Surviving Western Civilisation

You don't know what love is

2012-01-24T20:25:00.000+01:00

One of my readers was wondering why I wasn't writing much lately.
Here's why:

Western Man

2012-01-12T20:26:00.001+01:00

Here's a video I made a few years ago. I am in two minds about it - personally, I don't find it in the least depressing, just funny (in the sense of peculiar), but I think maybe some people might disagree. If so, please let me know (either by using the comment feature, or "disliking" the video on YouTube. Tx!

Merry Christmas

2011-12-20T13:47:00.003+01:00

I have always liked Christmas Carols. Here are a few I recorded some years ago:

Theory 21 - the Mid-life crisis

2011-10-05T09:47:00.000+02:00

According to wikipaedia, "Midlife crisis is a term coined in 1965 by Elliott Jaques and used in Western societies to describe a period of dramatic self-doubt that is felt by some individuals in the "middle years" or middle age of life, as a result of sensing the passing of their own youth and the imminence of their old age [...] The result may be a desire to make significant changes in core aspects of day-to-day life or situation, such as in career, work-life balance, marriage, romantic relationships, big-ticket expenditures, or physical appearance." The article goes on to suggest that it is less common than it may seem, and that it may be typically western, as there is "little evidence that it occur in Japanese or Indian cultures."

The article also records the existing question marks as to whether there really is such a thing as a mid-life crisis, because many of the possible causes listed occur throughout life, not just in the timespan between 40 and 60, and because many (even most) people seem to get by without crisis. To me, that is like saying that mad cow disease does not exist, because most cows do not get it.

I think it does exist, and I have a theory about it. I call it theory 21 in honour of Douglas Adams, whose answer to the big question about "Life, the Universe and Everything" is 42. The mid-life crisis only covers half of that, hence theory 21. My theory is that mid-life is the time when people reach a "boiling point" regarding their hopes and expectations. Whether this is traumatic or not depends, among other things, on how realistic your expectations are/have been and how easily you accept that things will not always go your way. And I think this is where we are going wrong, in western society: many of us have been brought up to believe that it is perfectly reasonable to expect not only that you will get the things you want (enough money, a good job, a nice family, etc), but also that you will be able to avoid the things you don't want (illness, a lousy job, poverty, loneliness etc).

But contrary to what you might think, many of us are perfectly capable of accepting adversity in the big things mentioned above. Often, it is the constant drip-drip-drip of small irritations (traffic jams, husbands who don't put up the toilet seat when they urinate, condescending waiters in fancy restaurants, etc. etc) that we have difficulty with. And the reason for this is exactly because they are so small that we believe we should be able to do something about them, even though often, we can't. Often, the only thing we can do is try to change our own reaction to them, because they are not going to go away.

Imagine a whole series of little buttons (the number is different for each of us), one for each irritation, each one with a different sound and a different volume (depending on your own sensitity to this specific irritation). Every time we come up against something unpleasant, the corresponding button is pushed. In some cases, the sound is outside our hearing range, so we are not bothered in the least. In other cases, the sound may be irritating at first, but you get used to it with time, and learn to ignore it (the same way people who work in a slaughterhouse stop noticing the smell). In other cases, you do not get used to it, and it becomes increasingly irritating with time. Still, you may still "accept" it, like old couples that are in each other's hair constantly, but wouldn't dream of splitting up. And then there are the ones that drive you completely bonkers every single time.

Mid-life crisis is when you start to see that life is too short to disconnect all the buttons.

A thought on thinking

2011-10-04T17:55:00.000+02:00

In 1984 (the book, not the year), George Orwell gave us the idea of "doublethink", which I will define here as maintaining two different (and often opposing) beliefs at the same time. When I first read 1984, back in the seventies, I thought it was completely novel. Now, many years later, I am not so sure, because we do something similar all the time, in some cases voluntarily.

The lightest possible variant of this is maintaining several different viewpoints or perspectives of the same subject at the same time, such as when we try to see the forest and the trees at the same time, or when we define energy as waves and particles at the same time, or when we see a number (1984) and think of it as a date and a book simultaneously. And this can even be useful, even if it may be somewhat of a brainstrain. Somewhere in the same general area, I suspect, is when children try to "believe" in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, etc. in spite of very clear evidence to the contrary.

Next, in terms of mindstress, come things like trying to consider the possible impact of a specific individual action on both the group and the individual at the same time. This combination is a bit more difficult to grasp than the previous ones, because (unlike the previous examples) the individual and the group interact. A similar idea is that of the "light touch" which is achieving almost total control with only very little pressure.

Not dizzy yet? Then try this one on for size: last in the list is the "does not compute - robot brain overload" category is when you try to accept both a literal reading of Genesis and modern science, including evolution. And this is where you might get the sort of mental burn-out that Big Brother uses to exert total mind control.

But there is of course one big difference, namely the fact that in 1984, conflicting beliefs are imposed on the citizens, and cemented in place by the worst possible negative reinforcement possible. Which makes me very happy to be where I am today, with the freedom to think what I want, and even think out loud once in a while, such as in this blog.

Assumptions and expectations

2011-09-23T11:08:00.000+02:00

Yesterday's entry set me thinking ...

If (incorrect) assumptions are “the mother of all fuck-ups”, hidden assumptions are the mother of all misunderstandings. And if you combine the two, you get a sour cocktail of mistakes and misunderstandings. Add unrealistic and/or hidden expectations and stir, and let this sour-bitter mix ferment for a few years, to let the anger evaporate. Serve lukewarm to get depression, cynicism, and a host of other problems.

	Assumptions	Expectations	Both together, short term	Both, long term
Incorrect or unrealistic	Mistakes	Disappointment	Mistakes and disappointment	Depression, cynicism, giving up …
Hidden	Misunderstandings	Frustration	Mistakes, misunderstandings, frustration, anger
Incorrect and hidden	Mistakes and misunderstandings	Frustration and disappointment	Mistakes, misunderstandings, frustration, anger, disappointment

NB: the hidden assumptions and expectations include not only the ones you hide from others, but also the ones you hide from yourself. Assumptions can be a bit like traffic rules in that most people find it much easier to identify the incorrect assumptions (or traffic violations) of others, than their own. And if you compare the top and middle rows, you see how important it is to make assumptions and expectations explicit: it is often easier to overcome mistakes and disappointment than correct misunderstandings and handle frustration.

To those who don’t like bitter-sour cocktails, the solution seems obvious: first, you have to make all your assumptions and expectations explicit, then you have to make sure they are as correct and realistic as possible. But as with almost everything, this is much easier said than done.

One assumption I often make, for example, is that certain people share my values (and especially honesty), and I am often unpleasantly surprised to find that they do not. You would think, after so many years on this planet, I would have learned my lesson, but my default attitude is still mostly the same: I presume honesty even if there is clear evidence to the contrary. And I think this is because this default attitude of mine is less “nurture” (something you learn) than “nature” (part of my personality).

If this is true of humans in general, it would mean solving the above problems could take half a lifetime. To which I can only say, given the advantages, have you got anything better to do with your time? :-)

The chimera of control

2011-09-21T12:14:00.003+02:00

Control is like El Dorado: the more you talk or think about it, the more realistic it seems to be. But - like the Spaniards in South America who found gold, but not enough – expectations outstrip reality. The amount of control you actually have over your life is usually not even close to what you hoped for, or dreamed of. All over the world (and probably more in the Western World than elsewhere) we overestimate our own ability to control the world around us.

It is possible that this overestimation (which could also be seen as overconfidence, pride, or even vanity) is due at least in part to the success we have had individually, and on a small scale, in controlling the physical world around us. We can plow the earth, move and break rocks, forge metal, make tools and pottery, build houses, make plants grow where we want them to. And when we pool our resources, we can build bridges and waterworks, move mountains and rivers, drain swamps, and redistribute the available energy to suit our needs. But we are finding that all those individual efforts have a huge collective impact that we do not yet know how to control. (In that sense, we are a bit like the stromatolites (colonial reef-building organisms), who, when life was just beginning, kick-started all further life on this planet by producing oxygen. Their impact was enormous, but they had no control over what was happening. In fact, they themselves went into steep decline, because the oxygen they produced – however useful for us - was actually poisonous to them. )

The problem, of course, is that although we are relatively good at controlling certain parts of the physical world, we are not much good at predicting the long-term results of our collective actions, and even worse at controlling complex systems involving other living organisms. A few examples.

Some 70% or more of business projects fail, because of systemic problems that are almost impossible to control (see the theories of Demming for more on this).
For years, hunting foxes was justified by claiming that it was necessary to keep the population of predators in certain areas low. In fact, it has now been shown that hunting has no noticeable impact on the total number of foxes, because the survivors simply have larger litters.
Ever since the invention of antibiotics, people hoped that it would be possible to completely eradicate certain (or maybe even all) infectious diseases. So far … (need I spell it out?).
President Obama, possibly the most powerful president of any democratic country, had perfectly reasonable plans for the future of his country, but is finding it almost impossible to turn them into reality.
The Unites States foreign policy of the past 40-50 years seems based on the belief that it is possible to exact real change in other countries by the use of force, in spite of a long list of examples to the contrary.
The Western World is only slowly beginning to realize that a lot of “well-intentioned aid” to the third world is not having the effect they hoped (I put well-intentioned in brackets, because often, the cost of “progress” – in terms of loss of cultural values etc. - may be more than the beneficiaries want to pay).
Governments have been trying to control the economy ever since money was invented, but recent events have made it very clear how elusive and fickle economies are. (Which is not to say that I advocate a totally "free" marketplace - that is probably worse).

I have in fact arrived at the conclusion that the only things that I personally have any control over (and this only if I am willing to dedicate a lot of time and energy to them) is my garden, what I write (not even what I say!), and (again to a very limited degree, and only as regards certain aspects) the behavior of my children. Which is a good description of how I see retirement: me in my garden, writing, and hopefully visited by my children from time to time.

Post 101

2011-05-06T17:19:00.000+02:00

According to blogger.com, this is my 101st post. Not that it means all that much (I have never really understood people´s fascination with numbers), but we all need moments to stop, reflect, evaluate. There´s a nice line in one of the Indigo Girls´songs: "every five years I look back on my life and have a good laugh". Well, looking back on some of the 100 posts (which, I just found out, includes the 20 or so drafts still awaiting further attention) makes me conclude that I should do probably do some quality/damage control.

In fact, I have already started, by largely rewriting an entry before forwarding the link to someone. I did so because it would be obvious that I wrote it, and I wanted to present my best side. When I started this blog, however, I assumed it would be completely anonymous, and I wrote the entries from that point of view. But then I got a bit disappointed with the size of my audience, so I allowed the entries to be automatically pushed onto Facebook. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was very easy, but now, of course, I have the same problem that the late George Carlin described young boys in his neighbourhood having during confession. They would confess to some sin, only to have the priest "why did you do that, then, George!?!".

Of course, my "confessions" are quite abstract, but in some cases, it is actually possible for people who know me to guess who or what I am writing about. Take my entry "a tale of two showers", for example. Any of my friends who read it at the time would realise whose fault it was that I was unable to use "my" shower. One of my readers even compared it to reading someone´s diary. So I have decided to go back and protect innocent and guilty parties alike (and especially myself). Transparency is all very good for public institutions, but private life should be just that. Private.

Don´t you think?

Classifying fear

2011-04-14T19:45:00.000+02:00

The other day I was talking with some colleagues about holiday plans, and how there is never enough time to do everything you want, and how some people try to solve this by planning everything down to the minute. Everybody at the table (myself included) groaned and laughed about this, because we all agree that over-planning takes the fun out of a holiday, but it set me thinking about the relationship between control and fun, and about the link between each of them and fear. Too much fear, and you may end up with an obsessive need for control; too little, and you can get recklessness, as if none of your actions have any consequences, and everything is just a game.

The trick, of course, is to find just the right balance between both extremes. On the whole, young people seem to be more on the reckless end of the scale, and the exasperated advice to "please grow up" often refers to their lack of responsibility. But the vast majority will “grow up” without any help or admonishments from others; for the most part, it happens all by itself. Going in the other direction (lightening up, when it feels like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders) seems harder, or at least it does to me. For many people, the fear curve is like the tension curve of most story plots: almost flat at the beginning, then steadily climbing towards a climax. For some people, this is where it all ends: like straws breaking the camel’s back, the fears (or more accurately, the negative effects thereof) accumulate until something gives. Anti-climaxes, when they happen, are often very recognizable: suddenly, many previous worries seem to disappear. People who experience this phase may cross the street without looking both ways first, or put on whatever they feel like, or speak their mind and are not worried about the consequences, or all three and more.

...

In his book "Class", Paul Fussell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell) claims that fear is mostly a problem of the middle classes, and that the people at the bottom and the top of the class scale are much less afflicted. Given the fact that working conditions for the lower classes were traditionally much more dangerous (think of mines collapsing, construction site accidents, dangerous chemicals in the factory, etc.) than for the middle classes - a correlation so consistent that Fussell even uses it as a quick-and-dirty way to distinguish between the two -, you would expect more fear in the lower classes, but I didn't make that connection until, in the course of reading up on something completely different, I was led - by the usual stream-of-consciousness type experience that I often have on the Internet - to a text of Freud's in which he discusses fear, fright and anxiety. Based on his text, I have come up with my own quick and ready way to distinguish between them, namely that fright is generally caused by a specific occurrence, that fear is linked to specific objects, and that anxiety is more of a general state, not specifically linked to either. And that in turn makes it easy - my usual de Bono lateral jump - to come up with the following rough and overly simplistic classification of fear: ordinary fear is for the lower class, anxiety is for the middle class, and fright is for the upper classes.

Keeping an open mind

2011-04-11T14:42:00.002+02:00

Every once in a while, I will surf the Internet for articles on self-improvement (in my case, there is a lot of room for that), and I almost always find a lot of good, free advice. Some very good advice, curiously, came from a book called "The Science of getting Rich" (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Getting_Rich) written in 1910 by someone with the unlikely name of Wallace D. Wattles.

My new-found friend Wally writes about having goals, keeping constant faith that you will achieve them (or something similar enough), being grateful for what you have, and - as Deepak Chopra might say - letting the universe take care of things. He (Wally) even argues that you should not try to get rich at other's expense, and should always try (in today's parlance) to make every situation win-win.

Having had some scientific training myself, I cannot help but note that - notwithstanding the title of the book - there is nothing even remotely scientific about his theory. He simply makes a number of claims, and asks us to take them on faith, without providing any kind of proof or even any arguments. If anything, that is in fact much closer to what you would expect from a religious sect. But that does not mean his ideas lack merit: I find them all very interesting, and certainly worth exploring.

Which reminds me of an argument I had recently with a friend, who rejected homeopathy in its totality simply because the theory did not seem to make any sense. To me, theory and fact are totally separate. Just because you cannot find a plausible explanation (scientific or otherwise) for something does not mean it is not true, or does not exist. Personally, I have serious doubts about the theory that the position of the stars at our birth determine who we will be or become, but I am quite happy that people continue to explore patterns or clusters of human characteristics.

What I am most interested in, in fact, is in keeping an open mind. I hope one day I will find convincing arguments for doing so, but in the meantime I would ask you - like my friend Wally does with his claim that one should not get rich at another's expense - to accept on faith the idea that suppressing ideas (however ludicrous they may sound) is not the best way to arrive at the truth. Knowledge moves in mysterious ways.

Books and their owners

2011-02-28T21:26:00.000+01:00

Whenever I get a chance, I will check out people's bookcases, because the books people have can tell you an awful lot about them. Of course, I am very conscious of the fact that merely possessing a book is no guarantee that the owner has read it, or even if he or she has, that he or she has assimilated any of their contents. There are quite a few people out there who collect books as status symbols. These people are a bit like name-droppers, who will take any opportunity, however inopportune, to insert the name of some famous person/book into the conversation, in the hope that this will somehow make them look more important or intelligent than they are.

Those of you who know me personally will realize that I know of which I speak, because I do this myself. I will tell someone, for example, that I have Plato's Republic, and in doing so, I will have established my credentials as a serious-minded person, who sets a high standard. But before anyone can ask any questions I would not be able to answer, I will hasten to add that (1) it is the English Translation, not the original Greek version, and that (2) I haven't read it yet. And it gets worse, because this last remark gives me the perfect opportunity to list some of the other books that I have but have not read, or have not finished, like The Golden Bough, The Embarrassment of Riches, Herfstij der Middeleeuwen, the Tao of Physics, or a political history of the popes.

But I digress. What I really wanted to write about was a strange, out-of-body-like experience I had the other day, when I found myself inspecting a collection of books that could have been my own, but wasn't. Some of the books in this other collection were identical to books I own, but for the most part, this other person had different books but by the same authors. Had this phenomenon been restricted to literature, I would not have given it a second thought, but it spanned art, history, the natural sciences, science fiction and even travel books. It was really scary. I worry that one day I will wake up and find I am actually him, and not myself. And what is worse: if I am him, I will have a collection of several hundred books I should have read, but haven't!

The mystery of the missing ballpoints

2011-02-22T19:21:00.000+01:00

Life is strange and wonderful, and even inanimate objects move in mysterious ways. Take ballpoints, for example. Everyone knows that they have a habit of disappearing, and nobody, not even Douglas Adams, knows for sure where they go. No matter how many you buy (or "borrow"), they always disappear after a few days, and you are forced to go back to your ever-growing collection of rejects of all sizes and shapes, in the hope of finding one that works. In my case, the choice is simple: for the past year, I have relied on a pen of which the top is missing, so that it wobbles while I write. I hate it, but I am convinced that it is this very defect that prevents it from disappearing, so in a sense, I am also grateful.

Of course, the parallels with the animate world are not lost on me. Just like genes, which must disseminate to ensure the continued success of the species, ballpoints strive towards new frontiers, where they can lead long successful lives (or at very least find gainful employment). And equally obviously, I do realize that pens are not actively involved in a struggle for survival. But there definitely is selection going on, and the fittest are surviving, even though - unfortunately for me - it is elsewhere.

Which leads to the thought that maybe I should be a tougher taskmaster, and simply throw the wobbly pen away. But how can I? It has been my salvation for over a year now. A hate-love dilemma if I ever saw one.

Footnote (pun intended): you might be tempted to see parallels with socks as well, but that would be just plain silly, because socks never disappear in pairs. It is always only one, and I cannot for the life of me imagine any gainful employment for a single sock (other than possibly as a makeshift puppet for children).

Laziness and the keyboard

2011-02-12T20:10:00.000+01:00

In a bout of laziness, I just had a look at all the draft entries that I started writing but never published, in the hope of finding something I could simply shine up a bit to make it suitable. Unfortunately, none of them are good enough: each would need at lot more work to make them readable. Mostly because they are too ambitious - when optimistic, I attack big items like the search for knowledge or whether there is such a things as objective reality - and also because I believe you should only publish stuff that someone might like to read.

Of course, this entry is not all that interesting either. But I have noticed that some of my most popular entries (in terms of numbers of visits) are about blogging, so I am quite curious to see how this entry will fare, in comparison to others.

I will keep you posted!

In and out of control

2011-01-31T19:14:00.000+01:00

The other day, while watching an episode of "Monk" (an obsessive-compulsive detective), I started thinking about how important control is to us all. Monk (and presumably, many obsessive compulsive people) tries to compensate for the gap between what he would like to control (just about everything) and what he actually controls (very little) by imposing control where-ever possible, in the form of useless but comforting routines (touching all the lampposts along his way, etc. ). Obviously, he is very aware of the gap, and he does not really accept the fact that very little can be done about it.

The three most important elements in the above description are the size of the gap (which depends more on our own expectations and assumptions than anything else), our awareness of it (some people hardly seem to think about it, while for others, it is crucial), and our acceptance of it.

As far as the real (as opposed to the perceived) size of the gap is concerned, we can only control a very little bit: we grow up to learn a certain degree muscle control, and we try to control our own emotions and our own thoughts, but most of us are only partially successful at that. Of the outside world, we can perhaps control small physical objects, and we can exert an influence over the thoughts and feelings of others in our direct environment (friends, family members, colleagues), but very few of us are in a position to influence (much less control) larger groups of people, except perhaps in certain situations (and then usually for only a short period of time). Example: you can make huge numbers of people think of a lemon just by appearing on the t.v. for a few seconds, and telling them not to think of a lemon. Personally, I would never throw good money away on something like this, but who knows, maybe this is some control freak's idea of a fun thing to do.

Knowing what is realistic is a big step towards accepting the gap. Notwithstanding - or perhaps thanks to - many infantile attempts to fly (including some of my own, which mercifully ended without major accident), most adults find it relatively easy to accept that humans cannot fly on their own, without help from a machine or contraption. In fact, a large part of growing up consists of exactly that: learning about your own limitations and in some cases finding ways to get around them.

And they say t.v. teaches us nothing!
Now if only it would teach me to accept my own limitations ...

Oh, for laughing out loud!

2011-01-19T19:22:00.000+01:00

There are a lot of popular ideas that some people might say are truisms, but I just don’t get. (Of course, you could be excused for thinking that this is somehow my fault, that I am just more simple-minded than most people, but that is besides the point. ..)

One such idee fixe is that laughter is a defence mechanism. I grew up hearing this. With some things, it you hear them often enough, you start believing them. But with this one, I had my doubts, even from very early on (when I was nine or ten). I suppose I may have been influenced by the fact that I already knew that a smile makes a lousy umbrella. In any case, I got a bit obsessed with the whole idea, so I was very happy to discover that my brother had a character flaw which made it possible to put the theory to the test. What he would do, on a relatively regular basis, was insult or otherwise bother some bigger kid, wait until he was mad enough to threaten with bodily harm, then start laughing. This allowed me to gather proof – from a safe distance - that nine times out of ten, laughter offers absolutely no protection against fists.

Another is the idea that laughter is the best medicine. To me, it is more like a sickness. Not only is it contagious (something that sit-com producers abuse shameless by sticking a laugh-track under just about anything), it can be really dangerous. If laughter really were a medicine, the list of counterindications would read something like “do not use in case of cracked lips, broken ribs, ruptured spleen or appendix, collapsed lung “ … the list is almost endless! And it can even be dangerous is a different way, namely when you laugh at inappropriate moments, like I demonstrated above. Some more examples of moments when it might be risky to laugh: while receiving a serious reprimand from your boss, at the most tragic or romantic point in a movie (don’t laugh, I was once attacked by a bag-wielding old lady for committing this heinous offence), or when getting an accidental (and completely unwelcome) peek at your ex-wife’s new boyfriend’s private parts … personally, I also think it is inappropriate to laugh at accidents, but I know there is a whole branch of media industry that now depends on that sort of psuedo-comedy, so I guess very few people will agree with me on that.

Of course, we now know that laughter releases all kinds of feel—good chemicals like endorphins. So I’m thinking, why run all those risks, and do all that hard work (laughter actually requiries a lot of coordination, and involves a lot of different muscle groups) when you could just inject yourself with these chemicals. Or better yet, take them as pills. I suppose the most important risk there is addiction, but that doesn’t scare me much.

Which brings me to what I find most interesting about the above-mentioned ideees fixes, namely that they both link laughter to fear, in a few short steps: defence – danger – fear, and medicine – sickness – fear. Which is of course one really important aspect of laughter: how it (like whistling when it’s dark) helps us conquer fear. And conquering fear is all about emotional control.

I am not too good at this, but once in a while I do succeed in getting though otherwise potentially very distressing situations by imagining how I (or others) will laugh about it afterwards. This is so useful that I have made a resolve to develop this skill.

Ups and downs for Christmas

2010-12-22T20:54:00.001+01:00

The "holiday season" has always been a time of ups and downs for a lot of people. On the up side there can be time off from work, warmth, togetherness, good food and nice gifts. On the down side, there can be guilt (for not getting it right with the presents, Christmas cards, or other displays of affection, or for being much more fortunate than others) and sorrow. But the down side that really catches our attention this time of year is loneliness.

And I think the "evolutionary" reason that loneliness is so important to us at this time of year may be because it is much more dangerous to be alone in wintertime (when it's cold and there is no food) than in other seasons. If so, this would be another example of our emotional toolkit's inability to adapt to the affluent times we live in, because it is probably much less likely that you will starve or freeze to death now and here than at any point in written history.

Of course, there is no guarantee things will stay that way, but just for the sake of argument, let's suppose we would want to get rid of this reaction, which is arguable a big part of the mid-winter blues that some people get. I'm hoping that it works like inoculation: you inflect yourself with a weak dose of some disease, so that your body can build anti-bodies. Of course you would have to do so repeatedly, through a process of desensitizing (a process used to help people with allergies).

The other day, I thought I would get my first shot, when I missed the last bus home, on a cold snowy night. There was no need to call anyone to tell them I was coming late, because my wife and kids were out of town. And I didn't feel like paying 40 Euros for a taxi, so I walked home. It took me an hour, and I got a bit cold, but not lonely. I guess it doesn't always work if you wish it upon yourself. I did pass someone on the way who looked cold and miserable. He was just standing there, outside a building. And then I realized he was just having a cigarette.

Which gave me an idea: I could desensitize myself to loneliness by taking up smoking again, thereby ostracizing myself from the majority of current society. And the irony is that most people (including myself) started smoking because of peer pressure. Talk about a wishy-washy society!

[Please note that I am not seriously suggesting anyone start smoking, for any reason. I kicked a three-packs a day habit 18 years ago, and am still grateful I did.]

Alliterating antonyms

2010-12-16T09:54:00.005+01:00

I like lists, I like opposites, I like pairs, and I like alliteration (and yes, I also like repetition, provided it serves a stylistic purpose). I searched the web for examples, but didn't find very much, so here is my own list of alliterating antonyms and the like, in no particular order.

style vs. substance
form vs. function
fact vs. fiction/fantasy
nature vs. nurture
beauty vs. beast
man vs. mouse
competition vs. cooperation
free vs. fettered
pull vs. push
help vs. hurt
whiskey vs. water
conscious vs. comatose
method/meaning vs. madness
mountain or molehill
sink or swim
do or die
friend or foe
publish or perish
right and wrong
sunshine and shade
pain and pleasure
vice and virtue
rhyme and reason
brain vs. brawn
mind over matter
heaven vs. hell
callous vs. caring
love/like vs. loathe
nice vs. nasty
sweet vs. sour
practice vs. preach
brainy vs. bubbly
knight vs. knave

The reason I like them (I think) is because they are easy to remember, and because the juxtaposition makes it easier to understand what I mean by each term: when I say "right and wrong", for example, you can immediately exclude "right" as the opposite of left.

In some future entry, I will also list alliterating pairs with complementary meanings (bed and breakfast, guts and glory, forgive and forget ...) and possibly also one for paired alliterating contradictions (or apparent contradictions), like STOP SHOUTING! In the meantime,
all suggestions for this list are welcome.

Stressing in the snow

2010-12-05T11:30:00.004+01:00

This morning I went to the park with the kids. They had been pestering me to take them sleighing for several days already, and last night, more snow fell, so conditions were perfect. Or at least, the natural world was being accommodating. The humans were not.

In the park, there are really only two slopes suitable for sleighing, one on each side of a high hill which also houses two slides and a climbing tower. The best one already bore the tracks of previous sleigh-rides, fanning out to either side of the central crest. It was popular because it is a long, gently undulating slope without obstacles. Except of course all the people (adults and children) who were climbing up the same hill as everyone wanted to go down, instead of using the stairs.

Being quite safety-conscious myself, I insisted my children use this route. Then, once we had reached the top, I would tell them to wait until everyone was either out of the way, or were at least aware that we were coming down (this was even more important in our case, because they were slightly bigger than most other children, and with a heavier sled). But no-one else followed my example, and while we were there, more and more people arrived, and not a single parent used the stairs. In the end, it became impossible to get down the hill without risking hitting someone else, and I gave up. Luckily, my children quickly found other fun (but safer) things to do.

I however am still stressed by the experience. I know I should learn to accept that things are not always as they should be, but I find this needless risk-taking too silly for words. While we were there, I saw three accidents (none very serious, luckily) and half a dozen really close calls, some of which could have easily end up much worse.

But, to be completely honest, I am almost as upset by the lack of consideration, and by the fact that I am basically being punished for behaving responsibly. I had absolutely no fun whatsoever, and I will definitely think twice before going back.

Making allowances for instant gratification

2010-11-27T13:49:00.012+01:00

Why is it that some children hoard their weekly allowance, while others spend it as quickly as possible? I know that the general consensus at the moment is to applaud delayed gratification and discourage instant gratification, but before making a final judgment on this, I would like to understand where this behavior comes from.

On one end of the scale, you have children who prefer not to spend any of their money. Having been a bit like this myself, I can see several reasons for this.

1) you attach great importance to what you buy, and find it so difficult to choose that you end up not choosing anything;
2) you know that your parents prefer this behavior, and want to please them;
3) saving stuff has become a goal of its own.

This last idea is linked, I think, to the "collector instinct". As a child, I collected a lot of things - shells, insects, rocks, fossils, coins, stamps - but mostly only the things I could get without spending any money. And when I did spend my allowance, I would consider the purchase carefully in advance, and try to think ahead by imagining what it would be like to have the thing I wanted to buy.

The other end of the scale is much more difficult for me to understand, but I can imagine some reasons why money might burn a hole in someone's pocket:

1) you really want something, and have been waiting for it "for a really long time" (I put quotation marks because to a child, five minutes can be an eternity)
2) spending, for you, is linked with being "grown up", and you want to exercise this right
3) purchase pleasure (spending for the sake of spending)

I do not have "purchase pleasure" (defined by the urban dictionary as "The unexplained feeling of bliss, joy and satisfaction one gets following a purchase"), but I imagine it is linked to comfort buying which - like comfort eating - is something you do to chase away the blues. And if so, it seems to me that it is a bit like treating the symptoms of a disease (dissatisfaction, weltschmertz, call it what you like) instead of its cause. Sometimes this is necessary, but it should definitely not be a long-term policy. Apparently it is possible to fight fire with fire, but I am not sure you can get rid of materialist blues with even more consumerist behavior.

Saint Nicolas: from stern father figure to group therapist

2010-11-13T18:00:00.004+01:00

As a child, I never really thought about it, but one fine day when I was all grown up it suddenly dawned on me that Saint Nicolas and Santa Claus are basically the same, namely a bishop that lived in Turkey in 3^rd century A.D.. In the Netherlands, Luxembourg and various other countries, he has his own day (the 6^th of December, or sometimes the 5^th). In many other countries, he has been lumped unceremoniously together with two very different celebrations, namely the winter solistice and the birth of Christ. My own personal theory is that someone, a long time ago, mixed Saint Nicolas up with the Three Kings, possibly because they all bring presents.

Which brings me to the past.

When I was young, we learned - by way of songs and stories – that Sinterklaas (like his copycat Santa Claus) kept track of how each child’s behaviour throughout the year, and would reward or punish the children on the night of December 5. Good children would get presents, roughly in proportion to how good they had been, and often accompanied by little poems in which Sinterklaas would comment on the recipient’s character or behaviour (both the good and the bad). Bad children would either not get any presents, or would be swatted by the wicker, or both. And really, really bad children would be stuck in a bag by one of Saint Nicolas’ assistants and dragged off to Spain. (What actually happened to these children was left to our own imagination, but if it were to happen today, I suppose we might think in terms of discpline training in a quasi-military survival camp.)

Over the course of the last forty years, the threat of punishment has almost completely disappeared from the celebration. The idea of dragging children off in bags has become so scary to parents that it is hardly ever mentioned, and corporal punishment is – ironically? – now punishable by law. Some parents apparently do still try to get their children to behave by threatening to tell Saint Nicolas not to bring any presents, but that only works in the short term. Shortly after receiving their presents and/or as soon as they lose interest in them, these same children revert to the horrible spoilt brats they are the rest of the year. Both most people just give the presents, without any real threat of punishment.

In the Netherlands, on the whole, the only vestige of punishment left is in the little poems accompanying the presents. Even adults exchanging presents on St. Nicolas day continue to respect this tradition. And to me, this still seems useful. In a sense (and this may be part of its appeal to Dutch people) these poems are like free therapy. You get to say out loud what bugs you about someone, and the other person is not allowed to get mad.

In fact, I think it is such a good idea I think we should introduce this tradition at the office. I already have some ideas of poems I could write about some of my colleagues …

An ABC of unwanted guests

2010-09-09T18:44:00.006+02:00

I have just had a fantastic two months of rest and relaxation, sea and sun, food and fun. It was so fantastic that I did not feel like writing anything on this blog (I did write some other stuff, but it is not yet fit for public scrutiny). But the holiday itself contained more than enough material for some blog entries. Like one on an important recurrent theme: unwanted guests. (We also had a whole slew of wanted guests - family, friends, friends of family, family of friends ... but that is another story)

The unwanted guests were, in alphabetical order (but not in order of importance)
1. ants
2. a burglar and a billboard, and
3. a cat

In chronological order, the burglar was our first unwanted visitor, and the less said about him, the better. Except maybe that his is about 2 meters tall and probably drives an old, clunky metallic grey Peugeot or Renault, and if you catch him, please get our stuff back.

The billboard was erected in our absence by a major Spanish bank whose name rhymes with BancCaca, and if the wording were any indication, its intention was to sell our apartment. Obviously, we were not happy with this: it is true we have not finished paying the mortgage, but we are neither late nor bankrupt, and our mortgage is with a completely different bank. A few inquiries later we had our answer: the Spanish bank was trying to sell the land on which they had placed the sign, together with a great many other plots in the area. Somebody had obviously made a mistake on the wording.

But they had certainly not made a mistake regarding the illegal placement of the sign: they never applied for a permit, and when, after having moved both the prophet and the mountain (=making a few calls and visits to the right people), the city council finally agreed with us and told the bank to remove it, they moved it some 30 meters to the side instead.

On to our next unwanted visitor: a cat. I can't say for sure that it was really the third one, in chronological order, because I suspect that it may have been a regular visitor, but that we never noticed. But this time we did. The first time was when we (=I) didn't feel like putting the garbage in the garbage bin (100 meters uphill from us) at night, and left it on the kitchen floor instead.
Sometime around three o'clock we heard strange scratching sounds. When I got up to investigate, and found the garbage bag open. And I could smell fish. So I put the broken bag in another bag, and closed all the possible entries except the sliding glass door in our bedroom. And just as I was dropping off to sleep again, I heard a sound, opened my eyes to see two green orbs only a half meter from my face, and was suddenly wide awake again. But at least it confirmed what I had told my wife to calm her down: it really was just a cat, and not a rat or mice. But that was not the last time it came to call: a few days later, having forgot all about it, my wife left a fish casserole on the kitchen counter to cool. She did think to cover it with a heavy metal lid, but around 3 o'clock in the morning there was a CRASH from the kitchen. We heard it, but didn't think much of it, but in the morning, it was clear that our pesky (and probably infest-ridden) feline "friend" had come to visit again.

Which brings me to the ants. Not much to report there: ants are everywhere, and will probably take over from us humans some fine post-apocalyptic day, but in fact, they weren't all that much of a problem this year. I just mention them here because I need them for the snappy title of this entry.

A modern day fairy tale

2010-05-02T15:25:00.005+02:00

There once was a man who found a magic lamp. He knew it was magic because of the letters “PMO” engraved on the side. Under the engravings were some instructions explaining its use, but the letters were so small he could hardly read them, and in any case, he was impatient to get started, so he rubbed it instead (as per standard operational Arabian Nights procedure), and presto!, out came a Project Manager, or PM. The PM (pronounced “Pmm”) told the man he could have one wish. The man, already quite deeply in fairy tale mode, thought he had a right to three wishes, and was disappointed, but the Pmm explained that times were tight and that this was real life, not a fairy tale.

The man thought for a bit, then started to answer, but the PM stopped him quickly, reminding him that he would only get one wish, and that it might be better to make it count. But the man insisted he was sure, and he made his wish.

“There is a little spot on the Spanish coast with a lovely view of the ocean.” He said. “That is where I want to spend the rest of my life.”
The Pmm sighed and said “It is a very nice wish, but I can see you are new to the wishing game. Luckily, I am in no hurry”. (The Pmm liked to feel some pride in his work, and he knew that merely obeying his owners usually ended in tears). “I could grant you your wish in many different ways. If I take the easy way out, I will simply make you a cave with an endless supply of food.” The man’s heart sank in despair, thinking that he had wasted his wish. But the Pmm signalled him not to worry.

“The trick,” said the Pmm, “is to take your time to think all your options through properly, then be as specific as you can. I can help. Start by closing your eyes try to imagine in your mind’s eye what your life on the coast might look like.”

The man closed his eyes and saw a nice big house, with lots of people, having a party. When he opening his eyes, he smiled at the Pmm and asked him if that was better.

“Better? How should I know? I’m a Pmm, not a mind reader!” the Pmm answered, frowning a bit. The man was confused. “But I assumed …”

“What is it with you owners and assumptions?” the Pmm muttered under his breath. But out loud he said “Never mind. How are you doing on your wish?”

“I am getting closer,” the man said, “but I need to check some things first.”

“Good for you,” the Pmm said, happy to see how quickly this new owner was catching on.

“I sort of know what I want,” the man explained “but I suddenly realised I am not alone. I also have a wife and family, and they might not like my wish.”

“Ahaa! Stakeholders! Maybe you should ask their opinion?”

The man agreed, and went to talk to his wife and daughter.

The wife liked the idea, but insisted they also have some rooms for her mother and aunt to come visit for several months a year. The man was not thrilled at this prospect, but he did not want to hold up things too much, so he agreed. Their teenage daughter (a spoiled brat who could have used some discipline) then tried to highjack the wish, and turn it into her wish, but for once, the parents held firm. Together, they made a rough sketch of the house of their dreams.

The man then went back to the Pmm and said he was getting closer. All he needed do is get some help from an architect. The Pmm told him not to worry, he could help out. But, said the Pmm, the man was still not finished.

“Have you thought through all the implications and consequences of your choice?”

“????”

“Isn’t this new house a bit too far away from your office? Or were you planning on giving up your job and living on air?”

The man hadn’t thought of that, but by now he was starting to get worried about all the time it was taking. The Pmm answered that the man was right to worry, but that time spent in the initial stages usually paid themselves back later on, and that he (the Pmm) would keep an eye on the time.

“Or maybe,” the man said, exuding smug satisfaction at his own intelligence, “you are like a fixed-wage supermarket cashier who works Saturdays: there is no need for you to hurry, because the list of potential masters is endless?”

A small black cloud started forming above the head of the Pmm. “You might be my owner, but there is no need to be insulting. Or perhaps you really want to spend the rest of your life in a cave?”.

The man apologised and meekly asked what the next step was.

The man did not realise this, but this was all part of the process of establishing roles and responsibities, and building rapport, and he had just taken a big step towards getting not only what he asked for, but what he needed (which, as we have seen, are not always the same thing).

And so after many false starts, the usual problems with contractors, the weather, and life in general, it came to be that the man got his wish, and went off to live on the Spanish coast. Of course, it took so long that the man no longer needed to direct his business from an office overlooking the ocean, as originally planned, because he was now retired, but this also meant that several other problems had magically vanished. His teenage daughter was no longer teen-aged, and his mother-in-law was too old to come much. Assorted other members of the family and friends did come by to stay on a regular basis, but with the Pmm’s help, the man had made sure that he also had his own private space, and was not bothered in the least, and he and his wife lived happily ever after. After official sign-off, the Pmm disappeared in a puff of smoke, filled in his post-implementation report, and went off and to try to make some other owner happy.

Deja Vu

2010-03-31T18:10:00.002+02:00

One explanation I heard for the sensation of deja vu (and one that seems quite reasonable to me) is that it is the hindbrain's fault. The hindbrain is the part of your brain that stores stimuli that surpass a certain threshold (e.g. those associated with serious threats), in order to be able to quickly recognise similar situations, and react accordingly. Unfortunately, the information it stores is so "generic" that it is unable to distinguish a new situation with an old one, hence the feeling of deja vu. That said, it can still be quite useful, if for example the new situation poses a similar threat.

This morning, I had a deja vu of the more rational kind: in the back of the car, my kids were playing using a rubber band as an improvised guitar, in order to play along with the music from the car radio. They called out for me to have a look, and I almost did, even though I have a firm rule never to turn my head towards them while driving.

So where does the deja vu come in? I can hear you wondering. It is this: when I was three years old, I had a scooter that I would ride for hours (or at least that's how it seems now). But it did not have a bell with which I could warn people to get out of my way. So I improvised one by spanning a rubber band between two parts of the handlebar. It worked quite well ... up until the point when one end let go. I decided that there was no need to slow down; I could repair as I sailed along. Bad idea: while repairing my improvised bell, a picket fence suddenly decided to cross my path. (And I have still have the scar to prove it).

So in fact, my hindbrain should have warned me not to listen to rubber bands.
(Just in case you missed the reference, think of the crows in Dumbo singing "When I see an elephant fly").

The Wonderful Web

2010-02-19T19:22:00.003+01:00

The Web is wonderful. It gives such quick and easy access to information that might have taken me weeks or months to find ... a time barrier which, for many things, would have prevented me from even trying. And now, with a few simple clicks, I can link Maslow's pyramid of needs to Herzberg's maintenance/motivation criteria, link that to Erikson's psychosocial development, Leary's Rose of interpersonal relationships, etc. etc.

And then, of course, somebody says something to ruin it all, namely the idea that we might have to start paying for some of the more interesting stuff. Which runs contrary to the idea that many of us have had, namely that information should be free. For some people, in fact (and certainly Tim Berners-Lee, the CERN employee who offered his transfer protocol to the world for free) that is the very essence of the web: sharing information. To me, this feels totally natural. And I also think it is a good idea, at least in the long run. In a sense, it is like a sibling to the "market will sort things out" dogma. With the difference, of course, that the market dogma is a short-sighted egoistic brat who can only win if someone else loses, and who hates his too-good-to-be-true sister, who works towards consensus and cooperation. The market-minded people will try to squeeze every last dime out of us, the information highway hippies want to share everything.

Or am I being too black and white here?

Western civilisation

2010-02-09T17:27:00.000+01:00

Just a short, simple entry, as an antidote for the previous one: when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation, Gandhi replied: "I think that it would be a very good idea."

To react or not to react

2010-02-07T19:27:00.002+01:00

The last couple of weeks, all my writing efforts have gone into some songs I am working on. But my blogbrain hasn't stopped working. One of the things I have been thinking about a bit is how to decide when to act and when to let things slide. And, as with most of the things I write about here, this is an issue at many different contexts and levels, from the home to work environment, through the level of the local community all the way up to the global level. And, again in common with a number of other blog entries, I distinguish three phases, namely input, response and outcome.

The input consists of whatever triggers a response. These triggers or stimuli can be external or internal, and can be the caused by a change in circumstances or by a change in attitude towards unchanging circumstances. And they can be physical needs, which range from basic, essential ones (food, health) to simple discomfort (I like my space and will move things that bother me or obstruct my range of movement aside) or emotional needs, such as the need for job security, friends, etc.

As for the response, everyone has their own "baseline" responsiveness, which can range from complete (comatose) inactivity to irritatingly hyper-(re)active. Inactivity may just be laziness, but may also be the result of reduced sensitivity (=a very high stimulus threshold). Hyper-activity can be a sign of insecurity and over-sensitivity. And responsiveness can either decrease with time (desensitizing), or increase, e.g. when a relatively minor irritation becomes a major issue).

The outcome or result of the response is important because it is (or should presumably be) the basis for future responses, the basic question being: was this really what I wanted, and if so, was worth the trouble? Asking ourselves this question, consciously or unconsciously, turns the process into a feedback loop. People learn from experience: the first set of results become input for a new round of the input-response-outcome game (or, put differently, we adapt our response to the expected outcome). [To preclude any suggestion of wishy-washyness on my part: as a general rule, I am against systematic suppression of certain behavior by others/society, but in favor of thinking things through and trying to learn from your mistakes on an individual basis.]

I suspect, however, that many people - and especially those would benefit most, namely those at the extreme ends of the responsiveness scale - are slow learners. And as a society, we are of course only as fast to learn as our slowest learners. Even so, I have the impression that, we are becoming more and more demanding, which brings us back to the core question: namely - assuming that suppressing our initial response for a moment and stopping to think first will help us improve - do we really want to do this, and is it worth the trouble? Is all this effort really improving our quality of life, or are we just a lot of energy into "fixing things that ain't broke"?

Let me know! :-)

Elephants on my mind

2010-01-21T13:26:00.003+01:00

This morning I woke up and realized that a disproportionately large part of my brain is occupied by elephants. I say "disproportionately" because my knowledge of elephants is quite limited (average or less), I have no special interest in them, and they have played no role worth mentioning in my life. As far as I know, I was not attacked by a zoo elephant as a child, and I have never even seen them in the wild.

Why is it, then, that when looking for analogies, my first choice often includes elephants? Some examples. One of the management books I read recently speaks of the "dead boss syndrome" which is when staff continues to behave as if a long-gone boss were still in charge. When explaining this concept to a colleague, however, I immediately transposed this into the "chained elephant analogy" (grown elephants are perfectly capable of breaking the chains around their ankles, but they don't even try, because of all the years they tried but failed, when they were younger and weaker). Or when discussing the lack of global vision needed to achieve improvement, I recurred to the story of how ten blind men were asked to describe an elephant, and came up with the wildest ideas because all the information they had was what they could feel with their hands. I have also been known to refer to certain colleagues as elephants in a porcelain shop. And of course, being in the lower ranks of the organisation and lamenting my fate, I often mention how the grass (or the mice, depending on my mood) gets trampled when elephants dance.

What is perhaps even more surprising is the fact that I remember doing all of the above. I don't believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I might conclude I was an elephant in a previous life. And if this were to be the case, I would definitely file a complaint with the appropriate authorities, because my skin is far too thin.

Next blog, please

2009-12-28T17:17:00.001+01:00

The first time I used the "Next blog" function (at the top of this page, last item on the left) , I quite liked it. Like a trip through the strange and wonderful world of other people's minds, each click would take me somewhere else. In that time, I have seen blogs on owl tatoos, informatics, anthropology, pink pride ... just about anything under the sun. Since blogger abandoned the random principle, however, I am less enchanted.

I have tried to find the link between what I write and the "next blog" (e.g. in the blogspot blog) but it is not obvious. It promises to present the reader with related material in the same language, and it does. But I expected something similar to targetted advertising, in which case it would either use the key words I enter, the text itself, and/or any links to my blog. Had that been the case, my next blogs would have probably been a strange mixture of natural sciences, raising children, and home-grown psychology. Lately, however, most of my "next blogs" are from fundamentalist Christian (Protestant) families. The family part I can understand - I do write about my children a lot - but the Christian part? I am an ex-Catholic writing mostly about humanist values. (Yes, I realise that I am still more similar to Protestants than to Muslims or Hindus, but still).

Of course, I could always start censoring myself, and only publish entries on politics, art, science and philosophy, or better still, create separate blogs, one for each main area of interest. But I already have four (this one, two on music, and one at work), each one presenting a slightly difference aspect of myself. Anytime now I will develop the first documented case of multiple virtual personality disorder.

Looking out for Number One

2009-12-27T11:44:00.006+01:00

Just finished reading Barack Obama's book on Life, the Universe and Everything (the real title is "The Audacity of Hope", of course, but with chapters called "values", "race", "faith", "politics" and "family", among many others, a wink to Douglas Adams is not out of place), and I have to say I am pleasantly impressed. He really seems to have thought things through. There is just one thing that gets my hackles up. It is not even a criticism; it is more a question of picking up where the book leaves off, and of giving the perspective from the outside.

My concern is the assumption, implicit in some of the wordings in the chapter on "The World Beyond Our Borders", among others, that the rest of the world poses a threat to the livelihood and security of U.S. citizens. This bothers me because it indicates the extent to which fear plays a part in determining U.S. policy (foreign and internal). Even for its allies or friends, the idea that this economic and military giant is not always able to control its own knee-jerk reactions is quite scary.

Having spent an important part of my childhood in the U.S., I am quite familiar with this fear. In my case, it was the the generalised and unchallenged belief that an "evil empire" (usually the Soviet Union and/or China) was out to attack and subdue the "free world" (the U.S. and its western allies). All around me, there were all kinds of different expressions of this fear, either explicit (spy novels), slightly veiled metaphors (most science fiction series and movies), or implicit (the things left unsaid). And the response (the nuclear arms race), though understandable, did not make much sense in the longer run. Now, of course, the main source of fear - international terrorism - is different, but the kind of response it engenders is similar in that it is again assumed that (1) military action and repression is the best (or possibly even only) way to "win the war" and (2) the U.S. must do something about it, or at very least lead the way.

As for the first assumption, I think the spectacular failure to "win the war" on drugs is evidence enough. The problem of drugs, and of terrorism, is complex, and cannot be solved by ouside force alone. But U.S. policy seems rife with overly simplistic beliefs and short-term solutions (presumably again because of fear and/or because it is much easier to sell a quick, simple "solution" than admit that a long-term committment is necessary). Most issues are not just black and white, good or bad, and there is a middle road between isolationist or interventionist.
As for the second point: of course it is difficult to "just stand by" when things around you are going wrong, even if you do not perceive these changes as threats. But just as a parent's failure to intervene may in certain cases in the long run be better for his or her children (see this entry), intervention is not always necessary or useful. In some cases, intervention may provide short-term solutions, but trying to "make the world safe for democracy" by force is a bit like a parent yelling at his children to stop yelling. It might work for a while, but the underlying message is that yelling is an acceptable and useful way to get what you want.

I am sure the above parent/child analogy could ruffle the feathers of lots of people across the globe, because (like me) they see the U.S. as a younger (though larger and stronger sibling), and not as a parent. And as such, there is always the issue of whether or not that sibling has the right to stick its nose into the internal affairs of other countries. I would say they do not. However much I can sympathise with the need to "look out for number one", I draw the line at pre-emptive strikes. I think that in most cases, we would all benefit if the U.S. were to apply the simple rule to "do unto others as they would have others do unto you".

There is of course much, much more to be said on this, but it will have to wait: my children need me.

Cultural diversity - blessing or curse?

2009-12-19T13:07:00.001+01:00

Working in a "multicultural environment" means being confronted, on a daily basis, with slightly different ways of doing things. One of the most obvious is how the French (or at least, the ones who work in the same hallway as I do) will come in to shake hands the first time we see each other. I quite like this habit, but not enough to start doing it myself (I tried, but I could see that - like swearing in a language that you do not fully master - people sense that something doesn't quite fit). Also, the meaning of shaking hands is shifting. It used to be seen as a way of showing good intentions (a derivative of the original meaning, namely to show you have no weapons), but is currently als seen as a very efficient way of spreading the flu virus.

Another important difference is the size of personal space. In Spain, a few centimeters between people in the supermarket line (or a meter or two between cars driving 130 km/h on the highway) is considered enough, if not ample; in the Netherlands, this invastion of your personal space is not only not acceptable, it is considered threatening. The first thing I think when someone gets this close is that they are trying to force me off the road/pick my pocket. My Dutch-grown instincts tell me to recede, but of course, there is nowhere to go. On the highway, I have learned to grit my teeth and "stand my ground"; in a supermarket line I have bumped into several people (which luckily is no big deal in Spain either) in an attempt to restore the balance. This reaction is in fact so automatic you can use it identify Nothern Europeans who have not yet learnt this lessons at standing receptions: they will be the ones receding all across the room with a polite smile, while the person advancing will be from a culture where it is considered rude to remain so distant ... Of course, you might reach the wrong conclusion if you are observing two people of opposite gender, but the subject of "women are from Venus, men are from Mars" type differences is so vast I will have to save it for another blog entry.

And there are differences that are related to personality. Many of my colleagues, for example, use first names much more than I do. To me, a first name is something relatively personal, almost intimate. I don't mind when people use it in passing, but using it to manipulate or obtain something from me, or sell me something makes me wish I belonged to one of those cultures where the first name is seen as something quite special, to be shared only with friends. (Mental note to myself: if I ever lead a revolution, salespeople who insert my first name into every second sentence should be the first against the metaphorical wall).

So what is my hidden agenda here, you might ask. Nothing much: just a small critical note to counterbalance those among us who insist that we should celebrate diversity. Diversity is all very fine and well, but all these relatively minor problems can also pile up and sometimes make me wish I only had personal and gender differences to deal with ...

Repression and over-protectiveness

2009-12-17T19:55:00.012+01:00

The other day, under the shower, I had one of those fleeting thoughts that seem to make perfect sense when you have them, but elude explanation afterwards. The thought was this: being over-protective about your children's safety is somehow similar to the repression, by society, of certain behaviours, such as drug use. It took me three days to find a more or less rational explanation for this intuitive mental leap.

The explanation is that being over-protective delays the transition from dependence to independence, and the sooner they can statnd on their own two feet, the better. This is not to say that we should let our children run wild, and learn everything all by themselves: parents definitely have a role to play. But the role should be one of guiding, helping them learn things, not telling them what to do every step of the way.

Every day, when we arrive home, my children crowd around the front door to get it, and I have to try to keep the youngest from bumping her head against the sharp metal corner of the mailbox while opening the door. My telling her to watch her head does not seem to help much - she is of the age and the height where her head seems to be magically and irresistably attracted to corners - and I am beginning to think she will have to hurt herself, possibly several times, to learn the lesson. The same applies to a lot of things children have to learn by experimentation, such as all the balance games they play (I only intervene when I think it really is too dangerous).

So how is this similar to drug use? Surely I am not suggesting that we should teach people how to use drugs? Well, in a sense, I am. I think it is time to admit we have lost the "war on drugs" and that some people are going to use drugs anyway, no matter what we do. If so, it makes more sense to focus on reducing the negative effects of drug use, both for the individual, and for the society. This is not to say that I would encourage it (any more than I encourage my children to experiment with their balance games), but repression is clearly not the answer, at least not in the long term.

The problem, of course, is fear. Fear is pretty effective at blocking reasonable arguments, and in both cases (as parents and as members of society) we have good reason to be afraid. But at least, it seems, we are slowly beginning to dismantle the worst taboos about drugs. It may have not yet quite reached mainstream US. television (a impregnable bastion of conventiality and traditionalism), but not so long ago, a fictional police chief in the HBO series "The Wire" actually established a prosecution-free drug zone in Baltimore.

Now if only I could stop cringing everytime my daughters take yet another risky step towards independence ...

'tis the season to be jolly ...

2009-12-06T08:04:00.006+01:00

For people like me, the winter holiday season with all its abundance can be a bit of a challenge, for a number of reasons. For one, I am easily over-stimulated, and the holiday season is full of stimulants. Bright lights, music and holiday cheer, wine and rich food ... I like them all, but in moderation. And this especially true of presents.

As a child, I was taught (mostly by example) that Christmas is a religious event, which should not be about presents. And, although I am no longer religious in any way that counts, I still hold on to that idea. It is good to have a time to reflect, count your blessings, and celebrate togetherness. It is for this same reason that I oppose the new fashion of opening stores on Sundays: for me, Sunday is down-time. And that downtime should not be used to try to buy happiness (as if that were possible). And of course that means trying to avoid having Santa Claus visit our house.

But not to worry, because in our (Dutch-Spanish) case, we have two other options. Dutch children have traditionally been visited by Sinterklaas, who of course is in fact the same as Santa Claus (both names deriving from St. Nicolas, a 3rd century Turkish bishop famed for his generosity) but who, with the help of a small army of "Pieten", leaves his gifts on the 5th of December instead of the 25th. And we can also appeal to the Three Kings, who bring gifts to Spanish children on the 6th of January.

We have already explained to our children that these five wise old men actually talk to each other, to make sure that the wealth is divided fairly. We haven't been too specific about what "fair" means, other than that it is based on a general evaluation of the goodness of the children throughout the year (as opposed to being good in the weeks just prior to the happy occasion), and we have also had to explain that the number of presents does not depend on the quality of the drawings they leave, as one of my children tearfully admitted fearing the other day, because it is the intention and the goodness that counts. We have also explained that the wise men often consult parents, and that at times, it is necessary to enlist the help of normal humans ("impostors") because the holy men cannot be everywhere at once. Which brings me to the problem of logistics.

Ever since the birth of our children, we have been in Luxembourg around Saint Nicolas' day (which, to make matters even more complicated, is celebrated on the 6th of December in Luxembourg, not the 5th). So logically, our children expect to find something in their shoes. But we always go to Spain for Christmas. In principle, we would want the gifts to arrive on January 6th. But we are hardly ever in Spain on that date. Having them sent up to Luxembourg is not an option, because the grandparents want to be present when the gifts are opened. So, like many Spaniards (who have a different problem, namely that the children don't have enough time to enjoy their gifts if they get them on the sixth, just before school starts again), we allow the gifts to arrive on Christmas. Which leaves me out in the cold with my anti-materialist, anti-hedonist aspirations.

Of course, in only a few years, it will no longer be necessary to maintain the myth (even though we would want to maintain the magic). The other day, I almost let it slip that Saint Nicolas is dead. Later, I realized that my children would probably not be overly worried by the idea of someone rising from the dead to give them presents, but still, I am happy I was not forced to perpetuate a myth that I should start gently dismantling soon, at least in the case of my eldest. I/we have not quite figured out how to do this yet, but I imagine it will help if we start by offering reassurance as far as the gifts are concerned. But that is just part of the problem, the other part being a pre-adolescent version of the existentialist crisis that teenagers/adults suffer when - to paraphrase Nietzsche - they try to come to terms with the fact that God (or at least their image or perception thereof) is dead.

As such, this demystification is a very important step (a bit like a rite of passage), and I hope we will be able to handle this well. At the moment, the most promising approach seems to be explaining how metaphors and symbols work: St. Nicolas may no longer be with us in a literal, corporal sense, but he lives on in people's hearts and minds, and many follow his example of generosity and goodness. (I did not invent this idea of redefinition and internalization, of looking inwards instead of outwards, of course, it is just a slimmed down version of what Humanists like Erasmus did many centuries ago.)

Merry Christmas!

Read my lips

2009-12-02T14:11:00.005+01:00

Like most "pleasers", I have never been very good at saying "no", which means I often agree to do things that I don't really want to do. This is not to say that I never say no - there is a big difference between things I don't really want to do, and things I really don't want to do - just that when comparing what I might get out of saying "yes" (in terms of approval/future cooperation) to the amount of work this will mean for me and the possible negative consequences of saying "no", the balance usually tips to the "yes" side. Of course, I do sometimes try to get out of things, and it is true that these attempts may sometimes be too subtle. I could probably be clearer, more assertive, especially when faced with people who simply do not want to hear an inconvenient "no". But I have difficulty discerning the - to me vague - dividing line between assertiveness and bluntness. When I try, I usually end up being rude.

I see a similar pattern in other areas - professional and private - in that I will acquiesce to things that I do not agree with, usually to avoid unpleasant conflicts. I know this is not ideal, but things are hardly ever the way I would like them to be, and you cannot fight the whole world. So for the past 25 years or so, I have accepted this as part of being me. But recently (and possibly because I am getting older) I have started to rethink this. It is not so much that I want to do less for others; in at least one sense (parenthood), I am doing more now than ever. Nor I am getting crankier and pickier with age: the things that bug me now are basically the same as ever.

No, the thing that bothers me most is how I am being forced - by a battle of attrition - to give up the principle of honesty. I am finding out that often, it is simply not possible - for any number of reasons - to give the real reasons for not wanting to do something. So you end up making polite excuses ("other commitments", "something came up" ...) that to me are so obviously a lie as to be rude. But people actually accept these excuses. Worse still: the other day, on "Lie to me" (a detective series where the protagonists depend heavily on body language to solve cases), it was mentioned that teenagers who are good at hiding their feelings are more popular. Apparently, our society not only accepts certain lies (or untruths), it actually rewards them.

Hmm.

The moral high ground

2009-11-18T09:32:00.012+01:00

According to my interpretation of evolution (which I apply to just about everything under the sun, from organisms to organs, and from motion to emotion), there is, or was at some point in the past, a reason for everything that exists. Sometimes the thing continues to exist after its reason disappears (like certain architectural features that used to be necessary but are now merely ornaments) and some responses are exaggerated, but as a general rule, I find it useful to try to figure out why things exist.

Why, for example, is there such a thing as the feeling of "moral superiority"?

The other day, a colleague mentioned that he took the stairs and not the elevator not so much because it was healthy, but mostly because it was better for the environment. I bike to work when I can, always fill the dishwasher to capacity, and regulate the pressure of my morning shower so as not to waste hot water (less pressure means less water, but it can also be less hot, because less water splatters off). (I almost added that I only wash the car a few times a year to save the environment, but that would be less than completely truthful: mostly, I just hate washing the car).

I have been doing these things so long that I no longer really have any feelings about them, but when I first started "saving the environment", in my late teens, I distinctly remember feeling morally superior over those around me who did not. Of course, I did my best to hide this from other people - nobody likes a snooty, smug, self-satisfied do-gooder, but now, many years later, I wonder whether I would have ever done them had I not had that feeling as a reward.

Can it be that we as a society actually need snootiness, smugness, and feeling of being moral superior to help us do things that are better for us in the long term? And if so, should they be reclassified as virtues? If so, is my disdain and dislike for snooty, smug, morally superior self-satisfied people also a virtue? :-}

The same old same old

2009-11-18T09:32:00.009+01:00

I spend a lot of timing thinking about the process of habituation, and there are several things that bother me about it. One is the lag time between the stimulus and the reaction, which is usually longer than I would prefer. When my wife and kids go off for a week or so, it usually takes me about three to four days to get used to their absence, for example. Then, just when I am beginning to enjoy my solitude, they come back, and I need another 3-4 days to get used to that. Or take the Luxembourg weather. It usually takes expats from more benign climates 20-30 years to get used to it. By which time they usually retire, and go back to where they came from.

And the second is the fact that, with time, organisms react less even though the strength of the stimulus remains the same (desensitization). Of course, it would be impossible to survive without this, because you would simply be overwhelmed by stimuli. And the process of habituation is also an important survival mechanism, because it allows us to adapt, and adaptability is one of the main criteria for survival at individual, group and species level.

But there are situations where it is better not to adapt. It is all very well for me to get desensitized to the problems I have with my my music software, and just accept the fact that it will usually take 2-4 times to create a final version of a recording. (I have tried to fix it, but without success. Now, I just take a deep breath and try again each time the problem occurs.). But it is not a good idea to get so used to working with dangerous chemicals that you forget the risks (a known problem in laboratories). And on a grander scale, it is not so good to get used to "just accept" injustice, abuse, needless suffering and so on.

Of course, there is another, opposite, risk, namely when the same stimulus evokes ever bigger reactions (over-reactions). For the human race, that is probably just as bad as desensitizing, and for the individual it is definitely worse. What would be best is to stayed somewhere in the middle: aware of the problems, and committed to do something about it, but not overly involved emotionally.

Sounds very Zen, I hope. Now if I could only find that balance in my own life ...

Scarred for life

2009-11-15T09:36:00.006+01:00

The first time I read Richard Dawkins' assertion (in "The Selfish Gene") that physical scars help their (male) bearers attract potential mates because they indicate survival skills, I felt quite pleased, because I have lots of scars. At the time, I did not stop to think whether this was a valid conclusion; I just accepted it as unexpected good news. This morning under the shower, however, I realized that almost none of my scars count in the way Dawkins meant.

For one thing, most of them are not very visible, either because they have faded with time (the ones on my chin, from an accident when I was four and the one across my eyebrow, from when my face collided with a toilet door during student party) or because they are usually covered (I have several on my scalp and behind my ear and one on my knee from a car accident, one on my stomach from an operation when I was one) or both (the scratches on my back - long story, better left untold). I even have one that was hidden on purpose, by a well-intentioned surgeon who had obviously not read or believed the scar theory.

For another, my scars do not indicate the type of survival skills Dawkins meant (he was referring to the animal kingdom). There is of course nothing wrong with surviving accidents and operations (as I say in my song "Unfair", the alternative is worse),

but you could also argue that it would be better not to have accidents (who knows, I might be a Bermuda triangle on legs) or need operations. And of course, accidents and illness can leave you worse off (Nietsche's idea that "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" might be true collectively, on the level of the species, but does not necessarily apply to the individual), if only in the sense that they may also leave mental scars. No, the scars that really count in this context are battle scars.

In the world I live in, however, male survival depends on more than just physical prowess. People might still be impressed by muscles and Heidelberg duelling scars (which apparently are still quite popular!), but that really only counts in the initial stages of a relationship. Very soon after that, most males will have to prove they also have provider skills (either directly - a steady job, or indirectly - the qualities necessary to make money).

Luckily, I no longer need my scars for anything (I have built my nest already, and a very nice nest it is). But it is still a bit sad to have to trash yet another illusion ... as a general rule, I am all for truth and demystification. But sometimes it is nicer not to peek behind the curtain.

Life is a project

2009-11-14T21:27:00.006+01:00

These past few weeks I have had several occasions to yet again witness the parallelisms between my personal and professional life. As a project manager, this is not so odd, of course, because projects are all around, even if you are not completely obsessed with project management. One example: one Friday evening a few weeks back, my six-year old (who is very into arts and crafts) announced she wanted to make a pinball machine [expression of the need, in project management terms]. It didn't take long for me to figure out that she was not thinking of the kind that I used to play on as a teenager: she wanted something along the lines of a wooden one she had played with at her after-school activity center [project definition and scope].

I told her that it was much too late to start work, and she ran away to sulk in a corner [negotiation and prioritization]. So I said that although we couldn't start work, we could draw the basic design [drafting of preliminary functional requirements]. The next morning, she [in her capacity of project "owner" or "sponsor"] woke me at seven, insisting that we start work immediately. So we did. I explained [with a view to project planning], however, that we should not start directly on the wooden version, and that it would be better to make a cardboard one [a model or prototype] first. As we worked, she kept a close eye on [monitored] progress, and made several change requests along the way. The most important one was her insistence that the prototype be fully functional (a good case of project creep if I ever saw one). This included mounting the cardboard structure on a plank of wood which was raised at one end (to ensure the proper inclination) and attaching close-pins by way of flippers. The end result, though definitely not a work of art, did in fact pass the factory testing (by me, in my role of developer/implementer) and the preliminary user acceptance tests (my daughter/sponsor). Of course, I was now beginning to get worried that we had used up all our time [resources] on the prototype, and dreaded having to inform my sponsor. She however was not worried; she was happy with the prototype, especially after having shown it to her sister [phase II of the user acceptance testing], who was duly impressed. This also signaled the official end of the project (the sign-off consisting of a "Thank you, daddy" and a kiss and a hug).

The meta-society

2009-10-27T20:20:00.004+01:00

I have been struggling with a concept for which I am sure a word exists, but I don't know it. The concept is a bit like what you get when you place two mirrors face to face in such a way that you get reflections of reflections, but with the difference that these reflections can go on and on to infinity, until your head spins, while in my examples (see the list below) they are usually limited to a single repetition. More like an echo of an echo, in fact.

Humanities (language, art, etc.):

Songs about music
Plays about theater
Books about writing (and blogs on blogs)
Photos of photos (and paintings of paintings)
Talking about talking
Thinking about thinking
Learning to learn
Terminology about terminology

Business & IT:

Automating automation
Investing in investments
Managing project management (projects about projects)
Planning to plan
Estimating estimation
Evaluating evaluations
Information about information (meta-data)

Other/general

Having feelings about feelings
Obsessing about obsessions
Discriminating discrimination
Being judgmental about judging
Being addicted to addiction
Making lists of lists

There are a few exceptions: you can actually learn about learning to learn, and you can have feelings about having feelings about feelings, but I try not to think about those things too much, because - like reflections of reflections - they too make my head spin.

Postscript: just now, at work, I gave some input on giving input. It is contagious.

What's is a name

2009-10-20T21:54:00.005+02:00

I think I may have already made remarks, in one of my entries, about one of the many limitations of languages, namely that the same word may mean several different things. The other day I was confronted with it yet again while helping my 6-year-old with her homework. In the course of two simple exercises, we came across four homonyms. And of course, it didn't take her long to ask the "but why, daddy?" question. I explained that there are a lot of things in the world but only a limited number of words, so some words are used for different things (obviously, things are much more complex in reality, but the finer points of etymology and phonetic transcription are a bit much to explain to a six-year-old). She agreed with me that it would be nice, and much less confusing, if each word were to mean just one thing.

Which reminded me of the fact that I am in a band without a name. We have been talking about the name ever since the band was formed, four months ago, and have already considered and rejected some 40-50 ideas. Some were just plain stupid, of course (proving that you do not need much of a brain to do brainstorming) but quite a few were actually okayish, but were rejected because they get significant number of hits when Googled. Not that I think we have to be absolutely unique, but still: if you want to use the web for publicity purposes, you had better make sure your band's name comes in the top few hits, and that is very hard to do if someone else already occupies that spot.

I even Googled a few less serious ideas out of curiosity (like "Thinking out loud" and "Work in Progress" - two of my trademark phrases) but they already exist.

Several centuries ago, the Swedish botanist Carl Linneaus transposed what his father had done for his family (namely adopt a permanent last name) to taxonomy by introducing binominal nomenclature, thereby virtually solving, single-handedly, the problems of homonyms in the animal and plant kingdoms. Maybe I should go one step further and do the same for band names, e.g. by always adding the origin. In the case, I could call the band "Thinking out loud in Luxembourg" or "Work in progress in Luxembourg". There is just one problem: nobody will ever hit on something like that by accident, which means you have to be well-known before you can become well-known ...

You are what you drink

2009-08-27T13:46:00.005+02:00

I haven't yet had a chance to look them up (a polite way of saying I'm too lazy, and prefer the sound of my keyboard to that of my lips moving as I mouth the more difficult words of undoubtedly heavy academic texts), but I'm sure there are serious studies on the link between food and drink and other aspects of human civilization, such as religion and political system.
But instead of making this another illegible treatise, here is my little slurping and burping summary of Western history, as seen from the point of view of liquids.

It all started with water: the infant Democracy was raised on rain. Then, there was wine, which was great fun until it toppled the Roman Empire (the preservatives used in the wine apparently made them go mad). But the Catholic Church survived, and carried the wine, now sacred, along in silver and gold chalices. Islam tried to return to water (not much of a surprise here, considering their dry and dusty desert origins), and up north, where grapes don't grow, the beer belt belched forth the Protestants, quite a few of which escaped to plant their grain in another belt, in the U.S. And to complete my little overview, even further north and to the east, the Communist revolution was fuelled by "little water" (vodka).

Now of course, we all drink just about anything; the world has become one big drinks mixer. No wonder so many people's lives are on the rocks.

I'll have mine shaken, but not stirred, please.

Satellite dishes and foreigners

2009-08-25T20:19:00.002+02:00

An article I read a while back in "352" (an English language periodical in Luxembourg) about the difficulties some people experience in getting their neighbours to let them mount satellite dishes on their balconies prompted me to write a letter about the underlying causes for the problems. Here, in slightly changed form, are the contents of that letter.

The most-used argument against satellite dishes is aesthetic. I agree that they make city streets even more cluttered than they already are, but I do think that within 10 or 20 years they will cease to bother most of us, much in the same way we have learned to ignore other things that were once reviled as eye-sores (such as trains and cars at some point in the past).

I think, however, that their perceived ugliness is just the surface of the problem, and that if you dig just a little deeper, you will very quickly come up against a more general resistance to change, and the desire of most people to control their own environment. Both are very human and understandable traits, and as such of course very difficult to do anything about.

But matters become even more difficult (and emotional) when you add the link between satellite dishes and foreigners. This is a touchy subject, but an important one. Where I come from (the Netherlands), you can easily identify big-city lower-class neighbourhoods with high numbers of non-Dutch inhabitants by the number of satellite dishes. Here in Luxembourg, satellite dishes are not linked to class, but they are definitely more popular amongst foreigners than amongst locals.

The problem, in such cases, is not only the fact that satellite dishes call more attention to the presence of foreigners (a cause of concern or irritation for some), but also that these satellite dishes - being a direct link to their respective countries of origin - can be seen as an indication of their not wanting to integrate. Irrespective of whether this is true, I can say from personal experience that having access to sources of information in my own language certainly diminishes the need to integrate. During my 13 years here in Luxembourg, I have only reached a limited degree of proficiency in French, but know virtually no Luxembourgish, mainly because I did not need it in my professional life, and because I know I will not be here forever. But I completely understand Luxembourgers (and especially the older generation) who are less than happy with the increasing numbers of foreigners who cannot really communicate in any of the languages of the Grand Duchy, and would not want to do anything that would maintain that situation, or even make it worse.

Controlling emotions

2009-08-19T14:12:00.002+02:00

Something funny happened a while back. I got into an argument with someone about something that was not really very important, and it became quite heated. To me, it was so obvious that I was right, but he didn't seem to see my point of view. In the end, I spent several days after the argument fuming over it, and blaming the other person for my anger and frustration.

It took me quite a while to calm down and realise that - irrespective of who was right (me) or wrong (him) - the blame for my frustration and anger was all my own. And the funny thing was that - contrary to what I myself would have thought - accepting the blame made me feel better, not worse. But I couldn't figure out why, until a few days ago, when I realised that it is all about control. When I blame others for how I feel, I basically put them in control of my emotions, with of course very frustrating results. Accepting responsbility for my own emotions puts me back in control.

I am feeling so happy about this little discovery that I think I might go pick an argument with someone, just get some practice in controlling my own emotions. But it has to be relatively trivial. Ooooh, I know! I will try to convince the neighbour to stop practicing the piano at ten o'clock at night. And I will do so by practicing songs I do not know very well on my electric guitar, and aiming the amplifier towards the connecting wall, at the same time. That should get the discussion going quite well. If I can really control myself, we will soon be playing in four or five-part harmony: piano, guitar, doorbell, percussion (banging on the door when I don't answer the bell) and vocals (shouting).

Effort vs. results

2009-08-15T09:54:00.003+02:00

Question: should you reward people for their efforts, or for results?

This sounds very theoretical, but it can cause big dilemmas. When my daughter makes me a drawing that I don't think is very good, for example, I will thank her for the gift, and try to find something positive to say about it, but I will not exclaim "what a lovely drawing!" if it is obviously below her normal standard (or far below that of children in her age group) for two reasons: (1) because children need to learn to distinguish between what is good enough, and what is not, and the only way to learn this is feedback from others, and (2) because false praise (which my children will certainly recognize as such, me being terrible at lying) teaches children that insincerity is normal, which creates another, bigger problem down the road.

So I will probably try to tell her - with the necessary diplomacy - where the picture might be improved, i.e. I lean towards the results side. According to what I have been reading lately about improvement processes, it is probably better to focus more on the process and not the results, but I am probably too old-fashioned to do that.

But how about adults? Where I work, we have a punch-clock that keeps track of our presences and absences, the rule being that you clock in when you arrive in the morning, clock out for lunch, then clock back in after lunch, and clock out again when you leave. All of this is designed to make sure that everyone works (or at least is physically in the office) during a certain minimum number of hours each month. Which is basically a measurement of effort.

Some colleagues argue that the number of hours should not matter, because they can finish all their work quicker than others doing the same type of work by working faster/harder/smarter, and they are not happy to have to sit in the office just because someone else is not as efficient/smart/hardworking as they are. Which reminds me of a beautiful episode of Dilbert, where someone yet again wins the employee of the month award because of all the hours of unpaid overtime she spent compensating her own inefficiency.

If it were up to me, the "reward" for minimum effort and standard work is the paycheck, and people that produce results that exceed the norm get something extra (a compliment, a raise in pay, a promotion). I would definitely not reward extra effort that is counter-productive. Which is not to say I would penalize the above-cited "employee of the month", because it is up to management to guard against the worst mismatches between skill and responsibility. So instead of giving her the award, the pointy-haired boss should give up his bonuses.

If I ever get to be a manager, I won't have that problem: my hair is not pointy.

Taking things personally

2009-08-12T10:55:00.008+02:00

Lately, I have been thinking a bit about how people react to the actions of others (individuals, groups, or organisations), and more specifically about how sometimes, people (myself included) may get upset about relatively minor things and "take things personally" even though that is not in their own interest. Examples abound: the world is full of drivers who obviously don't know the traffic rules, or worse, couldn't care less, people who make your life miserable by their constant nagging/whining/complaining etc. etc., rude and inconsiderate sales staff, incompetent colleagues, argumentative and incooperative civil servants, and family members whose very presence is an insult and an injury (just kidding, and please don't murder me in my sleep!).

But the main focus here is not on the perpetrator/initiator of the action, but on how it may in fact be possible to change the way you react by analysis. Here are some elements to consider, grouped as actions and reactions.

In the category actions, we need to consider

the focus or target of the action, if any: was it directed at you as an individual, at you as a member of a certain social or racial group, or was the action not actually directed at anyone?
the intent, if any: were the consequences for others part of the plan, was it just thoughtlessness or an inability to see the effect on others, or were such effects considered irrelevant (an example of which would be the oft-used phrase by silver screen gangsters "just business" - as if that makes you feel any better about being maimed or killed)?
(in some cases, such as insults): the type and intensity of the stimulus or action: was this normal or extreme behaviour, by the current culture’s or subculture’s standards?

In the category reactions, we need to consider

whether your/my interpretation of the stimulus was correct (did the person really call me a "blurque", or was I just hearing things that are not there? Was it perhaps a joke? Was it in fact not aimed at me, but at humanity in general, and if so, should that make a difference?), all of which in turn helps determine whether your/my reaction was appropriate;
the type of threat: is it just a question of personal pride or self-image, or is there a more tangible threat to your interests (e.g. your job, chances for promotion, etc.); and
the intensity of the reation: superficial, or does the hurt go deeper, even to the point of making you doubt your own abilities. And if so, is that really the fault of the other, or is it your own fault, for feeling so insecure?

On the whole, I would say that trying to answer the questions posed by each of the above should usually help to calm you down. It might take an hour, but it gets quicker with practice, and it is worth it. (Basically, this is an extended version of the “count to ten” technique, with the added value that you might actually discover something you didn’t realise you knew). Of course, that only works if you really try to be truthful, and that takes courage and some degree of calm. If you are really furious, you probably need a sauna and a massage first.

Mobility and social change

2009-08-09T17:41:00.011+02:00

The politic-economical history of our part of the world can then be summarized (and simplified) as (1) nomadic tribal life, (2) agricultural civilizations (including the Celts, Greeks, Romans, and other "classic" civilizations, and the feudal system of the Dark and Middle Ages), (3) industrial civilization, and (4) the information age.

In an earlier draft of this entry, I argued that what we now call the information age is not essentially different from previous history, because discoveries were already at the root of many historic events, including the change from each of the three phases mentioned. But then I realized that the information age does distinguish itself in one important aspect, namely the intended audience of information. In the past, although the most important ideas (making fire and weapons, the wheel, spoken language and writing, etc. etc.), probably spread like wildfire, they were not meant for everyone. Certainly within organized civilizations, information was guarded carefully within the various upper and middle classes (rulers, administrators, soldiers, priests, merchants and artisans).

The first clear example of a break in this tradition that I can think of (I am sure there are others) are the translations of the Bible into German, English, etc., thereby making it accessible to the common man. This was of course instrumental in the rise of the Protestants, and the fall of the Catholic Church. And over the course of the industrial age, the level of schooling for the middle and lower classes rose bit by bit, until we now have a situation where there is a certain degree of upward mobility. And I just saw the culmination of a very recent one, namely a proposal to give all U.K. citizens access to their own medical data, via Internet. You could in fact summarize recent socio-political developments as an upgrading of the lower classes (abolishment of slavery, voting rights for all in most countries), and a downgrading the upper ones (either in terms of power - royalty that is just there for show - or in terms of the amount of respect they command), and both are in my view very closely linked to increased access of information for the masses.

So why did I call this entry "mobility and change" (and not "information and change")? Because the exchange (or "mobility", if you will) of information is only one important driving force behind social change. An other, possibly equally important one is physical mobility. In the beginning, individual humans were limited to the distance they could walk. Then, they learned to ride a horse. Then came the wheeled transport (carts, trains, cars) and aerial transport (balloons, the airplane, etc). Each development increased the rate of change. And here again we see a similar trend as with information, with mass transport coming into its own in the last hundred years or so, starting (in some countries at least) with trains, and followed by cars and now cheap air travel. And this has had a profound effect on society. Language barriers have restricted mobility somewhat, but even that is becoming less and less of an issue. In the end, this mobility, and the ever-more global economy (or mobility of goods), will almost certainly contribute to the "harmonization" or "levelling" of cultures and the loss of certain aspects thereof, and of languages. This may not be such a bad thing as some make it out to be, but it does give pause, I hope.

One might be tempted to conclude that we have reverted to the hunter-gatherer stage. But there is an important difference: nowadays, families might move (and in some cases only one member the family), but not whole tribes. And the cost of this refound freedom is loss of social cohesion for society at large and rootlessness for the individual. Personally, I have moved house 15 times, and have never lived in the same house for more than 7 years in row, and though this has been an advantage in terms of language skills and the scope of my outlook on life, I do miss having long-term relationships that most people take for granted.

Sins and virtues

2009-07-31T18:28:00.003+02:00

I had wanted to call this item "the seven sins and virtues", but in fact, I only have six on offer.

It's a long story. Two weeks ago, my wife gave our children a large fake-ancient keyring, with seven fake-ancient keys. Like most children, our children follow the general maxim that "any present is a good present", but in this case they didn't really know what to think. My wife quickly invented something about doorways and secrets and magic but, also being my kids, they demanded a much more tangible and rational explanation. So the problem was passed on to me, the idea being that I would invent a story about the seven keys.

I soon hit on the idea of writing about the seven virtues (they are definitely not old enough for a story about the seven sins), and happily set off in search of web-based wisdom on the subject. Within a matter of hours I had enough information to start. I collected all the so-called virtues (modesty, prudence, beauty, chastity, etc.) I could find - in the end, I had about 100 - in a single document, printed that out, and then cut out each virtue and started sorting them. The end result of this exercise, which again took several hours, spread out over several days/sorting sessions, was the identification of clusters of related virtues. More importantly, the sorting allowed me to refine my own personal definition of a virtue (namely by excluding good qualities that are mostly genetic, such as health, strength, intelligence, etc.) and to also exclude values that I consider outmoded (mostly also religious values). Out of the original eight, I now have six left. Here they are, not in any particular order:

KNOWLEDGE
attention, focus, awareness (incl. of self), consciousness, discernment, sensitivity, perceptiveness
curiosity, love of learning, knowledge (incl. of self), understanding, intuition, foresight

GETTING THINGS DONE
enthusiasm, passion, hopefulness, optimism, motivation, commitment, dedication, determination, responsiveness
caution, prudence
efficiency
communication skills
diligence, industriousness
fortitude, courage
patience, perseverance, tenacity, resilience, stress-resistance, endurance
purposefulness
assertiveness, self-respect, confidence, autonomy, independence, self-reliance
flexibility, adaptability

HUMANITY
caring, mercy, nurturing, benevolence
consideration, thoughtfulness, tactfulness, discretion, courteousness, respectfulness (of others)
forgiveness
friendliness, kindness, gentleness, lovingness
generosity, hospitality, charity, sharing
sympathy, empathy, compassion
cooperativeness, helpfulness, altruism, unselfishness

JUSTICE
obedience, morality, sense of ethics
judgement, priotisation, decisiveness
equity, fairness, impartiality, justice
honor, integrity
faithfulness, fidelity, loyality
dependability, trustworthiness, responsibility
sincerity, honesty, openness, candor, truthfulness

TEMPERANCE
balance
humility, modesty, moderation, temperance
restraint, self-control, self-discipline

TRANSCENDANCE
appreciation, thankfulness
acceptance, contentment
detachment, equanimity, sense of humor, sense of perspective
wisdom

Now, if I can only find a way to turn this into a children's story ...

Cold turkey (internet style)

2009-07-27T08:49:00.004+02:00

Lately, there have been a lot of coincidences in my life. Of course I know that most coincidences are really just the result of heigthened awareness of something (suddenly seeing things that were there all along), but still. The other day, I started investigating the seven virtues, with the idea of perhaps using them in a story. That very same day, on t.v., "click on-line" had an item on a computer game that used the seven virtures and vices.

And yesterday, while cleaning up some old books, I came across a letter of someone I met once, more than 30 years ago. Out of curiosity, I tried finding him on the Internet, but didn't. I did find several references to a woman with the same last name, who was apparently a well-known authority on computer addiction, and had lately been working on Internet addiction.

That very evening my router and modem died, and I was able to experience Internet withdrawal symptoms* first hand. It is terrible. So terrrible, that I am writing this entry from my place of work (a definite no-no in my book, but addicts will stop at nothing to feed their addiction ...)

*I first wrote "cold turkey" but later realized that in fact, it was more like being in a methadon program, because I still had access to a watered-down substitute version of Internet at work.

Postscript: I am back on-line again. My drug dealer/internet provider gave me a new router and modem, and it took me all of ten nerve-racking minutes to be up and running again. Sigh!

Communication problems

2009-07-17T12:56:00.003+02:00

One of my (many, many) pet peeves is lack of clarity in written or oral expression. In the last few weeks, the issue has come up several times. At work, I usually spend a lot of time making my professional emails as clear as possible. I do this not so much as a matter of principle or courtesy to the reader, but more to avoid misunderstandings, which are very inefficient. Even so, the other day, I used my own mental shorthand in an email. As I hit the “send” button, I knew that there was something wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem, and I had already spent more than two hours whittling it down to a more palatable size, and needed to send it. It was not long before I got a request for clarification.

At home, people often assume that things will be better: the combination of shared experiences and the hours of practice often make it possible to communicate certain things very effectively. But other times domestic communication, and especially between partners, can be a complete disaster. My personal collection includes vagueness as an art form (“could you give me that thing from over there, honey?”) and the unfinished thought (as in “I was thinking that on Sunday we could …” followed by a long, totally meaningless silence).

I blame familiarity. Not that I would go as far as to call this kind of laziness “contempt”, but it is a bit like working in a laboratory with dangerous substances. After a while, you tend to forget how dangerous the substances are, and you start getting sloppy. Please note that I am not trying to compare family members with dangerous substances (although some are), just that you should take care not to assume that others will know what you mean just because you know what you mean. 20 years of marriage does not a mind reader make.

Of course, effective communication really is a lot of work. In my case, I have the added difficulty of having to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries, but even within the same language and culture communication it can be more effort than most people are willing to put into it. But – and here I return to one of my hobby horses – it is again a question of finding the right balance between the (often illusionary) short term gain and the long term advantage. Taking the effort to word things in such a way that they not only *can* be understood, but are very difficult to misunderstand, is good practice at work and home alike.

Now all I need do is find the correct cost/benefit ratio …

Getting what you want

2009-07-15T17:10:00.006+02:00

This morning, sitting by the side of the pool, I saw human society in a nutshell. In and around the pool were children of different ages, watched over by several adults (myself included). Most of the time, the children swam and played happily. But ever so often, conflict would break out, e.g. over a certain toy. When it did, I could see the children apply a whole arsenal of tactics to get what they wanted. These tactics fall into two main categories: autonomous action, and recurring to an authority (a parent, other adult, or possibly an older child).

Autonomous actions can be split into physical actions, the most direct one being simply grabbing whatever it is you want. Or, if you are not strong or quick enough, you can try distracting the opponent first, then grabbing (best of course being a real distraction that allows one to safely claim that the other was no longer playing with the toy, but if that doesn't work, an unexpected poke in the eye can also be quite distracting). There are however two problems with the above "solutions": the risk of painful repraisal by the child who had the toy first, and the risk of one of the adults seeing you and intervening, by either taking away the toy again, or worse, by imposing punishment for bad behaviour.

(Of course, there is always the possibility of waiting for the other to lose interest in the toy, and grabbing it then, but that is an adult solution. When you are young, five minutes can be an eternity when every cell in your body is screaming for the surfboard/water pistol/ball etc.)

The second group of autonomous actions can be grouped together as "negotiating". But there is negotiating and negotiating. Usually, the child will start with a simple statement of what he or she wants, but this can range from the relatively polite request (can I have that now?), to a flat statement of fact (I want that!), to quite demanding (Gimme that!). When that doesn't work, and depending on their relationship to their opponent, they can resort to cajoling, pleading and arguing (in which case the central point is often an appeal to the other's sense of fairness), crying (attempt at emotional manipulation), or threatening (which includes threatening to tell the parents). And then there is the more rational type of negotiating, which usually includes a compromise or trade-off. Of course, this too is rife witjust h manipulation and power games, with older children often fooling the younger ones into accepting less than fair conditions, but it is definitely a step forward from grabbing what you want.

And then there is the other main option, which is recurring to an authority. In doing so, children apply most of the tactics just mentioned. The only difference is that adults are easier to manipulate emotionally. For little girls, crying usually does wonders to make a parent give you what you want (and hopefully at the expense of the other child); for little boys, anger is usually considered more appropriate. Of course, some parents are quite good at recognizing theatrics, but even those can't always be bothered to get to the bottom of an issue, the end result often being the short-term solution: grabbing the toy away from whoever has it, and yelling at your children to stop yelling.

Of course, what they should really do is teach their children how to negotiate fairly, and offer them help in the form not of decisions, but of ideas and alternatives. In the long run, that would definitely increase the total amount of peace and quiet. The problem is that that is really a lot of work. And work is the last thing on your mind when you are relaxing in the shade by the pool.

I think a lot of the people (read also classes/nations) are relaxing by the side of the pool.

Holidays

2009-07-12T10:29:00.002+02:00

Just a quick note to let both my regular readers know that my recent absence is not laziness but lack of Internet access.

More on things I love to hate

2009-06-27T18:32:00.021+02:00

In one of my previous entries, I listed a few "things I love to hate", in an aside. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about the common denominator between them. But it's more fun to let you, the reader, try to figure it out yourself. Here are, in more or less random order, some of the things I love to hate.

filter cigarettes
alcohol-free beer
decaf coffee
sugar substitutes
sugar and caffeine-free cola

perfume
high heels
make-up

breast implants
botox lips

OK, the last two are a bit of a give-away: everything on the list is about "faking it". The first set are all foodstuffs where we have taken out the key ingredient. This may be useful for those among us who want to stop smoking, drinking, going on sugar highs or getting too fat, but they should be temporary solutions, not permanent fixtures in our lives. If you want to avoid the risks of tobacco, stop smoking (I know it's hard, but it can be done), if you are worried about caffeine or alcohol, drink tea or water, and if you, like me, are worried about sugar, find a healthy substitute, not this artificial stuff with unknown side effects.

The second set are things women do - on purpose/consciously or not - to increase their attractiveness. Perfume, when used properly, can smell very nice, but does make it impossible to detect the natural smells, which can be quite important. According to a BBC programme I saw some time ago, smell is one of the most important crtieria for deciding on potential partners. High heels force the hips into a position that makes them look bigger, and big, tilted hips is interpreted as a symbol of fertility. Naturally red, enlarged lips and dark areas around women's eyes are also signs of fertility. In modern western society, we are bombarded by good-smelling, well-dressed women in high heels and make-up: more and more, this is standard office attire. I think this is a shame for several reasons, one also because it makes it all the more difficult to read the real signs when they are there. Personally, I prefer not be fooled, confused or manipulated.

As for the last two items on the list, all I can say is do it very well or not at all. There's nothing more disappointing than discovering how a trick works while the magic show is still on.

Not enough words to go round

2009-06-23T20:27:00.002+02:00

Vocabulary, is what we need my friend
Vocabulary, is what we need
Vocabulary, is what we need, my friend
but there are not enough words to go round ...

The other day - for a reason that now escapes me, but definitely made sense at the time - I had to explain to my daughter of five what homonyms are. I find it very useful, explaining things to children, because you have to reduce things to their essence without oversimplifying. In the case of homonyms, my explanation basically came down to the observation that we do not have enough words to describe everything, so we often use the same word to mean very different things. The examples I gave to her included the Dutch word "zei" ("said"), which is pronounced exactly the same way as the pronoun "zij" (which means "she" or "her"). Luckily, she didn't ask why adults are so stupid as not to have language where each word means only one thing, and there is a word for each thing, because that would have been impossible to explain.

Take for example two very important words: "rule" and "law". Both can be used to mean "something that naturally happens more or less the same way repeatedly", such as in "laws of nature", or - more often in the context of human society - a behavior we would like to either impose or penalize, such as in "rules of conduct". How is it that we cannot invent some words without this built-in ambiguity? Or the word right, for example, which can mean quite a few different, including "correct" (as in "I am right") and "something you can lay a claim to" ("I have the right to remain silent"). And the list goes on and on. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the 5000 most common words in the English language probably have an average of 2-3 meanings each, or more. The average is presumably a lot lower for specialist jargon, but even there, you will find this problem: the word "pitch", for example, has three different meanings in aviation alone.

So how do go about carving a masterpiece of meaning, if words are such blunt tools? The answer, of course, is by creating context, or combining words with other words. This does not completely eradicate the possibility of error, but it does reduce it significantly. In the case of the example I gave to my daughter, for example, I had to admit the theoretical possibility that someone hearing "hij zei" ("he said") might actually understand "he zij" ("he she"), but in most cases, the second combination of words wouldn't mean anything, and listeners would reject it as a possibility without even really thinking about it.

To be continued ....

A quagmire of grey in the land of right and wrong

2009-06-14T11:45:00.006+02:00

This morning, I posted an entry with some pretty heavy life-and-death stuff on how relative right and wrong is, and how what is right for some may be wrong for the rest, and vice versa. Usually, once I finish something, it will leave me alone. But no this time. As I walked down to the park near my house, I was struck by yet another example of the conflict of interests between the individual and the society at large. What I saw was a car parked in a space reserved for invalids.

This space for invalids was created about two years ago, but merging two existing parking spaces into one and placing a sign. I suspect that the original reason for creating the parking space was to either make it easier for invalids to access the park (in which the prohibition should coincide with the opening hours of the park), or the hotel nearby (which is open 24 hours a day), or both. Whatever the intention, there are often car. But judging from the number of cars without invalid stickers that park there, it is obvious that many people interpret it to mean that it is prohibited to park there during working hours.

The car I saw this morning (Sunday) was presumably yet another example of this. Being a "good" citizen who normally respects traffic rules and regulations, I was very tempted (as I often am) to check with the parking police, to see whether or not it is acceptable to park there, knowing full well that that might mean that the car parked there now might be towed off. But I won't. Not because I have any sympathy for the owner - I can even derive a certain amount of glee from seeing a poorly maintained car with French license plates be carted off to the impound - but because (and here comes the ethical dilemma) every car parked there, legally or otherwise, means better chances for me of finding a space. The parking situation is not exactly dire in our neighbourhood, but every space counts.

Now I expect some of you will feel some righteous indignation: have I no sympathy or respect for invalids?!? Of course I do. But in the more than two years since the creation of the special parking space, I have not once seen an invalid park there. Nor have I ever seen an illegally parked car being hauled off, which suggests to me that it does not happen very often. So, rather than petitioning city hall (possibly in vain) for the removal of a parking space which is probably hardly ever used by invalids, I allow the situation to continue.

One last note: it is funny to see how emotional people (myself included) can get about traffic regulations. In fact, I suspect that people can actually get more emotional about small, "trivial" issues than about important ones, because they feel that the small ones should not be an issue in the first place. So in fact, they not only get upset about the issue, they also get upset about getting upset.

Post scriptum (almost a week later now): you know how it never rains when you remember to take an umbrella, or how the superslow supermarket cash-out line suddenly starts moving quite briskly the moment you change to another line? Well, this morning, there was an invalid parked in the invalid space. All I needed do was complain and - as Deepak Chopra puts it - the universe will take care of it.

Moral relativism

2009-06-13T16:26:00.006+02:00

While reading Obama's "The Audicity of Hope" I came across the concept "moral relativism", a term I didn't know existed, but which is a nice concise description of how I see things. It's nice to find a glove that fits: I am definitely a moral relativist. In fact, in spite of my general aversion of any extreme or fanatical position, I would say I am such a relativist that you might start to wonder whether I can distinguish between right and wrong at all. I think I can, but to me, right and wrong only exist in context. I am not talking so much about how ethics change with time (although they do), but more about the fact that there are different levels. There is right and wrong for the individual, the family, the group or class, the nation, the species ... and we spend a good part of our lives trying to resolve the conflicts that arise as a result.

Of course, it would be much more convenient to have universal rules of conduct, but I have yet to find them. Take our attitude towards life, for example. As a general principle, we want to protect it. This is seen as "only natural", and the drive is so strong that I still feel bad about a few tadpoles that I caught with my daughter some weeks ago, and that died because I didn't know how to take care of them. But there are situations where the general "life is holy" principle might be justifiably suppressed. I have great deal of sympathy, for example, for rape victims who do not want to have the child of their aggressor, especially since in most cases, it will mean taking care of them for years. And I have even more sympathy for the mothers of children who are the result of incest, where - in addition to having a constant reminder of what can only have been a traumatic experience - there is a significant risk of having a child with serious health problems. And I am not at all sure that life should be prolonged as long as possible, no matter what the condition of the patient. So here we have a conflict between the group interest, and the interests of one or a few individuals.

Or the disagreement about immigration, which arises from a number of different conflicts at the same time, namely between the rich (who stand to benefit from cheap labour for menial jobs), the immigrants (higher income), the lower class in the receiving country (unhappy about the competition from the outside), both nations (evening out of the income differences), the human race as a species (mixing of genes, when the immigrants stay and interrmarry), etc. etc.

I have no solutions for the above problems, but I would like to suggest that we try to avoid being unduly swayed by our emotions when deciding on them. Not that I am against emotion per se: as a survival mechanism, it has served us well for millions or years. But there are at least three problems with emotions: they are very imprecise and error-prone (having been badly frightened by a clown as a child may leave you with a lasting fear of all clowns), and they are or can be "contagious" (which can lead to mass hysteria, for example), and, like everything that has been hard-coded by evolution, they are slow to adapt to changing circumstances. In fact, thought is the only survival mechanism that can keep up with change. Which is why we rely on it so much. But there is a problem with thought as well: it not only helps us keep up with change, it can actually cause it. But that is a different story ...

Body language and ethics

2009-06-07T09:59:00.006+02:00

As an offshoot of a course I just did, I am reading the Definitive Guide to Body Language. I have some reservations about some of the explanations as to why we do certain things, but it does contain many interesting observations, and some advice that may prove very useful as well. On several occasions, the authors mention a cause-and-effect loop between a pose or gesture and the emotion behind it, and suggest that you can change how you feel by changing your body language. Research has shown, for example, that smiling can improve your spirits, even if you do it on purpose, without feeling particularly happy. It seems likely that similar relationships will also exist between other emotions and the accompanying body language (frowning, adopting an aggressive or defensive pose, etc.)

Of course, this is just a one-person version of a two- or more-person phenomenon that the authors call "mirroring", and which consists of - usually unconsciously - copying the body language and accompanying emotions of others. Of course, most people would associate this kind of behaviour with fluffy white scatterbrained animals that bleat but I don't mind much when the result is bonding and reinforcement of positive emotions. I am however much less charmed by the flip-side of this coin, namely lynch-mobs and mass paranoia.

But what I am really interested in, is this. If - like most things that have been around a long time - there is an evolutionary reason for this mechanism, then it means that, however much we may like to look down on it, copying the behaviour of others is beneficial in the long run (which is the time-frame within which evolution works). Of course, it is possible that the negative behaviour serves a purpose all of its own, but I suspect that it is just a question of the benefits of positive reinforcement outweighing the negative aspects.

I do see certain similarities with a theory described by Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene", about how a society of "sheep" can tolerate a certain number of wolves, but that if the percentage for whatever reason surpasses a certain threshold, the balance shifts completely to the other (baaaaahhhd) side, and you get a society of wolves, with only a few sheep. All of which brings me to a very convoluted conclusion, namely that what we normally define as "good" and "positive" corresponds, albeit roughly, with "the long run" and "the majority".

Of course, being an individual with only another 30-40 years to go, I would rather be a wolf than a sheep ...

Parallelisms and projection

2009-06-05T19:32:00.005+02:00

I think I may have mentioned in an earlier blog entry all the parallelisms that I see between my personal and my professional life.

Now, I realize that in fact, there is something else going on: it is not so much that there are parallelism, it is my own brain, projecting elements from my professional life (which after all accounts for a significant portion of my activities) onto my private life. Knowing (or at least suspecting) that I was going to be appointed project manager of a small project, for example, I read some books on project management, and suddenly, I started seeing everything around me, including my kids, my hobbies, my social life, and even my life as a whole as projects, with a specific scope, objectives and time-frame.

Next, I started researching databases, to be able to converse with our database designers without looking like a complete idiot. And suddenly, I am at my home computer, happily creating a relational database, standardized to the 3rd normal form (and wishing I could go to the sixth) with the names, addresses, telephone numbers and family ties of my friends and family. And just this week, I went on a management course, and suddenly, I see my kids as staff members, in need of Belbin analysis, and who need to be coached and motivated.

Now some people might accuse me of "having a one-track mind" or of "taking my work home". I am much kinder to myself. I think this is simply my way of processing information. I discovered a long time ago that I learn much better not by trying to memorize abstract concepts or rules, but by applying what I learnt as quickly as possible and/or linking it up to my daily situation, which often means applying it in places other than where was originally intended. And doing this also helps me around another (admittedly slightly strange) hurdle, namely the fact that awareness of the learning process can actually make it impossible for me to learn anything. When I was trying to improve my French, I had to get books that I wanted to read anyway. Getting a book purely for the purpose of improving my French would have defeated the purpose.

The problem, of course, with getting books that I wanted to read is that on the whole, they are a bit more difficult than the book you might choose to improve your language skills. But I persist, and I have good hope that soon (that is to say, within the next five years or so) I will have finished the French book that I chose to improve my French skills.

BTW I have another defense against the accusation that I take my work home: I also "take my home to work" by which I mean that I also export skills and knowledge from my personal life to the office. Settling arguments between my kids, for example, has taught me how to remain calm and keep perspective when everyone else is upset and/or unreasonable, a very useful quality in meetings.

Enough for today. I am a bit tired.

A tale of two showers

2009-05-30T17:36:00.009+02:00

Warning to friends and family who sometimes come to visit: this entry is not for your eyes. Do not read it.

The house I live in has two showers. Shower number one is a proper shower, standing all by itself in a separate shower room, with its nice semi-circular see-through shower cabin with sliding doors, a shower head that can be adjusted in various ways and that stays put once adjusted, lots of pressure, the right kind of ventilation, and wooden floors that are a joy to walk on. Normally, I start my workday with a short but very pleasant shower in shower number one. It takes me about two seconds to get the temperature and pressure just right (the two are co-dependant: if you increase the pressure, you also have to increase the temperature to achieve the same sensation, in the same way as the wind-chill factor links wind and the sensation of cold), and then I spend somewhere between 3 and 7 minutes, just enjoying the shower and waking up.

There is only one disadvantage to shower number one: it is right next to the guest room. This means (he intones, with the type of voice that is normally used for the trailers of Hollywood horror movies where they try to compensate for the lack of plot by increasing the advertising budget) that when we have guests, I "magnanimously" let them use it, while I am reduced to using shower number two. Shower number two is in fact not really a shower, but a bath with a showerhead attached to the wall at the far end (the end where the taps are), a shower curtain that gets in the way (I hate the way it can cling to your body, and especially if the water on it has already gone cold), poor adjustment facilities (at its very highest, it just about comes level with my neck, which means I have to squat down to rinse my face and head), very little pressure and tiles with a very practical but not exactly sensual anti-slip surface.

Now you might think that I sound like a spoilt and pampered child, but as a parent, I know how important it is for children to express, not suppress, their feelings, and I think this is probably true for adults as well. This is not to say, of course, that you should necessarily act on those feelings. Acknowledging how you feel about something in fact often makes it unnecessary to take any action whatsoever. In my case, I hope that whining publicly about the loss of my lovely, wonderful morning shower will help me accept the situation more easily.

[clock ticking, time passing slowly ...] Nope, not working.

So on to the second line of defense, which is to imagine (but not carry out) the action you might take as a result of those feelings, the idea being that putting these ideas into words will help you see how stupid they are which - again - makes it unnecessary to do anything. In my case, the most logical action would be to kick the guests out.

[clock ticking, time passing slowly, me imagining dragging the guests physically out of the house ...] Yep! That makes me feel a lot better.

There is just one problem with expressing your feelings: it might be good for you on a personal, individual level, but your social life may suffer. Assuming that virtually no-one heeded the warning at the beginning of this blog (a very likely scenario) I can now count on flak/fall-out from ex-readers who used to stay at my place. Which is a shame, because I did enjoy their company, in spite of the shower situation.

I would take a shower to calm my nerves, but I have guests ....

Objective and subjective

2009-05-27T20:12:00.003+02:00

I was going to write some more about hair, inspired by a discussion at work as to who had what kind of hair, and the fact that there are personal and cultural differences between the precision with which one might describe hair colors. I am sure whole generations of Dutch, for example, have been severely traumatised (not) by the fact that they themselves may have been of the opinion that their hair was golden brown, strawberry blond, deep chestnut, or a lighter shade of pale, but that according to their passports, they were either blond, brown, red or black, and nothing else. And I had wanted to link that to a discussion of objective and subjective perception.

But before I started writing, I checked out the meaning of objective and subjective, and came to the conclusion that etymology was much more interesting than hair color (or the perception thereof). But I will not bore you with information that you can easily find for yourself in any number of online dictionaries. What I have to offer instead is my only little collection of common English words containing the string "ject", which is derived from the latin "jacere" (to throw). Here they are:

eject, projectile,
reject, rejection, abject, dejected
subject, subjective, object, objective, adjective, conjecture

If we look only at the meanings that first come to mind, the first line of my list contains words that are mostly still used to refer to physical movement, and are therefore closest to the original concept of throwing. The second group segues gently from movement to emotion (not such a strange link, considering that the word emotion is a derivative of the word motion). In the third line the idea of movement has mostly been lost, and we have entered the world of abstraction.

I am sure this is leading somewhere, but I am not quite sure where yet. When it comes to me, I will come back and add it here. For the moment, I am just taking it as a demonstration of how very rich (and therefore also confusing) language can be.

Bad hair week

2009-05-25T17:30:00.006+02:00

OK, I admit it. I have a hidden agenda. Although of course it is no longer hidden, now that I am telling you all about it. The agenda, or long-term goal, of this blog is to understand life, the universe and everything (and if you don't recognize that quote please check out Douglas Adams' work). And I propose to do so by examining the world around me, and try to reach appropriate generalizations/recognize patterns where I can. The general framework for this examination is the input (perception) - processing (analyzing) - output (conclusion) cycle that I must have mentioned in some earlier entry.

Attentive readers will by now have started wondering how the heck this is supposed to connect with the title of this entry ("bad hair week"). But never fear, there is always a connection. And it is not even a six-degrees-of-separation (or the Kevin-Bacon game) type of connection. It is very simple, and obvious (to me, at least).

All last week, I walked around with phenomenously bad hair. I have no idea how or why this happened, although I am not ruling out a combination of a freak growth event (it suddenly seems to be much longer than it was only a week ago), the change in the weather, and the fact that some days ago, I took a nap right after having washed my hair. But that is not the point. (If it were, I would probably refer to Stanislaw Lem's "The chain of chance", but it's not, and I won't) The point is that it made me look a bit like Boris Johnson (the mayor of London).

And the problem with that is that I really don't want to look like Boris Johnson, because of his reputation of speaking his mind without regard to the consequences. Now I am not saying he is the idiot some journalists make him out to be - I am quite sure the media milk each of his bloopers for what they're worth - but the point is that I do not want to look like him, because of the risk of "guilt by association".

Which brings me back to my no-longer-much-of-a-secret agenda, namely that one bad hair week can be used to demonstrate not just one but two of the ailments that we all suffer from. The first is the way our brain can link up two completely disparate issues such as "Boris Johnson hair" and stupidity, and act as if there were a causal relationship between the two, and the second is how perception can be more important that reality.

Recently, I mentioned this preoccupation of mine to an Englishman, who looked at me for a moment then said that in his opinion, I didn't look like Boris Johnson at all, but that I reminded him of Greg Norman, the Australian golf legend who also goes by the name of "Great White Shark". Obviously, this made me very happy (especially after I checked him out on the Internet).

Last note on this: my wife says it doesn't matter who I look like, I need a haircut.

Devaluation blues

2009-05-20T19:15:00.003+02:00

All around me I see signs of the second law of thermodynamics - the one that says that things have a tendency to lose steam, run down, decay - expressed in human society. The examples that spring immediately to mind are schooling, money, words, and food, each of which seem to be worth less with the passing of time. But in fact, each case is very different.

First of all, I think that schooling is on the whole and in the longer run probably not getting worse, as everybody loves to say ("in my time, ..."), but better. Yes, there will be temporary ups and downs (in the order of magnitude of years, decades, and even generations), but collectively we know more now than a hundred years ago, and much more than several thousands of years ago, and schooling has definitely played a part in this. (This is by the way not contrary to the second law of thermodynamics: it acknowledges the existence of local anomalies, all it is concerned with is the the entropy of the system as the whole).

As for money (and the price of houses), its value goes up and down too. Of course, it has gone down now for a very long time, but this, I think, is linked to the fact that our economy is almost completely built on the idea that you have to grow to survive, which in fact is not necessarily true. There is also such a thing as stasis, and it might be good if we were to embrace that idea.

I already mentioned the devaluation of words in a previous entry, although I was talking specifically of curse words. But the same happens to any emotionally charged word, such as those indicating race, ethnic origin, culture, sexual orientation, etc. In the west, we have been obsessed with this long before the term "political correctness" was coined, as is evidenced by the long succession of names for migrant workers in Dutch society over the past fifty or sixty years.

And then we have food (and other consumables), which is suffering from the entropy of over-processing. It is like "overproducing" a record: there comes a point when every attempt at improving something just makes it worse. And I think we reached that point with food quite a while back. Here is my personal things-I-love-to hate list: decaf coffee, low-tar low-nicotine cigarettes, beer without alcohol, cola without sugar, hamburgers without fat, mayonnaise without eggs. (I could go on, but I am beginning to lose my appetite).

Last but not least, life itself is becoming less sacred. The Catholic Church may not yet realize it, but we have come to the point where having humongous families is no longer an option, or at least, not for all of us (I recently read that having large families is becoming a status symbol among rich American suburbanites, but I imagine this is just another local anomaly, which will iron itself out in the end).

The power of words

2009-05-19T21:24:00.006+02:00

In the beginning was the Word ... (John 1.1, King James Bible).

I have always been fascinated with that line. It shows just how important words are to us. Of course, the heavens and the earth were created first, but even in the very first lines of the Genesis, it seemed worth noting what God called things: first God made light, then he divided the light from the darkness (a bit categorical, black-and-white thinking if you ask me) and then - drum roll, abated breath - he called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And a bit later he takes the trouble to call the dry land "Earth", the gathering together of the water "seas", etc. etc.

A more scientific-minded person might phrase things differently, and might maintain that the word was the beginning of civilization. A recent study (the details of which, unfortunately, I have forgotten) reported a correlation between increasing size of our brain and the increasing use of language, and suggested that it might be a case of positive reinforcement (the use of language being both cause and result of the increased brain capacity).

This was a study over many eons. I have not yet heard of any such correlation within an individual human life-span, so I am going to assume that my bigger-than-average head is not related to my preoccupation with words. (My wife, BTW, is always very happy to point out to me that there is no one-on-one correlation between the size of the skull and the size of the brain, nor even between the size of the brain and intelligence, and I am afraid I am going to have to concede her that. But I digress. Back to the power of words).

When I was a child, we used to say "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me", as a sort of magic incantation against psychological pressure. It never helped me much, though: I have always been more worried about and hurt by words than by acts. Of course, maybe this is just me: maybe I am like the proverbial oversensitive princess who tosses and turns all night because of the pea under the many mattresses. But the mere fact that there is a saying indicates to me that I am not alone in this. Wars have probably been waged over a few words.

Of course, there is also the positive side, as I have mentioned in an earlier entry. Expressing thoughts in words can help clarify and even accept things. (A different, but related power is that of the blogger: say the wrong thing to a blogger, and he or she will hang you out to dry. They might not name names, but everyone will know. And saying the right thing to a blogger is not much better, because nine times out of ten they will pass it off as their own idea: I have caught myself doing this several times already. But I digress again). They may be very imperfect tools - communication problems all around, and it can take a long time to say even relatively simple things clearly - but they are definitely worth having all the same.

Final note: the power of words is not everlasting. The other day my daughter told me - using a phrasing that was more a request for confirmation than a statement of fact - that she had a five-year-old friend who claimed she was now old enough to use curse words. I confirmed that swear words should be used with care, not so much because they are "baaad" words (to quote George Carlin's "Seven words you cannot use on T.V.") but because a lot of people are hurt and/or insulted when you use them, and because they lose their power if you use them too much, in which case they won't be there when you need them.

Of course, the problem is compounded by the fact that only some people feel the effects of this devaluation (usually the ones who cause it in the first place), while others continue to be insulted and hurt every time they are used. This second group may in fact develop the emotional equivalent of an allergy for four-letter words, and become ever less tolerant of swear words.

More on this polarization mechanism later.

Minority languages: do we need them?

2009-05-16T19:38:00.005+02:00

This afternoon, as usual in a country where people are more apt to talk about languages than about the weather, I got into a discussion about minority languages, and specifically the current measures to promote of Catalan, which many non-Catalan Spaniards feel go to far. This is in part due to the link between language and identity, which is so strong that reaffirming Catalan is in effect a way of rejecting the rest of Spain. And the rest of Spain feels it this way, which of course makes it difficult to think about the issue objectively.

I am not devoid of emotion on the issue either: up till now I have always argued that people should be free to use whatever language they want. To me, it has always been a question of the pendulum swinging back: over the past two centuries, during the creation and consolidation of nation-states across Europe national, uniform languages were imposed by the central governments (of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Great Britain, to name a few), to the detriment of minority languages. Now, along with changing views regarding the nation-state and the rise of the ideas self-determination and subsidiarity, it is swinging back, and languages that survived the slaughter (Frisian, Welsh, Gaelic, Catalan and Basque) are not only tolerated but welcomed - by those that either already speak these languages, or have a good motive to keep them alive.

But I have had this discussion several times without really seeing anyone change their positions, which means I should probably think things through even further. (Which is what I am doing now.)

The decision of the central governments to impose a single, official language was of course completely logical from their point of view. Having a single language makes communication so much easier and quicker, much in the same way that roads can dramatically improve mobility and trade, and that legislation can make all the difference in the world to the stability and efficiency of a society. You might even summarize the whole Roman Empire (and the European Union, for that matter) as roads, legislation and language (yes, alright, the Romans also brought wine, and it was also safe to walk the streets at night ...).

So do we really want to take a step backwards, and allow people to wall themselves off again? I am not sure. But I don't think that will happen anyway. I think that we are already moving towards a near future in which a large portion of the population of most countries will speak at least two and often three languages: their "own" language, that of the country they live in, and possibly also an "international" language. You can already see it happening now, and I see no reason to try to stop it. The only problem left now is which language to choose as the international vernacular.

Within the institutions, this is very much a hot potato, because for many many years, the main working language was French. But ever since the Swedes and Fins joined (1995), English has been winning ground, which is a thorn in the side of the Francophones. A friend of mine has the solution, however: he says we should just kick the British out of the European Union. That way, the issue would cease to be political, and we could simply let the majority decide (and at the moment, the majority is in favor of English). Much as I love this idea, it will not be necessary, I think: I can already see that Francophones are increasingly willing to speak English. And - with apologies to my English-speaking colleagues - on the whole, they are doing a better job than the Anglophones who for decades now have been mangling French out of recognition.

Eenie meenie minie moe ...

2009-05-14T19:46:00.003+02:00

catch the blogger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go.

Mild case of blogger fatigue, I'm afraid. Very different from writer's block. Although come to think of it, I am not sure exactly what writer's block really is. I've always thought that it was staring at the blank page, pen in hand (or keyboard at hand), and waiting in vain for inspiration to strike. That doesn't happen to me much. But I do suffer, from time to time, from other types of writing disorders.

Such as for example chronic rewrite syndrome, which is when you keep rewriting something, but it just won't come out write (little writer's joke there, ha ha). In my case, this happens quite a lot because I work out what I want to write as I work, and sometimes, I am just not ready. Thing is, I rarely know when I am ready, and even when I have my doubts I often just wade into the quagmire of my own messy mind anyway, in the hope that writing things down will make things clearer. And overall, it does. Lately, in fact, I am feeling so confident about my success rate (measured as the ratio between the unfinished drafts + deleted entries vs. the published ones) that I even went as far as to suggest this to someone the other day, in the context of a discussion about double-binds and how frustrating they can be.

Another problem I have is when everything I write that I like so much that I can't bear to weed it out. I read somewhere in a book on writing that you should be extremely wary of "the best paragraph", because often, you leave it in because it is so well-written, even if it belongs in a completely different piece. I try to apply this now, but I have to admit it hurts.

And then of course you have writer's bloat, which is when the piece is longer than it need be. That (in my own humble opinion) is only a minor problem for me (I can't go on about it any more, for fear of being branded a liar).

But back to blogger fatigue, which is when you get tired of your own blog. I have been working on it quite intensely for the past few months, and it hit me the other day that I really didn't feel like writing. (Not for lack of material, BTW: I have enough ideas for ten blogs, just not enough time to make them all readable). But today I found the cure. It is called blogging.

The forest and the trees

2009-05-08T06:29:00.007+02:00

My wife and I are very different in many ways. Some differences are cultural: she is Spanish, I am Dutch; some are gender-related: I am more technical, more into sports and physical stuff (except dancing - tough guys don't dance), and have better spatial skills, she is much better with time; she is better at multitasking, while I - according to her - can barely walk and chew gum at the same time. But quite a lot of our differences are personal. She buys in bulk (and runs the risk of having to throw away stuff), I buy the minimum (and run the risk of having to go back to the store for more). She is too quick to judge, I am too slow. She likes the noise and bustle of the city, I prefer the countryside. She doesn't mind a certain degree of chaos, I am more into on order. She likes experimenting with new recipes and food, I stick to what I know and like.

And we differ immensely in our ability to recognize movie stars. She will recognize virtually any actor she has seen before, regardless of their appearance (including disguises), and usually be able to pinpoint the movie we last saw that actor in. I don't. I might get lucky and recognize the actor's voice if it is distinctive enough (the other day I picked out John Hurt by his voice), but if all I have is the visuals, I might very well sit out the whole movie without recognizing the actor. This is very close to another difference between us: she is much quicker to pick up on the links between words in different languages than I am.

True to form, I have turned these two small observations into the abstract generalization that she sees the similarities, while I see the differences. Interesting, but hardly worth spending too much time on, you might think, were it not for the fact that I think that this basic difference in how we perceive things (input) has important impact on how we interpret things (processing) which in turn has an important impact on our behavior (output). What exactly happens depends on the context. In the case of cognition, for example, this difference in perception mode can result in either seeing the big picture (the forest) or the details (the trees). If we add emotions, we have glasses that are either half full or half empty. And in the case of social behavior (one of my favorite subjects), it results in either competition or cooperation.

Each of the above have immense impacts on how we behave, both as individuals and as groups. Which I why it would be nice to know the root cause of all this. Unfortunately, even though I have been mulling over this subject for years, I am still not much closer to an answer. I have no doubt that it is somehow related to innate sensitivity or receptiveness, and it is obvious that people vary in their receptiveness to certain stimuli (sound, images, words, etc.), but that's about as far as it goes. But I have found out that, although you cannot really see trees and forest at the same time, you can learn to switch from one view to the other. Specialists can learn to see the big picture. I saw this myself while doing my Ph.D., of which a large part focussed on taxonomy (or grouping things): after five years of seeing only the details and the differences, from one day to the next, I was suddenly able to see the similarities.

And this in turn feeds the hope that pessimists can learn to be more optimistic, and those who only see competition all around can learn to appreciate cooperation as well.

What a tangled web we weave (even when we're not trying to deceive)

2009-05-02T09:09:00.007+02:00

It will be obvious from my previous posts that I assume that everything that we do and say, and even our anatomy, can in some way be explained in terms of survival. Analyzing things that way helps me figure out where and why things go wrong, and can even help me accept things more easily, because it allow me to view problems much more rationally. Basically, I see two main categories of problems: (1) opposing interests, and (2) stimulus-response type problems.

Opposing interests
Can exist between individuals, between groups, between individuals and groups they do not belong to, and between individuals and the group they belong to, up to and including the species as a whole: what is good for the species is not always good for the individual (again with thanks to Richard Dawkins, writer of The Selfish Gene, for the basic idea). These types of problems - though definitely not easy to solve – are so easy to understand that I will not spend any more time on them, other than to note that the human race seems to be becoming more aware that on the whole, cooperation can be more beneficial than competition, and that we all depend on each other to some degree.

Stimulus-response type problems include
• Problems at input
• Faulty processing or analysis, and
• Inappropriate responses

Almost all of the input runs through the nervous system, but the processing and output can either be done by the limbic system (emotions) or the nervous system (thought), or - usually - both at the same time.

The most common input problem is related to receptiveness or sensitivity, which differs from one person to the next. This can be physical, with oversensitivity to certain stimuli (warmth, pain, allergens) on one end of the scale, and the inability to perceive these stimuli on the other. Or it can be emotional, whereby very sensitive people will have the problem that most input hits too hard (which may cause them to overreact – “I’m only shouting because you are!!!!” – even though you had only raised your voice slightly), while less sensitive people will be slow to react to anything, as in the staple complaint in marriage counselling sessions: “He/she never listens”.

Response problems can include no reaction or overreaction - a problem of fine-tuning, you could say - and of course the problem of timing: there is always a lag time between a change in circumstances and the response to that change, examples of which are all around, at every imaginable level. At the level of the species, changing circumstances may require increased resistence to certain pathological agents, or increased tolerance for temperature differences, but genes take time to change. Within human societies, there is always a delay between changing mores and legislation. Corporate life nowadays is all about flexibility and adaptability, but of course, many companies fall by the wayside. And individuals may also be slow to change (e.g. because of laziness, inability to solve the dilemmas, fear of the unknown/uncertain, etc.).

All of these are quite interesting, and I will probably get back to them, but the problems I am most interested in are those in the processing stage, and especially in the case of thought/analysis, because that is where I think we stand the best chance of improving things. To give just a very few examples, we have faulty analysis at work at the level of western civilisation as a whole (just think of the current third-world aid mess), at the level of nations (witness many governments’ misguided attempts to repress drug and alcohol use), at group level (whole classes who seem to believe that all their problems are the fault of one of the other classes), but of course especially at the level of the individual, which is the basic unit of thought and therefore ultimately responsible for everything.

So basically, it is all my fault.

But what is it I am doing wrong, then? Well, for one, the whole stimulus-response system is based on making assumptions. You cannot process input in a vacuum any more than you can literally pull yourself up by your own bootstraps: you have to compare your observations with “template patterns”, take the best possible fit, and see if you can’t find a better fit as you go along. If you are very smart, this will not take to long. If , however, you are not so smart, but very determined (like me), you whittle away for years and years, until things start making sense. In any case, I’m off the hook again, because we all do this to greater or lesser degrees. We use assumptions. They may be the mother of all fuck-ups, but – like the opposite sex - you might not be able to live with them, but you can’t live without them either. The only good thing you can say about templates is that – again like relationships - the more you work on them, the better they get. And if they don’t, you may need to jettison them altogether.

Of course, not everybody has the same processing skills. I’m not talking about intelligence in the old-fashioned sense of the world (math, logic, linguistics): I am thinking more specifically about the difficulty to test theories. It would be perfectly understandable if living with your family has led you to reach the conclusion that all siblings are scum, but what distinguishes the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, is the ability to process new input. Seeing other families in action should probably help you conclude that in fact, you were overgeneralising: only your siblings are scum.

This can go a lot further, of course. Some people never really grow out of the comic book perspective, where people can fly, karate-chop through concrete pylons, and burst into flames (oh, allright, you might actually make a case for spontaneous combustion, but that is after death, not before it). In fact – but now I digress even further – I suspect this might be a pre-requiste for becoming a conservative politician. (Hey, that was a good one: in a few short paragraphs, I have succeeded in shifting the blame from myself to conservative politicians.)

But probably the most common processing problem is the fact that it is often difficult to separate thoughts from emotions. And I have no doubt that we should do try to do this: the two systems were designed to do different things, which is why your brain may tell you to do something completely different from your gut (note I do not say "heart" - this is because "using your heart" is not really about emotions at all, it is a metaphor for wisdom, or taking all sides into account, which in fact is a rational, not emotional activity).

More about this in a next entry!

Everybody's a doctor

2009-05-01T10:41:00.003+02:00

One of the advantages of a cross-cultural marriage and/or moving around a lot is that if gives you the chance to put your own culture into perspective. The basic attitude of people in the Netherlands (my country of birth) regarding health issues - from how to give birth, to when to use of over-the-counter drugs for headaches and the flu - is non-interventionist. I had never really given this much thought, however, until I started going to Spain (my wife's home base) regularly, where attitudes are at the other end of the spectrum, their view being that you should medicate as soon as you have the slightest symptom of anything. In the beginning, I suspected that Spaniards had difficulty distinguishing medicine from candy, that's how bad things seemed to me.

But then I found out that the average level of knowledge of medical issues is indeed higher than in the Netherlands. Truck drivers, secretaries, housewives and waiters alike have a much more extensive knowledge of the human anatomy and of the symptoms and treatments of common ailments such as arthritis, gout, the flu, etc. I am not sure which is cause and which is effect, but Spaniards are also perfectly happy to disagree with their doctor's diagnosis and the prescribed treatment. They have no compunction whatsoever in experimenting with medication, with or without help from their pharmacist, who is not free of this cavalier attitude. Everyone gleefully varies dosages, combines drugs and even - and here is where I draw the line - diagnose other people's ailments, and insist in treating them, using their own prescription drugs (which may or may not still be within their "best by" date). In Spain, everybody's a doctor. But interestingly enough, although average use of medicines is much higher in Spain than in the Netherlands, I have not heard of any significant differences in the rates of problems related to the use of medicines.

So where does that leave my non-interventionist attitude? Well, it helped me come to the conclusions that (1) it is probably a good idea to know you own body, and have patients be more actively involved in the process of getting better. In that sense, Spaniards are way ahead of the Dutch. (2) It may not be necessary to stick so very strictly to dosage indicators (but personally, I am not taking any chances) and (3) Over-the counter medicines should only be used to combat symptoms if these symptoms stand in the way of getting better, as a way to break through vicious circles. If however the symptoms are your body's way to tell you to slow down, you should listen.

The above has also prompted me to rethink our attitudes towards illness and the job. At the moment, to many people, it still seems like a matter of honor to continue working, even though you are sick, even though we know that this may only prolong the illness, and possibly lower our productivity. More importantly, if the illness is contagious, there is a good chance of lowering the productivity of our colleagues as well. But for the species as a whole, exposure to infectious diseases is not a bad thing, as long as the strains are not so virulent as to wipe out the whole human race. Of course I realize that future of mankind means doodly squat to someone who risks losing their own life, or that of loved ones, and I fully understand the Mexican government's decision to impose a stay-at-home period, as a way of combating the swine flu. But the jury is still out on the decision to keep with a mild flu at home (such as was the case with my children this week), to avoid them contaminating/infecting others. It reminds me of the obsession with cleanliness: for a long time, people did their utmost to avoid all bacteria and virusses, and to do the same for their children. Now, the pendulum has swung back a bit: people are less worried, and realise that a limited amount of contact is nature's way of giving vaccinations.

Migration problems

2009-04-30T07:29:00.007+02:00

Yesterday, I was talking to another friend, and we got on the subject of migration. (The way we got there is a story in itself: we started talking about bands - we share an interest in music-, and how the show must go on, and how the band on the Titanic kept playing while the ship was sinking, and how his great-grandfather was on the ship that rescued some of the survivors, who were then brought to America, and how his great-grandfather, a Swabic Hungarian, returned to his home country, which had seen massive migration some centuries ago, when the Turks left).

This prompted me to think about mass migrations, and about the many problems they cause. Human history is full of stories of local inhabitants being displaced (or worse) by newcomers, on all kinds of scales, and all over the world. On the level of continents, we have North America, South America and Australia; at the country level, we have Northern Ireland and Israel, to name just a few examples of where the situation has gone spectacularly wrong, but you can find similar examples at regional level, and even at the level of neighbourhoods. When I was young, the phrase "there goes the neighbourhood" was quite common: people were very concerned about who lived in their immediate vicinity.

Which is only natural. Not because I have any objection per se to any particular culture (they are all equally valid within their own context, and there are usually good reasons for the differences), but simply because mixing them can cause problems that didn't exist before. Slight differences in values within a culture (between individual and social groups) already cause problems, and there is good chance that they will get worse when differences increase.

Of course, cultural differences are not the same as racial differences, which is something I have always dismissed as so irrelevant as not even to warrant much thought. In that sense, I am a bit like the white daughter of very well-to-do liberal parents in the film "Guess who's coming to dinner" who has fallen in love with a (highly educated) black man, wants her parents to approve the marriage, and can't really see what the problem is. The film focusses most on the father's struggle with something that he would definitely have defended in principle, but had never even considered might actually become an issue for him personally.

On the whole, the film was well done, but I was a bit disappointed that virtually no attention was paid to why exactly interracial marriage was a problem. Of course I understand that people are more likely to "defend their kin", and I can also see how this can be extended to larger groups that are somehow genetically related, but that is a very theoretical bond. Sometimes, it really is better to have a good neighbour (of whatever color) that a distant friend.

In fact, from the point of view of the species, mixing genes is good, or at very least, not bad, because it increases our chances of surviving. Which makes me wonder whether mixing cultures - however unpleasant the consequences might be for certain individuals or groups - might perhaps not also a good thing in the long run, for the species as a whole. Certainly contact between different groups of humans can be linked to all kinds of important developments, including language itself. And were it not for language, I would not be writing this.

Hmm.

Adults drinking milk

2009-04-28T07:12:00.003+02:00

The other day, a friend announced (with a little more emphasis than necessary, but we are used to that from him) that adults drinking milk was "an aberration". We didn't really get into the details of why he believed this - the conversation went off on another tangent - but I imagine it is because milk was "designed" as food for infants, not adults. So in a sense, he was arguing that people should act their age.

I responded by mentioning a theory that certain adults (and most notably the ones in northern Europe and North America, with less sunshine) drink milk because they need it as a vitamin D supplement. And that this was another case of natural selection, namely in the sense that migration to sun-impoverished areas is only a choice for people who are able to digest milk as an adult. (And, I would add now, that this in turn is a result of population pressure).

But I do agree that it doesn't feel natural, if only because I know of no other species where the adults drink milk. (I have heard that certain snakes will drink goat's milk, but that does not count: that would be more like humans eating fruit, which is basically food for the infant plant/seed). In fact, you could argue that we should have never left the subtropics, not only because of the lack of sun as a source of vitamin D, but also because of the temperature, which has forced us into wear clothes.

Of course, I realize we do not really have a choice (there is no going back), and I also know that moving out of our climatic comfort zone has given rise to a lot of interesting developments, but - and now comes the twist - accepting the premise that we do not belong here immediately and completely validates a fallacy that I get more emphatic about than strictly necessary, namely the idea that we should only eat what grows in the area. Most diets nowadays seem a bit simplistic, but that one really takes the cake. We were not designed to live only on apples and lettuce, and there is not reason to restrict ourselves to them.

It is currently 7 30 in the morning. Time for breakfast. I think I will have a bowl of cereal. With milk!

Bad blogger!

2009-04-27T19:45:00.006+02:00

I confess, I am a bad blogger. I have thousands of notes, on just about any subject you can think of, in notebooks that span many years, but I seem incapable of turning them into something that people might like to read. For a while, I have been telling myself that it is just a question of time, and that the words will come as soon as all the pieces fall into place, but of course I know that the pieces will only fall into place if I "do my homework", which in my case means doing exactly what I am not doing, namely polishing each idea - in writing - until it becomes something that someone might like to read.

For many years, I tried doing this verbally, by throwing out ideas, just to see how they sound. Unfortunately, I can/could get quite argumentative when people dismiss the idea without giving it the attention I think it deserves. Which is in fact most of the time. End result: lots of unpleasant and unfruitful discussions, sometimes even to the point of losing the person as a discussion partner.

So now I do the same thing in writing. You might think I would have learned from experience, and would at least have the decency to feel guilty about harassing people with my mental diarrhoea. But there is a big difference: you, the reader, can stop reading any time you like, and I never get upset! A win-win situation all round, as far as I can see!

So congratulations and thanks for getting this far. I will try to continue to make it worth your while. :-)

Postscript: I just realized that Kathy Reichs does the same thing in the series "Bones" (a murder mystery t.v. series my wife and I try to watch when we can), but better: she delivers lectures on just about anything you can imagine on the sly, by integrating them into the plot.

Instinct

2009-04-09T13:12:00.006+02:00

A quick note before I dash of on holiday.

I was just reading the Wikipedia entry on Instinct, and was surprised to read that there is a "hot debate" on whether or not humans have instinct. And the reason this is an issue at all is because - after having coined a very useful term (albeit one that does not really explain anything) - people sat down and wrote a definition that made the term completely useless.

There are a lot of things wrong with the definition, but my main objection is a more general one: almost every single criterion is an absolute. To be considered instinctive, behavior must be automatic, irresistible, and unmodifiable. But there are many examples of behavior that most people would label instinctive, but that can be and is suppressed under certain circumstances. This may occur more often in humans (for the simple reason that we think too much), but it definitely not unique. As for "unmodifiable", the definition itself is contradictory: after having established unmodifiable as a criterion, it goes on to mention that "the organism may profit from experience and to that degree the behavior is modifiable". I don't want too be accused of being too categoric myself, but I fail to see a middle ground here: behavior is either modifiable or unmodifiable. It cannot be both at the same time.

Of course, I understand why people like the idea of denying that humans have instinct: it makes them exempt of innate behavior, which is almost like getting carte blanche on your own destiny. But that is an illusion, I fear: free will is not quite as free as some people would like. If humans are electrons, free will is our ability to jiggle our trajectory. Only a few of us will succeed in jumping from one electron shell to another, and some might even escape the atom completely, but that is about as far as we can go.

Irrespective of the in-fighting about definitions, the big question remains: how is innate behavior possible at all? It has to be hard-coded or hard-wired somewhere, but where and how? (Any input on this is welcome.)

Taboos and evolution

2009-04-05T08:01:00.003+02:00

For a long time now, I have been trying to find out why things are the way they are. And for the most part, I look towards the theory of evolution for explanations. To me, virtually everything we do, want, aspire to can be explained as a survival mechanism, which I will define here as a genetic response to circumstances that existed in the past. Countless articles and books must have been written on this subject, but I have yet to find one that deals with the totality of human existence in this way. This little blog will not be the exception - it would probably require hundreds or even thousands of pages to cover everything that I would want to cover, but what I can do is offer some piecemeal observations, on isolated issues that have caught my attention, in the hope that this will inspire others to make a more concerted effort. And the reason I think this is worth doing is that I think that understanding the causes of our own behavior goes a long way towards solving some of the problems that we deal with every day.

(For those of you who are wondering why our survival mechanisms - which are by definition solutions - can be problems, the answer is that circumstances change more quickly than and our genes or our behavior. Behavior that is completely appropriate in one situation may be completely inappropriate in another).

For today, I want to offer some thoughts on taboos. Of late, it seems to me, taboos are being seen more and more as unwanted obstructions to our freedom, as throwbacks from more primitive, less civilized times. I do not disagree with this, but I am not in favor of simply jettisoning all taboos in favor of "rational behavior", for two reasons. Taboos, to me, are nature's system of "keep out" signs, and they were put there for a reason. We should think carefully before pulling them up and throwing them on the bonfire. And secondly, just because we would like to act differently doesn't mean that we can (see also a previous blog entry on life and death). Nonetheless, I do have problems with the "reptile brain" aspect of taboos, that is, the fact that our reactions are hard-wired, and I am quite content to try to dismantle that part.

One taboo I am thinking about specifically is the one on ending life (murder, suicide, abortus). The gut reaction to this is rejection, which is perfectly logical if we accept the maxim that the main purpose of life is to "go forth and multiply". But of course overpopulation has made it necessary to rethink our attitudes on that. Even rationality itself could be seen as a survival mechanism, because it allows us to survive conditions that did not exist in the past, and notably the ones created by overpopulation.

Life after death - the Second World War and the Baby Boom

2009-04-04T09:55:00.007+02:00

For the past 200-odd years, the birth rate in Western industrialized countries has declined, in line with the slow change from a rural to an urban economy, the basic explanation being that large families are necessary and useful on the farm, but not in cities. If we generalize even further, one could say that birth rate declines as the population increases.

If this explanation is correct, and I think it is, why was there are a Baby Boom? According to Marvin Harris, author of "America Now" (later republished as "Why Nothing Works"), the main cause was also economic (namely the opening up of new markets after the Second World War). I do not dispute that this will have had an effect, but I think that psychological motives were at least as important.

To me, the gradual decline of the birth rate was a triumph of reason over instinct. The first goal of life in general is to have offspring. Nature does of course have mechanisms to counteract the effects of overpopulation, but as far as I know, only humans are in a position to not only predict the long term effects, but consciously and willingly do something about it. But when we do, we also create a tension between what our bodies were designed to do, and what our brains tell us is best for us in the longer term.

Combine this idea with the well-know effect that danger has on our impulse to procreate (the link between eros and thanatos), and add a threshold effect, and you have the Baby Boom: after the well-publicized trauma of the Second World War, a lot of people, and presumably especially the victors, found it much harder to suppress the urge to celebrate their survival by having more children. And voila! like a dam breaking, instinct wins out over reason.

Addendum: this may sound depressing - "how can we ever progress?", you might wonder - but that weighs less on my mind than the irritating suggestion that sheer willpower can overcome genetically encoded natural disposition. A key flaw in the otherwise very entertaining animation film Madagascar is when the zoo-raised lion, in the wild and almost overcome with hunger, succeeds in suppressing his natural urge to eat his friend the zebra. Obviously, the film is really about humans, not animals, but it is still a ludicrous idea, as I have felt obliged to explain to my children.

One or the other - you can't have it both ways

2009-04-02T20:14:00.005+02:00

When I was a teenager, it was a well-known "fact" (read: consensus opinion, or truism) that when you put two similar but different elements in one end product - the most obvious example being the radiocassette - one of the two would suffer. I can't remember exactly why people believed this, and I am not sure it is all that true, but we definitely believed it.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the many links between technology and the way I experience and appreciate music. I will definitely write about that some other time, but for now, all I have to offer is a strange similarity between this somewhat dismal view of combi-electronics and the bands I liked as a teenager, namely the fact that many of them made great music (or at least, music I still like today) but lyrics that I like a lot less.

As a teenager, this was not a problem, because I never really listened to the lyrics. I would hear a word here and there, and maybe the most striking line of the chorus, but I was usually blissfully unaware of the inanity that populated some of the more popular tunes of the Beach Boys, the occasional pretentiousness of some of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs, the ear-pleasing but not always intelligible phrasings in some Supertramp songs ... and I could go on.

Of course, each of the above groups have written and composed songs that deserve to be heard again and again, but even so, there are not too many people out there who can do both equally well. Paul Simon in his later years (after going it alone) is probably the exception, together with Cole Porter, but I am definitely much more impressed by Brian Wilson's musical than lyrical skills.

Now the solution for this, you might think, would be to get a great composer and a great song-writer together. But that seems to be just as rare as having both qualities in the same person. Off the top of my head the only such combination I can think of are the Sherman brothers (of Disney's "Jungle Book" fame) and Elton John and Bennie Turpin, and then especially for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. (Lennon and McCartney don't count - they stimulated each other, but often wrote the songs alone, as was the case in many bands).

Just a thought.

Social networks and languages

2009-03-31T20:07:00.004+02:00

Not so long ago, social networks consisted of groups of people that you knew at school, from work or school, that lived in the neighbourhood, etc. You would get to know their likes and dislikes, who their family and friends are, and you might get a chance to see some photos over the course of many months or even years. Now, electronic social networks give instant access to this type of information. Of course, it is filtered - most people choose what they put on the Internet quite carefully. Still, I think it does allow you to get a good first impression.

I am also quite happy with the possibility of finding long-lost friends (although so far I haven't found any), family abroad (I did hook up with a handful of relatives on the other side of the globe), and getting to know the friends of friends.

But networks are strange things. Where I live, there are four main networks, and they only touch each other marginally. The four are: the native Luxemburgers, people who work in foreign banks, people who work for the institutions, and the Portuguese immigrants who came in the sixties and seventies. I thought, when I joined Facebook, that I would some magically tap into a vast reservoir of people and cross the boundaries of existing networks. In fact, the opposite has occurred. My collection of Facebook friends (as oppposed to family) is not only restricted to people I know professionally, it is restricted to a very small subset of people I know from or through work. And the subset consists primarily of Hungarians, Maltese and Greek friends.

When I came to Luxembourg, I remember feeling very much at home with all the other people that were in greater or lesser degree rootless. It was a relief after many years of feeling out of place. But now, thanks to Facebook, I am out of place in my own social network: Hungarian, Maltese or Greek are so far out of my reach I can only throw up my hands and say Oi Vey!

Indigo Girls

2009-03-26T17:25:00.001+01:00

Finding socks in the dark

2009-03-19T20:04:00.002+01:00

Life is full of big and little mysteries. The big mysteries are the ones that my children ask from time to time: where do we come from, what happens when we die, what is out there at the end of the universe (or, in the immortal words of Buzz Lightyear, beyond infinity)? Great minds spend their whole lives pondering such mysteries. And then there a the mysteries that are too small too warrant any kind of serious investigation. One of mine is as follows.

Most evenings, as soon as I come home from work, I change into a track suit, which I find more comfortable than the clothes I wear to work. I also change my "day" socks for a pair of white sport socks for the same reason. Then, when I go to bed, I change into pyjamas and leave the track suit on a chair next to my bed. In the morning, I keep my pyjama on while making breakfast, but use the same white socks again. And here's the mystery: the vast majority of the time, I will find one sock either on the floor or dangling from the end of one leg of the track suit pants, and the other tangled with the underpants. This is so systematic that in wintertime, when it is still dark, I hardly ever have to turn on the light to find them.

The logical explanation for this is that I always take off the pants in such a way as to ensure that this happens (and I am definitely a creature of habit), but I just tried to reproduce the routine (I am in my track suit now), and the outcome was as one might expect: both socks end up at the far end of the pant legs (they only drop to the floor if you lift the pants up). According to quantum physics, the fact that one observes an experiment influences the outcome, but I hardly think that this is the problem here. But unfortunately, as with so many little mysteries, it really isn't worth finding out.

So I will just leave it at that, and be happy that I can find my socks in the dark.

Counting worms

2009-03-13T20:25:00.004+01:00

For the past two weeks, I have been walking my two girls (8 and 5 years old) to school. And for the past two weeks, it has rained almost every single night. So in the morning, as we walk, we see lots of worms on the sidewalk. (I would have liked to write "crawling with worms" but that would be an over-exaggeration, as well shall see in a moment). In Dutch, we call such worms "rainworms" (regenwormen), but I have explained to them that this is not because they like rain. Quite the opposite: they only come out because their lair or tunnel or burrow or whatever it's called are full of water, so they have nowhere to go but up.

I was quite happy to see that they were interested, and not really repulsed, by these worms. Each few days we would make a new discovery. There were big ones and small ones, live ones (movements would elicit ear-piercing screeches of combined delight and horror) and dead ones (mostly squashed, and usually white after a few days). But it seems that all in all, they were most interested in seeing how many they could find. So they counted. (For those of you who are statistically inclined, the high score to date is seventy). Of course, quite quickly it became a competition to see who would find each next worm. I did succeed in convincing them that cooperation was better than competition, but this was mostly self-interest: the 500 meters to school can be very long if all they do is argue. But now I have a different challenge: the game has become so engrossing that they seem much more interested in counting worms that in checking for cars when crossing the road.

Some years ago, when mobile phones were just becoming quite the fad in Argentina, in spite of (or perhaps because) the elevated cost. A man was killed crossing the road. Witnesses reported that it was because he was so engrossed in his telephone conversation. It was soon discovered, however, that the phone was a cheap plastic imitation. Moral of the story: vanity can be deadly. But so can curiosity, as the proverbial dead cat will tell you. So I keep close to my kittens, just in case. And in the meantime I have the secret hope that they will find a horribly disfigured worm on the crossing. That would really help me convince them to pay more attention.

Postscript: I took a different route back from school, to check whether the worms were all coming from the building site next to my daughter's school, but no. We are completely surrounded by worm country.

Brain vs. body

2009-03-07T16:44:00.004+01:00

A few days ago, another of my colleagues complained about the many ways the world is changing for the worse. He has been campaigning for some time now against the loss of a strip of beach near his place of birth in Asturias, and was quite upset because it seems this battle, like so many other battles to preserve our natural or cultural heritage, is lost. As he talked, I got the impression that he felt he - like many campaigners - was only one of few who cared. I think however that many people care, and might even just as feel as strongly about these issues, but have accepted them as a fact of life.

I also care about these issues, but I tend to look at the big picture. I see all these changes as the inevitable result of our own success as a species (measured in terms of population). Virtually everything we complain or worry about - loss of natural habitats, pollution, climate change, extinctions, etc. etc. - can be blamed on the fact that there are so many humans. To paraphrase Agent Smith in Matrix: like some viruses, we are reproducing so quickly that that we risk killing off our host.

The problem is twofold: on one side, reproduction is hard-coded in our programming. It is so much a part of us (and of any living organism), that it could easily be called the meaning of life. On the other side, we are also quite good at manipulating our environment so as to accommodate more humans, which reduces the need for us to do anything about the main cause of our problems (overpopulation), thereby in fact only making things worse.

This is analogous to the problem of traffic congestion. For many years, it was claimed that we could rid ourselves of traffic jams if only we had more and wider roads. What in fact happened was that the amount of traffic increased, filling up all the new wider roads until the traffic congestion was the same (or worse) because the improved throughflow made it possible for people to move further away from their place of work.

But knowing what the problem is and doing something about it is something else entirely. Most people (myself included) have very little intention of putting their money where their .... is.

Which reminds me of an old joke of a Protestant preacher who in his sermon lectured on that little piece of flesh that was at the root of all of mankind's problems. This to the discomfort of most of his congregation. And it got worse when he suggested he tell them what that piece of flesh was called. And much worse - blushes and grumbles all around - when he asked them "Shall I show that piece of flesh to you?!?" Upon which he stuck out his tongue.

Wistful whistling

2009-03-02T23:06:00.003+01:00

Luxembourg, we who live here like to joke, only has two seasons, and both are cold and rainy. It is one of the few places in the world where you can suffer from winter depression in Springtime. But this afternoon was uncharacteristically mild. The sun remained a UFO (unseen floating object) as usual, but several parts of the sky were actually blue.

So I whistled while I walked to my car. On the way, I passed several people. Now I am not a bad whistler, but I tend to go for tunes that I invent on the spot, which means, like in jazz (the imperfect art), that there is always a chance that it will go horribly wrong. This is why I cannot help checking people's reactions while I whistle. But for the most part, no-one ever seems to mind. In fact, several people have remarked that it cheers them up.

A few days ago, in Amsterdam, I saw someone singing out loud while walking in a busy street. The singer was not drunk, and he could hold a tune, but the reactions of others there was much more along the lines of "singing in the street is just not done". Of course, Amsterdam being known for its tolerance, no-one would actually say this, but you could see it on people's faces.

So what is the difference between whistling and singing? The only one I can think of is that singing is much more intimate. It doesn't matter how much of your soul you put into whistling, you will always bare more of it by singing. But that only begs yet another question, namely, why does that make us uncomfortable? Is it perhaps because it could be seen as an invitation that we do not want to acknowledge (I'm baring my soul, now it's your turn)?

I'm not sure, but I think I will stick to whistling. And when I really feel I have to sing outdoors, I will make sure no-one is around.

Short versus long term

2009-02-28T17:55:00.005+01:00

I think a lot about the short vs. the long term. Long term consciousness is probably the most importance difference between us and other animals. Of course (to paraphrase Darwin), it is a difference of degree, not essence, but still, the difference is quite striking: we are capable of thinking in terms of geological time, while most other members of the animal kingdom with similar life-spans probably don't get further than the concept of seasons.

Apparently, newly born babies start with no concept of time whatsoever, but as they grow, they learn to handle ever-increasing time spans. My eldest - now eight - has no trouble imagining things happening years from now, including having children of her own. And human society as a whole has shown a similar sort of development: collectively, we become more conscious of the long term with every new generation. The acceptance of the theory of evolution is just one of many examples, as are the idea that we might want to preserve our cultural history, and our current concern with climate change: all indicate that collectively, we are thinking in ever-longer time spans.

Emotions are a bit different. Emotional development also passes through phases in individual humans and in society as a whole, but as compared to the above-mentioned examples of commonplace long-term thinking, emotions are short-term. They can be useful as short-term aids to survival (think fight-or-flight responses), but they can also get in the way of our long-term collective interests. Which is why we tend to see emotions as something to keep in check.

Seen in Darwinian terms, we could see this process as the competition between two different systems designed to do the same thing (processing stimuli and formulating a response). And according to Darwin, the winner will be the more adaptable of the two. So kudos to the nervous system with its rapid-fire electrical signals, and a booby prize to hormones. (Sad, but logical.)

Coffee machines

2009-02-27T20:53:00.002+01:00

I have what you might call an addictive personality. I started smoking when I was seventeen, and I only stopped sixteen years and many tens of thousands of cigarettes later (and that more or less by accident - but I'll save that for another blog). During that same period I also drank quite a bit. The other day I saw a program in which a Motown mogul asked a sample audience whether they would spend their last money on a sandwich or on the single they had just heard. Some years ago, in my case, my answer might have been on a drink.

Nowadays, I go for the socially much more acceptable addictions of coffee and chocolate. Now the reason that coffee and chocolate are more acceptable is that the side effects are much less harmful for society, and for the addict as well. Although ... (and this is why I am writing about this) ... this morning, rushed and stressed, I decided to get coffee from the machine instead of going down to the cafeteria. The machine I got it from has the bad habit of dispensing a plastic spoon into the cup before the coffee. Six times out of ten, however, the spoon misses the cup and slips through the grill underneath, where it lies with other such spoons like so many bones in a graveyard. And two times out of ten it lands in such a way as to obstruct the cup from taking it rightful place on the grill, leaving it askew and incapable of receiving the much-desired black goo that subsequently dissolves in the hot water that is then poured on top. That is what happened this morning. And of course - rushed and stressed and with coffee withdrawal symptoms (even if only imagined) as I was - I tried to quickly force the cup into place. My fingers were just in time to deflect most of hot water into the drain below. So in the end I not only did not have any coffee, I had succeeded in hurting my pride as well as my fingers.

Only goes to show ...

From Darwin to Dawkins

2009-02-25T21:45:00.007+01:00

Today, Darwin's theory, just like Freud's theories, great works of art, and who knows what else, is mostly taken for granted by most people who learnt it in school. Now I am certainly not against standing in awe of great achievements, but personally, I have always found the future more interesting than the past, which in my case means focussing less on the achievement or the person and more on the possible consequences of that achievement.

In the case of the theory of evolution, the potential is huge. Not so much because of the conclusions he came to, but more as the seed for a new branch of science that I think will have an even more profound effect on us than the truth about our less-than-celestial origins: evolutionary psychology. And the reason I think this is because I think it will allow us to reframe how we see ourselves. In the past, organized religion gave some very good metaphors to help us understand our own nature and how we should act. But their explanations as to why we are the way we are didn't cut the grade, as far as I am concerned.

Now, in evolution, we have the basic mechanism that in the long run should help explain just about everything we do, because it is all about the survival of our genes (see "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins). Of course, for our genes to survive, individual human beings have to procreate - which explains why that is first and foremost in the minds of most young adults. And once you have done your duty in that department, you have to give your children a good chance of doing the same - which explains the nesting instinct, our obsession with money and control, and the lengths we will go to protect our children and other relatives.

As a species, we have become very successful in "procreating and going forth". So much so, that we have had to change our behaviour just to survive. Modern society no longer tolerates the sort of behaviour that we found completely appropriate only a few thousand years ago. But genes do not change that fast: like legislation, they adapt, but are always several steps behind the actual situation. And that makes me feel a little better about my reactions when some lunatic driver endangers my life and/or that of my family just to shave a few seconds off his ETA.

Communication overload

2009-02-12T19:46:00.006+01:00

The Internet is great, but it can get confusing. I no longer suffer from information overload, because I am quite selective in what I read/watch/listen to. But I am suffer from a still relatively mild case of communication overload. I currently have four different music sites to my name, a couple of videos on YouTube, am member of two different social networks and have, all in all, four different email accounts. None of these sites require much security, but they do all need logons and passwords. Which means I either need a much better memory than I actually have, or I have to write them down somewhere, which is of course not very secure at all. That is one symptom of communication overload. But there are others.

I have, for example, already had the first case of knowing that I wrote someone an email, and more or less remembering what was in it, but not knowing how I sent it. Was it through Facebook, Myspace, Gmail or my work email? And I have at times been reading the same messages twice or more, because several of my email sites forward messages automatically to my gmail, which then automatically forwards them to my work email. This has only been going on for two weeks now, and already, I realise I am going to have to turn that feature off.

Which is of course the cure for communication overload: reduce the input to manageable levels. But it is not so easy. If I do turn it off, I risk missing emails that I would normally want to read. I suspect that I might be tempted to log on anyway, just in case. Reminds me of an old Mad magazine cartoon, where one executive is bragging to the other about how "in touch" he is, thanks to modern technology, whereupon the other responds that the real luxury is being able to be out of touch.

Now, if I could only find my passwords ...

Mondays

2009-02-10T18:45:00.005+01:00

Yesterday was a difficult day. I was thick, I was slow, I was in a bad mood. Discussing it during the coffee break, my colleagues and I came to the conclusion that it was probably due to the full moon, because I was not the only one. Very appropriate for a Monday, too. But unlike with some problems, knowing the possible cause did not seem to make any difference: all day long I was still thick as molasses, and grumpy to boot.

Today should have been better, but it was basically more of the same. So much so, that I have been walking around all day telling people that it was like reliving yesterday all over again. It reminded me of the movie "Groundhog Day", in which the main character (Bill Murray) gets the chance to redo one single day again and again, until he gets it right. A bit like reincarnation, except that he was aware of what was going on. In the end, he learns. For me, I can only hope that tomorrow will be better. But the degree to which the environment can influence how we feel is a sobering thought. And I'm told it only gets worse with age.

The screens in my life

2009-02-08T16:16:00.008+01:00

When I was young, I remember the fierce discussion about how much t.v. you should let children watch. Being a child myself, I was of course in favor of letting them watch as much as they want, but I also being at least half-convinced/frightened by the arguments that it would ruin your eyes and rot your brain (if not exactly curve your spine - that was something else). I think the general idea was that you should not sit in front of a screen more than 2-3 hours a day.

Now, some forty years later, I find myself surrounded by more screens than I (or anyone else) could have ever imagined. At work, I sit in front of a computer screen for at least 5 hours a day. In the evenings, at home, I usually work on one or more of our four computers. I mostly only use the one I am using to write this blog, but there are days when I have three of them on simultaneously, for different things. Then, when I finish whatever it was I needed the computer for (making music, writing a blog, surfing the Internet, checking out friends on one of the various social networks), I go down to the living room to watch t.v., usually for an hour or so. In the weekend, I might also spend some time in the basement, doing simulated sports on - you guessed - yet another screen. All in all, I would say I spend about 7 hours or more in front of a screen each day. Of course, most of those screens are not cathode ray tubes, and as far as I know, no-one has gone blind yet watching t.v.. I am not too worried about the total amount of time spent, other than when it takes away time on other things that they should also be doing.

But I am worried about the underlying issue, which is how your view of reality may change as a result (or, as some people have put it, how t.v. can rot the brain). I remember how, when I was a student, I once read seven books by the same writer (Jerzy Kozinski) in a single weekend. I was so engrossed I hardly slept. When I finally did leave the house to get something to eat, I was almost run down crossing the road, because the real world no longer seemed very real.

Of course, this was an extreme case, but I think it is probably similar to what happens when children try to act out what they have seen in a movie, cartoon or computer game: the boundary between real and imaginary has somehow become unclear. For the most part, my children are a lot better in making that distinction than I first expected, but they do sometimes need confirmation ("people can't really fly, can they, daddy?"). And when they do, I am very happy to give it to them!

Is music worthwhile?

2009-02-08T08:09:00.004+01:00

The other day I had a somewhat unpleasant conversation with a colleague who stated (with a conviction that seemed to exclude discussion) that music was "just recreation" and therefore "a luxury we can do without". I got quite upset about this, and tried (in vain) to explain my view that music is one of many different ways to cope. To me, the arts fulfill a similar function as dreaming (not in the sense of hoping for something, but in the sense of processing your day while you sleep). Not having the arts would be like sleep depravation, which can lead to insanity quite quickly.

But the discussion did raise an interesting question, namely whether it is really necessary to be active in the arts, or whether a more passive, receptive role is good enough. I think that it is basically a question of personality, and more specifically of the way you learn. I personally only really learn things when I do them myself. Hearing/watching someone explain something, helps, but is only the starting point. I realize that this is not very efficient - I am basically reinventing the wheel again and again - but I don't seem to have much of a choice.

Learning styles are already well-known (check out, for example, "The Art of the Possible" by Dawna Markova). What I would like to see, is a study on the relationship between between learning styles and other aspects of your personality. Could it be, for example, that my learning style is linked to my difficulty in accepting authority? And if so, is that a result of having been born a close second (a recent Swedish study indicated that on average, first born are much more likely to accept authority than their younger siblings)? If so, it might be possible to find a statistically significant correlation between artistic inclination (though not necessarily talent or skill) and the position in the family.

All very interesting questions that I cannot answer. But if anyone has some input on this ...