Darkling Wood

Hot, hot, hot.

2009-06-27T20:10:52-05:00

Did I mention it was hot in Austin? My car thermometer hit 118F just yesterday. Official temperatures are still three digits. I spent much of today visiting friends, where we simply read, and ate, and drank, and swam.

The pool temperature was 89F; so warm that the only difference between being in the water and out of it was that water feels thicker than air. As a result, it's getting hard to remember Scottish weather, where not every year even has a summer. Somehow my mind filters out the seemingly endless rain, and miserable greyness that covers a lot of the year. What stands out are good-weather times like the vacation I took with three pals (Johnny, Joe and John), youth hosteling up and down Loch Lomond-side when I was in high school, where we got burned by the sun and I first learned to "cook" baked beans; or halcyon summers spent with umpteen friends in an old church house in Stratherrick, near Loch Ness -- the heather was always purple, and then brown and red if we ever went back in the autumn; or two weeks in Skye with my mum and dad and wee sister, and my wee dug, "Bambi" (it was a Papillon - what an embarrassment of a name!).

And I do remember a particular good summer around the mid 1970s. I was either in late Primary school or early Secondary (i.e. what they call Middle school in the US). It was so hot (by Scottish standards) that we could poke holes in the pavement (i.e. sidewalk) surface with sticks. It didn't get much better than that! I don't know what they made sidewalks out of back then, but it's clear they do it differently in Texas. Otherwise the sidewalk would be flowing down the street.

UK/US Differences #8 - The Weather

2009-06-23T19:33:00-05:00

The weather in Glasgow for five days, from this coming Sunday:

The weather in Austin for the same period:

I rest my case. Point to Texas.

(P.S. 102^oF is 39^oC.)

UK/US Differences #24 - BBC Radio 4 versus NPR

2009-06-17T05:48:30-05:00

The UK's BBC Radio 4. Or the US's National Public Radio.

There's really no competition.

One is a quirky and anachronistic, tax-funded and therefore I-don't-care-how-many-governors-they-appoint, Soviet-esque state-run radio station; the other, a genuinely listener-funded, of the people, by the people, for the people offering, with cool jazz musical overlay and mellow-voiced presenters, they being to radio what the gorgeous Rudi Bhaktiar (who buries Robin Meade, by the way) is to television.

As I say, no competition. Compared to Radio 4, NPR is quite simply shite. If I hear one more jazz riff to segue from one "All Things Considered" item (or is it "Morning Edition"?; who knows, they all sound the same) to the next, I'll be forced to switch to 1200 AM and listen to Rush. And what is with those sugar sweet voices? It's like listening to Saruman on Prozac.

Radio 4, on the other hand, demonstrates just why Britain was once a world empire. You have to start with the Today programme. Even the presenters' names tell you you're getting something heavy; Naughtie (pronounced "Naw-chh-tay", which is cool, rather than "Naw-tay" which is not), or Stourton which connotes "Stentor" in the Illiad. (That said, John Humphrys needs a slap. Regularly.) Then there's "Start The Week". It's necessary and sufficient if you want a simple list of books, plays, and lectures you should read, watch and listen to in order to stay abreast of what's important in the world (like, say, why "[Despite the] artwork of the Futurists [being] often overshadowed by the Cubists, ... their combination of salon and street art, with their visceral excitement for cities, has had much resonance over the last century.") Granted Andrew Marr's a bit damp compared with Jeremy "Mauler" Paxman, on whom Henry Kissinger walked out on the live show after Paxman asked him about being an alleged war criminal. But it's magic all the same.

And the comedy! There's "Friday Night Comedy". consisting of The Now Show and "The News Quiz". The latter is worth it simply to hear the lovable Sandy Toksvig take the rip out of her panel. (Sandy is to Rudi what I am to Brad Pitt, but she's a hoot nevertheless). And let's not forget the venerable, "Just A Minute". It works like this. They get a subject. They have to talk. Without "hesitation, deviation or repetition". For a minute! It doesn't get any better than that.

But the resisty bit (I'd say "pièce de résistance" but it's a bit too Frenchy for such a British institution) has got to be the inestimable Melvyn Bragg's (we are not worthy) "In Our TIme". Here's what I've been able to listen to over the past few weeks, via podcast, on my way to work: The Age of Caesar Augustus in Rome, The Trial of Charles I, The History Of The Whale (yes, the *whale*), Baconian Science, and a discussion of Huxley's "Brave New World".

There are only a few things I can say without fear of contradiction that Britain does better than the USA. The combination of chicken korma, pilau rice, and peshwari naan bread is one; grim and brooding rain-soaked, mist-covered mountains is another. But BBC Radio 4 is clearly a third.

Point to the Brits.

The Evolution of Outrage

2009-06-14T16:17:09-05:00

So, a cop Tasers a granny (one of thousands of such reports). It happened only a few miles from where I live, and I found it interesting to observe my own reactions to the event, and to see them change over time.

First, there was the inevitable, "Disgusting! Ridiculous! We are clearly living in a Police State!" My first reaction was essentially that the USA had finally managed to shed its last remaining shred of a legitimate claim to the title of "Land of the Free".

I was also filled with "Outraged of Tunbridge Wells"-style contempt for a so-called "man" who had to resort to such a weapon to subdue an old lady.

Next came a slightly dampened, "But, why am I so surprised?" Isn't this precisely what we should expect given the result of the 1960s' Milgram Experiment in which subjects of the experiment were induced by "authority" to give what they believed were painful electric shocks to other subjects. Milgram is quoted in Wikipedia:

"Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not."

Read that after watching the video and listening to the li'l ol' lady screaming, and it's kinda chilling, no? But the point is, if Milgram is right, then the cop isn't necessarily a craven coward. Rather he's just one of the rest of us. Or maybe we're all craven cowards when it comes to it.

But finally, I attended to an increasingly loud alarm bell ringing in my head. One of my favourite cognitive biases (c'mon; everyone should have a favourite cognitive bias!) is the availability heuristic. This is simply a sciencey name for our tendency to overestimate the likelihood of something happening if we frequently hear about it happening. I alluded to it before in the context of bad economic news. And Dan Gilbert gave an entertaining Ted talk on the same subject. One of the points Gilbert makes is that the media (and I include in that all the rubbish we consume off the internet, like this blog wot u r reading) thrives on news that is big, and bad, and ideally both. And tasering -- especially of an old lady -- is, to most of us, bad. So we hear a lot about when it happens, and almost never when it doesn't. But the fact is, if the media is distorting our sense of reality when it comes to how often tasering happens, in the same way it distorts it when it comes to the threat of terrorism, then we really should work hard to maintain a sense of proportion.

Tasering old ladies is rarely going to be justifed. But I'll hazard a guess and say that most cops would agree; would share my initial outrage; would have kept their Tasers in their holsters and used common sense and some well-placed words instead; but as a result would never have made it into the news.

Why GTD (Getting Things Done) Sucks

2009-06-03T21:24:29-05:00

GTD is the most popular of naked Emperors to hit the personal productivity scene. I bought the book, like hundreds of thousands of others. Like my entranced brethren and sethren, I read it avidly and thought "at last". Then I collected, processed, next actioned, contexted, someday/maybed, and pretty much everythinged. But did I actually Get Things Done? Nope. Well actually, I get a lot done. I'm the CEO of a small but international consulting firm. I'm very very busy. But did GTD make a difference? Nope; not a whit.

At first, I couldn't figure out why. It's so simple, and logical (with just a whiff of Zen thrown in to make you think you're all calm and mind-like-water-ish). How come it didn't work? My first reaction was, I imagine, like that of most people: I'm not doing it properly. Then that became: I'm just not doing it. And then the more I asked about, the more I realized - very few people are doing it. It's not me; it's not us. It's the bloody thing itself. It sucks.

And I think I've just figured out why.

It's all about thin slicing. Malcolm Gladwell discusses it in "Blink". Thin slicing is essentially the very rapid processes that go on in our heads, largely subconsciously, to help us process certain complex situations. One example is the ability of a famous tennis coach to predict, just prior to a tennis pro's serve, whether the serve would fault or not.

But here's the point. Our ability to thin slice can be seriously undermined when we try consciously to analyze the problem at hand. The example he gives is where the Getty Museum engaged several experts over several months to check the provenance of a Greek kouros prior to buying it. The result of the analysis -- that the statue was genuine and worth several million dollars -- was rapidly overturned by several other experts who spotted that it was a forgery after only a brief glance, a "thin slice". And the thin slicers were right. The conclusion, expanded by Gladwell throughout the book, is that as we perform conscious analysis of a problem, our thin slicing deteriorates.

This is, I think, part of the problem with GTD. It kills any chance we have at being productive because it overloads us with silly analysis over what the next action is -- "Move hand forward; Pick up pencil; Move pencil over paper; Lower tip towards paper ...); or what "@Context" a given action belongs to. And so on. As a result, the real underlying source of effectiveness -- the productivity equivalent of thin slicing -- is overwhelmed.

Exactly what that underlying source of effectiveness is, will be the subject of a future post (when I get around to it, someday, maybe). But for now, remember. GTD - just say no.

Them, and Us

2009-05-26T18:14:00-05:00

Had Sunday lunch at El Chilito in Austin.

Afterwards, my wife and I drove around looking at "the East side" of I35. It's a far cry from where we live, way out West of the city near a suburb called Lakeway. I live in what they call a "gated community". There are many of them, but ours is particularly special in that it has a manned gate. 24x7x365.25 there are always at least two "guards" to keep out unwanted people, like terrorists, illegal immigrants, and Canadians. It's a sanitized, mow-your-lawn-or-else kinda place; like Pleasantville, or Seahaven but not as wild and unruly. It's a mostly white, anglo-saxon, heterosexual, some-kind-of-Christian, fairly-to-very rich enclave. A place characterized by Safety Through Sameness.

By contrast, Austin's East side is what I guess you'd call "colourful". It's earthy, and uncouth; part dilapidated, but part brightly painted and gaudy, although the paint is often peeling. And it's not just the buildings that are "of colour". Back in Glasgow, the local pink folk, like me, live cheek-by-jowl with more recent, and far browner "incomers" from Pakistan and India (who are, in fact, so *not* recent that the national food of Scotland is effectively Indian, and if you hear a local urchin swear "Tongs, Ya Bass" at you before you see him, your guess as to his name being Imran versus Shug is as good as mine). So East Austin felt ... well, a bit like home to be honest.

Look there - a black dude sitting at the side of the road, smoking and reading the newspaper. Further along, an old and shabby hispanic man waiting for a bus. (Bus? You don't get buses in Lakeway. Everyone has at least five cars). Here, a kid poking at a hole -- Oor Wullie style -- in the sidewalk with a stick; there, some guys in coveralls clustered around the open hood of a beat-up car, doing their own poking at the unwilling engine. It has hints of Notting Hill, or Glasgow's own version, The Barras.

Now I don't want to create too much of a rosy glow here. There's a rough end of life to see in the East part of Austin. I've never been there after dark, and I may not want to without availing myself of Texas's concealed handgun license rights. I certainly wouldn't want my womenfolk walking alone in certain areas there. But what I saw as I drove there in the daylight, past umpteen quaint and tumbledown restaurants and busy stores, was the price I paid for the safe sterility of Lakeway. It's a price in diversity, in connection with people different from me (or, more to the point, a lot less different than I may think), and in exposure to all of what is Out There. The original settlers of Texas (OK, not *the* originals -- but John McGregor and the like), were not, I think, Lakeway people. Not in the sense of erecting walls out of fear (well, not fear of Canadians anyway; hoardes of angry Mexicans, on the other hand, well fair enough.)

And then it struck me. Isn't my safe, gated homestead not simply a microcosm of that much larger increasingly-gated community, the USA itself? For numerous reasons, many understandable (hey, I live behind a gate myself, and those Canadians can be nasty), but many tragic and unnecessary, the USA is trying to lock the very doors through which its builders got in. And, as with the microcosm, it's not those builders, the Tough And Manly early settlers, who want to lock the screen porch and throw away the key. It's their meek and mild descendants.

Brownian Motion

2009-05-06T09:13:31-05:00

My Google Apps front page has a CNNMoney.com newsfeed gadget. Here are the headlines for the last three days:

Monday: Stocks head for rosy start
Tuesday: Stocks could lose momentum
Today: Strong start seen for stocks

That's a "yipee!", a "darn!" and a "wahay!" in the space of three days. Give me a break Mr. Klein. This is not news, it's chicken entrails.

Property, Property and the pursuit of Property

2009-04-22T01:44:31-05:00

I never really saw the need for the third right -- Pursuit of Happiness. It always seemed to be embodied in the second -- Liberty. If I have Liberty, don't I get the right to pursue happiness anyway? For free, as it were. And then I got wondering about the first too -- Life. Isn't that similarly redundant?

And so in the spirit of a McKinsey-esque MECE, it looks like we can get away with a single right -- Liberty -- plus a Scope on that right. And the name we give to that scope is Property. In this sense, Property is not a Lockean "possessions", but simply the range of a person's liberty. For example, Life is Liberty applied to the most important scope of all - our bodies.

Everything else is then merely an argument about scope; about property. Everything else is about what lies within my scope, or yours, or both, or neither. That's why a theory of property is important -- it is essentially a theory of liberty. This is what Paul's philosophy teacher was on about.

I think this explains the apparently insatiable demand in the USA (witness, for example, the efforts of the RIAA and MPAA in defence of "intellectual" property), for property. It's understandable. The Land of the Free needs to be the Land of the Property. Property is what you get to be Free with.

UK/US Differences #1,743 - "Momentarily"

2009-04-21T19:12:00-05:00

Karen recently wrote about some hazards of flying. She ended with a PS:

"P.S. I wish that as the plane is landing, the flight attendants wouldn’t say “we’re making our final approach”. It sounds so… well… final."

My fears tend to be raised on hearing another common final approach phrase in the USA:

"We will be landing momentarily"

Of course, the original, everyone-in-the-world-except-the-USA meaning of "momentarily" is "for a moment", and not the newer US meaning of "in a moment". Whenever I hear the cabin crew tell me about such landing intentions, I have a mental picture of the plane bouncing off the runway before climbing off to its next destination.

Point to the rest of the world.

UK 3, USA 2

And on a lighter note ...

2009-04-18T13:56:22-05:00

Tommy Kelly