Andrea S. James

Category: Curiosity

  • Simplicity gains momentum, but at what cost?

    Simplicity is all the rage right now. And in so many walks of life, too.

    Do you ever wonder why? Why do we want to pare down, cut back, sift out, and reduce to the essentials?

    The world is no more complex than it’s ever been. The difference is that, thanks to the information revolution, we see the complexity now.

    The popularity of simplicity as a life priority is a pushing back against the abundance of information, of pressure and of stuff that is foisted upon us without our permission.

    Simplicity is cheaper, less risky and many times, safer. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 can be boiled down as being caused by Too Much.

    Too much borrowing. Too much risk. Too much house. Too much commute. Too much mortgage. Too much debt. Too much stuff.

    But the metaphor extends.

    Medicine: One of the worst diseases that we can’t seem to lick, cancer, is a disease of too much cell growth, rather than an illness where something lacks.

    From Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies,”

    We tend to think of cancer as a “modern” illness because its metaphors are so modern. It is a disease of overproduction, of fulminant growth – growth unstoppable, growth tipped into the abyss of no control . . . If consumption once killed its victims by pathological evisceration (the tuberculosis bacillus gradually hollows out the lung), then cancer asphyxiates us by filling bodies with too many cells; it is consumption in its alternate meaning — the pathology of excess.

    Writing & self-expression: Twitter limits our words to 140 characters, giving us permission to be brief. Information flows through Twitter like molecules through water, shifting, fluid and flowing.

    The messages are simple, though they themselves are great in number, thus creating a complex system of simple parts. I treat Twitter like water, diving in, soaking it up and getting out as soon as the simplicity starts to feel complex.

    Because our thoughts are easier-than-ever to share, they are abundant, and the backlash is the pressure to make each word count.

    Food: Cooking trends favor fewer ingredients, letting natural flavors stand alone, rather than complicated processes and mixes.

    What’s the opposite of simple food? From Adam Gopnik’s “Paris to the Moon”

    The recipe is for a timbale des homards. You take three lobsters, season them with salt and pepper and a little curry, saute them in a light mirepoix – a mixture of chopped onions and carrots – and then simmer them with cognac, port, double cream, and fish stock for twenty minutes. Then you take out the lobsters and, keeeping them warm, reduce the cooking liquid and add two egg yolks and 150 grams of sweet butter.

    Definitely too much.

    Technology: For years, technology advanced by getting more complicated. But end-users don’t care for more buttons, more options, more menus and more screens. As complicated as the behind-the-scenes programming and hardware may be, the end result should be simple.

    This was part of the genius of Apple’s products. Do you remember that relief you felt when you first learned that the iPod didn’t come with a thick instruction manual?

    Garmin even recently came out with an advanced GPS running watch that was simpler than prior versions.

    Research: A national intelligence leader said recently that the most important commodity in Washington is not information, it’s time.

    Synthesizing information — telling us not just what and who, but why and how — is more valuable than a deluge of data.

    Another story: In college, I took a fascinating course that combined teachings on philosophy with artificial intelligence. One overnight assignment was to write a paper about brain synapses and the challenges of replicating brain function using computer processors.

    At that time, I was learning to appreciate the genius of brevity. I submitted a four-page report.

    I got it back. “D”

    Horrified. The professor, visiting from Oxford, explained that my paper was too short. “You’re an American. It’s not your fault you can’t write,” he said sympathetically.

    All of the other students in the honors colloquium had submitted 16-and 20-page papers. (Bachelors of the arts types = show offs.)

    He let me rewrite. And so, I embellished. If a point could be made in one sentence, I took five. I turned four pages into 12 — four pages of solid information and eight pages of, well, bullshit. It was now an “A” paper.

    Today, I think that a situation like that would play out dramatically differently.

    Today, everyone wants the executive summary.

    Conclusion:

    I’m still figuring out where I shake out on the simplicity continuum.

    In politics, the dedication to simplicity of message – talking points – ends up eliminating nuance. And life has more gray that many of us want to tolerate, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value in exploring it. Truth rests in nuance. The truth is below the headline.

    So much of the backlash against faith, and maybe even God, comes from simple interpretations of the Bible, black-and-white rules that leave whole groups of people feeling excluded. Even in the faith community itself, I see a lot of disagreement that can be boiled down to arguments of simplicity versus complexity. (Theme alert: I just took a complex issue: interpretations of faith, and boiled it down to A versus B. Like that?) I tend to think that matters of faith and God are more complex than simple.

    At the opposite end, I find it inherently satisfying to boil things down to the essentials. So far as the trend toward simplicity eliminates bullshit and bureaucracy, I’m for it.

    And on a personal level, I’ve found that by cutting out what I don’t need, my life is more open to the people and relationships that I do.

    Wisdom is often simple. Perhaps simplicity is at its best when it enhances knowledge and wisdom, and at its worst when it dumbs down and obscures.

    As English Franciscan philosopher William Ockham put it, sometimes simplest is best.

    I apologize for a complex post on simplicity — a complex topic, no? — and I welcome your thoughts!

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  • You know you’re part of the digital revolution when . . .

    . . . Apple speaks, and it suddenly becomes OK to stop working and pay attention.

    Engadget live blog
    New York Times live blog

  • An illustration: Smart phone goes here

    Over at GeekWire today,  talks about how she bravely left behind her smart phone on her summer vacation. It’s well worth a read.

    One of her sentences, referring to her interactions with her husband, made me laugh out loud:

    It’s not reasonable to tweet while he’s asking me a question (“Sorry, what?”) or to make my phone an honorary utensil on foodie nights out.

    This image popped into my head instantly of the smart phone that’s never more than an arm’s reach away. So, I decided to illustrate it. Crudely.

    Voila:

     

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  • The double workday, makers and managers

    My first paying job was a regional sales administrator at Radio Shack. That was the summer of 2000, and about 50% of the job was putting in the hours.

    I had set duties involving culling mountains of sales data in Microsoft Excel, and then large expanses of the day set aside for me to resolve customer complaints. I could handle zero to 25 customer complaints during a day.

    Mostly, my job was to be there. And that required just one shift.

    Today, I’m blessed enough to have more autonomy over my activities. On a given day, I can choose to dig into a new subject, explore and evaluate some risk that I perceive to my stocks, make introductions to new industry contacts, or add complexity to my financial models. But, a large portion of my day also still involves being present — being able to respond to market developments, current events and field answers to client questions.

    Thus, like many of us in the information economy, I work a double day.

    There are the office hours where I’m present and able to answer questions and perform administrative tasks and respond to news. But my best creative productivity, with long stretches of thinking, modeling and writing, happens after stock market close and sometimes goes well into the night.

    Programmer and investor Paul Graham writes a compelling essay about this concept on his blog. The managers, he says, are the ones who can gather for coffee and hold speculative meetings. The makers are the ones who need large, free expanses of time to create. And many of us are in between.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

    …

    When you’re operating on the manager’s schedule you can do something you’d never want to do on the maker’s: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.

    Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They’re effectively free if you’re on the manager’s schedule. They’re so common that there’s distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to “grab coffee,” for example.

    I appreciated his take on scheduling.  It’s definitely worth reading the whole essay.

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  • A paradox of modern life: Comfort is a noose

    It is two days post Hurricane Irene.

    If you talk to enough folks, you can detect disappointment in some Northeast corners about how boring the storm was.

    Why is that?

    My theory is that people are hungry for adventure and many don’t know how to seek it themselves for risk of losing physical comfort, and thus, they find themselves surprised and pleased by the adrenaline rush of an approaching storm.

    Most people would never confess that they find storms exciting.  It’s not a politically correct thing to say, especially when death and damage are involved. But, on some level, an approaching hurricane is as exciting as it is dreadful.

    Because as much as we seek comfort, we also find it boring.

    Comfort is a noose. Once we have it, we become too content, we fight too hard to keep it and not hard enough for the things that give life meaning. A hurricane is a reminder of what’s important — relationships, life, little pleasures, love, truth.

    A life lived to preserve physical comfort isn’t really all that fulfilling. It is fulfilling to seek it, but once you’re there, then what?

    The happiest people are not those who are the most comfortable. The happiest seem to be those who are in a zone. Those with a mission and a goal, those who are seeking to better themselves or some societal element over which they have control, those who have risked physical comfort for some greater purpose.

    Religious missionaries and business entrepreneurs and loving parents share this in common.

    Happiness lives outside of our comfort zone.

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  • The world economy in 10 seconds

    For a nice overview of the American and global economies, I read Caterpillar’s quarterly earnings reports. They are a wealth of analysis and information!

    Here’s a snippet from the latest, released today.

    Sovereign debt problems, political change in the Middle East, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and higher oil prices contributed to slower than expected economic growth in the first half of 2011. Those factors heighten concern about the future pace of economic recovery. Although the recovery is slower than expected, particularly in developed economies, we anticipate further growth in the second half of 2011. We expect the world economy will grow 3.5 percent in 2011, down from 3.9 percent in 2010.

    My summary of CAT’s thorough analysis is thus:

    • Developing countries are growing while the Western world remains stagnant.
    • China is still growing but is not accelerating, so it is second derivative regression.
    • Any growth we do have in North America is not tied to jobs, but to technology improvements and worker productivity.
    • If we enter a time of austerity, we are probably facing another recession.
    • And finally: Highlight Japan’s economic importance. The disasters there this year slowed global economic growth.

    I have been writing about business and finance for the past eight years, and I’ve found that the ability to synthesize a lot of information and make it readable, comprehensible and interesting is a rare skill. Hats off to the writers at Caterpillar.

  • What’s that big white ball in the Port of Seattle?

     

    Sea-Based X-Band radar (SBX) in Elliott Bay. (Missile Defense Agency photo.)

     

    You may have noticed the big white ball in the Port of Seattle over the past month. It’s easily the most recognizable thing at the Port, outshining the container cranes and the ferries.

    The ship is a Sea-Based X-Band Radar Vessel, and it is a sensor for the nation’s  Ballistic Missile Defense System.

    The vessel is under refurbishment at Vigor Shipyard Seattle. The X-band radar is switched off while the vessel is in port. The radar dome sits atop an oil-drilling platform.

    The cool thing is that it arrived in mid-May is expected to be here until mid-August, so it’s almost like it’s a part of Seafair, Seattle’s summer-long festival that celebrates the air and the sea.

    When the Boeing-built X-Band Radar is on, the ship system is able to detect hostile missiles, and relay data to interceptor missiles so that the threat can be destroyed. The vessel itself is bigger than a football field and has living quarters on board.

    While it is in Seattle, the U.S. Coast Guard is enforcing a “naval vessel protection zone” around the ship.

    More:

     

  • How do you unlock your heart?

    If you’ve followed along for a while, you know that I’m nuts about downhill skiing. That said, I pretty much can’t stand the minutia involved in getting ready to go to the mountain.

    I live in a condo building and store my skis in a unit in my building’s basement. To load the skis into the car involves sticking my condo-unit key in my pocket, going to the elevator and using a special key to tell the elevator to go to the basement. Once down there, we unlock the storage area door and then there’s a combination lock on the storage unit itself.

    Then, we haul the gear upstairs – skis, helmet, poles, boots — and use another key to unlock the car and yet another to unlock the ski rack.

    We haven’t driven two feet and we’ve already had to employ six keys. It saddens me that humanity must be so guarded to protect ourselves from each other.

    But once we get to the mountain, we’re free. I always felt that there was a camaraderie on slopes — a bunch of like-minded people, willing to brave frigid winds and a mountain that could kill us, just to strap on some heavy piece of equipment and hurl ourselves down a hill. It’s play at its finest. Totally pointless and totally filled with utter, sheer joy.

    One day this past season was particularly cold. I was losing feeling in my fingers and my friends and I agreed that we’d grab lunch after this next run. Like I’ve done for more than 15 years, I raced over to the ski rack, popped off my skis, hung my poles around the top and clodded clumsily in my boots into the toasty restaurant.

    Probably two hours later, we re-emerged, full and warm and ready to have at it again.

    My skis weren’t there.

    After an hour of digging in the snow and checking the racks over and over and over again, I realized with sad finality: Someone had taken my skis.

    But, maybe it was a mistake, I hoped. Maybe they’d bring them back. Later that night, security informed me that there had been six thefts that day. I learned that equipment thefts are often not done by “just kids,” but have ties to organized crime. Criminals steal the gear, sell it on eBay or Craigslist, and use it to finance drug-running and other illegal activities.

    My skis were stolen.

    I hate that phrase. I hate what it means and I hate how much it still bums me out even as we head into summer. My skis were 10 years old and cheap and my ski ability had improved so much since I bought them that I should’ve had new ones by now anyway.

    My skis had little fiscal value. I bet they wouldn’t command more than $20 on the open market.

    And yet, the thieves had stolen something invaluable: my ski-culture trust.

    It’s interesting to me that in the Bible, Jesus refers to the devil as “a thief.” If I were to pick the worst adjective for evil, the worst thing you could do, I don’t think I would have chosen that one. I think I’d pick murderer or rapist or despot or tyrant. But Jesus says, “thief.”

    Even 2,000 years ago, people knew that thievery was a very evil thing. A murderer is a thief: He steals life. A rapist is a thief: He steals peace of mind. Despots steal autonomy. Petty thieves steal our ability to look at a strange man as a brother and love others as we love our selves.

    Before this upcoming winter, I’m going to have to buy new skis. I’m even a little excited for some new, shiny carvers.

    But what makes me sad is that I’m also going to buy yet another lock and key.

  • Why I start at 4 am: It’s morning first in New York

    How many time zones are in the contiguous United States?

    a) Three

    b) Four

    c) Who cares?

    If you answered (a) you might live in Chicago, or the central time zone. Or, you might live outside of the U.S. and made a bad guess.

    If you answered (b), you are correct. And you likely live on the West Coast or in the Mountain time zone.

    If you answered (c), you live on the East Coast.

    I grew up in New Jersey. In other words, I grew up thinking that New York was the axis point upon which the whole world pivots. I never realized that there was an entire country out there of people constantly adding hours to their own time to convert to eastern.

    When I worked and lived in Washington, D.C., I never put an ET after the time. A 9 am conference call was at 9 am. Period.

    An East Coaster’s awareness of time zones is like the average American’s awareness of Canadian politics.

    Growing up, I didn’t even consider myself an East Coaster. I wouldn’t have known what that meant. West Coasters tend to not be like that. They’re hyper aware of the fact that they live on the West Coast, and that it’s different from the rest of the country and that you have to add three hours to your time so that New Yorkers understand you. It’s kind of like how in the South, everyone goes around thinking about how they are in the South. But growing up in the Northeast, I never thought about how I was in the North. I never called myself a Northerner until I moved South. But Southerners call themselves Southerners all the time.

    The first time I moved out of the ET zone, I lived near Chicago. A New Yorker said to me, “I don’t understand why you’d move there. There’s nothing you can get there that you can’t get in New York.”

    I responded back about how people love the Cubs, even though they don’t win like the Yankees, and how that is really endearing. He didn’t get it.

    “Oh wow, in Chicago, their t.v. shows are an hour earlier,” I realized. “Isn’t that neat.”

    By the time I moved to Seattle, my New Jersey family had given up trying to figure out what time it was in my world.

    “It’s still light out,” I’d say at 8 pm.

    “Really? I’m going to bed,” they’d say at 11 pm.

    East Coast business people who travel West and wake up at 7 am say, “By the time I wake up here, I feel so behind, like I’m missing out on everything. I’ve got all these e-mails already.”

    Yes. 7 am on the West Coast is 10 am back East. It’s late morning.

    I love my adopted West coast. I’d like to stay forever. I’ve fully confronted my East Coast geographical snobbery and have overcome it.

    But it will always be morning first in New York.

  • The world didn’t end. What did you learn?

    Preacher Harold Camping predicted that the world as we know it would end on Saturday. It didn’t.

    Bare with me for a second, but, I read Camping’s analysis to get a sense of where his conviction came from.

    You see, I’m in the future prediction business, too. Lots of people in corporate America are — maybe we all are in some way — but definitely business folk.

    Before you make an investment of any kind, starting a company, creating a new product, backing a political candidate, you try to foresee. You study up, learn as much as you can, compile what you know and estimate around what you don’t.

    And then, you make a bet.

    As a stock analyst, I’m constantly asking myself: Where could I be wrong? What are the potential flaws in my thesis? What is the one variable that would render the rest of my analysis worthless? And what is the probability that one variable will occur?

    And that’s the thing that Harold Camping, and his followers, did not do. Here’s an interview with him from NY Magazine. Look at these excerpts, notice the disconnect between the reporter’s way of thinking (always with the what if in mind) and Camping’s refusal to go there:

    If six o’clock rolls around and there are no major earthquakes, are you going to start to get worried?

    It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. I don’t even think about those kind of issues. The Bible is not — God is not playing games. I don’t even want to think about that question at all. It is going to happen.

    You haven’t thought about what you’ll tell your followers on May 22 if the Rapture doesn’t take place?

    I’m not even thinking about that at all. It. Is. Going. To. Happen.

    …

    I know you’re convinced this is going to happen, but if May 22 comes around and you’re still here, can we talk again?

    I can’t even think about that question because you’re thinking that maybe, maybe Judgment Day will not happen. But it will happen, and I believe the Bible implicitly.

     

    Wow. Fascinating. He never did a simple thing that most of us do every day, which is ask ourselves, “What if I am wrong?”

    His analysis of the Bible — whether you believe in God or not is irrelevant, here — is guesses upon guesses. If just one of his estimates were wrong, his date could be off by a million years.  And he doesn’t appear to assign a probability to any of it. He assumes that “one day” means 1,000 years, and thus, seven days must mean 7,000 years and that “seven days to escape destruction” as told to Noah must really mean 7,000 years since the Old Testament was written until May 21, 2011 … or something. He kind of lost me.

    When I first read Camping’s analysis days ago, I was pretty sure that he was wrong. So sure, I would have bet my own money on it.

    Still, I made sure to spend time with friends on Friday and Saturday. I went to a class that I had been wanting to try out. I ate four tacos in a row instead of two, just because they tasted good. I literally stopped and smelled my neighbor’s lilacs.

    Nothing major, but I’m glad I lived a little bit more in the moment this week. Maybe you did too — and that’s OK. You’re not silly, it’s prudent and humble to have in the back of your head, “What if I’m wrong?”

    I only wish Camping’s followers, who sold their belongings and let debt pile up, had done the same. It’s not funny — it’s tragic.