And in fact, when asked why they bike rather than drive, the great majority of Copenhageners respond that it’s simply the quickest, most convenient way to get around. Health and economic concerns are factors, too. Protecting the environment? Hardly a blip on their radar:
(Copenhagen city officials have worked hard to make biking easy. For details on their methods, which one planner described as “the carrot, the whip, and the tambourine,” check out part 2 in this series.)
[Is there a greater force in the world than self interest?]
Do you ever notice that you try hard to keep your new car pristine as long as you can, but if you buy a mountain bike, you hurry to get some dirt on it so it doesn’t look so new anymore? Or talking yourself into spending $100+ on a pair of alpine climbing pants, but wincing at a $100 price tag on a pair of jeans? Wearing $100 jeans to help your buddy move a couch is not OK, but wearing $150 soft shell pants to bushwhack through a forest of thorny bushes is OK. Walking through mud in $400 Italian leather loafers: absurd. Walking through mud in $400 mountaineering boots: expected.
Give me the warmest, best-designed down jacket, so I can spill coffee on it and watch embers from a campfire put tiny holes in it. Which I will then patch with Seam Grip, duct tape or Krazy glue. Please make it a bright, fashionable color that will highlight the stains I will put on it by brushing against dusty cars, spilling food on it, and coiling ropes.
[I once foolishly added up the outfit I was wearing while cycling. Worse it was the autumn, so there were a couple of layers and jacket… I immediately composed the outdoor clothing teetotalers pledge: “I agree to abstain from ever summing the cost of the clothing and gear I ride, wear, and abuse in pursuit of my outdoor activities. So help me Muir.” I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from that first time… and look.. REI is having a sale. Oooh, shiny…]
My friend Evan and his family started a coffee shop, the wonderfully engaging Roast Coffee & Tea Trading Company, a couple of years ago. They aimed high and decided early on that they to roast their own coffee. They transparently source single origin green coffee beans from around the world, roast them, brew them and serve them as “single origin brews” so that you can taste the different regions and how they compare to one another. And it is from him that Lisa procures her daily dose.
A recent trip by the folks at Roast brought Maui Yellow Caturra to our home. Grown in a hot, dry climate on the island of Maui, these coffee beans produce high yields of coffee cherries all with a bright shade of yellow when ripe. Enriched by the nutrient-rich, volcanic soil from a farm located in the West Maui Mountains and grown under the guidance of owner Kimo Falconer, this coffee is grown overlooking the famous western coast of Maui. Mild and clean with a spicy character.
I’m a tea guy, not a coffee guy, and not a particularly crazed one at that, but there’s some kinda magic in good coffee, and Evan & Co. goes to great lengths to produce the magic. At this point Roast is quiet resource from Long Island and I know first hand the lengths that were traveled to procure an appropriate roaster, get it tuned and producing excellent coffee. I’ve also had the chance to taste the roasted beans of many batches and have learned quite a bit about the varying tastes and flavors. Right now, the Maui Yellow Caturra is the one Lisa tosses in the grinder and the smell is so wondrous it makes me wonder why I don’t drink the brew. Go get yourself some before it’s gone.
My friends—my riding friends—they all always have some mission, some dream, some ride that for them is crazy and maybe impossible and which the world will never care about. Some aim to do a single loop of 2-5-10 without walking. Some want to ride across the country, win national titles, world championships, just keep up for once dammit, or figure out a good route to work. And we all understand it all. We know as fully and purely as we did back in those summer days that something vital to life and truth is at stake every day. We have each other’s respect—though not, anymore, because we saved the world but, I think, because we’re still at play.
[Noah teaches me this every day. So do my riding friends who always have some mission or other. Bill’s on fire lately.]
On my bike, when I am aware, which is almost always, I am aware of being me, or, more rare, of simply being, or, more often, aware of the riding, and sometimes of how my bicycle and I relate or of something I hope to put into words. If those words ever feel at all to anyone anything like a ride, or if in them riders recognize themselves, I have done my part, whatever my part is.
[Well that ain’t gonna happen with this description… but the rides are beginning to feel good. Joyous and overflowing with beauty. It was cool outside this morning so I pulled on arm warmers until I hit the climbs. The gnats that have been bit of a plague on the climbs were MIA. Two woman flying down a decent left an odiforous wake of sunscreen mixed with detergent(?) that nearly gagged a pair of hikers kitting up on the side of the road. The riders were also talking so loudly a deafness warning zone should have been established around them, so now I have some potential new additions for the Velominati rules. As it was a fleeting encounter, we collectively shook our heads, smiled and moved on. The little cottage (rectory?) of the Church in the Woods is being rebuilt and is coming along quite nicely. And as you can again see from the above, the anglers stayed home.
By the time I rolled home Noah had saved the world at least twice (evil ninja’s, storm troopers, who knows from what else) and was headed out the door to get some summer reading books and to meet his friend at the book store.
Below, you can see my Oma making her entrance to the celebration of her 100th birthday. 61 (not counting babies) of her immediate family, their spouses, nieces, nephews, and including grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren were able to attend. Those who were not able to make it were missed. Beneath that is some of the food that was served and why the scale yelled at me this morning. But what is one supposed to do? We waited 100 years to have this celebration. I doubt I’ll be at the next one… Allez!]
And that’s all awesome and fabulous and social and 3.0ish except for one, small, inconvenient fact: zero sum. What you consume here, you take from there. Not just their attention, not just their time, but their ability to be the person they are when they are at their best. When they have ample cognitive resources. When they can think, solve-problems, and exercise self-control. When they can create, make connections, and stay focused.
Is that “content” worth it? Maybe. But instead of “Is this useful?” perhaps we should raise the bar and ask “Will they use it?” (and so, yeah, I’m more than a little self-conscious about typing that as I consume your cognitive resources. But I didn’t start Serious Pony to save your cognitive resources; I want to help save the cognitive resources of your users).
[I complain about various bits of cognitive drain to my wife all the time. No doubt a self fulfilling prophecy for her… I’ll have to work on that. On the upside, I bother my team at work about reducing it for others all the time. It’s zero sum game at every level.]
The question and the possibility it presents put me in mind of my father, who died a few years ago at age 86. An engineer by training, he read constantly after he retired. His range was enormous; he read about everything from astronomy to natural history, travel and gardening. I remember once discovering dozens of magazines and journals in the house and was convinced that my parents had become the victims of a mail-order scam.
Thinking I’d help with the clutter, I began to bundle up the magazines for recycling when my father angrily confronted me, demanding to know what the hell I was doing. “I read all of these,” he said.
And then it dawned on me. I cannot recall his ever having remarked on how fast or slow his life seemed to be going. He was constantly learning, always alive to new ideas and experience. Maybe that’s why he never seemed to notice that time was passing.
So what, you might say, if we have an illusion about time speeding up? But it matters, I think, because the distortion signals that we might squeeze more out of life.
It’s simple: if you want time to slow down, become a student again. Learn something that requires sustained effort; do something novel. Put down the thriller when you’re sitting on the beach and break out a book on evolutionary theory or Spanish for beginners or a how-to book on something you’ve always wanted to do. Take a new route to work; vacation at an unknown spot. And take your sweet time about it.
[All the excuse I need to always continue programming, music, woodworking, photography, and everything else. One should never stop learning.]
It’s 2013. Where’s my flying car that folds into a briefcase?
A lot of folks feel this way, and some critical things have changed and frankly grown inexpensive enough that folks are making what they want on their own. Of course, that’s not the only factor. Another is the power of social effects as so many folks have a mobile device within three feet 24 hours a day (I don’t, but hey, whatever works for you). In the example below Nathan took an inexpensive microwave and added the sorts of features I’d think any microwave in 2013 would have. Even just setting the clock from the Internet on startup would be a huge improvement, never mind a simpler interface, and some kind of app that would make more complex cooking simpler. (I’m going to add right now that I think microwave cooking is a bad idea. Ping me if you care to hear more about that.)
For the less technical, the Raspberry Pi Nathan used is computer on a board. It cost $25. So it’s not like the larger manufacturers couldn’t include it for very little additional cost. And if the scanner were common the “microwave” food database would crowd source to useful levels in no time at all, and the food conglomerates would be happy to start including their stuff only requiring adjustments by the people.
Crowd funding sites like Kickstarter are filled with examples of watches, belts, tokens that help find other items, and all sorts of “I’m tired of waiting for the BigCo’s to make this” projects. This has been common in the software world. Something didn’t do what you want? Write the answer! Now this is becoming common with hardware.
I find this so exciting because I felt that the place where software is at its best is where it “disappears” into hardware. That the “thing” has great support in the back from a world of connectivity and processing power is great, but at its best… not evident. There’s a lot of products to improve, and since the BigCo’s are far better at copying than they are at innovating, folks like Nathan will either show them the way, or in many cases, become the competition.
One such harm, for example, which I call aggregation, emerges from the fusion of small bits of seemingly innocuous data. When combined, the information becomes much more telling. By joining pieces of information we might not take pains to guard, the government can glean information about us that we might indeed wish to conceal. For example, suppose you bought a book about cancer. This purchase isn’t very revealing on its own, for it indicates just an interest in the disease. Suppose you bought a wig. The purchase of a wig, by itself, could be for a number of reasons. But combine those two pieces of information, and now the inference can be made that you have cancer and are undergoing chemotherapy. That might be a fact you wouldn’t mind sharing, but you’d certainly want to have the choice.
[A great read an why we’re about to make a huge mistake in the US. Reductionism fails again on this issue. Looked at as a whole, it is frightening.]
Ms Mayer’s move is not just a bad idea in itself but also a nail in the coffin of the naive notion that women with big jobs help their sisters up the ladder. Her plan will knock out a few rungs. Flexible employers help women run families and jobs simultaneously. Rigid working practices make combining the two impossible or unpleasant. To be fair, as somebody who took two weeks off to have a baby, Ms Mayer is hardly asking others to do what she would not; but then she has dulled the pain of separation from her child by installing a nursery next to her office. Yahoo’s less privileged and less Stakhanovite women may well hoof it to a friendlier organisation.
But this is not just about women. A well-managed company’s workers want to be productive, and managers trust them to decide how and where they will perform best. If that’s not happening, the boss needs to find out why. You can shackle a Yahoo to his desk, but you can’t make him feel the buzz.
[A lot of folks ask what I think about this since I run a remote team with folks in 3 countries. And the short answer is if folks aren’t motivated to work you need to fix that, and not place rings around how they do what they do. Solid piece.]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 