More lessons from literature

[This side of paradise. The egotist becomes a parsonage] F. Scott Fitzgerald

“If you’d have gone to college you’d have been struck by the fact that the men there would work twice as hard for any one of a hundred petty honors as those other men did who were earning their way through.”

“The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long we’ve forgotten there’s any other way. We’ve made a world where that’s necessary. Let me tell you” — “If there were ten men insured against either wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five hours’ work a day an a blue ribbon for ten hours’ work a day, nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon.”

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Lessons on Delegation from Tom Sawyer

Owing to some late night escapades on a Friday night, Tom Sawyer’s mother ensured that his Saturday would involve a day of hard laborious punishment for Tom Sawyer.

Whitewashing the fence was a far cry from the excitement that was possibly being had by Tom’s friends and Tom Sawyer wanted to get out of this chore quickly. Looking at his worldly possessions of a few bits of toys, marbles and some trash: prospects for buying his way out of it by bribing some other boys to share his task seemed bleak.

Then it struck Tom. Ben Roger’s taunts about Tom rather working seemed to brush right off him:

Ben: “Say, I’m going in a swimming, I am. Don’t you wish you could? But of course, you’d druther work, wouldn’t you? Course you would! … Come now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

Tom: “Like it? Well I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

Ben stopped nibbling his apple.

Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth — stepped back to notice the effect — added a touch here and there — criticized the effect again, Ben watched every move, and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said:

Ben: “Say Tom. Let me whitewash a while.”

Tom considered.

Ben: “… oh come now; lemme just try, only just a little. I’d let you, if you was me, Tom”

Tom gave up his brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart.

The retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by and munched on an apple. Boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy fisher for a kite in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with; and so on.

When the middle of afternoon came, from being a poor poverty stricken boy in the morning Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He’d amassed twelve marbles, part of a Jew’s harp, a blue piece of bottle glass, a spool-cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six firecrackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass doorknob, a dog collar, the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange peel and a dilapidated old window-sash.

… and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it.

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What will be the major concern of the knowledge revolution?

Dodig-Crnkovic (2003) states:

The industrial revolution was concerned with the utilizing of energy.

The information revolution, is concerned with the utilizing of information.

With these in mind, what will the knowledge revolution be remembered for?

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Masters of Tacit Knowledge (Ayrton Senna)

A quote from Ayrton Senna. Tacit Knowledge? Grok?

“I was already on pole, then by half a second and then one second and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel. Not only the tunnel under the hotel but the whole circuit was a tunnel. I was just going and going, more and more and more and more. I was way over the limit but still able to find even more.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down. I drove slowly back to the pits and I didn’t want to go out any more that day. It frightened me because I was well beyond my conscious understanding. It happens rarely but I keep these experiences very much alive inside me because it is something that is important for self-preservation.”

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Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom and … Grok

From Robert A. Heinlein‘s novel ‘Stranger in a Strange Land:’

“Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.”

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On The Park Bench

On an early morning jogging visit to the nearby park, you notice a pair of unkempt men. Unshaven and shabbily dressed, their greasy hair shows signs of fatigue as it sprouts from the sides of hats that have seen better days. One reaches out a half empty can of extra strength lager and gives a smile and a salute to his friend before chugging it back.

First impressions? A pair of drunks, probably homeless. They might even well deserve to be in the state they’re in.

That’s what you see. How about what you don’t see? How about the ‘perhaps?’ Perhaps the two men might have, one time, been a pair of very successful business partners; before some seriously unfortunate event caused their demise which ultimately left them out on the street. Why is the man holding out his beer can to the other and smiling? To celebrate drunkenness? Or perhaps he was he reminiscing a time when they were once very successful and his friend pulled off a big deal.

There’s always more to a story. However, our primary impression is based on our assumptions, experience and knowledge. Sticking to our prior assumptions, experience and knowledge will seriously limit ourselves to seeing only with our eyes and not what is beyond.

I think it is our job as curious human beings to try and find out the whole story before snapping to conclusions. Our duty as innovative human beings is to challenge our own assumptions, experience and knowledge in order to create new knowledge and experience new things.

In our unforgiving societies we are often looking at the ‘obvious’ and condemning people straight away. On the flip side, we are also very quick to put people on a pedestal and fall over their every word out of admiration.

Or sometimes we just need to see what we see with our eyes at face value, and look deeper so that we can see with our minds as well as our eyes. If we challenge ourselves continually there will be no end to the amount of new knowledge we can generate.

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Differences between Asian and Western Children. A matter of context. Or category?

Given four words: Monkey, Banana, Cow, Grass.

How do you categorize them? There may be two major categorizations to consider:

Categorization 1 (By Context):

Monkey & Banana (Context of monkey eating banana)
Cow & Grass (Context of cow eating grass)

Categorization 2 (By Category):

Cow & Monkey (Category of Animals)
Banana & Grass (Category of Animals’ foods)

According to a paper written in 1972 by cognitive psychologist Chiu Lian Hwang, the majority of Asian children would categorize by context (and have a more holistic view) by associating the animal with the food that it eats. The norm for Western children was to look at the categorize the cow & monkey together as being members of the animal kingdom, which is coming from more of an analytical viewpoint. The important thing here is that neither are wrong.

Interesting study for thought. Especially in our modern environment where me might be leading a team with members from over six different nationalities on it. We are no longer dealing with topics such as ‘managing men vs managing women;’ but the differences in managing someone who was brought up, schooled and exposed to an Asian environment vs someone who grew up with Western education, environment and ideals. A modern manager must be able to sensitize themselves to such differences in upbringings amongst the members of their team.

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Browser wars. Still no paradigm

Inspired by someone’s tweet from yesterday, I set off thinking about the current state of the competing web browsers out there. Yes we may have gotten over the Netscape/Internet Explorer wars (embarrassingly for Netscape, but also a greatly iconic moment in the demise of the dotcom bubble), but this did remind me of a paper by Paul Wernick and Tracy Hall in 2004 where they tried to make a point that there are no paradigms in the software development world. Yes, there may be Java vs .Net vs the rest of the myriad of tools out there, but there is no ‘one paradigm to rule them all.’ Or at least dominate the others. It would seem, the internet browsers we love and hate would be still in the same stage of their life-cycle. I thought it might be interesting to have a ‘pinch of salt’ meditation about this.

Paradigms Revisited

Yes we may have heard this term a painfully large amount of times during college/university/etc, and/or especially in the working world where the term is thrown around almost as if it makes one sound smarter the more times it is blabbered. Problematically, and not surprisingly the term is of course hardly used in the correct context. The context of which is as the original coiner of the term, ‘Paradigm Shift,’ Thomas Kuhn, intended.

So what exactly is a paradigm then?

Thomas Kuhn, in his 1968 ‘essays’ entitled ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ identified clear stages that compose the make-up of a scientific revolution. In short, those were 1) a pre-paradigm stage, where there are multiple, conflicting views on a phenomena 2) a period of ‘normal science’ where a the dominating paradigm is agreed upon by practitioners of the science and 3) ‘revolutionary science,’ where new ‘out of the box’ thinking is needed, and new ideas generated, to deal with anomalies that may have occurred, of which the current scientific thinking cannot answer for. At stage #2, it can be considered a ‘paradigm.’ Put 2 and 3 in sequence and you have got yourself a ‘paradigm shift’ in your hands. Web browsers seem to be not even out of stage #1 yet.

Pinch of salt

Okay, yes I’m diluting the pure sense of a scientific revolution here, but this is of course a ‘just for fun’ exploration. Now let us imagine for a while that instead of scientists, we have browser users. Can we identify the reasons why people stick to the browsers that they use? In my completely unscientific observations I have noticed the following trends:

Internet Explorer: Most people use this browser because it is ‘just there’ and is often set to be the default browser on a windows system.

Safari: Likewise, this browser is the default on the Mac. Although it does indeed have an awesome RSS parser.

Firefox: Most business users I’ve spoken to have decided to use Firefox because they have read somewhere that there are security flaws with Internet Explorer. Firefox users on the Mac feedback to me that it renders pages much better than Safari (does it?). Firefox is starting to move in the direction of bloatware though. Scary.

Google Chrome: A nice toy. Loads YouTube videos well. I haven’t used it since the day I installed it.

Opera: Had the great feature of tabbed browsing. Then everyone else came along and took the idea away.

Others: Yes, there are lots of other browsers out there being used. Especially obscure ones like Lynx. Which I personally use when a text based browser is needed (such as downloading things via putty on a remote system).

Browser wars

So, sorry guys, as much as a leader of the pack might stake the claim to be the most heavily used browser out there: if we try to analyze it through terms of a Kuhnian paradigm shifts, the mass adaptation of one ‘browser to rule them all’ is still very much opposed by the fact that there are droves of users all using different browsers, for their various advantages. We can’t call it a ‘paradigm’ unless there is a clear leading, and largely uncontested (and not necessarily correct) scientific school of thought. Here we can see that the browser wars are still very much in the ‘pre-paradigm’ status.

What does this mean?

We’re going to see the browser wars go on for a long time yet. Maybe this is a good thing, as in most Kuhnian scientific revolutions there will eventually be a winner. Or maybe an anomaly might happen such that we start to see more applications running under Adobe AIR, and such Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) might become ‘the paradigm.’

Just sayin’

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When madmen go mad

A man’s wife commits suicide and he then goes on to marry a young, attractive but incompatible woman who drives him into the ground both mentally and financially. Add to this the outcome of a failing World War I effort and you might get the beginnings of a man who’s losing his marbles.

Which is great news for science, because it might be that only people who are on their way to becoming a fully fledged Bedlamite are daring/insane enough to try and probe further into some of the most far fetched theories.

To illustrate this, we can discuss the commonly accepted science that oceans are made up not just of plain H2O water, but also include a vast array of other materials such as diluted salts, minerals and metal elements.

“Metal elements?” you say? “Gold is a metal element isn’t it?”

Yes indeed it is. An unverified source reads that the world’s oceans contain about six milligrams of gold per tonne of water. Which appears, on the surface, to be quite believable. Given the vast amount of water in the world’s oceans it would seem that six milligrams of gold per tonne of water equates to infinite wealth to anyone who can master a method to filter this gold out.

However, only a person of most unsound mind or driven by extreme greed (i.e. the desire to quickly pay off Germany’s World War I debts to the sum of 132 million gold Deutschmarks) would attempt such a gigantic and risk laden task.

Enter Fritz Haber. The renowned chemist who’d so far, via synthesis of fixed nitrogen from the atmosphere, saved the world from starvation (and later fueled Germany’s war efforts.) After his earlier successes, poor old Fritz seemed to have lost his mind and believed it would be magnificent if he could somehow use a chemical, or electrochemical, method to achieve this lofty goal to bring unfathomed amounts of gold back to Germany.

Good news for Fritz: there was actually a technique in existence for this which was known by Babylonians as ‘cupellation.’ In cupellation, lead sulfide is used to precipitate the gold from the water, and the resulting mix of lead and gold can be purified by burning off the lead.

Fantastic. One would think. Until it is tried on a sizable scale. Fritz and his team took to the seas to try exactly this. After five years of failures, Fritz finally gave up in 1927 and concluded that 1) after five years, he had still not managed to make the plan feasible and 2) the data where he got the original idea from was most likely to be incorrect.

Unfortunately, he did not even bother to publish most of the data he collected during the time. I guess the world could sure do with some new data to carry on this lofty challenge. Much respect to Fritz Haber too. We might be needing a new such thinker very soon (to be covered in later blog posts).

The madness: Believing that something exists without solid proof?

The act: Spending millions of somebody else’s dollars to try and prove it.

The legacy: It is still unproven as to whether this problem can be solved. In theory it can. What do you think?

Is anyone crazy enough to continue? The challenge is there folks. Just remember your economics teachings when you are rapidly bringing more gold into the world.

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Grains of Sand

I woke up today with this thought in my mind.

If our existence is nothing but a grain of sand in relation to the history of the universe. Then what happens if we all work together effectively?

We might just be able to create something awesome; if just only for a finite moment:

Sand is awesome if it works together effectively!

Original image from: http://digital-tech-guide.blogspot.com/2007/06/pics-sand-art-part-3.html

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