Suddenly Fourty

A persistent mind

2011-01-23T11:21:00.003+11:00

I think I have become an atheist. I say "I think" because I'm not really sure. The Roman Catholic religion is so deeply-ingrained in my psyche that I'm not really sure where the dogmatic imprisonment ends and where my free-inquiring rational mind begins. But I've stepped back far enough from it to gain a bit of an understanding of why religion is useful. It is there to mitigate the deep almost unfathomable feeling of loss, waste, and grief whenever someone we love dies. So one of the difficulties of becoming an atheist lies in coming to terms with its implications -- that we simply blink out from existence after we die.

After a bit of scrounging around I managed to find the building blocks for what is shaping out to be my personal alternative view of what happens after we die.

It starts with my acquired view that our mind is really a pattern (a literally mind-bogglingly complex one) of neural connections in our brain. In that sense, our brain is really a complex piece of biological equipment for storing patterns [I touched on the source of this acquired idea briefly in a previous blog on Brittany Murphy].

A pattern is a finite construct (even if the magnitude of its scale and complexity is beyond human imagination). As such it is replicable. This means that in theory, the pattern of our mind can be replicated and stored in a medium other than the brain. If we want our minds to survive our bodies, we therefore have to either (a) build an artificial medium for it, i.e. to replicate the pattern of our mind, or (b) wait for a natural one (such as but not limited to some form of brain) to re-occur in nature and get wired up in an identical pattern.

Between the above two, the latter is highly unlikely (in fact infinitesimally likely). But if we take the view that (1) the universe has a finite number of particles but endures infinitely and (2) the probability of that second scenario occurring is non-zero, then it is possible for our minds to re-occur naturally after death. For given infinite time, all events with a non-zero probability of occurring not only will occur but will occur an infinite number of times.

If our consciousness -- our ability to experience stuff firsthand -- is indeed an outcome or by-product of the existence of a pattern that describes our mind in a device such as our brains (if I interpret Douglas Hofstadter in his book I Am a Strange Loop right), then the recurrence of this pattern sometime (and most likely infinitely) in the future will result in that consciousness recurring as well.

And that is a claim to an opportunity for our minds to persist beyond the death of our brain that is underpinned by a bit of amateur science.

[Photo credit: Juan Robleda]

Dream car of my youth

2010-01-30T21:53:00.017+11:00

On my way to the supermarket today a shiny silver 1980's BMW 535i pulled in front of me on a roundabout (note that the picture on the right is just something I picked off the Web). It was beautiful, almost mint condition. I checked around and found that some of these beauties are selling for less than $10,000. But the one I saw today looks like it's had at least that much on top of that in repairs and improvements.

Why this car? I guess it was the hot BMW of the 1980's. Well the 635CSi was hotter, but then the 5-series had character. If I'm not mistaken, the police patrol cars giving chase in one scene in For Your Eyes Only were BMW 5's. Tom Hanks's character's car in Splash too. Then there is that brilliant chase scene in The Peacemakers. George Clooney and Nicole Kidman in a Merc S-class being chased and shot at by baddies in black 1980's vintage BMW 5's. Priceless.

I could buy one, but it'll probably be rusted through in many places and in bad need of an engine overhaul and re-upholstering. Can't really say I'll be up to that task in terms of time and energy. But see, I'm being negative here because it'll help me feel better about not getting around to actually doing this. I do have a friend who lives in the U.S. who's re-built most of his 1980's vintage BMW 3 series from scratch by hand. He had the time of his life doing it -- perhaps because the whole journey had its share of headaches. Indeed, what journey that doesn't have potential for lots of surprises is worth taking anyway?

Amazingly between the prospect of someday owning a late-model BMW and this car of my teenage fantasies, it is still the latter that gives me that warm fuzzy feeling all over.

Another crap meeting to go to

2010-01-29T13:22:00.004+11:00

God, I gotta go into another frickin' meeting in about 15 minutes. I'm currently in the middle of writing up some project documentation and because part of that work involves distilling, interpreting, and paraphrasing bits and pieces of information scattered across emails and hare-brained PowerPoint "communication packs", it takes quite a bit of concentration to perform. So that is why after coming back from lunch and with fifteen minutes left 'til that meeting, here I am writing a blog instead. It doesn't make sense to me to get a train of thought going only to be interrupted by having to go off to that crap meeting.

Indeed, this is another instance of the kind of outrageous waste that unnecessary meetings cause. They not only take up the time representing the duration of the meeting itself, they also take up participants' wind-down and wind-up time, not to mention the time it takes to actually physically move one's arse from one's desk to the meeting venue. Add to that the crap sense of punctuality here and you've got aggregate corporate waste in the tens of millions of man-hours per year.

If only people read and understand stuff, perhaps 80% of the time we spend in meetings will be freed up for more productive work -- or possibly get us out the door of our office at 5 pm sharp more often.

Entourage withdrawal

2010-01-22T13:35:00.004+11:00

In the last couple of days, I've read quite a few news snippets (most recently this one) about people suffering emotional distress after watching Avatar. If I recall right, there was even one that committed suicide shortly after seeing it.

I can relate to all that as Avatar provides its audience with a dreamy alternate universe. Hmmm, ok, what fantasy movie doesn't, anyway? The Ugly Truth was a gem as far as making us believe that acting like a complete buffoon still gets you the girl. Those Twilight movies, for their part, show us how wit-challenged humourless forever-brooding (literally) pale stiffs (also literally) routinely make nubile teenage girls crazed with lust.

Then there is Entourage. It's a TV show by the way, so there may be an apples-to-oranges fallacy going on here. Anyhows, just look beyond that minor technicality and hear me say that at least Entourage makes it quite clear that one first needs to be a movie star to get the babes and the lifestyle.

The other night, I finished the last DVD disk (of three) of Season Five of that HBO TV show. I'm not 100% sure if I quoted the right season number but it's the one previous to the season currently being aired. Having watched all three disks (12 episodes) over just two nights, I'm today suffering serious Entourage withdrawal. The show is kind of the male-oriented counterpart of Sex and the City. It's characters live in a magical world of seemingly untenable personal dramas and challenges -- that always lead to happy resolutions, mostly involving the main characters getting into the company of naked or scantily-clad ladies.

And that can be quite emotionally distressing for a fourty-something bloke with a mortgage, who is employed by a bank, and is facing a have-to-do-this weekend of mowing the lawn, grocery shopping, and chauffering the kids to this and that sport event (it's Friday here in our part of the world by the way).

But I deal with it.

In transition

2010-01-18T17:44:00.006+11:00

I'm struggling here. Recall I mentioned earlier how I've accepted a role in another division. Well, this week and the next two or three will be the period that I hand over my portfolio of work to my colleagues. This means doing up generic templates of my spreadsheet models and updating my procedures documents for the benefit of the poor sod who will be running with my stuff.

Trudge. Trudge. Trudge.

Earlier before ducking out to grab lunch, I took the time to check out Becky's Blog where she posted a a reality check on sex which I found quite funny specially when I recall Mr. London Street's consistency around splashing cold water all over that favourite subject of mine, particularly in his recent piece "Irish wristwatch" (which I can say, by the way, but fumbled a bit when trying to type it above). I could fully relate with Mr. Street's having to imagine a scene involving Margaret Thatcher and the Queen Mother to whip some endurance out of his performance in a park episode he related to us.

Hmm, sex doesn't seem to be having a good day today in this part of the blogosphere. I not intentionally caused some feelings of depression in Ms Becky as a result of a comment I made on her blog involving the likely scenario of one's face being replaced by a mental image of somebody else's by the other party during coitus.

That was the least of my worries, though, when my wife and I were trying to conceive our son ten years ago. The first thing my mind worked on when the doctor told us that we were not the most fertile of couples was to look back to the three years of "safe sex" I've been having with my wife up to this point and think "jeez".

So having figured that much out about our prospects, our doctor put us on a monitored conception regime. This basically involved the missus regularly taking a cocktail of ovulation-inducing drugs and the doctor monitoring for signs of that critical process firing up then giving us a hard green light to get it on when said signs appeared. Trouble is, when we got our first green light I had the performance anxiety attack to end all performance anxiety attacks!

I mean, hey, for the first time we were performing to a goal that is the whole point of the act, as Mother Nature originally intended it to be. And that was a new context we were working with. The thing with this new context was that it was totally un-sexy. At that time she was a vessel with something in it that needed to be seeded. I don't know if the original point as a context for sex is as un-sexy as the commercial context that exists in the making of a scene in a porn video. But if it is, I'm thinking man, you just gotta admire the expert tradesmanship of these porn stars!

I got the whole range of flavours across many attempts in the next 24 hours since we got the green light, dude -- some would be a total failure to gain altitude, and some would involve a healthy altitude reached then a failure to deliver the payload as altitude was lost (and everything between the two extremes). We had a failed attempt when we got home from seeing the doctor, then a failed morning attempt the following day, then a day at the office for our trouble. We got on to start that evening's attempt which, as we got into it, started failing as well.

Panic! My wife, as it turned out, was in sync with my sentiments. We have to get this done now. Another month or two of "monitored conception" and we could've easily spiralled into despair!

"Start thinking of Rosanna Arquette or whoever the hell you wank off on!!!"

* * *

Well, I better get back to my "transitioning" work. I promised my son this morning I'd be home early to help him with a lego kit he got from a trip to the mall yesterday.

Into the salt mines

2010-01-15T17:54:00.022+11:00

Last month, a friend of mine had recommended me to the head of a division within the company I work for. They are in the process of recruiting people to staff a big project they are kicking off this year. I sent them my resume and hadn't heard from them until a couple of days ago when I got a call from HR informing me of the interview they were scheduling for me.

This morning I was in that interview. I had a nice informal chat with the head of that group and one of her managers. Turns out they had already checked out my resume, liked what they saw, and just had a few formality questions to ask me. So, yeah, I got the job. First thing I did when I got back to my desk was tell my boss. I think he was a bit relieved as well. My boredom in my current role has probably become quite obvious to him in the last couple of months. In the last six to eight months in this role, I managed to turn what was once a suite of tasks that took the full 40 hours a week to do into one that pretty much takes up one fourth of that. Same (if not more output) for less effort.

That's an achievement not really well-rewarded (if even recognised at all) in big bureaucratic organisations though. Often it is all about being seen to be "contributing" or (this one's my favourite) "adding value" or, even worse, being a "team player". But, hey, who cares. It's the cost of the security you get for working for The Borg. You lose your individuality and defer to the bell curve. Much obliged on my part, as what I do doesn't really involve the kind of life-or-death situations that make good hospital- or lawyer-themed drama television (where all the characters seem to give a damn).

My boss is a real decent guy. He's very supportive of everyone in our team. He's five years younger than I am and less-experienced. But I never ever make him feel like anything less than The Boss. He's the boss because he's a people person and plays The Game really well. I and the rest of my team respect him for that -- because he runs with the stuff us introverted techos prefer not to be involved with. Well that's what bosses do I suppose.

Anyways, a typical week consisting of ten hours of real work and thirty hours spent trying to be seen to be "busy" is, well, a bit too comfy for me. I tend to get uncomfortable with comfort. I've taken the view that there are always hidden costs to comfort. It's kind of like, in the bigger scheme of things, how we are now coming to realise what the comforts we achieved for ourselves as a civilisation are really costing us. But enough's been written about that stuff already so I won't get started on that. I think the more important reminder for me here is that that principle also holds at a micro level -- in this case me as an individual. I know if I get too comfy with my cushy job, my salary grows in small increments every year while my marketability stagnates. I'd suffer from salary inflation. I get stuck; priced out of the market.

So here I go. Off Fat City and into the salt mines. Let see how we go.

My five minutes of fame

2010-01-14T11:26:00.006+11:00

I don't know if anyone of you have noticed but lately there's been a glitch in the "Next Blog" functionality of Blogger. For some reason a small handful of lucky blogs are referred to by that function disproprortionately to the rest of the millions of other Blogger blogs.

One of them is a blog called BrandNew which according to its owner now benefits from referrals from this glitch to the tune of 5,000 hits per day. What did the owner of BrandNew, the venerable ad man Mr Tobias Wacker decide to do with his lottery winnings? He got creative and launched his first "stunt" which he called "Your Five Minutes of Fame". The details of the "experiment" can be found in the blog post there of the same title (click on that last link), but this excerpt I quote sums it up:

You write some short description of yourself, your [non-profit] organization, your project or your thoughts. Then you comment your content to this post. If it is good stuff I will make an own blog post out of it, and link to the sites you mentioned. Or in other words, I give away this blog to your cause for a post, if you convince me. If you want me to add a picture to your post, add a link to the picture in the end of your comment, so that I can grab it.

I'm not really a patron of the lottery. So with BrandNew getting 5,000 hits a day and presumably hundreds of other bloggers trying their luck at getting their five minutes there, the attitude I harboured as I considered spending two minutes banging out a short pitch for this nothing-to-lose opportunity almost did me in. But then I pulled myself together and came up with this:

Sorry, I didn't realise this is where I should make my pitch [I originally placed it in one of the selected blogs' entries]. Here goes:

I've earned my blogging stripes as a social/political commentator over the last 10 years and have decided to do something different. So I started a new blog:

http://suddenlyfourty.blogspot.com/

I plan to apply the same kind of vulcan logic I applied to socio-political commentary to, well, a more diverse range of more personal and interesting things. [a smiley follows]

Well as it turns out that was two minutes well-spent because I got my five minutes! Not bad. I'm actually quite pleased with myself. I don't know if this will actually convert to sustained traffic (though that of course depends on other factors) but to actually get into a shortlist of eight selected from three hundred entries received "just in the last 24 [hours]" (as of Mr Wacker's update today) constitutes a beating-of-the-odds in my book (not to downplay Mr Wacker's, ehem, good taste of course).

Anyways, there you go. My small win for the day. I'll hang on to this for the next day or two (or seven). I don't really win too many (if any) contests so I count this as a significant personal win in the real sense of being selected for the prize rather than simply having the luck of the draw. Thanks Mr Wacker. I almost feel like Suddenly Fourty is today's Blog of Note!

After seeing Avatar...

2010-01-12T13:05:00.010+11:00

I finally got around to seeing Avatar last Sunday. Nice. It came across to me more as fantasy than science fiction. For me there is a big difference between the two (and using the mashup term "Sci-Fi/Fantasy" is a cop-out) for the purpose of this exercise. Science-fiction as the term implies explores possibilities grounded on reasonably plausible conjecture. Fantasy, on the other hand makes use of, well, fantastic concepts, settings, and characters as literary devices for telling stories or delivering messages. I guess in a sense, science fiction is a fantastic story built upon scientifically or logically plausible conceptual underpinnings.

Perhaps I could demonstrate what I mean by personally classifying some films I've seen (and and at least liked) that are relevant to these two categories. Note that I will list only those that I think fall within that gray area of "SciFi/Fantasy". This means that movies and stories like the Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series of books and movies which make no attempt at all to even look remotely plausible are hands-down classifiable as fantasy.

So here they are expertly classified:

Fantasy:

- The Star Wars episodes
- Star Trek and its spawn
- War of the Worlds
- Transformers
- Battle Star Galactica
- Avatar

Science Fiction:

- Alien
- The Thing
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010
- Blade Runner
- Contact
- Thunderbirds are Go
- They Live
- The Matrix
- Jurrassic Park
- Tron

The most notable feature that spells the difference between the two lists is the application of the concept of aliens, specifically intelligent extra-terrestrial life forms. The movies included in the "fantasy" list not only all contain aliens, they depict them in a matter-of-fact way. It's like, they (the aliens in those stories) just are, they are there among us and interacting with us, and there are stories behind why they are and are among us but are irrelevant to those movies.

On the other hand, not all the movies under the "science fiction" class are about aliens or include aliens in their stories; and those that do have them depict them in a more abstract way; in a way, as a matter of fact, that highlights, explores, and focuses on their very alien-ness. For that matter, the movies under my "science fiction" heading all attempt to propose to and immerse the audience in truly alien experiences (interacting with alien creatures being one such subset experience proposed). Perhaps I can describe good science fiction with the following one-liner:

Good science fiction proposes the plausible existence of a truly alien experience.

There is no alien experience in any of the movies in my "fantasy" list even as they pitch themselves as "science fiction". The human drama in the movies listed there hook onto experiences that even the most reptilian recesses of our minds can relate with -- our propensity to war and violence, our instinct to mate, and the primitive fight-or-flight impulse we share with other animal species -- regardless of the underlying premises of their plots. In contrast The Matrix, for example, builds the drama of discovering the phoniness of our world (and exploring the possibilities of the "real" one) squarely upon the arguably fictitious science of using computers to simulate a virtual reality in one's brain.

Avatar obviously may as well be a story about what happened to the people we call native Americans and Aboriginal Australians. The only difference is that Avatar has a happy Hollywood ending. And to a huge chunk of humanity, there is nothing alien in a well-executed entertainment product coming out of Hollywood, which is why extraterrestrial alien intelligences may be good storytelling devices but don't necessarily make true science fiction. For that matter, glossy special effects deliver good entertainment (and immensely entertained I certainly was while watching Avatar, prior caveats to the experience being helpful as well), but only in the same sense of the way that sixty-year-old technology called television also succeeds in this regard.

Going ga-ga over Polaroid

2010-01-10T19:03:00.038+11:00

I read recently that Lady Gaga was appointed Creative Director at Polaroid. Actually it is supposed to be a "strategic partnership" between the fashion icon of today and the iconic brand of yesteryears (or maybe even more appropriately, yesterdecades). As if that weren't bizarre enough, according to the Herald,

The partnership is designed to help Polaroid appeal to a younger demographic after its technology was rendered obsolete by digital cameras offering a more effective form of instant photo gratification.

And here I was thinking "I wonder what Polaroid's been doing since the 70's when they did instant film photography...". Turns out that they are still doing instant film photography!

That can't be right. So I checked out the Polaroid website and looked over their products section. Indeed they still do cameras. To be fair they do digital cameras now as well as a little device that does instant digital prints called PoGo. A bit sad, I think. The Polaroid name alone used to stand for instant portable photo printing. Now, the process that made them an icon is provided by a mere peripheral to the range of undifferentiated products they currently market.

Would you choose a Polaroid digital camera over one made by, say, Canon, Panasonic, or even JVC? The brand itself is definitely still seen to be iconic as the marketability of Polaroid charm necklaces (pictured on the right) attest to. But the current products of Polaroid itself have "So what?" written all over them. That's where Lady Gaga comes in, I suppose. As "creative director", presumably she will likely work on rubbing off some of her coolness onto them.

I dunno. At first I thought that there is something dishonest about painting a lead bar gold in order to pass off said bar as worth its weight in... well, you know. But then don't most of us wax and vacuum the car before we sell it? Or wear a suit to an interview? Get all made up for a night out in town? My point is, everything in one way or another is a pitch. Often the sale is made less on the merit of the product and more on the skill by which it is pitched.

In the case of Polaroid, the company made its mark pretty much on a groundbreaking but one-time technological innovation (instantaneous film photo printing). That technology has since been made obsolete by digital photography. So unless it is up to the task of coming up with the next big groundbreaking technological innovation, the company will have to transform itself from being primarily a technology company into one whose core competency is in marketing undifferentiated products. Clothes, for example, are fundamentally undifferentiated. Most of the clothes we buy nowadays, which could easily encompass fifty-odd brands over a year, are probably produced by a handful of garments manufacturers somewhere in China. Think of it: fifty-odd brands manufactured by ten-odd factory owners. Garment marketers in our comfy societies have all but convinced us that we're getting a shitload of "variety". That's the garment industry's pitch to us.

Beer is another. I mean, honestly, how different is one brand of beer to the other in the overall scheme of flavours the human palate is exposed to? Three to five bottles into the night and it won't even matter even to those who beg to differ to my summary dismissal of variety in beer. Yet the sheer variety of beer brands and the equally diverse range of marketing and advertising approaches taken to convince us that drinking their brand is cool boggles the mind.

It's ridiculous.

Because we have become a society obssessed with self-image, the pitch to us has become more an appeal to our egos and less to our rational sensibilities. And that to me is why Lady Gaga is now "Creative Director" of Polaroid.

2010: we should have been travelling to Jupiter by now

2010-01-04T21:51:00.033+11:00

One of my favourite movies of the 1980's is the film 2010. It is the sequel to the classic Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey which ended with its lead character Dave Bowman uttering the words "My God, it's full of stars". If I recall right, those words were said as he approached that big black alien monolith that he, his crew, and the self-aware computer HAL-9000 were sent to investigate aboard their interplanetary space ship the U.S.S. Discovery. I've seen 2001. The novelty of space travel at the time the film was made is quite obvious in the way the minutiae of such things as the dynamics of moving in zero-g or the architecture of spacecraft and space stations were highlighted and focused on.

But 2010 was made during my time -- 1984 to be exact (another seminal year, by the way. But that's another story...) and the images that stuck included Roy Scheider's character Dr. Heywood Floyd tapping away at an Apple IIc on the beach and that tense space walk from their spacecraft Leonov to the Discovery. Presumably Dr. Floyd's using an Apple IIc in what was going to be the year of the iPhone comes from what would motivate one to drive around in a vintage Volkswagen Beetle. I dunno. Vintage cars and vintage computers? Considering I am most probably the same age today -- in 2010 -- as the character Dr. Floyd is in the fictitious 2010 of the movie, I'd say the nostalgia of using an Apple IIc that the makers of 2010 tried to evoke in that scene was spot-on (perhaps it may be no more than a product placement). But then in practice, I don't see myself lugging a CRT monitor (even the small one that comes with the IIc), the Apple IIc CPU itself, plugging all the cables and then firing it up from some sort of portable power source on the beach (the IIc was strictly AC-powered). That's a real 2010 mind at work (mine) but one also recognising the accidental foresight in a movie released in 1984 implying that Apple Computers would be at the forefront of cool 25 years later.

Funny how science fiction (at least the popular sort) more often than not gets it wrong. For one thing, much of the gadgetry in most 1980's sci-fi cinema features lots of flickering CRT screens. Blade Runner in particular had lots of them. They flickered all over the place and some even suffered faulty vertical-holds every now and then. In retrospect, you'd think flat screen devices would have been considered to be desirable pieces of technology that even 1980's sci-fi writers would envision as common fixtures in the future worlds they create. Carl Sagan had a term for this sort of myopia -- temporal chauvinism. Just as Victorian Era illustrators envisioned London of the 1940s abuzz with self-propelled vehicles that still resembled 19th Century horse-drawn coaches, we saw the turn-of-the-21st-Century human habitat as abuzz with flickering analogue video delivered by electron guns on phosphor screens. To our fascination with the future we apply a temporal chauvinism to pull it back into our comfort zones.

The future beyond 2010 -- our current future -- is likely to be one where our computing devices are even more intimately integrated into our clothing and even implanted within our bodies. Rather than have to squint at the screens of our mobile devices, we'd probably have a heads-up display built into our spectacles projecting data directly into our line of sight, a-la Terminator or, more recently, the fat humans in Wall-E (no more people looking over our shoulders at what we are doing on our mobile devices). In short, technology tends to get less conspicuous as it advances. Instead of us wearing bulky utility belts with battery packs to power the "ultramagnetic personal transcievers" strapped to our backs, today's mobile phone is tucked away out of sight in the shirt or pants pocket of the average man-on-the-street. Considering that the average 2010 city slicker routinely carries in his shirt pocket a hundred times the computing power available to the Apollo missions, he is virtually indistinguishable from his 1969 counterpart.

Indeed, visionary technology is not necessarily good showbiz. Even relatively low-tech telephony and email gets in the way of a good drama scene. Ever notice in an episode of Boston Legal or Law and Order how people take the trouble to pop into one another's offices to have a conversation? You can't have that same dramatic effect enacted with a more realistic workplace scene of people having heated email exchanges over policy disputes (though You've Got Mail somehow pulled off a romantic comedy story on this platform). Even a telephone conversation will never be as theatrically appealing as a face-to-face dialogue between two characters in a drama show.

And that is why Roy Scheider is sitting on a beach with an Apple IIc in the 1984 movie 2010, or why Dr Bones McCoy gave Captain James Kirk a pair of "late 20th Century" stainless-steel rimmed glasses as a present in Star Trek: The Movie, or why Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader would rather hack at each other with light sabers than blast away at each other from a more comfy distance with the same technology. Hi tech is bad showbiz.

Yakkity yak all around

2010-01-04T21:21:00.018+11:00

Several years ago, a consultant was employed by my previous employer to conduct one of those Myers-Briggs personality profiling tests on us. The test determines what sort of person we are inclined to be, presumably if removed from the pressures of stepping up to (and in some cases stepping down to) a particular archetype required in your chosen line of work. As expected, one of my parameters showed that I tended towards introversion. No surprises there. I didn't really need a test to tell me that. In fact, I was a consultant myself for most of my career, and I needed to step up from my introversion to succeed as a consultant. So I did. But that did not change my inclination to introversion. That's what off-duty hours are for, aren't they? They're for us to spring back to our natural selves.

What the consultant told me in a follow-up session though was quite insightful (even if it was probably just something she got off a standard script she follows for these sessions). She told me that I am self-sufficient. It was such an obvious implication of being introverted but still quite an eye-opener to me at the time. Indeed, it is likely that she meant not me in particular. I'd say it's a no-brainer that most introverts are self-sufficient. Why else would we be introverts? If we weren't so we'd be dependent on constant human interaction for our "energy" (using the Myers-Briggs jargon I learned from those sessions). Instead, I find that I am able to lose myself in my own thoughts and sort things out pretty much on my own.

Trouble is, I live in a world of yakkity-yak. At work, I'm surrounded by colleagues who need to be "walked through" or, the worse version of this concept, "talked through" documents I produced which I took great pains to make as concise and intuitive to behold as possible. A lot of times I feel like being a smart-arse and ask them, "Ok, what part of the document don't you understand?" just to see if they even tried to read it. Actually I have responded in such a manner many times -- of course in the softly-softly way consistent with the people-person archetype that employers expect their people to align themselves with nowadays. Lately, well actually after two years in my current gig, people I deal with at work respond less to my emails now. Presumably it's because my emails are masterpieces of water-tight written communication. I'd also like to think that I get responded to only with the most pertinent of questions -- a testament to the reality that 90% of meetings and probably 70% of phone calls (both by my personal reckoning) in the workplace are unnecessary (refer to my beef with all that in a previous post).

Home is another matter. Home is where my life being a life of have to (Steve Martin's character in the movie Parenthood beat me to the concept by 20 years) is most in my face. I'm the go-to person at home, the guy who knows how to program the appliances, navigate all the remotes, and sort out the computer when it acts up. I'm the guy who gets asked all the hard questions by my son (because I have an extensive track record of not dismissing his questions as "too hard"), the guy who my daughter can use as a punching bag when she is on one of her indignation rampages, and the guy who's got the spatial processing faculties to optimise our dishwasher load.

Much of what alerts me to (and more often reminds me of) all of the above responsibilities and have-to's come in the form of yakkity-yak.

That's my personal reward for being "self-sufficient". I get relied upon in return and constantly reminded of that fact. No mercy.

How to enjoy Avatar...

2010-01-02T16:58:00.003+11:00

I haven't seen Avatar yet. But what I have seen thus far is a flurry of great amateur reviews about it, mostly on my Facebook newsfeed, some on the odd blog or two, the rest on various channels of the hype machinery of Big Media.

Then I read Miranda Devine's review on the Herald...

About the time the baddest bad guy - a US marine, of course - launches an unconscionable attack on the Na'vi with the words "Shock and awe", "pre-emptive war" and "fighting terror with terror", you realise you've been had. The snarling vipers of left-wing Hollywood have been let off the leash in a way previously unmatched in a high-priced blockbuster. In fact Avatar is reputed to be the most expensive movie ever made, with a budget of $US500 million.

I'm kinda reminded of how George Lucas let lose his politics on his Star Wars prequels. Episodes 1 was simply corny, and unless you took a conscious effort to focus on the StarWars-ness of Episodes 2 and 3, your eyes will keep rolling at every political angle highlighted in the latter two.

Considering that Avatar is not quite a sequel yet, Devine's review does nothing for my cynicism for half-billion-dollar blockbusters made by Establishment directors like James Cameron. Remember Godzilla? Lucas, in contrast, was fulfilling a personal vision at great personal risk when he made Star Wars (now prefixed by "Episode 4"), and lacked the sort of technology that tends to get in the way of good story telling.

If I had already watched it, I'd feel terrible that someone would beat me to highlighting the irony ...

[...] that Cameron has used the most advanced technology known to man to create an anti-technology movie about how much better are the ways of the noble savage.

Of course I'm going to watch Avatar, and I will probably enjoy it -- specially now that i know the aspects of it I will focus on enjoying.

The New Year in the cosmic scheme of things

2009-12-31T11:56:00.004+11:00

Tonight in Sydney we're going to be among the first cities on the planet to welcome the New Year and the new decade. Speaking of which, I was reading this week's edition of Time on the train (the one with this year's "Man of the Year" on the cover, wait, "Person of the Year" lest I be accused of being politically incorrect). In it was a letter from a certain "Lisa" who was arguing (with regard to that magazine's welcome of the new decade) that the decade is supposed to begin on 2011. If I recall right her argument went along the lines of her kid knowing how to count and always starting a count from the number one.

Funny. Even funnier if she was being serious there.

Would you consider 1970 part of the 1960's and 1971 the beginning of the 1970's?

I don't think it really matters in the cosmic scheme of things if we are to consider the brainwave I had while commenting on noted blogger Mr London Street's We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight:

Strange, all the silliness of these holidays marking what are really just our planet's location at an arbitrary point in space and time.

Happy New Year all!

Victims of clever marketing

2009-12-26T23:56:00.005+11:00

This blog post is based on a comment I made on Kevin J. Gamble's blog article Jobs: The trend line is not positive. Gamble's article in turn was also based on a comment he intended to make in another blog article that also describes the magnitude of the job creation challenge that faces most advanced economies in the aftermath of the "global financial crisis" (GFC).

The thesis of Gamble's article and the article he refers to is the reality that there may be no jobs to go back to despite all efforts to "create" new ones to replace those that were obliterated by the collapse.

And here is what I think:

I think there are no jobs to go back to because most of the ones that were lost were created on the back of a layer of perceived value that coated the core of tangible value in our economies' asset base before this crisis. The GFC I believe and as I have read in many articles, at its most fundamental, serves as a severe test of asset value. Not surprisingly, it is assets that lack substance that are at biggest risk.

Compared to the past when an asset was tangible in the sense that you could see the direct connection between its value and its ability to produce tangible goods, what constitutes the asset bases of our economies today are increasingly abstract (accounted for by things like brand equity, goodwill, and complex securities).

Whereas one couldn't plow a field to produce the season's harvest without a horse, today, it is still possible to sell a cola drink even without the brand "Coca Cola". The Coca Cola brand in this example is booked as an asset with a nominal value in the Coca Cola Company's balance sheet. Yet factories can still physically continue to churn out the drink even if the brand disappeared tomorrow.

The value added by the Coca Cola brand is in the role it plays in the "creation" of demand -- i.e., the brand represents demand creation capability. However the brand itself does not represent production capability.

In short the Coca Cola brand creates demand for cola drinks -- through the clever marketing machinery it keeps humming that continuously makes people believe that they need or want to drink Coke. When demand collapses, enterprises that are valued for their demand creation capability are most vulnerable to asset deflation. Of course, Coca Cola is not the sort of nebulous "asset" that gets hit hard by financial "crises" that cause collapses in aggregate demand. But my point is that there is a huge chunk of our economy that is propped up by demand for non-essential goods and services. That they are non-essential highlights the reality that our demand for these goods and services was created by clever marketing. And it is this clever marketing that made valuable "assets" of what are really nebulous business artifacts like brands and other "assets" that underpin much of the market capitalisation that accompanies such perceptions of value.

Worse, we keep seeing population growth as a good thing because it keeps enterprises whose business models are premised on the idea of creating demand healthy. Yet when demand goes, we are stuck with the dependence on "creating jobs" and increasing agricultural yields, which in turn accounts for our addiction to petroleum-guzzling industrial agriculture methods. That includes the petroleum-based synthetic fertilisers that constitute a major input into food production.

Catch my drift so far?

This is a world where our very standard of living owes itself to the idea that we as a species should sustain and even grow the voraciousness at which we chomp away at our planet's resources, all for the sake of keeping "aggregate demand" up so that money continues to exchange hands at a fast enough rate.

Next time we something we see on TV convinces us that we "need" or even "deserve" that overseas vacation with the additional sweetener of rock-bottom airfares, perhaps we should pause and think twice about what it is we are really spending on.

Babe Army!

2009-12-25T23:47:00.005+11:00

It's almost like a fashion show on steroids -- in that intense way that only the Chinese could do.

I had two years of mandatory Citizen's Military Training (CMT) back in my university days, and have experienced marching (after weeks of drills to get it right!) in platoon- and battalion-strength formation. Our marching pace in those days was probably half the tempo of this parade. So I just have to pause and salute these ladies.

Face time

2009-12-23T12:13:00.005+11:00

I had my mid-year performance review meeting with my boss today. My performance as an employee is measured along several lines: "community building" among users of our service, customer service, development of new services, and quality of output.

I got high marks in all except the first: "community building", which happens to be the item that wields the biggest weight (20%) in an accounting of my overall performance. My boss said I need to be out there with the customers getting more "face time".

Okay.

I'm thinking as I listened to the words coming out of my boss's mouth:

If I am tops at customer service, develop innovative new services on a regular basis, and deliver at a high quality consistently, what exactly is the added value of this additional "face time" I need to have with my customers on top of the regular day-to-day communication and interaction I have with them?

Do I arrange meetings with them just for the sake of earning some "face time" points?

The trouble with the organisation I work for is that there is this nebulous metric around which a big chunk of our "performance" is assessed called "customer satisfaction". This metric is based on a customer satisfaction survey conducted quarterly after which we get our "satisfaction" scores reported at a department level. So the more "customers" rate themselves as being "satisfied" with our department's services the higher our score is, and the happier the boss is. In effect the game around being a department that satisfies its customers is really a popularity contest. The more we schmooze with people, bend the rules for them to make things "easy", and delight them with our personable qualities over the phone, the more we gain face and name recall and overall brownie points with them.

As to the nature of the work involved? Well now, who needs to dwell on that when I've got it good with Sally from Accounting who was my top "customer" this Quarter because I helped her sort out some formatting issues with a spreadsheet report she struggled with last week. She'll be sure to remember me in the next survey. I also bought Harry from Systems Support a coffee last month just to "catch up" on stuff related to our services. Nothing specific. Just a catch up to see if there is anything more we can "do" for him to keep him happy.

If you haven't worked out what exactly is wrong with the picture I painted in the above paragraph, stop right here and move on. If you did (and most probably will have), read on please.

It's little wonder that there is so much politics and bullshit work going on in our organisation. Of course, what large organisation doesn't have its share of both? After all, the big ones have deeper pockets and can tolerate and afford far more inefficiency than the smaller ones. Indeed, as the last couple of years' challenging financial times have demonstrated, Big Corporate have played a key role in keeping unemployment rates in check. Inefficiency creates jobs after all.

But then this is all about me. I had excelled over the last six months at doing my work properly in such a way that I created less dramas for my customers and in the process made my job easier without compromising on the volume and value of my output. What do I get for my trouble? A directive to undertake an initiative that will (1) create unnecessary work for me, and (2) take up other peoples' time unnecessarily; all for the sake of getting a bit more "face time". Note the common denominator here: unnnecessary. It's a term that best describes politics and bullshit which is essentially what all this is.

Brittany Murphy and the thing about death...

2009-12-21T10:35:00.005+11:00

Just saw this on the news this morning: Brittany Murphy dead at 32. Brittany Murphy is the girl who played the homely sidekick of the character played by Alicia Silverstone in the movie Clueless. She went on to become a star in her own right and I read that she even had a dance track that became a dance club hit.

I can't claim to know Brittany Murphy by any stretch. But the thing about hearing news about someone's death is that it induces an almost reflex-like process in my mind to call up all memories about that person. In the case of Brittany Murphy, it was all the scenes of her in various movies she was in that I've seen. My most extensive store of images of her was from the movie Clueless.

Last night, I went to the wake of the grandmother of a friend of ours. She was 80. I remember her as someone who'd just be sitting quietly or making light conversation with people whenever we'd attend their family gatherings. And then last night, I see her lying in her casket, silenced forever.

As Douglas Hofstadter in his book I Am A Strange Loop described the idea of someone you know dying:

There had been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out.

Strange Loop for me was Hofstadter's insightful journey of coming to terms with the idea of a human mind emerging over our its lifetime and then suddenly blinking out after death. If we think of the human brain as a kind of a mind-bogglingly complex machine for storing patterns, the mind would be a mind-bogglingly complex pattern that forms in the brain starting from the time we are born and as we go about living the rest of our lives. The nature of the pattern of our mind is therefore an outcome of the nature of our interactions with the world around us.

If our minds our patterns, it means that like any pattern it can be reproduced or copied. Unfortunately like most copies and reproductions, some of the finer details of the original are lost in the copying process. Our memories of the people we know who have died are, in a sense, imperfect copies of those people. So they do live on -- as patterns that are imperfect representations of the original -- in our minds and all those who remember them.

Advanced alien life: couch potatoes who can't be bothered

2009-12-19T10:30:00.008+11:00

On the train this morning, I just finished reading the book We need to talk about Kelvin by Marcus Chown. It's an excellent book where Chown makes connections between what is readily observable everyday -- the solidness of our bodies and the stuff around us, our reflection on a glass window, the darkness of the night sky, etc. -- to the counter-intuitive realities that quantum physics predict about our universe.

In the last chapter of Kelvin, Chown lays out an extensive discussion around the probability of us coming into contact with extra-terrestrial (ET) intelligent life. He brings together the views of an array of experts on the subject. Biologists, for one, describe the fine points around how infinitessimally improbable the evolution of complex multi-cellular organisms is, much less intelligent life. To highlight that point, they show how single-cell life forms were around on Earth for more than three billion years before multi-cellular life emerged and flourished only in the last 700 million years. Imagine how lucky a little planet like Earth is. It managed to survive long enough, circling the sun more than three billion times without being blown to bits by a stray asteroid, to see our close ancestors (in relative terms given geological timescales) crawling out of the muck!

Physicists and astronomers for their part cite how the vast distances between stellar systems make a civilisation's mustering the motivation to physical travel between them quite unlikely as well. Even amongst ourselves, we can see how the frenzy of manned space exploration of the fifties and sixties that accompanied its novelty at the time (not to mention thea gendas of Cold War global politics) simply died down in the seventies as humanity turned inward and focused on developing technologies and systems that connected us better (personal computing and the Internet) and made us more efficient thinkers.

This brings me to my key takeaway from that chapter. Chown's final point was that perhaps ET is out there. But they have come to find themselves, their own civilisations, and their own creations far more interesting than anything that might lie out there to even bother to go out and explore. He cites the theories of Stephen Wolfram who puts forth the idea that complexity in the universe (which includes us) ultimately can be reduced to mathematical constructs and therefore modelled in computers. It is just a matter of having enough computing power to do this progressively efficiently and in a sophisticated enough level as to capture our sustained interest. At some point, civilisations develop enough computing power and programming savvy to model and simulate just about any form of complexity in their computing infrastructure. And perhaps even ours, the whole history of our planet and the evolution of our species in it perhaps, is already a running simulation in ET's personal computing device somewhere out there.

I believe that even in relatively primitive Planet Earth we are already seeing the beginnings of this trend. Facebook and Twitter among others have become a more interesting place for socialising than the real world for many. The latest computer games have become so realistic and engaging that many of us now spend almost half our week immersed in their artificial worlds.

And that is just 21st Century Planet Earth computing technology at work here. Imagine what the future holds. So far there is still no foreseeable limit to the growth in computing power available to us and the amount of interesting things that can be made available within our living rooms by these technologies.

If we can live out an interesting life in the world of Halo or even Grand Theft Auto, how can the prospect of discovering bacterial alien life on Mars compete? Perhaps ET is somewhere out there. But he may already have become too much of a couch potato to bother with us.

[Photo credit: Josep Sardanyés Cayuela]