood and fall over when they are shot) but there’s no bespoke detail at all. It’s as if they made the game engine, then turned it over to the level designers who were told to work with the tools they were given. At no point does anything special happen. You can almost sense that all animals belong to a LandAnimal class, with modified properties to make them a bit slower or faster, and a few methods for running and dying. An animal will never look at you curiously in this game. An animal will never sleep. You occasionally stumble across something unique like the grieving husband that John mentions in his post, but then you see the same setup randomly spawn somewhere else an hour later and you realise you’ve been duped.
Probably these developers know something I don’t. Probably they know that their market already understands the conventions of this world, and that eventually, and through repetition, anything that deviates from these conventions seems somehow false. (I suspect that this might be what Tom means when he mentions games literacy.) But for me, this time at least, it never stopped feeling like a videogame.
This might not be a problem. I wonder whether cinema has the exact same issues, but that all of us are so familiar, so fluent in film, that we can’t see it any longer. Look really closely and you will indeed notice things like continuity errors and jump cuts, but it’s hard to detect much else. You’ll notice scene beats and act endings at regular intervals if you remember to try (look for them just before the ad break on TV). But it’s hard to watch a movie without forgetting about all about the other people in the studio, hunched just out of shot, or every scene as a post-it on someone’s wall before being ordered in a shooting script. It’s hard not to just get sucked in and have your disbelief suspended. And most of the time, the same thing happens for experienced gamers, for whom this game is a fully immersive experience. And why shouldn’t videogames enjoy the same level of enchantment as films?
Maybe RDR’s shortcomings would be a lot less noticeable if it didn’t spend it’s entirety aping every classic western trope in film history. Maybe it’s this crossing of streams that makes the whole thing hang together so awkwardly for me; if it didn’t call so much attention to the language of film, its own pidgin dialect wouldn’t be so glaring. In any case, the references to films are lame too; if you saw a real movie with a character like the snake oil salesman in RDR you’d think it was clichéd, derivative rubbish.
I’m on a bit of a rant here. Red Dead Redemption is one of the best-reviewed videogames of all time. But that just serves to highlight the dearth of ambition in so many games; it’s only a great game if you accept the existing conventions as a given. But really it’s just a popular old game with horses and six-shooters. A local maximum. It’s Back to the Future Part III: a fun twist on an old favourite, but hardly the greatest achievement of the medium.
Creating something shouldn’t just be about what comes out when you give it a go. Music that sounds like it came out of pressing record and just strumming away is usually boring. Much more interesting, on the other hand, is when someone has a sound in their head that nobody has ever heard, and they have to search high and low for a way to turn that idea into actual sound waves and record it. Quoth James Murphy on how a song can either develop organically from tinkering, or can be something that you hear in advance and have to seek out:
JM: Both of those things happen and they’re very separate. It’s not a balance between them. Sometimes I’ll just have a loop, then go play drums, then go play something on top of the drums, and things just start having a feel. Then other times I’ll think, “I want to have something that sounds like this.” Then you just have to sit there and try to chase a sound that’s in your head, which is a pain in the ass.
Don’t let the material guide you, designers. Think of something simple but rational and self-contained, internally consistent, and then chisel away at the material until it matches. It’s fine if it’s small. But don’t just settle for whatever comes out first try.
Or do and just call it a new language, I don’t know.
The Universe Or Nothing
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.
– Carl Sagan (via)
What this suggests to me is that whatever collective notion of the self that humans tend to have, it has always related to their known context. Just as a vacuum expands to fill all available space, self-identification will grow to encompass a group that is bigger than that which is known but still foreign. Each stage of this historic trend of expanding inclusion was triggered by the awareness or threat of a stronger outside force; tribes become settlements when their world view becomes bigger and they realise that they need to fortify against those other large tribes out there. Which makes sense, seeing as everything is relative. You’ve got to beef up the ranks by accepting more people into your group or you suddenly become the small guy. Right now we’re stalled at the super-power stage, because there’s nothing bigger out there to necessitate further growth.
If you accept that premise, you don’t have to go much further before you figure that the ultimate fate of humanity probably won’t be based on some intrinsic or intellectual ability to broaden our loyalties further, but by the changing context within which we perceive ourselves. Humans groups will always be content to be big fish in the pond, but seeing ourselves as a bit player within the broader frame of the universe would certainly change that perspective. If that’s the case, things are pretty much out of our hands. Or else figuring out what’s actually out there could be the most humanity-affirming thing that we ever do.
Put it on a button: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Universe yet?”
Running, hunting
Your body was made for running. You inherited it from someone who absolutely had to be good at running. Chances are your (great × 40)-grandfather — you have one you know! — was pretty good at running and hunting. If he hadn’t been, he might not have lasted long enough to see to it that you had a chance of being born, so credit to him for all that chasing about that he did. The human body got where it is today, partly, by running after things.
And now. Here you are, with your Nikes and your playlist of power songs, wondering if you can manage to go pound out a few kays after work this evening.
You can probably imagine how things were for him, your great-whatever-grandfather, but he would certainly be amazed by you. What are you doing, running around in circles like that? Stop, save your energy! You’ll need it if you want to survive the next winter. Wait, you’re saying that you usually put ON weight during wintertime? By the stars, what’s happened here?
Well, long story short, at the end of a chain of events wherein dozens or hundreds of people worked and lived and died so that you could be here today nestled stout within that body you’re occupying, something happened to invert the rules. Suddenly, probably as recently as a couple of generations ago, everything changed. You’re still physiologically primed to stock up on fat reserves for those sparse patches in the hunting calendar. But now there are no sparse patches. Now you have an abundance of food available to your body, and you probably expend much less energy than any of your ancestors ever did to earn access to it. You can fill you body with this energy well beyond its capacity and past the point where you need to worry about running out. So you go out running.
In many ways, running is pointless. Unless you’re doing it solely for fun, you’re simply working to undo all of the great things that society or your lifestyle has made available to you. You’re working, not to earn, but to lose what you’ve received almost for free: an abundance of cheap food, and an absence of manual labour to burn it off. You are a battery that craves to be charged, but never gets depleted.
Anyway, this may be a logical absurdity, but it’s the way of things, and it’s certainly not undesirable. Be happy that you live in a cozy building and not a hut. Be happy that you have your Nikes and power songs too, I guess. Your body was made for running, so take some pleasure in it.
Speaking of Nikes and power songs, there are loads of new gimmicks to try to encourage you to go running more often, and they’re brilliant if you ask me. They prod your anachronistic brain so that you’ll be compelled to use your anachronistic body (and they do it with technology, which is what got you into this mess in the first place). Nike+, for example, is a little digital fob that you put in your shoe. It records data about your run and you can challenge your friends online to see who can make it to a hundred miles or whatever. Your motivation to go running is no longer only virtuous and selfish; it’s now about beating your fellow man at a made-up game.
It’s very post facto though. Here’s a free idea. Make an iPhone exercise app in which you chase virtual animals. I mean, you actually go outside and run, and your iPhone tells you whether or not the imaginary animal is getting away. Regress a few generations and pretend that you’re actually running to eat, not to un-eat. The faster you run, the closer you get to your prey. Don’t slow down now, dinner’s getting away! In the settings you can choose an animal to chase based on your level of ability; doughy beginners can chase after a small boar and athletic pros can hunt majestic gazelle. Go after a wild horse of you want to try sprint training, or a mountain goat if you’re into trail running. You might have a virtual family to feed, and if you’re the serious type you already probably have a big family and should be out there chasing animals most days. Don’t get lazy or your kids will go hungry. Arrange to run with friends and you might be able to take down a water buffalo. A group of you could form a tribe and hunt enough to seize local supremacy over other runners.
Your old man would find that quite odd, of course, but at least you’d be making some use of the legs he left you.
Creation : Consumption
So I’ve been using @yfd to track various simple bits of data since the start of the year, like movies I’ve watched, flights I’ve taken, and so on. It’s very nice: frictionless, as anything that’s really supposed to be a background process should be. Less than a quarter of the way through the year though, and I’ve already come across the occasional worrying statistic. It turns out I’ve spent more of 2010 watching movies than I have exercising, for example. Even seasonally adjusted to take into account my usual winter hibernation, that’s not good.
Not to panic. The whole point of the quantified self thing (if indeed there is one, which would probably be questionable if it wasn’t inevitable) is to figure this stuff out, to read the data and draw some conclusions. Inquiry, observation, measurement, calibration. It makes tidying the apartment more interesting, at least. It also begs the question of what a better set of habits would look like. Being unhappy with my current ratio of loafing to running suggests that there must be an optimal ratio that I should be shooting for.
So I’m coming up with The 20% Activity : Passivity Rule.
It’s simple. For every 5 minutes that I spend watching television, films, or playing videogames, I must do a minute of exercise. Yes, I’m being sort of easy one myself, here. And yes, this is another game to trick my lizard brain into behaving a bit more like I wish it would by default. The choice of 1/5th is arbitrary and subject to change. It’s not the golden ratio of lifestyle balance, but it’s attainable, a starting handicap. I’m free to engage in whatever activities I want to, as long as I stick to my side of the deal and end the week in the black.
What about mapping other activities? Maybe I should write in proportion to what I read, forcing myself to spend time typing dutifully to purchase offsets for wasting time reading crap on the internet. Or how about aiming high and creating a minute’s worth of reading material, putting back into the world in proportion to what I suck down? (Book reading might get a free pass, since it feels like more of a virtue in itself; for every book I read, I’ve read a book.)
I also considered other direct credit trades but I don’t think that would really work: I might have to create few minutes of edited video for every film I watch, or I would have to design a scene of game time whenever I sit down to play a videogame. Not very workable, although it’s an intriguing idea. I like that it would force me to consciously maintain a level of control over the type of content that I spend my attention on. If I’m interested in looking at photos I should have a go at photography myself, if only to develop some critical faculties by struggling through the formal process of creation myself. The means of production of pretty much any media I care to consume are freely within my grasp. If I’m going to consume media of any form, I should be able to reflect on it enough to engage with it. This wouldn’t make me much good at making films, but the process would certainly increase my appreciation of films.
Best to keep it simple, though. Fun but generally unproductive things go into a single bucket of time. Maybe I’ll try the more complicated stuff later. For now, Fantastic Mr. Fox costs me a run.
Things Unblogged
Or, it’s better to half do something than to not do it at all.
Designers should be allowed to use six typefaces, ever. Once a year you can pick a new one, but it’s a one in, one out system. Only six at any given time. Given the coming font revolution on the internet, this would probably be a good thing for common decency.
Is there a rough limit on sizes and distances that humans can comprehend? The scale of the solar system is impossible for me to really understand, as is the size of an atom. The simplest way to explain these things is by some comparative illustration (if you laid all the blood vessels in your body end to end they would reach a quarter of the way to the moon!) but really there is a delta of size that humans can understand, and it’s relative in either direction, big and small, to the size of a human body. Even when you constantly look out the window in a plane taking off, at some point you lose perspective on how high you are and the view just becomes a picture.
Someone please make this for me: An RSS reader that allows you to click through the original permalinked posts taken directly from the source website. It could be a toolbar along the top of the page that shows an iFrame of the latest updated post (preloading three ahead so that you can just click through without any latency). I want to see what websites look like again.
Holding a short intake of breath is the biggest indicator in conversation that you’ve got something to say. If you do this, the other people talking will usually give you a chance to speak next. Videoconferences should listen for this sound, and superimpose an icon over the head of the person on the screen (like in The Sims) until they give up waiting and breathe again.
Imagine what it will be like when your child is the age you are now, and they’re reading your blog archive. Or, if you like, imagine reading your parent’s blog from when they were your age. Wild.
If you cloned Mozart and gave him music lessons from an early age, would the clone be a musical prodigy? In other words, is creative genius something that is genetically encoded? The question is specific to areas of creativity (which would seem to be the realm of the mind) rather than just smartness (which I can understand as being somewhat related to the physical makeup of the brain). This seems like something that might have an actual answer, so please leave a comment if you know.
UI testing is a bit like unit testing. You do the initial creative part, and then you test it initially to see if you were right, and continually to see if you’re still right for some time after (or if changing context causes your rightness to lapse). It’s also like test screenings of films (cf. the death of the artist), and as such faces the danger of having the same effect on creativity as any kind of design by committee. Lando died in the original test screenings of Return of the Jedi, you know. There’s probably a good reason stuff like this doesn’t make it into a full post.
Google Images == internet ethnography. A chilling glimpse into the vernacular underbelly of the web.
There’s this awesome video showing what Earth would look like if it had rings like Saturn, but it shows images of the rings sweeping over the Eiffel Tower and the statue of Christ at Rio de Janeiro. This ignores that if Earth had rings, nearly everything on it’s surface would be different. Large parts of the globe would regularly be under dark shadow, so many of our cities might not even exist. Religion, culture and architecture on our Earth have all been influenced by the fact that early humans were amazed by the sun, moon and stars; surely a great big band across the sky would have skewed their ideas in an entirely different direction.
Minimalism or retro, faux-naive restraint in consumer packaging is now a way of standing out on the supermarket shelf. This is the simple design principle of negative space being attractive to the eye in effect, and clever design that considers its context. What would a decades-long time-lapse movie of the same supermarket shelf look like? A lot of packaging is now as loud as possible while remaining within the realm of static visuals. What will supermarkets be like when every bottle of detergent can make noise and play video? People in Switzerland have to pay for their waste disposal, so you often see bins overflowing with packaging right outside a supermarket exit; people got rid of the cardboard boxes rather than taking them home with them. What if a supermarket had one display package and many minimally-packaged versions of the same item that people could buy?
Design meeting I’d like to have been in, for a few reasons: How Long Should We Make The MacBook Power Cord?
Zürich
Our new home. I didn’t see it coming either, but events conspired, stars aligned, opportunities arose and here we are.
My subconscious mind is now figuring out that this isn’t just a holiday or short trip, but perhaps more of a permanent arrangement. Things are starting to make sense, gradually. We caught the tail end of summer, and the mythical season that comes between it and winter and is nothing more than a rumour in Ireland is now dropping slowly around us.
To me, there are few things better than a new city on a quiet, balmy night. It’s photosynthesis, like the whole city is exhaling at the end of the warm day, and in turn you’re breathing that in.
Published
A while back my good friend and part-time partner-in-crime Dom and I co-wrote a couple of essays about an eco-walking-mapping project that we put together (previously mentioned here). Seemingly out of nowhere those words were made form and plopped through my letterbox in the last couple of weeks.
The first is an article in the Fourth Door Review ecology magazine:
And we’ve got a chapter in a new book called Rethinking Maps:
So I’m in print! This is the first time anything I’ve written has been published, and I must say it feels quite proper. There’s definitely something about the 140 character revolution that devalues the ongoing notion that I have of publishing; the web is fast, which these two-year old pieces in new books are most certainly not, but it’s also so very transient[1]. These printed things, on the other hand, might be sitting around somewhere, mildewing on a shelf for the next hundred years (for better or for worse). They’re both valid formats, but I can’t help thinking there’s also room for a more agile, disposable book-like thing somewhere between these two extremes.
I’m not a writer, but finding the right tone for each publication was an interesting process. Rethinking Maps and Fourth Door Review both quite academic in style, but fundamentally one is a magazine and the other is a book, and I learned a bit about their respective editorial requirements based on the feedback we got on our first drafts. Again, the odd strength and weakness of writing online might be it’s lack of any kind of editorial requirements, so you get philosophical musings sitting next to (or rather, above) holiday photos. In the long run I think that the freeform style of the web gives rise to more creative freedom, or at least lack of restriction and self-consciousness, and ultimately the potential for greater things. At least for the writer, if not the poor soul who has to slog through it all (cf. this paragraph).
I’m pretty delighted to be involved with both publications. The magazine is a handsome affair: large, printed on good quality paper, colour photos throughout, and a broad canvas: Swiss architecture, neogeography, wilderness, land art, digital projects, crafts, music. The individual chapters of the book are just as diverse, taking maps as a jumping-off point into a range of disciplines (chapters on The emotional life of maps and The 39 Steps and the mental map of classical cinema sound pretty good to me).
Neither of the pieces are available online, but I guess that’s the nature of the beast.
- I wonder if Twitter’s change from having numbered, paginated archives to having an AJAX-ey “load more” link at the bottom is somehow intended to reinforce this idea of impermanence; the transition from pages (which suggest archived content) to streams (where the past simply recedes to a vanishing point).