Month: March 2020

First up, how we speak about it.

Because time is so abstract, the only way to talk about it is by using the terminology from another, more concrete domain of experience, namely that of space. For example, in Swedish, the word for future is framtid which literally means “front time”. Visualising the future as in front of us (and the past as behind us) is also very common in English. We look forward to the good times ahead and to leaving the past behind us.

Languages around the world have different spatial terms:

But for speakers of Aymara (spoken in Peru), looking ahead means looking at the past. The word for future (qhipuru) means “behind time” – so the spatial axis is reversed: the future is behind, the past is ahead. The logic in Aymara appears to be this: we can’t look into the future just like we can’t see behind us. The past is already known to us, we can see it just like anything else that appears in our field of vision, in front of us.

Mandarin Chinese employs a vertical time axis alongside a horizontal one. The word xià (down) is used to talk about future events, so when referring to “next week” a Mandarin Chinese speaker would literally say “down week”. The word shàng (up) is used to talk about the past – so “last week” becomes “up one week”. This affects the way observers perceive the spatial unfolding of the ageing process.

…they alter the way the same individual experiences the passage of time depending on the language context they are operating in. For example, Swedish and English speakers prefer to mark the duration of events by referring to physical distances – a short break, a long party. But Greek and Spanish speakers tend to mark time by referring to physical quantities – a small break, a big party. Speakers of English and Swedish see time as a horizontal line, as distance travelled. But Spanish and Greek speakers see it as quantity, as volume taking up space.

What’s interesting is when people can speak two languages that use different ways of referring to time.

But Spanish-Swedish bilinguals are flexible. When prompted with the Swedish word for duration (tid), they estimated time using line length. They were unaffected by container volume. When prompted with the Spanish word for duration (duración), they estimated time based on container volume. They were unaffected by line length. It seems that by learning a new language, you suddenly become attuned to perceptual dimensions that you weren’t aware of before.

The Indian languages I can speak all use volume to indicate time. For instance you’d say “bahut waqt” in Hindustani which transliterates to “a lot of time” unlike the English “a long time”. I learnt both languages around the same time. Perhaps as a result of this, having thought about it, I don’t have a visual perception of time, either linear or volumetric. But I have realised I’d prefer the term “a lot of time” when speaking in English to “a long time”.

Also interestingly, the words for tomorrow and yesterday in Hindustani are the same: “kal”. In Gujarati the word is also the same but always qualified: “gai kale” for yesterday and “āvati kale” for tomorrow, transliterates to ‘previous day’ and ‘next day’.

The magnificent illustrator of the Asterix books, Uderzo of ‘Goscinny and Uderzo’ died this week. You could enjoy several reads to spot every detail and mischief in the artwork.

The text was art in its own right with outrageous puns, irony and satire. Once I learnt as a child that the original had been in French I marvelled at how natural and clever the English seemed to be. It turns out the translators were every bit as gifted as Goscinny.

This blog post describes three examples in detail. It’s impossible to quote extracts: it is a delightful, delightful read.

ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 moon orbiter is taking the highest-resolution photos yet of the moon’s surface:

Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has an optical camera called the Orbiter High-Resolution Camera (OHRC) that captures detailed images of the moon. OHRC can image at a best resolution of 0.25 meters/pixel, beating NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (LRO) best of 0.5 meters/pixel.

Back in October, we already saw OHRC flex its muscles by sending images including clearly visible boulders less than 1 meter in size. And now OHRC has demonstrated imaging an area not directly illuminated by sunlight. It captured an image of a crater floor in shadow by seeing the dim light falling on it that has been reflected from the crater rim.

Moving ahead, this capability will be used to image insides of craters on the lunar poles, where sunlight never reaches. Mapping the terrain of polar craters is important because future lunar habitats are believed to be stationed near them, transporting water and other resources from inside them.

In addition to the high-resolution camera,

The Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC 2) onboard Chandrayaan 2 is a stereo imager, meaning it can capture 3-D images. It does that by imaging the same site from three different angles, akin to NASA’s LRO, from which a 3-D image is constructed.

And it’s already yielding results

Chandrayaan 2’s orbiter is in the process of adequately quantifying just how much water ice is trapped beneath the permanently dark crater floors on the moon’s poles. Current estimates based on past observations suggest that the moon’s poles host more than 600 billion kg of water ice, equivalent to at least 240,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The productivity consultant Tiago Forte has a method of organising digital information that I have used for a while personally and find very useful. It’s described in great detail on this page on his firm’s website, built his interview to Evernote describes it succinctly:

I have this method I’ve developed called PARA, which stands for projects, areas, resources, and archives… PARA is 4 categories, and that’s kind of the starting point. You divide your work into projects, which I’m using here the GTD definition, a series of tasks linked to an outcome.

Areas of responsibility: Some standard or area of your life that’s an ongoing concern; that you want to maintain on an ongoing basis.

Resources: Basically, interests or topics. Things like website design. For me, it’s not a particular project — not even really an area because that’s not my work — but it’s something I’m interested in that I’d like to keep track of.

And then Archives, which is anything from the previous three categories that’s no longer active, because you want to avoid clogging up your actionable categories. As soon as something is not top of mind, not front and center, you want to move it to the archives, but still keep it in case you want to go and find something there.

– Tiago Forte’s Approach to Productivity

It’s practically, and as he describes, is a framework replicable across your toolset: your task manager (say Microsoft Todo), your notes capture system (say Apple Notes) and your research + organisation system (say Evernote).

This article about an ordinary citizen with a 3D printer:

Christian Fracassi came to the aid of an overwhelmed Brescia hospital that ran out of breathing tubes for an intensive care machine on Saturday.  Doctors raised the alarm after their regular supplier said they could not produce the valves on time – forcing them to come up with an alternative solution… word soon reached Fracassi, a pharmaceutical company boss in possession of the coveted [3D printer] machine. He immediately brought his device to the hospital and, in just a few hours, redesigned and then produced the missing piece.

In an ideal world, this would be a story about humanity and humankind’s wonderful technological advances. But it is also a story about another uniquely human quality:

… even though the original manufacturer was unable to supply the part, it refused to share the relevant 3D file with Fracassi to help him print the valve. It even went so far as to threaten him for patent infringement if he tried to do so on his own. Since lives were at stake, he went ahead anyway, creating the 3D file from scratch… Fracassi doesn’t dare share his 3D file with other hospitals, despite their desperate need for these valves

… the official list price for a single valve is 10,000 euros — about $11,000. This is a perfect example of how granting an intellectual monopoly in the form of a patent allows almost arbitrarily high prices to be charged, and quite legally. 

This reminds me so much of E O Wilson’s quote that “the real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”

This is also a reminder that we’ve yet to find a balance between rewarding deep research and making the fruits of research available widely and affordably.

“Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

The ongoing pandemic has brought to the fore discussions in the US around universal basic income. As more economies are being put into suspended animation by governments putting entire countries or regions into lockdown, it’s becoming clear that people need some sort of sustenance during their temporary retrenchment to help with their dues and expenses.

In India, this week has seen an exodus of migrants from cities back to their home towns and villages because daily wage jobs have been put on hold as cities lock down. The second-order consequences are serious: while people have moved back to avoid rent and high expenses in cities (than in their home towns), the move puts pressure on resources in these towns, both economic and social. Even once this crisis abates, there will be disruption – not all these migrants will be able to return to the same jobs and the same living quarters as before.

There is a strong case now to build slack into the system in the form of basic income.

The modern economy operates at criticality. For nearly two hundred years now we’ve benefitted – mostly – from lower prices, faster availability, increased quality and greater variety by ekeing out efficiencies in the economy. For example fewer companies pay out dividends now because the wisdom is to re-invest surplus capital in growth or just buy back stock than pay that capital out.

As long as the infrastructure, the underlying conditions are stable, this works. But like with any well designed critical system, there have to be redundancies built in, and perhaps part of that is having a country pay out a dividend to its citizens in addition to investing in (GDP) growth.

This blog post about burnout contrasts how we deal with mental health versus physical health issues:

As far as I can tell, 100% of the google results for “burnout” or “recognizing burnout” boil down to victim-blaming; they’re all about you, and your symptoms, and how to recognize when you’re burning out… the burden of recovery is entirely on the person burning out.

If this was advice about a broken leg or anaphylaxis we’d see it for the trash it is, but because it’s about mental health somehow we don’t call it out… Bee stings are just part of life; maybe you should take the time to rethink your breathing strategy.

As the blog post further points out, even the American Medical Association identifies burnout as a structural problem and mitigating it requires structural solutions. Burnout is a problem with the workplace, not with the individual. In fact, in this article I have bookmarked in whole a long time ago,

It’s a common misconception that the culprit behind burnout is simply working too long or too hard… [a]t its core, burnout emerges when the demands of a job outstrip a person’s ability to cope with the stress. Over the past 20 years, Maslach and her collaborators have developed a comprehensive model identifying six key components of the workplace environment that contribute to burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Burnout emerges when one or more of these six areas is chronically mismatched between an individual and his job. 

Ultimately, the writer of the original blog post says, we need to completely change the way we think about burnout.

If “mental health” is just “health” – and I guarantee it is – then burnout is an avoidable workplace injury, and I don’t believe in unavoidable mental-health injuries any more than I believe in unavoidable forklift accidents. 

Apparently, consciousness – as defined by deliberate focus – is somewhat fragmented:

The reason why we experience reality as a movie when it’s only a collection of pictures can be at least partially explained by our rhythms of attention. About four times every second, the brain stops taking snapshots of individual points of focus — like your friend on the corner in Times Square — and collects background information about the environment. Without you knowing it, the brain absorbs the sound of the crowd, the feeling of the freezing December air — which it later uses to stitch together a narrative of the complete Times Square Experience.

This reminded me of U G Krishnamurti’s philosophy of ‘natural state’ – although what he said is not exactly what the article above describes. He described himself as living (after a realisation he calls the ‘calamity’) in this manner:

“… he claimed to be functioning permanently in what he called “the natural state”: A state of spontaneous, purely physical, sensory existence, characterised by discontinuity – though not absence – of thought.”

It has always seemed to me that after that event in his life he became very aware about the constant lack of awareness, or wakefulness, in what we call human consciousness. Only very infrequently are humans aware that they are observing the world around them. Most of the time the brain is on auto-pilot, rapidly alternating between focus and distraction.

This article on Scientific American on how human conventions fall apart at edge cases, such as the meaninglessness of time zones and days/nights at the North Pole:

At the North Pole, 24 time zones collide at a single point, rendering them meaningless. It’s simultaneously all of Earth’s time zones and none of them. There are no boundaries of any kind in this abyss, in part because there is no land and no people. The sun rises and sets just once per year, so “time of day” is irrelevant as well.

They could see the smiling faces of their colleagues just feet away—but they were two time zones apart.

The ship operates like a windup toy, disconnected from the spinning of the planet, which normally dictates time. “Time” is just an operational ritual, intended to create the illusion of regularity.

As people push boundaries scientifically, physically, virtually, more conventions will fray, and more will need to be layered on top: at a point in history people created the concept of dividing their day into 24 hours. Atop that, time zones became necessary with the advent of railroads.

With space travel, we’ve reached the next level – the International Space Station typically orbits the earth 16 times a day, leading to sunrises and sunsets approximately every 45 minutes, so the layered convention is to anchor clocks to GMT. If and when people begin colonies on Mars or other planets, we’ll need even more layers to translate between two planetary day/time systems.