Seasonings

We pruned the trees in our yard last weekend. It was warm and sunny and eventually we shed our coats to stay cool as we worked, cutting limbs and branches overhead and then stooping to gather them up. It is a different thing to work overhead: to grasp and use a tool at the limits of your reach above head height. Even just to study the structures overhead, looking for problems to be solved by a pruner or a saw.

It was warm and sunny, but there was still over a foot of snow covering the entire yard. Walking back and forth between the backyard and the driveway was an effort all its own. At some point I realized I was actually thirsty, which can sneak up on you sometimes in cold weather.

We wrapped up late that afternoon and then went for a walk with a friend, making the most out of the pleasant weather. It was dark when we got back home. We had leftovers for dinner, but they tasted better than they did a couple of nights ago. They were perhaps even better than some freshly prepared meals I’ve had.

There are many ways to prepare food, but that’s only one part of a meal. How we come to the meal is just as important: the dinner and the one who dines both benefit from preparation. It wasn’t that I simply worked up an appetite and was hungrier than usual. I think that food simply tastes better somehow after being active outside most of the day. Perhaps our senses are sharpened or our blood flow is increased or we are simply more alive…

Activity, exertion and adventure are methods of slow-cooking our perceptiveness and appreciation. They are seasonings we add to ourselves that improve our ability to savor.

Questionable Tastes

I don’t think that orange-flavored yogurt should be a thing but it is. It just seems so… unlikely. It seems like it just shouldn’t work and yet, there it is on store shelves. People must be buying it. (Maybe they’re somehow not eating it. Or maybe it’s a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, or they forget that they don’t like it and they mistakenly buy it again?)

I’m reluctant to try it, but I’m a little curious now.

I mean, yogurt is slightly acidic due to the culture used to make it and oranges are acidic, so it’s not like it’s combining two completely different flavor elements. Besides, other citrus-flavored yogurts, like lemon and lime seem like they would taste good. And orange crème brûlée is extremely tasty, so it’s not that orange flavors can’t be paired with dairy. Perhaps I’m just skeptical because the fruit flavorings that get used in foods are usually grotesque caricatures of real fruit flavors, e.g. grape or orange-flavored soda or watermelon-flavored anything. There is skill in selecting the right ingredients and approach to combining flavors in food.

Some things truly require too much effort to combine. Chocolate and bacon don’t really go together, for example, even though I wish they did. (Vosges makes the only bacon chocolate bar that works.) The salty/sweet combination works in many other combinations: salted caramels, chocolate-covered pretzels or even chocolate-covered potato chips. The saltiness of bacon combines brilliantly with the sweetness of maple syrup. (Hello, bacon waffles!) But chocolate is more complicated than syrup. In my opinion, it’s that the particular kind of savoriness (“umami”, if we’re being precise) of bacon is hard to blend with the rich and complex cocoa flavor of chocolate.

Just think of what might have been: chocolate-covered, bacon-wrapped espresso beans! The world came within a hair’s breadth of having the ultimate on-the-go breakfast snack.

Chocolate and orange might also initially seem to clash in a similar way, but they actually pair quite nicely. And curiously—to return to the citrus theme—lemon does not seem at all correct as a compliment to chocolate. It just doesn’t really work the same way. Pineapple is only slightly better: meh…

But the way that flavor combinations sound can never quite capture the experience of how they taste: like strawberry and basil (quite good), or pineapple and mint (astonishingly good). There is, perhaps, simply too much complexity for my imagination to grasp at once. Some things need to be tried to be believed, or even just comprehended; after all, my tongue can taste much more than it can articulate.

Maybe I’ll try orange yogurt sometime, if only to understand why it doesn’t taste good to me. Maybe I’ll be surprised.

Look What We’re Doing

I don’t know how much of what we do on a day-to-day basis is understood by our cats, but I’m guessing it’s limited. I think they understand sleeping and eating. I think they understand cooking a little bit. They’ve certainly come to associate it with food and eating. They understand play: batting a toy around or chasing each other.

Animals understand movement and intent, especially as it relates to them. They know when they’re being stalked, for example, like when I’m trying to give one of our cats his medication. The only way I can successfully do it these days is when I pretend to walk past him to go into another room or act like I’m looking for my phone.

So it probably shouldn’t surprise me that they behave as if I am available for play or head scratches or incessant petting when I’m working at my computer. It certainly doesn’t look like I’m busy from the perspective of the descendants of an apex predator. It doesn’t look like napping or even self-grooming. I think even other primates would wonder what it is that has captured my attention so completely.

To be fair, we also wonder at times what, exactly, animals are doing. It’s not like we have everything figured out—and we have a lot of advantages in that department. But even if animals had language, how exactly would we begin to explain why we focus so intensely without hunting prey? Why we remain nearly motionless for hours on end without sleeping? Why the things we appear to have caught and are playing with are so inert and lifeless (unlike a mouse or a bird), and why the game seems so dull?

Touch, Tap

I touch eggs to the edge of the sink before I crack them. Just a brief, light touch to get the feel for where the egg and the sink will meet before I tap with just the right amount of force to get me one step closer to breakfast: touch, then tap. I sometimes do the same thing when I’m using an axe (to chop wood, not eggs): a slow swing with a gentle stop at the target, then a full swing. Less often these days, I might make a quick little squiggle in the air with a pen just above the surface of a paper document before I actually sign.

I don’t know exactly how I started doing any of these things, but I assume that I picked them up from watching someone else. They’re not the sort of thing you’d learn in school.

These movements before the real movements are not quite practice or dry runs, even though they improve our performance. They are not quite simulations, even though they give us information about the movement, the endpoint and the workspace. They are quick calibrations of the system formed by our hand, eye and tool (or egg).

The movements we calibrate tend to be percussive or explosive and directed outward; not pulling movements that bring the action closer to us. Pulling the starter rope on a snowthrower doesn’t need a practice movement.

And we don’t do a dry run of pulling on our socks. We do it with movements that count. Movements that we might do only once, or a few times but want to do efficiently; otherwise why waste the time? Touching the egg to the sink saves me the cleanup of an egg that was smashed instead of just cracked. The slow-motion, targeted swing of the axe saves me the embarrassment of missing the tree. (The squiggle-in-the-air with a pen is actually a combination of a warm-up and trying to determine exactly how energetic I can be, given the microscopic space I have to put my untamable signature in.)

Touch—when you want to be sure—then tap.

It’s feedback.

It’s “feel that”.

The Name of the Color is Red

We finally went for a walk, now that the intense cold has retreated a little. Bright white snow still covers everything but the well-plowed streets and some sidewalks. Bright white, contrasting with the dark tree bark and the shadows that they cast on the snow. Looking across one of the fields we pass by, the snow cover formed a sharp, clean line that the forest edge met: bright white, thin line, dark trees.

As we walked through a woods, two bright red Cardinals flew across our path—two flashes of color in an otherwise dark and light scene—and then were gone.

In winter, it’s easy to imagine why languages that have only two color terms those words translate as black and white, or dark and light. The world in winter seems to lose most of its colors. They seep down into the Earth to hibernate; they fly South until Spring.

To be fair, the sky remains blue (“azure”, if you’re fancy), but so often it’s gray (or “grey”, if you’re British). And when the sky does happen to be clear, as it can be on those bitterly cold days, it can be so bright that it’s hard to look at.

And then there are evenings—especially it seems during colder weather—when the sky is clear and the color of the sky forms a breathtaking gradient. During twilight the sky runs from light blue near the horizon, where the sun hasn’t yet fully retreated; to navy blue; to the deepest midnight blue, where you can begin to see the stars just before the sky fades to black directly above you. (I exclaim this out loud Every Single Time I see it, which has justifiably earned me gentle teasing.)

So it’s a bit of a puzzle to me why it is that languages that have only three color terms, universally that third term is “red”. Sure, it kinda makes sense: ripe fruits, blood, dangerous animals and signs that say “DO NOT ENTER”. It just seems like blue should maybe have been given a little more consideration. In any case, light and dark, then red:

Languages, if they have additional color terms, go on to add either green or yellow (or vice versa):

Then blue:

Then brown:

Then gray, purple, pink, orange… (It’s kind of a free-for-all after brown, to be honest.)

There have been some interesting studies done in this area to try to figure out why cultures develop and use color terms in what appears to be a rather strict progression. The evidence seems to point to the way that sensitivity to small differences in color vary over the spectrum of visible light. (My own very intuitive, completely unsupported, non-sensical just plain wrong hypothesis is that the color terms are developed in the order of decreasing wavelength, just like a rainbow.) 

See how they kinda line up with the rainbow?

But if it ever turns out that the color terms are related to the change of seasons, it will not surprise me. After all, here in the upper Midwest in February, the world seems like it’s still stuck with only light and dark. It was nice to see the Cardinals add their statement of red, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of the color terms return to the landscape.

The Velocity of Shallow Angles

I found an old book on the floor of a used bookstore. (The store sold used books, but the bookstore appeared to have been used as well.) The title of the book was The Velocity of Shallow Angles. I thumbed through its pages, scanning for something interesting, remarkable, inspiring.

I found a passage that struck me and read on a while. I went back to that first passage again, but it was different somehow. It didn’t carry the weight it had just a few moments ago. I went further back, thinking I had somehow confused it with another. Flipping forward again, it was different again, but differently this time.

Thinking again that there must be some confusion on my part, I looked at the table of contents; searching for a boundary and title to tether it, but the passage moved. The index was no help and the passage moved again, despite my thumb’s effort to mark its place. (The table and the index did not agree, anyway…)

I struggled to find the passage one last time, and when I finally recognized it, it bore little resemblance to the one I read only minutes (or was it hours?) ago. I read it carefully, again and again, trying to reconcile it with my memory (feelings?) about my first reading of it. It seemed to gradually give under the weight of my scrutiny, becoming flat and lifeless and written for someone else.

I couldn’t bear to read it any more and placed the book back on the floor.

Turning

Turning things over—in your head or in your hands—can be contemplative. You might be accused of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but I don’t think that’s quite right. It is about expecting something, but expecting something more, not different. It’s about allowing time for things to seep in.

Some things respond easily to that kind of examination, like old furniture or hand tools: weathered and witness to use and carelessness and care. Some new physical things do, too, but many are purposefully designed to be abstract and minimal—merely portals for designed information. There aren’t a lot of obvious features to turn over and examine, because they’re not supposed to be there: they’re supposed to be magic, like a sleek, black, glossy hat.

And yet, when my phone is off (“off-off”: when it is powered down into a sleep mode that means it can’t be roused with a touch or a lift) I can better appreciate its understated aesthetic. (After all, I would never eagerly dismiss or disparage the beauty of a smooth stone.) It bears repeating: it’s not supposed to draw a lot of attention to itself—it should simply be what you need, when you need it. It should provide functions in a way that you naturally reach for them when you want them, but don’t otherwise notice them. And I can still examine the details of its elegant design and the places that dust and lint find its tiny seams and pockets. Tiny imperfections and limitations; an almost microscopic wabi-sabi.

My phone and my coffee cup have more in common than I thought. They are both attractive and well-designed and they both show signs of wear; and my attention is ordinarily drawn more toward what they hold than their affordances.

Avocado, Bagel, Cutting Board

Some of the most common hand injuries admitted to the ER are cuts from preparing avocados and bagels. I don’t have the statistics on the reasons people give to doctors and nurses as they’re getting their wounds cleaned and bandaged, but I can make some pretty good guesses:

“I was in a hurry”, “I wasn’t being careful enough”, “My knife just slipped.”

I can sympathize: I’ve had my fair share of near misses.

The problem with this particular situation isn’t necessarily just underestimating what can go wrong—it’s what happens when you actually succeed. Or, more precisely, what happens right after you succeed.

We tend to look at some tools and technologies as the entire solution to the problem. In the case of cutting an avocado in two, we grab the part of the knife that fits our hand and vigorously apply force to the avocado-problem with the part of the knife that fits the avocado. At this point, however, the line between success and failure is razor-thin if our other hand happens to be supporting the avocado-problem.

Cutting boards are boring. They’re one more thing to get out, clean and put away. But boring things like cutting boards (and parking brakes and hard drive backups) are highly underrated, and it might make a lot of sense to consider a knife and cutting board as forming a system that can gracefully withstand your successes as well as your failures.

Matching

Your mouth is a rather abrupt opening in your face that sounds can emanate from. It is not shaped like the bell of a trumpet or a tuba, which would be more acoustically efficient. Cupping your hands around your mouth, you can form a kind of megaphone that helps your voice carry across greater distances (or noisier environments) than usual. Your ears (at least the weird-shaped fleshy parts on the side of your head) are shaped a bit like the bell of a trumpet or a tuba (on a very bad day), which is very important for hearing. Even so, cupping your hand behind your ear does something similar: it funnels more sound into your ear, helping you to hear even better.

Well, it’s not actually the case that your voice or quiet sounds are amplified or even “funneled” by your hands. It’s more accurate to say that your hands help your mouth or your ear to be better matched to the way that sounds travel through the air. Your cupped hands form an additional interface; a bridge that sound can more easily travel over.

Our hands aren’t optimized for this, of course. They’re not intended for this purpose; our hands are optimized for handling (Ha!) things, not sound waves. Our hands can reach both our mouths and ears and they happen to have useful acoustic properties—even if they’re not really megaphones or ears. It’s interesting that our hands can do this; that we somehow learned to do it at all and that we learn how and when to do it from each other. (An admittedly brief search did not turn up any evidence that other primates do this.)

In any case, cupping our hands can also be a visual cue to others. Holding one cupped hand behind our ear, perhaps craning and turning our head slightly conveys that we’re trying to listen; it’s a universal sign that means, “What? I can’t hear you.” Likewise if someone sees you looking directly at them with your hands cupped around your mouth, they might pay closer attention. (Or even cup their own hand behind their ear to listen!)

Getting your hands involved in this way when we’re trying to be heard or trying to listen necessarily also creates a different posture in us. It focuses our own attention even more because we’re physically more engaged than if our arms simply hung at our sides.

Just as the shape and placement of our hands helps to better match the acoustics of speaking or listening, our posture—our gesture—becomes more of what we’re trying to do. It reinforces the signal being sent to ourselves and others.

Some Assembly Required

Should I really have to pay the same amount or more for a deconstructed salad as a normal salad? In fact, it doesn’t seem like it should be called “salad”—it’s a tidy collection of separated ingredients. It’s like the mise en place for a salad skipped a couple of steps on the line and went straight to plating.

Don’t get me wrong: sometimes I’m in the the frame of mind to play with my food or build something from a kit, and there is something appealing about the high degree of organization. It just feels a tiny bit silly to get an almost-prepared dish; it feels a little like I’ve accidentally signed up for a foraging experience. Somehow a little more entropy feels appropriate for a salad.

Flossing

Animals don’t really need to clean their teeth as much as we do, or they have other ways of coping. Hippopotami open their mouths and little birds are happy to fly in and pick away at their teeth to clean them. Sharks just grow entire new rows of teeth as replacements. But in addition to brushing our teeth (because compared to most other animals, we eat a lot of powdered sugar) we humans floss. I don’t know what evolutionary advantages we gain from having teeth that require this kind of maintenance, but I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering if it’s worth it.

And perhaps there’s no advantage. Maybe it’s simply a drawback of having a giant brain that craves (and dutifully rewards) sugar intake, and our genetically programmed, socially coordinated brain conspiracy has finally achieved its evolutionary goal: unlimited corn syrup. Or maybe it’s a side effect of developing the technology we call cooking. We don’t eat extremely tough things like antelope bones and tree branches anymore: there’s no need to chew as much before swallowing and so there also isn’t any attendant tooth-scouring.

But teeth are very important to the enjoyment of food and the production of speech—so we must floss. We must floss, despite the fact that it feels a little unnatural; a little uncomfortable. We must floss, even though it takes just a little more time than we’d like to spend each night before bed. We must make these clumsy attempts to coordinate hands, eye and jaw in the mirror; struggling with a string too short to tie any knot, yet somehow too long to easily manipulate in our mouth; thin and fine enough to cut off circulation to our fingertips and paradoxically so stout that no neighboring teeth will let it pass between them without great resolve and determination.

Which is only somewhat easier than trying to find precisely the right kind of weird-ass, disposable flossing utensils to buy at the store.

Dammit.

Extremes

On Sunday morning, the sky was completely clear and the sun reflected off the snow; it was intensely bright. It was also intensely cold this weekend—not a weekend for leisurely strolls or even walks for exercise, but rather efficient, goal-oriented, survival walks: get coffee, get food, get back to the room. Quickly.

We’re capable of adapting to very cold weather. Our bodies will naturally start to burn more calories in order to generate enough heat to keep us warm, but it doesn’t seem to happen very quickly or easily—at least not if you live indoors. I’ve read that you can deliberately adapt to cold weather if you prompt your body by regularly showering with cold water for a couple of minutes. (My interest in this is extremely limited.)

I do notice sometimes in March or April, when I walk outside to get the mail or take out the garbage, that even though there’s snow on the ground I don’t feel like I need a jacket. It certainly feels cool, but 40F in October does not feel the same as 40F in March. Somehow, gradually, I become more acclimated to the cold over the winter. Maybe it’s from shivering in the car before it gets warmed up, or short dashes outside when it’s too much trouble to put on a heavy coat. Maybe it’s from getting up in the morning when the floors are still cold.

However it happens, it happens over time, by degree and with a little discomfort. Even the extreme effort of showering with cold water takes more than one session to adapt. But maybe there is a counter-intuitive comfort to be found in the discomfort, knowing that simultaneously there are deep, quiet changes happening, too.

Let It Snow

It snowed pretty hard today, so after work this evening, we went out to our driveway to shovel. Occasionally, throughout the day, you could hear the city plows in the streets and see the private snow removal trucks clearing out driveways. 

Snow removal is a very different problem to solve than other outdoor maintenance. A lawn can be mowed a day or two earlier or later without much impact, and fertilizer or aeration can easily vary by a week or two. The weather has to be accommodated, in any case, but usually during the warmer months the timing isn’t terribly critical. This is not the case with more than 1 or 2 inches of snow, especially if there are to be especially frigid temperatures shortly afterward. Pretty much everyone needs their driveway or parking lot cleared out within the span of a few hours, residences and businesses alike.

It makes me wonder: when we finally go back to the office a couple of days each week, would a group of us be willing to take up shovels against the snowy sidewalks and parking lots? For the benefit of a faster response than the snow removal service, the fresh air, the exertion and maybe even camaraderie?

Playing On And Around

Growing up, we we would bring our household garbage to a metal dumpster. It was parked at the end of our long-ish gravel driveway, a few feet away from the group of three mailboxes that seemed to form the nexus of the three households in our strangely-formed little neighborhood.

Sometimes the dumpster would get nearly full and our parents would have us climb up into it (perhaps giving us a boost at first?) to stomp down the garbage so we could fit in whatever else we still needed to throw away. 

Being an avid reader even at an early age, I couldn’t help but notice the stickers on the dumpster that read, “Do Not Play On or Around”. Pointing this out didn’t seem to raise anyone’s level of concern, apart from perhaps wanting me to finish my task quickly, discretely and without mentioning any more potential safety hazards. 

Even if I hadn’t considered the conflicting interests of my parents and the lawyers at the dumpster company, I think I knew intuitively that I was getting away with something. I was engaging in behavior that wasn’t completely sanctioned; even as I was directed by the highest authority I could think of, apart from the police and the President of the United States. It had a whiff of adventure; a fleeting detour from the rules.

But underneath that, I think the pleasure came from the sheer physical novelty: climbing up something that wasn’t a ladder or a tree; getting into something that wasn’t a bed or a swimming pool; walking on a completely different terrain than I could find anywhere else in my neighborhood. It was fun pulling myself up over the edge of the giant metal box and stomping around on the trash bags, cardboard and whatever else it was that got thrown away in the 70’s and 80’s instead of being recycled or up-cycled or sold on eBay.

As I got older, taking out the garbage and stomping it down when necessary became a dull chore, of course. But learning something new like ice skating or doing a cartwheel or swimming might be just as invigorating and won’t get strange looks from the neighbors.

Tickled

It’s hard to tickle yourself; you can’t, really. You can’t introduce enough unpredictability into your own movements to be surprised in the way that feels ticklish. You know exactly what you’re going to do before you even do it, and that ruins the feeling.

I think there is an analogy here with food, because it seems like it usually tastes better when someone else makes it for you than if you make it yourself. It could be that in the process of making even just a PB&J, you become a little desensitized to the smell of it, or the effort somehow dilutes the flavors. It could be that making the food yourself somehow partially satisfies your hunger.

And it could also be that making food for someone is simply a gift; a nice, little surprise. And who wouldn’t be tickled by that?

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Rock: our basic, inherent nature and needs.

Paper: (mostly) pre-modern technologies that address those needs: food, conversation, hugs, a good book or meaningful, healthy movements , e.g. work, play, exercise.

Scissors: high-technology solutions to our basic needs and problems: NETFLIX, cars, maple bacon doughnuts and anything with a touchscreen.

Paper covers (read: “soothes”) rock, by definition above.

And yes, scissors cuts paper, i.e. makes it look stupid and primitive and inefficient, even though paper works totally fine most of the time. (Paper is a wonderful technology, by the way.)

Rock breaks scissors, but probably only after scissors sits next to rock, distracting it and tricking it into creating an account by presenting an interesting article headline, which the rock knows is probably just clickbait, but the rock is really enjoying a mocha frappachino in an overstuffed chair, procrastinating doing real work, so why not? (As an unusually literal example, I could tell you a story about an ordinarily mild-mannered friend who actually went completely Office Space on an ink jet printer in his driveway after his patience ran out.)

Seems like the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors is itself broken when a computerized laser scissors with soft-touch handles gets to play and starts seriously messing with the rock. Rock may need to get better at recognizing scissors for what they are instead of being fooled by the fancy Kickstarter video presentation that scissors put together. Rock should probably rethink its strategy against scissors, because scissors is not even playing the same game.

Our basic, biological, bedrock nature can be tricked and hacked for our short-term convenience and enjoyment, but the fact is “scissors” are brittle and can’t solve every problem in the long term. They’re an adjunct, not a substitute for “paper”. “Paper” is natural and flexible—a set of holistic approaches that developed with “rock” over a much longer period of time than “scissors” have had. “Paper” is pretty reliable, even if it seems a little boring or tedious at times.

Coffee Makers

Four of us enjoyed a rare gathering outside, spaced several feet distant around a backyard fire pit on a frigid afternoon. Our friends told us that they had tried different coffee brewing methods and settled on a Chemex brewer for their morning cup: ideal for its excellent flavor and fast clean-up.

The subject of coffee preparation has come up a couple of times lately. It’s interesting to note the machines and accessories and techniques people prefer: what makes good coffee, the right amount of coffee, what’s too much fuss, etc. It’s an interesting lens to look through when you consider all the choices available. So what is it we’re making, anyway?

For some people, coffee is just hot brown water that needs to happen—quickly—in order for life to continue. For others, there are subtle flavors to be gently coaxed out. Less often, there are those that value the ritual just as much as the final product, perhaps more—coffee as an act of creation. For some, coffee is a medium for delivering flavored syrups or milk.

To be clear, I try not to judge what anyone likes to drink, even though I sometimes poke fun at the tastes of friends and family. Some people find the very idea that a well-brewed cup of coffee is important to be faintly ridiculous, but I can't hear them over the sound of my conical burr grinder.

It is extremely tempting to equate a particular method or device with a level of discernment and taste, but it’s not always so. A coffee brewer is a lever that you pull. (metaphorically speaking, of course: very few have actual levers) You might just need the lever to efficiently produce coffee. Or you might think that the lever should be especially beautiful to look at or a pleasure to use. The lever might be cheap or durable or small enough to fit on the counter. You might enjoy adjusting and tweaking the lever until it's just right before you pull it with practiced skill.

But we are the coffee makers: we're firmly, if sometimes sleepily, gripping one end of that lever. (And merely pulling that lever is doing subtle work on us, too.) Any of the brewers can be supplied with high or low-quality coffee beans and water, and can be operated with varying levels of care. The gadgets we select are a small subset of a dozen different factors that impact what we use and how we use it to get a good (or maybe just good enough) cup of coffee.

Startling

Our oldest cat has become quite deaf. She sleeps very, very soundly. She no longer looks at us when we call to her and she seems completely oblivious when we make noises behind her. She has developed a maddening habit of standing directly behind us when we’re working in the kitchen. Interestingly, the only cat I have ever been truly afraid of was deaf: a pure white longhair named Claire.

Occasionally, when Claire’s owners were out of town, we would look after her, along with their other pets: 3 other cats and 4 dogs. Claire had this habit of hiding in the basement ceiling rafters. I would walk downstairs to take care of the litter boxes and she would, inexplicably, hiss at me from her semi-concealed position in the darkness directly above me, scaring the living hell out of me. My hands and shoulders would shoot up instinctively to protect my head as I jumped sideways away from the lethal threat, landing in a fighting stance. I may have shouted something rather shocking. Every. Single. Time.

We use sounds a lot for just relaxing now, but every sound in the natural world is potentially important survival information. Noises alert us to potential danger—they prepare us for movement. Quiet can perform a similar function, like when crickets and frogs suddenly become silent whenever a predator or other large animal approaches: it’s definitely a good idea to look around and see what’s going on.

Claire’s owners said that she also had a tendency to knock over anything and everything on the counters and ledges she walked on. We get feedback in the form of sound and noises almost every time we move: we can hear the sound of a glass as we slide it across the table, the floor creak as we walk across it, a fork when we accidentally knock it off the table. We can hear the change in the sound of our footfalls when we walk over different surfaces or as we get tired and our running technique degrades. If you’ve ever worn hearing protection like ear plugs or ear muffs that attenuate sound significantly, you might have even noticed that you feel just a tiny bit clumsy. We get a tremendous amount of feedback from how our movements feel as we perform them, but any baseball player or golfer will tell you that the sound of their performance speaks volumes as well.

Poor Claire was deaf from an early age. She was rather high-strung and probably took to the rafters because she didn’t like being constantly surprised by the other household pets “sneaking up on her”. And she might not notice knocking something breakable off the counters and ledges because she wouldn’t ever be startled by the noise.

I’m glad that our old cat is still very affectionate and comfortable enough in our home that she doesn’t feel like she needs to hide. And I’m really glad that she’s too old to get up to the rafters.

Seasoned

My understanding of cooking has changed a lot in the past year since reading Samin Nosrat’s remarkable book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. In particular, I’ve gained an appreciation for how salt and seasonings are used effectively: ideally, at more than one step in the cooking process.

Salt especially can be added long before the oven is even turned on; in a brine or marinade or just applied directly to the surface of meat. There might be two or three more steps when salt or seasonings are added, depending on the heat being used to cook and how delicate the herbs are. When you think the dish is finished, it always pays to taste it and consider if maybe you need to add a little more of the seasonings called for in the recipe—or even some that aren’t. And many dishes recommend a garnish of an herb like parsley or cilantro, or a final sprinkle of fancy sea salt to complete the dish and give it an added flavor or texture.

Samin refers to this process as “layering”: using different herbs and spices and salts at different times to bring out and create the best flavors. But I also find myself thinking about it as iterating: getting closer and closer to the final product by paying attention to the feedback the food is providing through flavor and appearance at several different times, and then making adjustments.

The word “season” in the sense of flavoring food comes from the French assaisoner (to do something during the proper season) which brings with it the sense of the right time for tilling the soil, planting for the harvest and ripening. When we re-season food as we cook, we stir, taste and add more herbs and spices—and then we wait a while and repeat to see if we’ve arrived: miniature seasons within the process of seasoning.

I’m better in the kitchen now than I when I started, but I could use more time, more tasting, more experience for the food to do the work of seasoning me into a better cook.

Three Laws

Isaac Asimov wrote in his science fiction stories about laws of behavior programmed into robots to prevent them from harming humans or destroying humanity entirely. They formed a hierarchy based on human safety and utility:

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Many of Asimov’s robot stories are interesting because they deal with situations that introduce ambiguities and unknowns that cause the robot to fail to act appropriately. He later wrote that these concepts were obvious and applicable to any human tool:

First Law: A tool must not be unsafe to use.

Second Law: A tool must perform its function efficiently unless this would harm the user.

Third Law: A tool must remain intact during its use unless its destruction is required for its use or for safety.

Many of our tools are now embodied by software. While some of these are, indeed, mission-critical and/or safety-related, most of them are pretty ordinary. I propose here a set of usability laws for software and related devices that we all must use regularly:

First Law: Software must not automatically or by default piss off the user, or through some inexplicable delay or aborted function cause the user to become pissed off.

Second Law: Software must perform its functions efficiently unless it produces a surprising, nonsensical, counter-productive or useless result that would surely piss off the user.

Third Law: Software must perform updates as needed in order to maintain and/or improve its functions, unless the update actually degrades its functions; or the timing, duration and sheer frequency of those updates would cause the user to become pissed off.