Mindfulness

Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.

Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.

It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).

As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.

It has taken me some three years to realize it but when I did it was obvious. The crazy sleep schedule I’ve been riding since I dropped out of college is more than the pale-hacker tropism for long quiet nights. It’s more than manic-depression, which for a time I was sure of having. It’s more than youthful immaturity, which I’m sure of having.

I remember the first nights out from college, and some before, I would curl up on my bed, scared as I’ve ever been—fingers curled, fetal, with hamsters in my head and a stomach full of nothing, churning away anyway. Scared of what you say? Oh, the usual I guess, scared of failure, of success, of not being up to the challenge, of blowing it all away in search of some silly dream. Mostly, though, scared of this fear I knew not inside of me.

Those nights stopped without my realizing but I now know what happened to them: I tired them away. I would work (or idle) my way to exhaustion, till there was nothing left for me to do but tumble down. Sleeping was sure easier than facing my fears, and since everything could wait, what was the harm of sleeping on it? Again and again.

I remember being completely, utterly floored when reading in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson about how, at bottom, supply and demand are one and the same.

Yes, it was obvious. Ridiculously obvious. But I had never realized it. A whole semester of economics in high school plotting gratuitous graphs and fondling equations for what? They should have put this in big, bold black letters at the very first class and let us go afterwards. My twenty something dollars per hour would have been far better employed.

But yesterday I stumbled on Wikipedia’s trade pedia and realized, mind blown, I had only scratched the surface of it. It only took the first, luminous paragraph. (Its scary how good Wikipedia is becoming.)

Buying and selling are concepts that only acquire meaning when we bring in money. At its essence, trade (barter), is fundamentally reciprocal—providing no ready way to distinguish between its participants.

So simple and yet so deeply buried by mindlessness. Don’t forget it and watch countless everyday fallacies come tumbling down, naked.

(Notice also the definition of market: “a mechanism that allows trade”—a mechanism that allows for voluntary exchange. There’s untold beauty and nobleness in free trade.)

Click a message checkbox, then, holding shift, click another one a couple of messages apart—all intermediate checkboxes are automatically checked.

One of the most universal uses of the Shift^WP key is to aid in selecting ranges (think how you use it to select text or several files) and yet it was only today that it occurred to me that it just might work for checkboxes. I blame years of crappy webmail for that. I checked Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail (the “standard version”, the cool beta version does implement something along these lines), and my university mail and it won’t work there—which is bollocks: it’s a tremendously useful feature that costs near nothing to implement.

Last Saturday, Gwyn invited me to the First Flickr Phototour of Guadalajara^WP. I didn’t know what to expect or what the hell a phototour was (I brought my camera rather as an afterthought), but I wanted to meet that mysterious Gwyn and get some air. (My parents wouldn’t let me go at first, having read in the day’s newspaper about some local murderers that met their victims through the web. When they finally read the article more carefully and found the victims were local gays hooking up dates online, they exhaled, relieved, and let me go without further ado. Which was homophobic and then some but I can’t change the world all at once—I was too late already.)

Well, it was unbelievable fun. I read somewhere that as we grow old we stop seeing things and only name them instead. You look around your room and instead of seeing the bed—its shadows, texture, pattern, perspective—you call it “bed”—and move on. Precipice locals, from John Brunner’s ^WP Shockwave Rider^WP novel, had a very peculiar way to fight this tendency:

With my formist^ELZR obsession and my “My kingdom is not from this world.” joke, I am of course guilty of such distracted overnaming. (It has been, in fact, a point of pride.) And so it was a revelation for me to be forced by the shutter to shut up and simply look around.

There was a point, while we visited the Hospicio Cabanhas, when my euphoria was reaching religious-experience proportions. Everything was suddenly so sensual, so fresh and poignant^EEM, so physical, so there. I looked and looked at stones and tree bark and white walls, and they seemed suddenly infinite in their detail.

I have to go back there soon. Sit in the middle of that huge, geometric patio, and read, design, or program the morning away. Which reminds me, I had this weird impossible idea before breakfast^ELZR (I skipped it) that with its many patios, its huge rooms, and its beautiful cloisters, the Hospicio Cabanhas would be the perfect media hotel!^ELZR We’ll see when we can afford it.

So, yeah, I had a great, crazy time. Check out my photoset, Gwyn’s, and Pedro’s.

Here some of my favorite shots:

There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera Mechanism^WP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).

Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track^AM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.

Of late (and not a minute too late, some will say), I’ve been studying tact. Here are two nice anecdotes I’ve stumbled on.

Do you know more?

One on the design process, another on prejudices, and another on Ted Nelson^{WP, ELZR} .

And since we’re at it, I might as well show off my other train-and-grazing-animals-through-the-window joke:

That’s an example of the questions Ellen J. Langer, as she recounts in Mindfulness^AM, p167-170, posed to a group of elementary school kids in a study on discrimination. I’ve been rattling my brain for good answers since: Why?

No satisfactory answers have been found but here are some stabs at it, in markedly decreasing order of quality:

Any thoughts?