Taut Lines

I’m drawn to ropes and knots: books about knots, diagrams of knots, knot apps, paracord and ropes sold at hardware stores. Knots can be elegant solutions to otherwise difficult problems, like making a clothesline, pitching a tent or keeping your shoes on your feet. They can also be difficult, vexing solutions to simple, everyday problems if you can’t quite remember how they’re supposed to be tied.

I’ve tried regularly practicing knots like the double sheet bend and the tautline hitch, but it’s only been somewhat successful. (Same with napkin folds, but luckily napkins work perfectly even when they’re not folded.) I remember some of the knots I’ve practiced but not all, and my memory of them seems to be very specific as to which direction it starts from and how it’s oriented. It’s almost like I just can’t grasp what’s really going on with anything more than a very simple knot so I’m reduced to rote memorization. It’s like memorizing a poem in a language I don’t understand.

Perhaps this is a clue: I could read proficiently in kindergarten, but couldn’t reliably tie my own shoes. I was apparently good enough at reading out loud that my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Fasnacht, would sometimes let me sit in the big chair and read a story to the other kids while she went outside to have a cigarette. (I have been told this repeatedly, but my personal recollection is a little fuzzy. Like much of the 70’s, it sounds so wrong but feels so right.) I was poor enough at tying my own shoes that Jenny Barnes had to help me on several occasions.

It doesn’t make sense that I would be able to interpret these strange little marks strung together on the page better than I could manipulate a short length of string. It doesn’t seem reasonable that I would be able to follow the thread of a story and not be able to thread the ends of my shoelaces together in a useful way. Then again, actually weaving a story that will hold another person’s attention is much harder than simply reading one: the knotty problem persists.

And there’s the underlying principle: tension and connection. A rope simply provides tension—everything that a knot or a rope can do is because it can provide or withstand forces pulling on both sides of it. A simple line can tether us to something else with a little skill and attention: my shoe (and I) on the bight of my shoelace and Jenny on the two working ends; Ms. Fasnacht, my classmates and I bound together by the lines of a storybook.

Goodnight

It’s hard to say, when you get a cat from the Humane Society. They don’t really know for sure how old they are, but they said she was about 1 year old. We know that it was the summer of our nephew’s 13th birthday. And so there is complicated math, or trying to remember which year that was, or which year our nephew was born, or how old he is now… But our cat Isis was 20 years old this year, and that means she was with us for 19 years.

Her name—Isis—is a little unfortunate, given the world events the last few years. She is, of course, named after the ancient Egyptian goddess of the underworld, and she acted the part. We sometimes called her “The Princess of Everything”.

Isis, the Princess of Everything

It was only by chance that Isis came to live with us. She was quarantined for a cold at the Humane Society, which postponed our first chance to meet her and begin the process of adoption. After the quarantine expired, a misunderstanding or poor communication or computer glitch resulted in her being adopted by someone else before we were contacted. Isis was subsequently renamed “Penny” (likely because of her beautiful gold and copper-colored eyes) by her new owner, who obviously did not recognize her status as a goddess. Isis meowed far too much for the neighbors when she was left alone for most of the day in the apartment, and so after two weeks the owner returned her to the Humane Society which, in turn, called us to see if we were still interested. We were, and my wife rushed over to pick up Isis and bring her home the week that our nephew had come to stay with us, during the summer of his 13th birthday. She was adorable and sociable and loving and beautiful and complicated and playful and stately. We restored her original name, only referring to her as Penny when she was a little too imperious or fickle.

She liked to play a game of hide and seek with my wife: they chased each other around the house in turns, looking and listening carefully to discern which room the other might have crept into. Isis developed a nighttime ritual involving sitting on my chest while I lay in bed reading: she would first lick my nose repeatedly, then nuzzle my chin and cheeks (usually smudging my glasses in the process) before finally laying down in a position that might have allowed me to continue reading if my glasses had not recently become opaque. She would also occasionally sprint the length of the house, up the front stairs, down the hallway and down the back stairs for no apparent reason. (She continued this until as recently as a couple of months ago, although not with the same celerity or grace.) Around this time of year, she would have a habit of curling up on the floor vents of our old house when the heat would kick in—never mind that her favorites were in the high-traffic areas of the kitchen. She loved napping in the breezeway, no matter how hot it was in summer and much longer into Autumn than you might expect. I would sometimes cradle her and carry her into the house if she was still lounging there after dinner. And she would find me and sit with me at any time of year when, sleepless, I would read in the middle of the night.

She had slowed down the last couple of years. She no longer jumped into and out of the tall kitchen recycling bin every week when I emptied it. She became deaf, which we did not really notice at first, (after all, a cat-goddess may simply be ignoring you) but she was increasingly more vocal, much louder and nearly oblivious to us when she wasn’t looking at us. She walked fine, but was taking more time going up and down the stairs, favoring one of her front legs just a little, and hopping with her back legs. We put little stools by couches and chairs for her and bought steps so she could get into bed with us more easily.

But then she started having trouble breathing and had fits of wheezing and coughing. And then came the cancer diagnosis. We knew the time would come, of course, and we dreaded it. We had lost one of our other cats, Hobbes, early on in the pandemic but my secret hope was that it would be resolved before we had to consider how to let Isis go. Selfishly, I just wanted her to help us get through this; to just have a little space between…

But we couldn’t abide the strain and effort of her breathing when fluid began to fill the pleura around her lungs a second time. We arranged for a veterinarian to come to our home: she was profoundly compassionate and as skilled as anyone I’ve ever dealt with. Isis was able to die at home with both family and dignity.

Each pet is different, but Isis was different. There are unfathomable depths of loss and grief I have only seen from a distance, but I’ve had some little experience. There seems to be a different quality to feeling a simple loss: one that you can, unfairly or for some unreasonable reason, grasp and manage without too much distraction. And then there are the losses that persist somehow, that linger and deepen before they lift and recede. In this case, it is losing a friend with whom you’ve built ordinary, daily routines; one who brought you comfort by simply sitting quietly with you late at night when you could not sleep.

Good night, Isis. We will love you always.

Movement and Stillness

We saw a doe and a fawn slowly emerging from the cornfield the other night on our bike ride: watchful and beautiful; tentative and somehow poised at the same time. They stopped to look at us and we stopped to look at them. After a few moments and a little encouragement from us, the two deer bounded up toward the road. A car came from around the corner, and the two deer ran back toward the bike path and cornfield (A tricky thing: what is a road to a deer? What is a car?), then turned again and crossed the road, away from us and safely into the thick understory of a grove of trees.

Running and standing still are the two tools at their disposal to deal with the problem of how to respond to something they don’t recognize or understand. A small set of sharp tools, carefully honed, they complement each other nicely. Stillness lets them accurately observe movements of other animals (bicyclists, and motorists in this case). Quick acceleration and remarkable speed and agility leave potential predators behind.

Hummingbirds are magnificent examples of this in the extreme: they can suspend themselves perfectly in place, then fly across the yard like a dark green, feathery bullet. They occasionally stop to consider us as we work in the yard or stand looking about. They are curious, not really knowing what to make of us. 

I am curious, too; marveling at them. The tips of their wings moving impossibly fast; the tip of their beaks impossibly still. Both of us quiet for a few moments until something sets us in motion again. For the hummingbird: the business of drinking nectar, perhaps. For me: the departure of the hummingbird.

Movement, stillness, movement. Repeat.

The Cut

On the business end of an active knife is the cut. And similarly, from a distance, it can appear as sharp and clearly defined as the blade that made it. But under close examination it’s messy and untidy. A “clean” cut doesn’t really exist; under magnification it’s a rough valley with debris littering the landscape.

Successful cutting depends on repetition and persistence at a small scale. The tool isn’t truly perfect and neither is the result. Scale and perspective matter.

All Knives Are Serrated

A very sharp knife looks (as seen by the naked eye) to have a perfectly continuous edge formed by the intersection of two perfectly smooth surfaces. But the edge of a very sharp knife is, in fact, (as seen under powerful magnification) a jagged, impassable ridge line formed by the intersection of two rugged slopes.

A knife edge polished to a mirror finish—relatively smooth even at the microscopic level—doesn’t cut better. It may not even cut as well because the tiny imperfections of the edge are what actually do the work of tearing and dividing the material*. A knife does it’s work a little at a time on a very small scale. A little progress here and there, over and over again, over the length of the strokes. Not perfectly, but persistently.

Just like us.

* A note to my wood-working friends: I acknowledge this is not the same for a chisel or other tools with a similar action.

What Counts

I remember carefully knocking small, colorful, plastic bears off of a 2x4 or a cigar box or a case of empties in my 1st grade (or was it 2nd grade?) classroom. We were learning addition and subtraction. I would line them up in a row and knock them down, one by one, to arrive at the answer for some complicated mathematical operation like 7 minus 3. I don’t remember counting on my fingers to accomplish the same calculation, but I suppose I did. It just wasn’t as memorable as defenestrating bears.

Using your fingers to do arithmetic is frequently considered bad form. It’s seen as unrefined—almost rude. I imagine that the practice of counting on one’s fingers probably offended the sensibilities of some self-assured school administrator at some point and then caught on as a new pedagogical war to be fought. (“Surely we can’t have children using their hands! That’s for babies! It’s undisciplined or… cheating! They can’t expect to be able to use their hands to do things in real life!”)

As it turns out, kids using their fingers has been linked with better mathematical abilities. Another bit of evidence for embodied and enacted cognition; there is a benefit to literally getting a “feel” for math.

While I suspect that disparaging finger-counting has to do with a feeling that the body is vulgar, there might simply be a general cultural bias against the literal. One insult often leveled at someone who doesn’t understand a verbal explanation is, “Do I have to draw you a picture?!” That might be good, yes; please do. Luckily, this perspective doesn’t seem to extend to math. Using a pencil and paper for ciphering or sketching out mathematical concepts can be vital, since they can quickly become complex. Past a certain point, there’s no easy way of getting around using a symbolic notation to manage it.

But there is some poetry, too, in that we use our digits (fingers) to type digits (numbers) into computers (bright rectangles that steal time from us). And here’s a fun fact: you can count up to 1,023 on your fingers by using them the way a computer would. Each finger represents one bit: on or off, up or down. With both hands in front of you and a slight change of perspective to a base-2 number system, you can count far, far higher than 10. Demonstrate this the next time you’re at a party and see how long it takes for you to be asked to leave.

We count with our fingers, with an abacus (or preferably plastic bears), with tally marks, with numbers, with computers and sometimes quietly in our heads. 

And we still hold up the fingers of our hand to let the hostess know we’re a party of 2.

Surface

During normal operation, our kayak is situated at the interface of wind and water and subject to the influence of both. The water and the wind are not always in agreement. The waters and their waves have their own ideas about where things are going. The wind is an invisible but independent, insistent current at and above the water. 

Without sails, the wind is simply tolerated. Our hats are pulled down tight against our heads. We squint our eyes, as if the wind were a bright light.

The water can be navigated, of course, but not simply through brute force. Water has gravitas and power, but it can be bargained with. An arrangement must be negotiated: playing for a minimum of friction and a method for force production. The paddles provide leverage and the water provides purchase. The hull and the water seem to readily conspire to grant buoyancy, but awkwardly and grudgingly offer slipperiness.

It doesn’t require much effort to balance—only to sit upright—but more to command where the boat points. It can be like a compass needle searching for North, except North continues to move and drift. The flow of the river might be the boat’s True North at any given moment, but the wind, waves and wakes are like nails and magnets scattered around our two-person kayak-compass: jangling and pulsing, pushing and pulling the needle. (The ducks don’t seem to notice or mind any more than the sunlight reflected on the water does. Show-offs, they are perfectly at home in both the water and the wind.)

The interface—the meeting place of these two elements—is where we sit and paddle. That slightly convex surface is where we brace ourselves against the pedals inside the hull and move from our core. Our core is the only part of us strong enough to brace us against and heave us through the wind and the waves. Movement, intention, resolve, efficiency come from the center, from the core. A kind of understanding about the water, the wind and the kayak must also come from the core. Or maybe that’s just where it’s focused, where it naturally concentrates. Maybe wisdom and understanding work their way in, bit by bit, from the outside and gather there, where the currents sink deeper down, growing in strength and finally providing stability; a place where we can mark our current position at the interface of things.

A Group of Goats Walk Into a Field…

A group of goats is properly called either a tribe or a trip. A tribe seems fitting: they do seem to be a tightly-knit bunch, at least when I’ve seen them at farms or petting zoos. They play and they hang out with each other. Sometimes they butt heads.

And they are a trip, too; particularly where food is concerned. You will know this if you ever see one preparing to nurse from its mother, if you ever walk toward the fence with a handful of feed corn, and maybe if you stay a little too close to the fence after you’ve run out of feed corn.

A tribe or a trip, certainly, but I would propose adding another term: a party.

Because these goats look ready to party.

We Are All Programmers Now

Every once in a while you hear about an accident someone has using a spreadsheet. One of the more recent and frightening ones involved the British NHS Covid-19 tracking spreadsheet that lost a lot of data. But other (hopefully less serious) stories regularly involve the corruption of data like messing up pasted-in Greek letters or mis-interpreting some numbers for calendar dates. 

These accidents are kind of like autocorrect (which should perhaps be renamed “overcorrect”), but instead of automatically changing the spelling of a word, it changes the numbers and other data you might type or paste into a cell. And you might not notice.

Microsoft Word and other word processors are expecting you to input text. Whether it’s a love letter or a resume or a grocery list, it assumes you’re typing words into it. You might also paste a picture or two, but it’s still only trying to figure out where to display it in relation to the text. It doesn’t claim to know anything much about the words you enter except how to spell them and some pedantic grammar rules. Excel, on the other hand, isn’t a tool for merely displaying and printing out nice, neat tables: that’s just a by-product. The real job of a spreadsheet is to do math, and we don’t realize that whenever we type numbers or words or other symbols into Excel, it’s fully expecting to do mathematical things to them. Whether you know it or not, you’re programming a computer. Excel gives you the settings and tools to specify exactly what kind of numbers you’re typing in (e.g. money, percentages or text) but most of us go with the default setting.

So using Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets to make a quick table of words and numbers that you just want to read might be a bit like using a blender for a flower vase: it will hold whatever you put in it even though it might look a little awkward. And it might do something unexpected and violent to its contents if you’re not careful.

Time and Tide

On Sunday morning (or afternoon), it is time to wind the clock. It may not actually be the time, but it is the day. Time to add more time to the time-measuring device. Time will continue unfettered, of course, but my ability to measure it, to make distinctions about it will diminish somewhat if I don’t wind it. It is a grandfather clock, and I often note the hour or half-hour when it chimes. Sunrise and sunset will prevent too much drift in my sense of time, but the pigeonholes that I use to organize the days might shrink, swell or slant a bit. Softer, more malleable days might arise: a few more moments during the breakfast hour; a few more minutes of night; a more compact afternoon or mid-morning. Maybe time would stretch and compress throughout the day with my changing heart rate, since heartbeats might remind me of clocks: a regular tempo, marked by staccato thumps.

Our clocks might be somewhat more generous and peaceful if they mimicked our breathing instead: a gentle swelling and receding. The term tidal volume refers to the amount of air we cycle through during a normal, resting breath. Our breath is an invisible tide: slow and smooth in comparison to our heartbeat. “Tidal” sounds natural and congruent with the world. The sound of waves on the shore or a loved ones breathing—is there a difference?

Besides, marking the precise point of emergence of a specific second isn’t necessary for most of us. Most of us need to know the time in a wider sense, zoomed out to minutes and hours; pulled back and viewed against the backdrop of other events. The rhythm of things is what’s important—we use time to achieve a kind of synchronization, to be in step with each other. We most often are striving for kairos (timing) more than chronos (time).

It is interesting to note that an instruction in meditation is very frequently given to observe your breath. The long and ancient line of practitioners cannot have arrived at this bias absent-mindedly—they’ve had plenty of time to consider it. So I wonder if one reason for it is that we can (and perhaps unwittingly do) subtly adjust our breathing directly, but not our heart. Other practices make use of this as well, teaching coordination of the breath with movements of the body in yoga, martial arts and sports. We shape the kairos of our breathing according to the demands of our exertions, even as the chronos of our heartbeat pounds away in our chests, unattended. And yet the insistent punctuation of the ticks and tocks of time bring to mind the heart more than the breath.

I don’t begrudge our grandfather clock for its lack of resemblance to the tides. (Besides, its pendulum creates gentle, comforting beats and its chime is warm and low.) It’s not likely that there is a good design for a clock that is modeled more literally after our lungs. And, after all, the swing of a pendulum obeys the same natural law of increase followed by decrease—just along a small, slender arc rather than through the expanding and contracting volume of two irregularly shaped balloons.

Berries

We picked black raspberries on a morning walk this weekend. The berries were wet and sweet and full of tiny seeds; the thorns along the canes are sharp, but not particularly aggressive. They are plentiful on the edges of the woods: enough sun, but not too much. The dark, ripe fruit released with a gentle pull and sometimes fell off with just a touch. The berries are considerate enough to grow at heights that I don’t often need to stoop or squat to reach them (though squatting is a good way to spot those I might have missed), but not quite considerate enough to grow right next to the mowed paths.

We worked our way around and through the understory, trying to avoid burrs and being careful not to step on the raspberry canes themselves or too many other plants. I found myself standing on one leg a few times, looking for an opening on the way to the next group of ripe berries, like an elegant and majestic crane slowly making it’s way through tall grasses. (Well, maybe more like an ungainly and awkward industrial crane just…standing there, wondering what to do.) In any case, it was a good reminder that simply standing on one foot is a nice movement, too: improvised tree poses among the trees.

Warm, humid and drizzling; it was the kind of warm summer rain that soaks you completely a little at a time without ever giving you a chill. Listening to the light rain and searching for ripe fruit, I noticed that I wasn’t noticing much else. I heard the occasional runner or dog-walker on the paths, but never really looked up. Other animals browsing in areas like this would be pausing frequently to glance around to see who else might be approaching. We’re a bit more focused and goal-oriented, I guess. But at the same time I can’t help but think that that kind of focus when one is out-of-doors is somehow inappropriate; arrogant, even. Or maybe it’s just a little rude to be so absorbed in my own activity that I don’t bother to look up into the canopy to appreciate the cardinal that’s singing.

The Things We Carry

Laptops are much better suited than smartphones to all but the simplest of tasks, but we’re willing to give up ease-of-use for portability. Smartphones have really, really good cameras these days, but not as good as an actual camera with a lens the size of a rocks glass.

Using a smartphone can be like having a superpower and a disability at the same time. You can access and work with all the knowledge of the world, but only by peeking through a narrow (albeit rather high-resolution) aperture; navigable with only 1 or 2 fingers. And that’s before we consider the quality of any given app.

My pocket tool has a knife (which works great), a pliers (which works pretty well) and screwdriver bits (which work OK, as long as you don’t have to turn them for too long). The idea of having a power circular saw built-in to a pocket multi-tool might sound kind of cool at first, but if my pocket tool had one, there’s a good chance that using it would be either terrifying or incredibly annoying.

The things we carry in our purses or pockets are for convenience (not to be confused with genuine ease), not necessarily for quality.

Eye of the Tiger

I awoke to a noise at 5am one day last week and immediately became aware of two things, one completely understandable and one utterly inexplicable: the first was that the smart speaker in the kitchen was playing music, the second was that the song was “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. I fumbled with my smartphone, first laying on the nightstand, then held by both puzzled, drowsy hands until I could turn it off.

The complexity and brittleness of today’s modern technology didn’t allow me to immediately rule out a purely modern technological explanation for the music playing, e.g. a brown-out, an obscure firmware glitch or a faulty TCP-IP packet. But I had other suspicions, confirmed once I inspected the kitchen: items disturbed in the area of the speaker, and a small amount of cat vomit containing plant matter which matched the plant sitting next to the speaker.

The smart speaker has a capacitive touch control on its top surface, allowing the user to pause/play and increase or decrease the volume. It is rather a sensitive interface, as most smartphone users will acknowledge, that is easily—and not infrequently—inadvertently activated by attempting to wipe off it’s dusty surface with a sleeved arm, or accidentally brushing against it while working in the kitchen.

One of our cats can sometimes become particularly restless early in the morning, and the evidence points toward his foraging on the counter (because he cannot possibly learn to not eat the damn plants that always, always, always make him puke every single time), accidentally activating the smart speaker and then fleeing the scene, knocking over the items during his escape.

“Eye of the Tiger”, indeed.

Postmodern Movement at Work

I maintain that modern “work” is grotesque and unnatural, and it would be better for everybody if that changed. We don’t typically get enough movement or enough different kinds of movement for our bodies (and minds!) to stay healthy. But how to incorporate a greater quantity and quality of movement without adding a whole extra category of activity to our days?

Well, what if we largely eliminated the corporate cleaning services that we contract with and cleaned the damn building and offices ourselves?

This, of course, will never work.

Yup, objections abound: “I went to college so that I didn’t have to do grunt work!” “I have to clean up after my family at home! Why should I have to do it at work, too!?” “I’m a really important person at my company! I’m the Senior VP of Global Synergy Directives and Coordination, goddammit!”

This can’t possibly work.

And the optics are poor: “The company is just trying to save money by forcing us to do the cleaning, too!” And there are profoundly serious gender issues wrapped up in who cleans what for who. And underneath that are profoundly serious socioeconomic and cultural issues wrapped up in who cleans what for who. And few people genuinely like to clean up filthy messes or take out the trash or wash windows. So yeah, let’s piss off everyone in the company by making them feel like they’re being disrespected, mistreated, abused and taken advantage of.

This might not work.

But the human movements of bending, kneeling, reaching, lifting, carrying, sweeping, mopping, wiping and scrubbing are very different from sitting motionless and using a mouse or trackpad, or standing in the same place in front of a machine. And movement has its own genius—literally—because thought is embodied and enacted: we think better when we move. (We are actually in the process of thinking even when we think we’re only just moving.)

And paying attention to the building and the space that we work in can help us to make it better. We might feel better about personally taking care of our little cube or shared spaces. We might realize that the break room could use a new coat of paint or be more willing to say something about the broken chair. We might feel a little more invested, feel a little more ownership of the building we work in if we help to take care of it. Besides, 10-15 minutes a day from everybody would more than offset the cost of having a cleaning service (and all the attendant complaints and misunderstandings that seem to come along with them) and wouldn’t impact productivity at all. It would probably improve it.

This might work...?

Device Register Revisited

As I’ve mentioned before, talking to our devices can be tricky. That’s a relatively recent development; an older problem is how our devices talk to us. Siri and Alexa actually sound normal enough to not be jarring—if they correctly interpret our request—and I would expect that to continue to steadily improve.

But there’s still a need for getting printed communication right, and it seems there will “always” need to be a human to look closely at text rendered on the screen to help. A classic example for those of us of a certain age is the dreaded “syntax error” message of early computer systems. Frustrating and opaque, there is almost no information contained therein: the programmer may as well have left off the word “syntax” and just had the single word “error” displayed instead. It might have been less infuriating.

I spotted a somewhat more amusing example at a grocery store recently. At the self-checkout, the display admonished me to “Come on, Scan and Bag it!” This could be taken two different ways. One would be as enthusiastic encouragement to participate in the grocery shopping process; to get into the spirit of commerce and joyfully ring up those eggs, asparagus and bell peppers and get them into a bag so I can go home and make a frittata! Oh, boy!

But another reading might feel like you’ve been transported to a busier, perhaps slightly grittier grocery store, where even the machines are in a hurry. One might feel like the message to “Come on, Scan and Bag it!” could easily be followed by “I don’t have all day!” or “There’s other people in line, pal!”

The difference, of course, is tone, which isn’t something that our devices have a lot of flexibility with yet when they are speaking. (That will be an entirely different and possibly much more amusing chapter in voice assistant development.) But it’s also something that requires much more care any time that text is displayed that you might ordinarily simply say out loud. At a time that everyone is forming text messages exactly the same way they would speak, the mistaken assumption is that you know how I sound in my head just by the words I’m typing. Perhaps that’s why we lean on emoji to ensure the other person knows what we mean. ;)

Waiting In Line

We recently went to a movie theater to watch a film—the first since being vaccinated and the first in well over a year. There was no line for the attendant who checked the tickets we bought on-line but there was a pretty long line for buying snacks. We decided against popcorn and instead found our seats in the theater and waited for the commercials to end and the previews to begin.

Looking around the room, it might have been half-empty. There were still plenty of seats available, even disregarding the buffer seats between groups of masked people. I don’t miss crowded theaters at all.

It was great to watch previews on a big screen and we really enjoyed the film: a fine way to spend a couple of hours after waiting to venture back out for so long. Which, of course, led to using the restrooms after the film. I waited for my wife just outside the restrooms after I was finished. 

Pause for a moment and consider that: even after a screening at a half-full theater, the women’s bathroom had a line.

Caroline Criado Perez explains in great detail a fundamental failure of building codes and the architecture of public places in her book Invisible Women: women’s bathrooms are the same square footage as men’s bathrooms. I will state this plainly and briefly: what might seem like logical and geometrical equivalence of gendered restrooms is nonsense on stilts, enshrined in ignorant building codes.

OK, I’ll expand on this somewhat. There are slightly more females in the overall population, who tend to need a little more time to use the restroom in accordance with their biology. Women also require stalls to address these needs, which clearly require more space than urinals. Women tend to live longer than men, so there tend to be more, older women who might have a disability using the restrooms than men—again requiring a bit more time. Women still tend to do most of the childcare, so women are changing diapers or helping our children use the restrooms as well: again, more time needed. (I don’t have children, but I have overheard some of these proceedings and am aware that even just going pee-pee can be an epic saga.) 

It is manifestly obvious that women’s restrooms are grossly under-provisioned for the population they are intended to serve. No one in their right mind would want their wife, their sister, their mother, their daughter, their grandmother or their granddaughter to have to wait in line for far longer than comfortable just because of a stupid and myopic convention.

The scientific community has developed an insanely effective vaccine in an astonishingly short period of time. This breakthrough is nothing short of breathtaking and awe-inspiring, and the benefit to humanity is enormous—even allowing us to go back to the movies with minimal risk. So now let’s fix the goddamned building codes so that women’s restrooms are adequately sized.

Lasting Effects

The most obvious and well-known danger of using dull knives is that you’ll have to use so much force to cut something that you’ll slip and cut yourself. But a subtler, more problematic danger is getting used to dull knives.

If you’re used to using sharp knives and you find yourself in the situation of having to use a dull knife, you automatically get a warning when you realize that you can’t cut as accurately or efficiently as you expect to. You can then decide to sharpen the knife, find another knife or even proceed at risk.

But if you’re used to using dull knives and you find yourself in the situation of suddenly using a sharp knife, you may be surprised at how efficiently it cuts. “Surprised” here might mean that you cut deeper or differently than you’re expecting. Depending on the exact circumstances, you may even cut something you never intended to.

Using a dull or a bad tool is dangerous each time you use it. But the lasting effects of using a bad, dull tool over and over again can gradually make even a good, sharp tool dangerous.

Sit-Stand Desks

Sit-stand desks are a great innovation in office furniture, allowing the user to not only adjust it to precisely the right height, but to go between sitting height to standing height whenever they want.

But there are a lot of positions and postures between sitting and standing that could be achieved with a desk that has such a large range of adjustment: bending, slightly crouching, stooping, lunging and maybe even squatting.

Just because it’s called a sit-stand desk and just because the pictures of sit-stand desks being used only show people standing or sitting doesn’t mean those are the only two positions you can use.

P.S. If you’re thinking that you couldn’t possibly be comfortable in a slightly crouching posture for hours at a time at your desk, you’d be right.

P.P.S. Staying in one position—any position, but especially a “comfortable” one—for hours at a time is what we’re trying to avoid.

Rough Translations

Foreign films have the challenge of being understood in more than one language. Subtitles are problematic gateways to these films because 1) translation is just plain tricky, and 2) they are, of course, written—they’re not quite speech from another language. I won’t dwell too much on the first point, but suffice it to say that translation isn’t just matching up words from one language to another. Languages say things differently—sometimes much differently—than others.

The ears are working overtime to attempt to understand what’s being said—or how it’s being said—whether we want them to or not. You can hear the actors’ inflections and tone, but you can’t count on really understanding the shades of meaning they convey because culturally and linguistically they don’t always match up with what we expect. Luckily, context helps and we can watch the actor’s behavior, too. Maybe that’s part of why we sometimes gesture when we speak. Gestures may have been our first language and now they’ve become a supplement. Or maybe gestures are a side effect of speaking?…

The eyes are working overtime to take in the whole scene, going back and forth between the action and the subtitles. Luckily, the average adult can read around 250 words per minute and the recommended talking speed for comprehension is about 150 words per minute, so there’s usually enough time to keep up with the subtitles. (A different, but fascinating phenomena is that human languages all cluster around nearly the same rate of spoken information per minute: other languages just sound a lot faster.)

During the film festival that just wrapped up we watched a comedy about a couple who did voiceovers of films when they lived in Russia, before they emigrated to Israel. The film is in both Hebrew and Russian, but the subtitles gave no indication which language was being used, so it was sometimes hard to tell when something was funny because the couple wasn’t fluent in Hebrew or if it was just funny. There was an Australian film that I wish we had subtitles for because it was often hard to understand the dialog. In fact, we’ll often turn subtitles on for British and Australian films and TV shows—just so we don’t miss any words or phrases that we aren’t familiar with. (And, to be honest, sometimes we even turn subtitles on for American films…)

Tangentially, it’s interesting to note that Shakespeare’s plays are deceptively challenging for modern English speakers because they are in a distinctly different dialect, if not quite a different language. The biggest problem being that the meanings of many words have drifted since then: the way that real people use certain words in everyday life have changed so much that we fool ourselves a little into believing we understand Shakespeare’s characters, even when we don’t quite. Word-for-word subtitles would not solve this problem nearly as well as a modern translation.

But even reading the text of my native language being spoken isn’t the same as listening to it being spoken. And reading the subtitles while listening to the actor’s rhythm and intonation and trying to re-assemble them in real time is work—and not always satisfying. It just doesn’t land the same way that spoken language does.

But all of the complexities and difficulties aside, subtitles are still enormously powerful. They give us a way to understand stories and ideas we might not otherwise have access to. They can entice us to pay a little more attention, tricking us into more carefully considering things we think we recognize. They emphasize a perennial question of life as well as film: what is going on in this scene?

Not So Bright Idea

There’s a new post on my Uneasy page that takes a look at a user experience problem with trendy light fixtures.