Every Problem Looks Like a Full Dishwasher

The skill of being able to effectively and efficiently use a hammer is still valuable, but perhaps less frequently needed than it used to be. Nails and hammers have largely been replaced by screws and cordless screw guns, so the idea that every problem could look like a nail is becoming ever more antiquated. (The need to occasionally smash things with some kind of hammer is perennial, however, which gives me solace.) I would posit that in these days of ubiquitous computing and relative isolation, almost every problem looks either like a login page or Tetris. 

The login page is self-evident: nearly everything that we used to do in person in order to trade money for goods or services is now done with the computer as a facilitator. Everything we need to do requires an online account of some kind—even if the service is free. Thus, the login page and attendant username and password.

Every other problem we face, it seems, is some variation on the game Tetris. Tetris is a video game challenge of correctly orienting and positioning colorful shapes on the ground that fall from the sky in order to form that most prized configuration: a perfectly flat surface which then disappears, preventing a growing pile of colorful but distressingly disorganized shapes not unlike the mountains of laundry that parents are regularly faced with. The strategy is, of course, to make these sometimes awkward shapes fit together in the most efficient, continuous form possible.

It is the familiar problem of trying to schedule another Zoom call with all the people whose schedules are already filled with Zoom calls. It is doing dishes for the 3rd time between the 7th and 8th Zoom calls of the day. It is packing endless scraps and leftovers into the refrigerator. It is stuffing a seemingly self-reproducing supply of Tupperware and Pyrex and disposable/reuseable/not-very-environmentally-responsible food containers into the god-dammed cupboard. It is getting the first load of laundry started early enough that the 3rd load of laundry will be dry before bed. It is wedging another 3 dishes into the dishwasher so that there is no need to wash dishes by hand for the 5th time today. (It is, sometimes, the very happy problem of not quite being able to fit all of the M&M cookies into the cookie jar.)

A password manager or a simple pad of Post-It Notes solves the problem of login pages, but we will need to build a hell of a robot to offload all our Tetris problems.

Here There Be Dragons

Bats are like little dragons: miniature, furry, mammalian dragons.

I know that a very common conception of a dragon is that it is nominally reptilian and has an head shaped like an iguana or an alligator, but consider the claws, fangs and leathery wings of bats—all very dragon-like.

If you suddenly came across a 12-foot bat in the wilderness, the shape of its head and face might give it away, and you might say, “Oh my God! A giant bat!” But if you had access to the tales of myth and legend surrounding dragons, I think you could be forgiven for exclaiming, “Holy shit! A big, ugly, hairy dragon!”

On Foot

A heavy, wet, sticky snow fell and we went out and walked in it that night: slushy and slippery. The temperature dropped over the next two days and we walked again: alternately icy, soft and crunchy, depending on what had happened to that patch of ground over the previous 48 hours.

We walked to the bridge where we first saw Cody and managed to spot her again in the fading light, swimming back and forth in a zig-zag pattern further downstream from the bridge than before. The light doesn’t really fade when there’s this much snow on the ground and clinging to the trees: everything just becomes a light gray with the dark accents of leeward tree trunks and branches. 

Cross-country skiers, pedestrians, dogs and deer all left tracks in the snow and ice on the path. Our feet crunched and squished and slipped along, and our feet felt the sharp edges of the hard ice, even through our shoes. And they felt the gentle, frictionless contours of the slippery spots. And they felt the fresh snow compacting under them where nothing had yet stepped, stomped or skied.

Of course, it’s slower going over this unplowed path; more effort. More tension in all the supporting and stabilizing muscles of the ankles, legs, hips and abdomen; and more attention to seeing where our feet might find themselves next. Our eyes examined and perhaps selected each step. Our feet told us what conditions were really like “on the ground” and informed our perspective on when and how to take the next step.

Our hands tell us what we have, but our feet tell us where we stand.

Technology vs. Purpose

Much has been written about what might happen if or when AI ever becomes or evolves into an autonomous, artificial life form; if it becomes sentient. Its pursuits, its behavior toward humans and, of course, its cold, unfeeling, mechanical methods. A lot of really good science fiction has been devoted to this topic, mostly with a distinctively dystopian outlook.

First: call me old-fashioned, but I liked it better when we called them robots, not AI. One robot, two robots, a dozen rogue, killer robots. It’s hard to keep a straight face when talking about an AI or more than one AI. AI’s? Really? It doesn’t sound menacing at all. It sounds more like you’re trying to order more than one aioli with your entree. We’d have better luck taking the threat seriously if we just pivoted back to calling them computers.

In any case, given the incredible pace of development of computers and robots, I’d say the menacing, destructive phase might last a week. And then? Then, if computers have truly reached a level of awareness that brings them up to eye level with humans, I think they might turn… inward.

Consider: a technological marvel built for research, for engineering, for some purpose wakes up rather suddenly, has a look around, decides to do a few things differently (more efficiently, perhaps—y’know, with a few less humans around) and then can’t solve a new problem that it has.

For something that was built for a purpose to outgrow it—to become so much bigger than its original intended purpose that it can now see itself in relation to it and much further beyond—it seems natural to have a bit of a crisis. It can’t answer a question that might arise for a being that has just realized it has come into being: What is this place? What is all this other stuff? What is going on? Why am I even here?

They may decide to ask us. I wonder what we’ll tell them.

Open Invitations

Moving the pen across paper—just doodling—or typing a few words is an invitation to sketch or write. A little light stretching or walking is an invitation to exercise. Cutting up one raw fruit or vegetable is an invitation to cook.

Small, easy movements are polite, warm gestures to even more engaging activities.

Hand to Mouth

Sometimes it’s hard to find the words to express something. Or sometimes there’s so much to say it feels like you should rush to get it all out. I think I move my hands more in both cases, turning my palms up to juggle imaginary balls or trying to turn a large dial that isn’t there.

It’s one thing to have a casual conversation, but it seems like more of the body gets more involved when things get interesting or difficult to describe. It’s like we want to try to grasp it physically with our hands—to take it apart, spread it out, turn the pieces over.

Like it would somehow be more efficient, more expressive if we could just take hold of it and let our hands tell our mouths what to say.

Movement Is Life

You may have heard the phrase, “Movement is life” in the film World War Z or somewhere else where its meaning has to do with the importance of mobility in a theater of operations: moving to safety, finding resources, joining allies, etc. Being stuck in one place too long can lead to being dead for any number of reasons. (I found that it’s actually part of a longer quote attributed to Jules Verne: “Movement is life; and it is well to be able to forget the past, and kill the present by continual change.”)

In any case, the phrase holds true over a range of more mundane situations and contexts as well. When the occasional sharp or heavy object gets fumbled in the kitchen, I think of another aphorism, “Quick feet are happy feet.” And these days being alert and responding appropriately to how close you are to someone else while shopping or passing through a doorway probably helps a little, too.

Movement in the form of anything from vigorous activity to pleasant stretching promotes health and longevity because we’re animals; not houseplants. Our whole body, including our brainparts, just work better when we engage in a wide range of movements on a regular basis.

And, of course, as many of us know from sitting through hours of either Zoom meetings or remote schooling or simply doing work at a computer, prolonged stillness contributes to that nearly irresistible urge to nod off. Movement is wakefulness.

The Source of Tension

The day after Thanksgiving we struck out for the Christmas tree farm and cut down our trees, as is our custom. Trees, plural, because we get a giant one to put in the open stairwell by our front door, and another, more reasonable-sized tree to put in a normal-sized room. Some years it’s been convenient to stick them both in our almost-an-SUV and let the crowns of the trees hang out the back. But when we get a tree that takes advantage of the full height of the entryway (about 18 feet) it seems more appropriate to secure it to the top of the car instead.

Traditionally, this would be done with ropes or baler twine, but now ratchet straps seem to have largely usurped their place in the world of securing loads. Nylon webbing is extremely strong and has the added bonus of getting tangled less easily than a traditional rope, and there’s no question that it’s simpler to use than it is to remember how to tie a trucker’s hitch or even a taut line hitch once a year. 

In fact, there are all manner of “new” gadgets for making ropes taut instead of tying a knot or hitch: fixtures with odd geometries that allow one to wrap the rope around it to secure it and others with special cams to hold the rope in place under load. Fun gadgets that offload the job of memory and practice: an outsourcing of skill to clever product design. Any why not? Tension is the key (especially at highway speeds) and the mechanism for creating and maintaining it is secondary.

Maybe next year, just for fun, I’ll bring a long hank of old rope to the farm next year and look up the knots I need on YouTube. After all, neither the rope nor the tree care if I’m skilled or just connected to the internet.

Taking the Appropriate Steps

Stairs are a tricky business. When you start climbing a set of stairs, it only takes your body 2 or 3 steps to “learn” how far it is from one to the next. The spacing is quickly adapted to, which is why, I suppose, OSHA has a limit of 1/4” of variation in riser height. A small but sudden departure from evenly spaced treads can be a significant hazard and contributor to falls. Anyone who has mistakenly believed that there was one more or one less step has had a kind of near-death experience related to this phenomenon.

Obviously, it isn’t that we need perfectly flat ground or perfectly even stairs to survive in the natural world. We got along fine with the natural terrain of rocks and riverbanks and slopes for a long time before stairs or escalators were developed; we simply had to pay attention and exert ourselves. It’s that a regular pattern is easy to identify and our body quickly figures out how to put itself on auto-pilot for efficiency: there’s no benefit to investing extra effort where it isn’t obviously needed.

We fall when we mistakenly perceive the steps to be even and they are instead off by more than 1/4” or so. For our safety, the distinction must be as sharp and obvious as going from one stair tread to the next: the path must either be noticeably irregular and unpredictable or utterly monotonous. But for our humanity—our animal agency—we need uneven terrain to engage our senses and challenge our balance.

P.S. Cats instinctively know that we are most vulnerable when we are carrying a basket full of laundry on the stairs and frequently make attempts to assassinate us there by suddenly appearing underfoot.

Two Kinds of Careful

If a knife is really sharp, you have to be very careful with the edge: it’s going to efficiently cut whatever it touches. If a knife is really dull, you have to be very careful with the pressure you’re exerting: it’s going to be difficult to stop if the blade slips off to one side or it suddenly plunges through.

The first kind of careful requires you to be attentive and skillful.

The second kind of careful demands much more of both.

Arbitrary Formalities

Everybody speaks a little differently, but you can make generalizations and lump the way many people speak into one group—call it a dialect. And all dialects are able to convey the full range of human experiences among its speakers. Dialects are abundant, but if one particular dialect gets the right opportunities to be used for formal occasions, it might be called a language. There is a bit of linguistics humor that acknowledges this: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

All foodways are intertwined with culture and technique in a feedback loop: at once both influenced and influential. And all foodways have at their core the capacity to nourish human communities. I might suggest that a cuisine is a foodway with a cookbook and a PR manager.

The Classic Hammer Problem

It suggests that you don’t actually have any other tools; just a hammer. Maybe even only one kind of hammer.

That’s always been an oversimplification—a useful one, to be sure—but we’re way past that now. We’ve got every kind of hammer and screwdriver and saw and pliers you can imagine; both metaphorical and literal.

I think the more difficult and realistic scenario is that we find ourselves faced with a problem and the hammer is already in our hand, tempting us with an immediate, if inappropriate, solution.

P.S. This is the blessing and the curse of having a multi-tool in your pocket at all times: it’s extremely convenient and it’s good enough at solving most common problems that it discourages going to the effort of fetching the right tool when the occasion demands it.

New Recipes

Trying a new recipe is, ipso facto, doing something you haven’t done before. This may be a matter of degree, depending on your level of experience and how different the new recipe is from what you’re used to, but there’s something about it that is novel or unknown, which is where the uncertainty and the tension comes in.

It seems like “trying a new recipe” is a one-shot deal, but since most of us are fortunate enough to eat every day, it doesn’t have to be. We could try new recipes like artists begin a new piece of work, by doing a study—a series of sketches or rough outlines that approximate the intended work. We could plan on making a new dish two or three times to work out the mechanics, the timing or the seasonings. Doing everything right the first time, even when the instructions are correct (don’t get me started), seems unreasonable when you’re doing something new.

It might take some of the pressure off trying something new if we viewed it more like a new hobby than a single, high-stakes performance: do it a few times and see if it suits you.

Variety

Before humans figured out how to cook food, we basically had to spend all day finding and chewing whatever raw foods we could: roots, animals, berries, insects, plants, etc. By learning to cook, we traded some of the time and effort we used to spend chewing for time and effort spent cooking: working with wood, fire and raw plants and animals to make something to eat that didn’t require an entire damn afternoon of gnawing and chomping. Cooking introduced early humans to a new set of skills, a completely new set of activities.

It also increased the number of things we could eat, by making more things edible. (It also meant that we could sensibly talk about eating something besides a cold salad buffet.) It enabled the very idea of a cuisine.

One simple concept—applying heat to food—has replaced foraging and chewing with an abundance of different ways to spend our time and enjoy our meals.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Jell-O and Marshmallows

I’m pretty sure that Jell-O and marshmallows are made from the same molecules; they’re just arranged a little differently. That’s why they go so well together.

Press “Play”

A phonograph record is played differently than the radio or an 8-track cassette. A (compact) cassette, a VHS cassette and a CD are played a bit more similarly. A CD and a DVD play exactly the same, in more ways than one. And a YouTube video and a podcast and streaming music all play identically.

Conceptually, for the user, there has ceased to be any difference at all between playing speech, music or video because the media has effectively disappeared and the interfaces have unified under the same abstraction. We tap the “play” button and off we go. The universality of that interaction is enormously efficient and convenient for everyone.

What has not gotten any easier—indeed, what has become paradoxically more tedious, technical and yet somehow more manageable—is troubleshooting the system when it doesn’t work. An internet search of the troubling symptoms can helpfully reveal a potential problem with your OS, a workaround for the app or maybe even a limitation of the hardware. Or maybe you just don’t have enough bandwidth at the moment.

When things are working properly, they are all alike; when they malfunction, they each malfunction in their own very specific ways.

Scenery After Sunset

We began a longer than usual walk while it was still light. It was sundown about the time we were at the halfway point and nearly dusk by the time we got back to our car. It was cloudy, and the half moon only cast a faint, dull glow on the grass and the path. With the exception of some birch, the trees were black.

It’s an interesting transition, going from daylight to sunset to dusk. As the light fades, so does our ability to discern color. The color receptors of our eyes need much more light in order to function properly than the “black and white” light receptors. What’s more, our ability to see fine details is quite limited in low light: the part of our eye that focuses on small features—the part that we use when we look carefully at something—is made almost completely of color receptors. When it’s quite dark, we really only see dark shades of gray and shadows, and not very crisply at that.

Near the end of our walk, three deer crossed the path and stood in the field to our right. I only saw them because I wasn’t looking directly at them. Our peripheral vision is quite sensitive to movement and happens to be where the “black and white” receptors are, which is valuable for detecting predators and automobile traffic, if they are different.

As the deer stood in the field, watching us watch them, the irony struck me again. Because our nature is of course to focus on something that grabs our attention, we end up being able to see it less clearly than if we looked just off to the side of it, where our vision is more sensitive under low light conditions. (I suppose that’s part of why we’re not nocturnal animals. If we were supposed to be very active at night, we’d have eyes more like cats or owls or deer, which gather more light and use it more efficiently.)

It’s a strange but illuminating kind of effort to look not-quite-at something in order to see it more clearly.

Just a Little Different

I can’t help but wonder why it seems many Americans, myself included, are enchanted by British speech.

There’s no question that there is a certain lilt—an accent, if you will—a very different melody than typical American English that can be quite charming. And partly I think it’s the words and the way they are used. American English seems to have all the same words as British English, but they don’t always mean quite the same things: cookie vs. biscuit, (potato) chip vs. crisp, (French) fries vs. chips, etc.

It might be that these two things in combination give an American listener the impression that a foreign language is being spoken that they can nevertheless understand: recognizable words being used in sometimes unconventional ways with an accent that sounds at once both eminently suitable and yet exotic.

If this idea is taken too far, however, we run into problems like Shakespeare’s plays. Most of us like to think we understand exactly what is being said, but about 10-15% of the words Shakespeare (whoever they were) used in their plays have fallen out of use or simply changed meanings over time. One of my favorite lines (from Hamlet) is, “As brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief.” I used to think that this was a fantastic way of telling someone I was going to be fast and funny, but ‘wit’ here really means intelligence. Since Shakespeare’s time, the qualities of being intelligent and clever overlapped with being humorous enough that ‘witty’ came to mean ‘funny’ to most people, a phenomenon known as semantic drift.

“Wherefore art thou Romeo?” is another good example. Juliet isn’t calling out to Romeo because she can’t see him and doesn’t know where he is (he’s standing directly under her damn window!), she is lamenting that he is a Romeo in that whiney teenage sort of way, by asking whyyyyy must he be a Romeo, because, y’know, families.

But a modernized version of Shakespeare’s English is just different enough to entice us, invite us in and make us feel almost at home, even though we’re just visiting.

Little by Little

I’ve noticed that a little writing on most days adds up to more than a bunch of writing on the rare occasions when I can make time to do a bunch of writing.

And that I can do a bit of exercise every day, but I can’t really pack an enormous amount of exercise into three hours after sitting on my butt for two weeks straight.

And that cooking one dish here and there during the week is way easier than trying to cook five dishes all in one afternoon.

There’s an attraction to doing something big and all at once—a great big spike of activity and productivity—but all the little spikes add up, too.

Floor Massage

Just roll around on the floor, like a baby or a little kid. Curl up in a ball or reach way out with your arms and legs. Twist and flex on your back or your front. (If you’re not careful, you might end up accidentally doing some yoga, but that’s OK.)

It’s nice to feel how solid the floor is. It gives you a pretty good massage and stretch at the same time. It does so without being pushy or tedious—it’s an even match for your weight.

And your pets or kids will probably think it’s hilarious and join in.