Irons in the Fire

The blacksmith knows, when you have too many irons in the fire, the iron you leave in the fire will burn before you have time to hammer the iron you're working on. The expression 'having too many irons in the fire' comes from blacksmithing and stands for having too many tasks competing for your attention. I just realized how accurately it describes being overwhelmed by stressful commitments.

The trouble is, in life, we often need to put several irons in the fire. For example, you may need to go back to school for continuing education, but you can't go right away, so you make plans, you make an appointment for the required tests and schedule of classes, you anticipate months of class work. This one task, going back to school, becomes an 'iron in the fire.'

While you're anticipating going back to school, other things will come up, daily life, a new person, a new project, but all the worries of going back to school will still be on your mind. As life goes on, we collect more tasks and responsibilities that stretch out over time or will need to be done in the future, along with the task's we've already begun. Each becomes an iron in the fire, until we are overwhelmed by anticipation.

The irons, the things we need to do, but can't do right away but must eventually complete, the things we start but can't or won't finish, build up in the fire until we become overwhelmed, knowing we will have to abandon some of the irons to burn or abandon the iron we're working on.

Blacksmiths have a way of dealing with too many irons in the fire. They keep some of the irons out of the fire until they are ready, until they've hammered the irons they're working on. Maybe there is some way in life to keep some of those irons beside the fire, waiting, until the ones you're hammering are done, and the ones in the fire are ready. I'm going to try to mentally pigeonhole those tasks and responsibilities, setting them down beside the fire, but out of it, waiting their turn.


By the way, I've learned (to my surprise, since it is such a traditional, low technology craft), blacksmithing is an art that can teach us a lot of important lessons. It teaches that some things can only be learned through experience. Getting good at smithing requires using the hammer. It requires creating a muscle memory of simple moves, before you can make more complicated or sophisticated ones. It requires building up sufficient muscles before you can wield the hammer effectively. It is impossible to become a blacksmith just by being an educated person and following a series of instructions in a book cold turkey, at least not without going through the actual practice of making things. Blacksmithing, is a lot like Zen, it requires practice to realize.

I don't mean the kind of practice your piano teacher had you do as a child, although that is related, but the kind practice that means actually doing something, not as a study, but as a reality. You could purposefully make simple things to teach and strengthen your muscles, but the point is that you have to do it in order to learn it, to realize it, to gain the benefits of it. Talk won't get you there. Reading won't get you there. Knowing won't get you there.

"Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's a useful description to say autistics are only focused on on thing, but I would say there's a lot of tasks you can give autistics, like picking out small details in locked patterns, or picking out different musical pitches, where autistics seem especially good at attention to small detail. So if you think of the web as giving us small bits, like a tweet or a blog post is shorter than a novel, if you think of that as the overall trend, like an iPod, a song is shorter than an album. It seems that we're now all living in a world where we manipulate small bits effectively, it doesn't mean any of us is just interested in one thing, but we manipulate these small bits to create bigger ideas that we're interested in, and those bigger ideas are synthetic, and I think it's another way in which we are using information technology to mirror or mimic capabilities of autistics without usually people knowing it. "

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article380.html

This is what I suspected when I envisioned Strands in the late 90s, before Twitter existed. That shortening the length of information might be another instance of the medium being the message, that it might broaden the number of people writing by lowering the barrier (less memory, organization required to write), and that there might be some way of using the "many small pieces loosely joined" to create some kind of better, large paradigm of writing than the book. And perhaps we could give to writing the same kind of flexibility we give to data in relational databases, for combining, recombining in novel ways, mining and analyzing.

What if we could create a Twitter Query Language? Enabling virtual documents consisting of projections and selections of real time status streams?

Graphic Recording

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake.

The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference
Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis. How much better a "presentation" these graphic recordings make than a PowerPoint presentation!

These drawings are a lot like my vision for an information system, called Strands, which would be as thick and filled with complexity as the Talmud and as visually expressive as these graphic recordings. If only the web could be like this. When I think of Twitter and Tabloo, if they could be combined, I think we'd be close. Tabloo enables users to create visual narratives (through the structure and relationship, size and aspects of images) and Twitter enables users to create conversations out of small fragments of thought flowing continually.

Blogging the Archives

A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents.

We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds.

Illustration Art

All Edges Gilt

If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that would be. I don't know if people will do this, but I do know that ordinary people have a lot to contribute. Academics cannot know everything, they are an isolated individual, no matter how expert they are, and there is a very Long Tail out there of family members, amateur historians, hobbyists and who knows who that know something about cultural and historic artifacts. Maybe they will be willing to contribute. It will likely be only two percent, like Wikipedia authors, but that small percentage can do a lot of good.

As an aside, author and developer Liam Quin has a site, fromoldbooks.org which has great potential to provide fodder for bloggers. The interface to this digital archive of old book scans is easier to use and better than ones I've seen institutions deploy.

I wonder, also, if this phenomena is not somehow similar to the Cinematheque, not just an archive, but concerned that people actually view or interact with the artifacts.

Update: Shorpy is a commercial site, which shows  how successful blogging the archives can be. The site appears to have developed a following, with, I imagine, readers checking in each day to see what new photographs are posted. The blogger acts as curator by selecting images that will be of interest to the readers. Arranging them into albums, possibly by narrative (using Tabloo would be a good way to achieve this).

This fits exactly with the idea of people being able to easily find images of their local area in the past and the idea of "blogging the archives" at its most simplest and effective. The power of simply posting images and their captions, without any commentary, is surprising. It is encouraging to see people are interested and willing to participate in the interpreation and "unpuzzling" of old photographs. One of the pleasures of old photographs is rediscovering what lies behind the mysteries the images present.

Racing Games Encourage Risky Driving?

By now, many have heard about a study making claims that exposure to "driving games" encourage risky behavior on the road. I can see where the effect may be real, just as the effect of violence in video games may be real, but most of these studies forget that violence itself is neutral, it is the purpose and context for violence that may be troubling. They also never seem to separate games from simulation.

As others have pointed out, there is a vast difference between a simulation and a game. I fly flight simulators (Microsoft Flight Sim, Flight Gear and X-Plane) and have done so for about ten years. You can learn a lot about flight procedures, navigation and many other elements of flight, which are modeled to a good degree of realism. You obviously can't feel the effects of turbulence. You are not likely to feel your stomach in your throat from clear air turbulence. You are not likely to feel disorientation. But the rest you can learn a lot from. I'm fairly new to racing games or simulators, but the same rule applies to racing "games" that take a simulation approach.

The object of racing is to win. You win by following The Line, or ideal course through the given track that optimizes the efficiency of running the track in order to reduce the total lap time to a minimum. To follow the line, you do not just go as fast as possible through corners, but take advantage of physics. You actually run a faster time by going slower. I've always read that in racing books, but now I know it is real. My first runs through the game/simulator were slower than than my later runs when I calmed down, tried to follow the line, braked into corners, tried to hit the apex of the curve and position myself for as early an acceleration out of the corner at the highest exit speed possible. I'm still not very good at it, but my lap times dropped considerably the better I drove.

I believe racing or driving simulators teach people how to drive well and avoid taking risks, so let's not conflate simulation and racing. You ought to get real world pilot license credit for simulation practice and I've read many reports of pilots being more quick to learn at pilot school because of their simulation experience. Real sports car enthusiasts who run the Neurburing in Germany recommend taking a few laps in the PS2 game Gran Turismo before coming to the real track. The model is pretty faithful and at least you can memorize the names, directions and characteristics of the turns. Memorizing the course is essential to racing.

The bottom line is that racing simulations require you to follow the line to achieve anything. If they model damage, they punish bad driving severely. If they model tire wear and other mechanical elements the punish hard driving.

It reminds me of A-10 Tank Killer, a game I played many years ago on the PC. While not a flight simulator, the game offered realistic military scenarios, frequently without any good solution and failure to carry out the mission or causing friendly fire (and in some occasions there was no choice) resulted in being chewed out by the commander. The game offered dilemmas such as choosing to fly to rescue a downed pilot or take out the target or both. Hard decisions have to be made in war and this game taught those lessons very well. I would _want_ my children (if I had any) to play this game. They might learn something about life. That the enemy can come out of nowhere to rip your wings off in a second from a hidden truck mounted anti-aircraft gun; that war is chaotic, that it is difficult to tell who is friend and foe, that you must make life and death decisions and no matter what you decide you may be wrong. We need more "games" like that, we need young people to play them. One rarely hears in the media how science has found evidence that games can help, such as showing that surgeons who play video games show improved dexterity. Or that medical simulation helps surgeons to practice without endangering patients. I believe from personal experience that first person shooter games can improve soldiers performance on the battlefield, that people who have never been exposed to warfare can probably pick up a lot about tactics and warfare from playing them, perhaps too much, but that is something for society to worry about, the game is not the problem. They are not "murder simulators" by any means...they may mean raw recruits who have played them come with a few qualities helpful to the soldier, such as the understanding that in warfare one must move forward into the face of fire, use cover, organize into fireteams, etc. Games are a powerful way human beings can learn, give us new ways to play, relieve stress, compete, keep our minds sharp and simulators are their older, wiser brothers who can help us to learn to avoid mistakes by allowing us to fail at tasks that are deadly when mistakes are made.

Driving games like Burnout, I tend to take a different view of, they are intended to be absurd fun, like many good games, they allow you to do crazy-fun things that are enjoyable, such as the wild drives in Halo's Warthog I've done or blowing yourself into the sky on a pile of grenades. Does that make me want to drive off a cliff or sit on a pile of grenades in real life? No, I can't believe any sensible person would take such games any differently. I think if people can keep perspective, we also need games like these to maintain a sense of the absurd and to do those things we know we'd never do in real life. One would have to be malicious or delusional to take these activities into real life.