The Chinese Compressibility Parable

July 30, 2015 By

I read the story somewhere as a kid and can’t recall the source now (perhaps one of you can help me). It goes something like this.

There was once a Chinese emperor who wanted to know about everything that had ever happened. This was before Wikipedia, so he instructed his court scholars to go write it all down so he could read it. The scholars toiled for 10 years, and returned with a caravan of 20 camels.

“Here you go,” said the chief scholar. “Twenty camels, twenty beautifully bound volumes per camel. I think we got everything.”

“Are you kidding?” the emperor yelled. “There’s no way I’m going to get through that in one lifetime. Go write me a shorter version. Include only the important stuff that happened.”

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Breaking Smart

July 28, 2015 By

Today, I am launching a new site: Breaking Smart. It is a seasonal binge-reading site (think Netflix binge-watching, but for blogs) devoted to big-picture analysis of technology trends. Starting with this first season, I plan to publish a complete season of essays once every 2 years. The inaugural season has 20 essays, amounting to a total of about 30,000 words. For those of you planning a lazy, slow August of vacationing, staycationing and catching up on reading, I hope Season 1 of Breaking Smart makes it onto your shortlist and propels you back to work in September with a fresh set of ideas about how the world works. I am also launching a new weekly email newsletter (in illustrated tweetstorm format!) that you can subscribe to on the site.

Season 1 explores the theme of “software eating the world.” Marc Andreessen, who coined the phrase in a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, and also helped me explore it through several in-depth discussions last year, has been kind enough to write an introduction.

landingnoenter

Unlike my writing on ribbonfarm, which has an unabashedly insider tone (you either get what refactoring is or you don’t), I have consciously tried to make Breaking Smart accessible to a broad audience. Among the most fun parts of achieving a more accessible tone was working with artist Grace Witherell to come up with a bunch of great illustrations to accompany the text. The montage above, composed from a selection of the individual illustrations from this season, should give you a sense of the essays.

So head on over to breakingsmart.com to start reading. Or read the rest of this post first, for the backstory of how this site came to be, and details on how you can help it boldly go where no website has gone before.

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Inbox Zero versus Flow Laminar

July 21, 2015 By

The world of stream-metaphor workflows in tools like Slack and Github — with strongly emphasized temporal structure, and the realistic probabilistic expectations of chat replacing the illusory deterministic expectations of email — has made me reconsider how I think about information processing. In particular, I’ve moved from an Inbox Zero mental model to a Flow Laminar mental model, as illustrated in this picture.

Inbox Zero, while a great concept within the limits of email and paper (“Clean Desk policy”), is a fundamentally authoritarian high-modernist concept. It creates a strong, bright line between profane and sacred regimes of information, and encourages you to get to illusory control (a clean inbox) by hiding precisely the illegible chaos that’s tempting and dangerous to ignore (if you use folders, you likely have one or more misc folders even if you don’t call them that). This is dangerous because you’re just moving unprocessed chaos from a procrastination zone with strong temporal cues (the Inbox) to a denial zone with broken temporal cues (the set of de facto misc folders).

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New Horizons

July 14, 2015 By

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to start a second track of weekly content on ribbonfarm, featuring short, dense pieces in text or visual form. I can’t think of a better way to kick that off than with an image more dense with significance than almost any image I’m likely to see in my lifetime.

tn-p_lorri_fullframe_color

In this one picture of Pluto, taken just ahead of the (now completed, with data streaming back) New Horizons flyby, is encapsulated a few centuries of telescopic astronomy, just over a century of flight, and just over half a century of spaceflight. This picture also marks an end and a beginning. Along with the Rosetta comet lander mission and the Dawn asteroid mission (which returned images of Ceres), New Horizons marks the tail end of a basic exploration of the solar system. At the same time, we are at the beginning of a serious exploration of the universe beyond, thanks to early 21st century planet hunters and the Kepler mission (an excellent summer read on the subject is Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings) and the upcoming Hubble replacement, the James Webb telescope.

We are exploring beyond new horizons and living once again in brave new times, where men are real men, women are real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

A Neptune Kid, Waiting to Always-Already Know Pluto

July 1, 2015 By

If you’ve ever wondered what it means to always-already know something, you’re about to get a powerful demonstration, along with the rest of the planet. If all goes well with the NASA New Horizons mission, in a few weeks, you will always-already know what Pluto looks like. At crater-level detail.

As of June 29th, these low-detail teaser images of the Pluto-Charon system, based on the latest New Horizons update, are as good as it gets:

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Pluto,_June_18,_2015

Savor the moment. Those born after around 2010 (I assume 5-year-olds are too young to appreciate the moment) will never know what it was like to not know what Pluto looks like. And those of us who do know will find it hard or impossible to re-experience that mental state of not knowing.

Moments like this, just before a significant collective mind-expansion, are rare. The last time we experienced something like this was in 1989, when Voyager 2 arrived at Neptune. That event changed my life.

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The Boydian Dialectic

June 18, 2015 By

If you’re a certain sort of metacognition-obsessed person, at some point in your intellectual wanderings, you will eventually run into a murky and illegible world of ideas and practices swirling around words and phrases like OODA loop, control the tempo, snowmobile, fast transient, maneuver warfare, E-M theory, inside the decision cycle of your adversary, fight the enemy, not the terrain, and be somebody or do something. If these seem vaguely familiar or have a peculiar resonance for you, you’ve encountered this world. It is the world of “Boydian” ideas, which swirls chaotically around the life and intellectual legacy of John Boyd. You’ve seen glimpses of this memeplex on this site before, and probably elsewhere on the Internet and in meatspace as well.

In the last four years, I’ve found myself giving impromptu and messy introductory tutorials on Boydian thought multiple times, in contexts ranging from casual emails and executive coaching conversations to online debates and talks at events. I’ve done 1-minute versions and 3-hour versions. I get reactions ranging from instant recognition (“Oh, I’ve often done that, I didn’t know there was a German word for it!”) to complete and bewildered incomprehension.

I figured it’d be fun to try writing a quick-and-dirty context-setting entry point to this stuff.

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The Things You Carry

June 12, 2015 By

The title story in The Things they Carried, Tim O’Brien’s classic collection of loosely related short stories about a group of Vietnam-era American soldiers, is one of my favorite pieces of fiction. Here’s a taste:

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives,  heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man’s habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he’d stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April.

While the story is well worth reading for its own sake, what has stuck in my mind since I first read it is the idea that the things we carry reveal a great deal about us. Oddly enough, this has become more true as more of the things we carry get eaten by smartphone apps. The things you carry, both on and off your phone, now say a lot more about you. Because they are mostly not determined by necessity; they are determined by possibilities.

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The Amazing, Shrinking Org Chart

May 28, 2015 By

About a year ago, an 1855 org chart of the New York and Erie railroad was cascaded worldwide by the VP of the Infographics Department of the Internet. There was a good deal of admiration as well as lamentation. Apparently we no longer care enough about our corporations to create beautiful depictions of their anatomy, ars gratia artis. Whatever else the shortcomings of mid-nineteenth century corporate management (they had a tendency to start wars and gun down workers in pursuit of their Missions and Visions among other things, and you had to be a quick-draw gunfighter to earn a Harvard MBA in those days), they clearly cared. 

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Library of Congress (via McKinsey)

By contrast, a modern set of org charts is usually a showcase of apathetic PowerPoint banality. In fact, you rarely ever see a big global view anymore. Just little local views that could, in principle, be patched together into a global view, but in practice never are. Often, even CEOs only have a coarse, low-resolution view of the whole, with blocks representing entire huge divisions of thousands of humans and billions in capital assets. There is usually no operational capability for drilling down into finer points where the situation demands it (Proctor and Gamble, apparently, is an exception). Most senior executives — VP and above in organizations of 1500 or more people say — are in the position of surgeons operating on the basis of having played the kids’ game Operation rather than on the basis of medical training and tools like MRI machines.

There’s a very good excuse for this though: the pace of organizational and environmental change today turns static maps into garbage very quickly. The part of the organization that is both possible and useful to represent using an org chart has been rapidly shrinking.

What, if anything, should be done about it?

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Pretending to Care, Pretending to Agree

May 20, 2015 By

A couple of years ago, I happened to catch the tail-end of a performance of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town on TV, and the poignant closing soliloquy stuck in my mind:

Most everybody’s asleep in Grover’s Corners. There are a few lights on: Shorty Hawkins, down at the depot, has just watched the Albany train go by. And at the livery stable somebody’s setting up late and talking. Yes, it’s clearing up. There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven’t settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk … or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain‘s so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

Being the unsentimental jerk I am, what stuck in my mind was not the poignancy, but the evocative stress and relaxation metaphor. Today, thanks to the medicalization of angst, most people would use the word stress rather than strain to convey the thought.

But it is actually the engineering sense of both terms, used together, that sheds the most light on the cultural idea underlying the passage above. The distinction and relationship between stress and strain can be understood using a stress-strain graph. Here is a pair I made up that I think represent the human psyche (I’ll explain how to read it in a minute).

commIndStressStrain1

In common usage, the stress and strain are used interchangeably, but in engineering, stress is the force acting on a material, while strain is the resulting distortion in the material. In humans, stress can be measured by the internal anxiety we feel, and various physiological symptoms. Strain can be measured by the distortion represented by the social masks we need to maintain, in order to function under that stress.

There are two basic types of masks: masks of pretending to care are exit masks, and masks of pretending to agree are voice masks. I suspect these two kinds of masks, between them, cover almost all cases of preference falsification, the concept Sarah introduced us to in her post a couple of weeks ago. Much of her post had to do with the effects of voice masks at the scale of nations, but in this post I want to consider both together at an individual scale.

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Roundup: January – April 2015

May 1, 2015 By

It’s been a busy few weeks for me. Since I just returned from three weeks in Chile and am still catching my breath, you get a roundup instead of new material this week. We’ve had 16 posts so far this year: four from Sarah, two from Haley, one from Ryan and nine from me. The themes have been all over the place: rituals, community, art theory, video games and corporate humor. Both for me personally, and for the blog, it appears to be a season of experimentation.

  1. A Better Art Vocabulary, Part 1 (Haley)
  2. The Capitalist’s Zombie (Venkat)
  3. The Essence of Peopling (Sarah)
  4. The Art of Gig III (Venkat)
  5. The Art of Gig II (Venkat)
  6. The Art of Gig (Venkat)
  7. The Art of Agile Leadership (Venkat)
  8. Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty (Sarah)
  9. The Mother of All 2x2s (Venkat)
  10. A Dent in the Universe (Venkat)
  11. What Is Ritual? (Sarah)
  12. The Heroine’s Journey (Haley)
  13. Let’s Play! Narrative Discovery vs. Expert Guides (Ryan)
  14. On the Design of Escaped Realities (Venkat)
  15. Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture (Sarah)
  16. Black Mirror as Hell-Is-Other-People Futurism (Venkat)