Some time ago I had occasion to travel to Korea for work. The job involved getting out into the countryside, inspecting some equipment, taking a lot of photos and meeting with some Korean business associates. Having spent precious little time in Asia (at this point I think the sum total was four months in Taiwan and a day in Hong Kong) I found the cultural experience fascinating and, if I think about it, a little disturbing. Fascinating because, well, differences are. But disturbing because it seemed that the way in which I communicated and carried myself in Korean society left some of the locals uneasy. What was I doing so wrong?

I may have been born elsewhere, but I’ve spent most of my life in urban Australia, at its heart a very multicultural society. Melbourne is the second largest Greek city outside Athens; Perth, thanks in part to its timezone and distance from the other major Australian cities, has at times more in common with India, Indonesia and China than it does with its own national capital. So when a work colleague was leaving for Korea just recently we got to discussing our cultural differences, and he cleared it up for me – Korea is a monoculture.

Having lived here most of my life, have I become so accustomed to a sort of multicultural tolerance that monocultural intolerance is, if not inconceivable, then at least difficult to fathom? Perhaps this is why when an image like the following goes viral I think it says more about the people who are popularising it than does the picture itself.

The caption is

Two women standing in line at an airport, completely unaware that their daughters are holding hands. The innocence and love of children is amazing.

Wait a second… innocence? Of what crime are they unaware? Is there a subtext here pitting racial disharmony (the parents ignoring each other) against the kids’ ignorance of it? If so, and if racism might even be a small part of why this image became popular, are we not propagating the concept of racism by popularising it?

If I ignore the caption – and I’m pretty sure that’s a good idea – what I see in the image is completely different. As a parent, if I’m not visibly acknowledging my kid holding hands with another I can assure you it doesn’t mean I’m unaware of it. No, if one of the first things you grow as a parent is eyes in the back of your head, then I’m fairly sure any parent is aware of what their kid is doing if said kid is in their arms.

Rather, as adults we tend to be focused on what we need to do next. Like, get on the plane. So if I and a friend (or random stranger) are travelling and waiting for a vacant ticket counter we might well look as the adults in the photo do, in which case I’d substitute my own caption:

Kids. Not giving a damn about schedules since forever.

Multicultural societies or not though, I do wonder if we’re still letting our xenophobic buttons be pushed unawares.

Any news headline which can elicit an emotional response will make an audience sit up and pay attention – and few emotional responses are quite as effective as fear. If since childhood we’ve been made aware of stories of school shootings, child abductions, paedophilia and more; as parents these stories relate directly to our responsibilities to our children – even to the point where we’re doing them a disservice.

And if we also live in a city, rushing about ignoring the people around us, does it become completely too easy to ignore a stranger? If I’m on a four lane highway in the city, surrounded by a hundred other cars all going 80, how easy is it to ignore that car stopped, broken, in the middle of the road with its hazards on? For me to fit in with the crowd, not hold up traffic, keep moving, get where I’m going?

And yes, that happened – and what really gives me pause is that a few days earlier I was in the country, saw a car similarly stopped, and thought nothing to pull over and ask how I might lend a hand.

Some might argue that urban isolation is a myth, but I’m not so sure. I worry that even without traditional racial or ethnic boundaries to prey on, a fearmongering media is finding it can still sell stories that have us boarding up the windows for fear of the stranger walking down the street.

And if that stranger comes to us asking for help, are we going to be so used to the wall between us that we can’t listen?

So perhaps it’s time for good news stories whatever the caption.

A recent io9 article on the science behind extroversion and introversion got me thinking on this subject at length. Not least because I think that society tends to render introversion with negative connotations. Just consider the loaded introduction to this Huffington Post article:

Are you a happy, outgoing person, or are you more neurotic and anxious?

Like, really? So in the broad spectrum of human experience, personality can be read as either outgoing or, as a single mutually exclusive alternative, neuroses?

I’m an introvert, and I’m comfortable being an introvert. But it wasn’t always so – from the end of my teens to my early twenties, there was a time when being an introvert seemed a definite disadvantage: Like the Huff Post article, people around me seemed to be pushing the notion that introversion was a defect, an illness a person could and should be cured of.

It’s at this stage it seems worth noting that introversion and shyness are very different traits. Shyness, or social anxiety, is a response to the real or perceived opinions of others. If left unchecked, it promotes a dependency on the approval of others which can lead to extremes. And if we’re stuck in a loop of either approval seeking or disapproval avoidance, at which point do we find a moment to be true to ourselves, to live our own lives?

No, introversion is something else entirely. While Carl Jung first popularised the terms extroversion and introversion, modern popular understanding tends towards a description based on how a person derives their mental energy – for introverts, from solitary introspection, and for extroverts, from external interaction.

Various personality models take this into account, and tests such as Myers-Briggs may then go to add further personality classifications to result in a wide variety of “common” personality types. It’s always interesting to see that Introverts take up a significant proportion of a sample population in these test results.

Take that, extroversion promoters!

Yet, I’d wager that introverts are always going to tend to perceive themselves living in a world where they’re second class citizens.

Sure, introverts can expend energy in social interactions, but given an introvert is energised by solitary time, that’s where their compulsions lie. It follows then that they’re not going to be running out to promote their product to others, to perform three stage shows a day, every day, for a year on tour, or to be perceived as the last man standing at the bar. Not that those things are anathema to the introvert, but if they’re not where you’re most motivated to spend your time, you’re quite possibly not going to be as good at them as those who are, right?

But introverts have their place too, and not just as computer programmers or writers. As a New Statesman article put it when discussing the strengths and weaknesses of having a more introverted leader such as Obama:

Carl Jung, who popularised the word, described introverts as people who focus on the meaning of events rather than the social surface. They tend to work in a more considered way. We may need those qualities now more than ever. The incentive structure of democracy has been revealed as problematic: too many promises, too lightly made.

In a media culture that promotes performance, social high-fives itself every chance it can get, and tries to motivate our purchasing decisions based on how we will socialise with one another or be seen by others, it’s easy to conclude that the introvert is the endangered species. One of the latest films out of hollywood is not called Woz, it’s called Jobs. It’s a story about the extroverted guy behind the founding of Apple, not the introverted guy.

Because after all, watching someone sit in a cubicle for hours at a time, talking to nobody and quietly solving problems isn’t box office material.

But don’t be fooled: Just because it isn’t fun to see, doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to be.

This last week a friend made the statement that she likes rainbows. This wasn’t a general observation of preference to all things colourful, soon to be joined by equal support for unicorns and butterflies. Rather, it was a statement of solidarity in support of the LGBT community and some recent protests against Vladimir Putin’s perspectives on their identity.
Even taken out of the context of the discussion at hand, I could hardly disagree: I like rainbows too.
A rainbow is an almost perfect metaphor for language and communication.
If a friend tells me he’s feeling alone, or hurt, or excited, he does so in words and body language, perhaps also reflecting these feelings in his choice of activity or repose. Lets say I take this communication and try and understand it. How do I understand how someone else is feeling? What if I’ve never experienced the emotion he’s talking about? What if, and this I suggest is guaranteed, I’ve never felt it the same way?
If I’m reading a novel that promises action, emotional turmoil and wonder, how does it deliver this? The emotion I’m feeling isn’t the author’s. It’s not even the character’s – since the character never existed to have those feelings in the first place. The emotions are my own.
So I suggest that when we empathise, we take another person’s perceived emotional situation and translate it – using our own experience – to an emotional feeling of our own experience.
What has any of this to do with rainbows?
I never really saw the connection until a few years ago, when flying above some mist.
Here on terra firma, when your friend points out a rainbow, you turn and look and sure enough, there’s a rainbow where they pointed, off in the distance. An arc that, weather and terrain permitting, stretches from one point in the ground, across the heavens to another. This rainbow you’re both seeing must be the same thing – and if it’s the same thing, then surely it must exist outside of ourselves?
From the air though, another interesting property of rainbows is revealed. They’re a circle, with the shadow of your aircraft at their centre.
And at the exact centre of that circle, amidst the shadow of the aircraft, is you – your shadow.
Though we might be both on the ground and you see turn to where I’ve just pointed out a rainbow, the rainbow you see is your own. Hidden by terrain, light and shadow, at the centre of your rainbow is you. And at the centre of mine is me.
Rainbows are like communication – like good communication. Because although what we’re observing is physically, provably different, we convince ourselves that we’re sharing the same experience. And if only we could all communicate that well, I suspect there’d be a lot less need for protests or shows of solidarity.
So yes, I like rainbows too.

These last two or three years, getting distraction-free time I’ve found to be both a frustration and a challenge. Time to focus on creative pursuits has been something I’ve always been able to manage in the BC (Before Children). There are also some activities, such as writing, which I need to be engaged in as part of my personality, but which seem stymied by an environment which precludes concentration.

It also occasionally seems frustrating if I’m tempted to contrast “my time” with work. The office environment at The Day Job is engineered towards focus, a quiet place where the day’s task gets done. At home, in contrast, parenting is the primary focus, where it’s either time spent engaging with our young kids or else, it seems, trying to think straight while they have some noisy playtime of their own. Once the hours spent commuting or preparing for the day are subtracted, it feels like there’s hardly more than a pair of moments left to rub together.

Or so it seemed.

In this blog I’ve spent some time talking about motorcycling and flying. For me, these activities are about focus – they’re a chance to quit worrying about or planning the future, or reviewing the past, and simply live a hundred percent in the moment. There’s little room for daydreaming or spare thinking.

And so it was that through an odd transition from flying to motorcycling that has led to a workable writing schedule again. Flying is something that might only take a few hours once a month, so it’s an easy way to take time off from the family and get that focus. And realise just how important focus is.

But flying’s occasional – in my situation it’s not something I can engage in every day (nor, I think, would I want to – I think it would lose some of its romance were it to devolve into a day job). Motorcycling, though I’d argue to be substantially more risky, is an activity involving focus which can be done more regularly – whether on the weekend for a ride in the hills, or daily for a commute to work.

So I commuted a few times.

And hated it.

Well, I was riding the bike, so that was somehow intrinsically fun. But dealing with traffic jams, bad drivers, weather and having to dress in all the kit (or risk the consequences without) were serious detractors. And despite knocking thirty minutes off the commute every day when compared to public transport, it was also stressful.

So I packed the writing laptop into the bag and wrote on the bus.

And loved it.

So whether or not the current writing develops into the novel I’d like it to be, or simply becomes much needed practice and writing time, it feels good to be engaging in that activity again.

Our kids are no strangers to computer games. While we’re very selective about what they play, and limit their computer time to about half an hour a day, their world at school and the world they’re growing up into is being shaped by computer-based media.

At home, they’re playing with Minecraft, Kerbal Space Programme, Into Space, Light Bot and Scratch. Each has some level of educational merit; due to playing Minecraft our kids have asked questions about and shown an interest in coal, ore, or even animal husbandry. The games span a variety of genres – from first person experiences, to flight simulation, to arcade, logic puzzles and programming. They’re rich in colour and art – which of course makes them appealing, as well as competitive in a modern computer games market.

But it got me thinking – there is a type of game kids aren’t really exposed to today: text adventures. Games where the story’s special effects are formed in the player’s mind. They were popular thirty years ago – but quickly died out as the computer entertainment industry grew.

I wanted to introduce our seven year old to this game type. But at his age, something like Zork would be, well, too much. He needed something much simpler.

So I put together a very simple text adventure in Ruby, in which he’s in his room, smells smoke and has to get out of the house. It’s just a maze – there’s nothing really to do but enter in compass directions and try and leave the house – and there’s only five ‘rooms’.

There were no graphics, no art. Just white text on a black background. He had to read the story and make decisions based on what he read. And sure enough, a minute or two later, he’d reached the end. His reaction: “That was awesome!”

Watching him get immersed in an interactive story was fascinating. The compulsion to keep playing was generated by his own reading and imagination. And it got me thinking – have we lost something along the way, with computer entertainment? Have we so diluted story and imagination with pretty pictures, that we’ve forgotten just how great these old games used to be?

I’m tempted to find out – either by writing another for him, or by exploring a site I just found (which saves me making my own!): Quest appears to be free, and allows you to create your own text adventure and share it with others. I might just have to try it out on the seven year old again!

My kids are quite young. One is in second grade, the other has recently started in Kindergarten a few days a week. As a parent this is a fascinating time because I can watch their horizons expand on an almost day to day basis. Things that we as adults take for granted are as yet completely undiscovered by the kids, and there’s some joy and occasionally a little hilarity when they discover something new.

Although names can work a little different in some cultures, in ours it’s fairly common for our given name to be, well, not exactly unique. Instead, it often has some history or meaning to it that seemed appropriate to our parents at the time and, perhaps, goes on to shape us a little as we age (which I’m sure is an engrossing subject in itself). At three years old, though, there’s a very good chance we’ve never met anyone else with our given names. So what went through our heads that first time? Did we for a moment wonder if they were us? I somehow doubt it; I think that at most, we only sensed some kindred bond (or, if the other person was annoying, perhaps a small sense of betrayal).

So I find it amusing when I catch myself expecting other things with the same name to be the same.

Recently, I had the good fortune to watch the recent Les Misérables film on bluray. The musical has been a favourite of mine since the 1980’s, when I studied it for a month before watching the original production on tour. I have the musical on CD (well, transferred to MP3 these days) and could probably sing through almost the entire musical from memory. The prospect of adding massive setpieces to the musical and stepping beyond the stage was more than a little alluring, and so it was with high hopes that I sat down to watch it.

Well, as you might imagine, it wasn’t what I was expecting. Yes, there’s some great imagery, and getting closer to the performers than you can at a theatre certainly opened up more room for appreciating the performance. But… it was different.

They added a song. They cut some parts out. They changed some words here and there. One part that stood out towards the end, which I couldn’t get my head around, was the duet between Cosette and Marius which, in the musical, includes these verses:

Cosette: Every day, you walk with stronger step, you walk with longer step, the worst is over.

Marius: Every day, I wonder every day, who was it brought me here from the barricade.

Cosette: Don’t think about it Marius, with all the years ahead of us, I will never go away, and we will be together every day.

In the musical, this verse structure makes sense: Cosette says something about Marius’ condition, Marius takes that and turns it to show his ongoing frustration at not really knowing why he’s the only one left alive from the barricade, and Cosette responds, trying to ease his mind (and demonstrating she doesn’t really understand what’s bugging him). It’s touching, it’s characters talking across purposes, and in my opinion it works.

In the film, this same duet is sung, except… they cut out Marius’ verse above. Now, Cosette says something, and then she answers herself, and it doesn’t even make sense. Seriously? Did they cut this because they needed to make the film four seconds shorter?

And don’t even get me started on Russell Crowe’s singing.

So things like this bugged me, and it took perhaps a day for me to come to a realisation.

Having the Same Name doesn’t make it the Same Story.

Together, the film and musical can form a larger, more complete story in our heads. They’re complimentary; visuals from the film, or Anne Hathaway’s I Dreamed a Dream add to and inform our enjoyment of the story in its other media.

It was probably a good realisation to come to about then, since a few days later I finally got around to watching the film version of one of the books I most enjoyed reading recently.

So when Cloud Atlas showed grim determination at staying, well, vaguely related to the novel I wasn’t quite so annoyed. If anything, it reaffirmed my appreciation of the original story in its written form.

Which makes me think I should probably read a certain novel by Victor Hugo one of these days…

Being a parent has its memorable moments. For me, one of these is just where innocent curiosity can lead a six year old. Being asked, while out walking in the bush, what the magpie just said (because Dad must be able to understand birds even if I can’t, right?) will stick with me for a long time.

Communicating with young kids is something I find an enjoyable challenge. They don’t have the same set of primers an adult would have if we discussed a particular topic, so it forces me to break things down into first principles, use simple language, and often accept that the explanation that best gives the sense of the answer is what they’re likely to be able to digest and use, even if it’s not entirely accurate.

One of the topics that still prompts curious questions is how the moon, sun and so on stays in the sky. Explaining orbital mechanics to a six year old with notions of swinging things around themselves sounds obvious, but they’re not going to easily make the connection between a bucket of water and the moon. Try to explain transfer orbits and, well, despite many evenings watching space programme documentaries with the old man, their eyes glaze over and ‘Yes, Dad’ and they’re off to draw on the walls or something.

Heck, until recently I don’t even think I really had that good of an understanding of transfer orbits.

Enter Kerbal Space Programme, a space simulation / sandbox I stumbled across recently. Essentially a rocket science lab, in its free demo form you can build various simple rockets, launch them into orbit and perform numerous orbital manoeuvres using a handy orbital planning system. Suddenly, burning at periapsis to raise your apoapsis can be demonstrated practically, rather than just with formulae and diagrams on the whiteboard; conserving fuel, understanding ISP and delta-V or even managing space junk becomes something you can experience interactively.

And accidentally stranding your cute Kerbals in space leads to some interesting reflections on just how risky – and what an engineering triumph – the early era of manned space flight was.

Mind you, these days, while manned space flight is still far from routine, at least it’s progressed to the stage where it can serve as a venue for a music video. You can’t do this in Kerbal Space Programme…

In other news, hopefully things are returning to normal around here. Maybe I’m reaching my own apoapsis – and pretty soon I can start back down and get back into it.

My blog has been looking a little neglected this last month as life seems to have hit overdrive.

The TLDR version: I got a new job, am riding motorcycles again, ordering online is weird, and David Farland Needs Your Help.

Things I planned to blog about these last four weeks (but then didn’t, somehow) included:

Changing Jobs

The Day Job^N morphed into The Day Job^N+1 just recently, which in large part accounts for the relative silence on this blog. While my schedule exploded and is gradually being reassembled into a new shape, the new job has presented new opportunities: While I’m still developing software, it’s in a new industry, new language and using a completely new toolchain. That, and working with a new and very different group of people means new and exciting opportunities to learn and grow.

Motorcycling

I like to think of my blog as a way to share my own experiences and opinions in a little more formal setting than, say, facebook. But it also serves me in another way – it’s a chance for me to explore my own ideas, hash them out, and have them around for reference. A few months ago I posted an article about giving up, in which I took a couple of personal examples of failure – one in a glider and another on a motorcycle, examined my responses to each, and concluded that it’s better to pick up, dust off, and try again if at all we can.

After writing this, I started thinking more about the motorcycle incident I had four years ago and grew increasingly dissatisfied with my I-won’t-ride response to it. Now I’m not saying that it was wrong to quit – I think I needed to stop riding for a while afterwards because I really wasn’t in the right headspace for it. But the time had come, I felt, to ride again. So I spent some time looking around, and eventually bought a six-year-old motorcycle. I’ve yet to work out a parking arrangement at The Day Job^N+1, so the bike only gets used on weekends, and it probably took a week or so to get comfortable on it again; but goodness – I do still love to ride.

Ordering Online

The motorcycle also presented an opportunity to do some online shopping. I’d sold some of my old motorcycle gear and so needed to pick up some new stuff. After doing a ton of research I decided on, as a good fit for my riding needs, budget and comfort, a certain set of gear which wasn’t available from local retailers (this not being odd, since due to Perth’s isolation we tend to be off the radar for many distributors).

In Australia, our options when buying online usually amount to either:

• Buy from an Australian distributor online,
• Buy from overseas, either in the US or Asia, for between 15-50% less.

The way in which manufacturers and distributors price items for Australians has been under scrutiny here recently – Apple and Microsoft were called in to answer questions over their pricing policies here for digital content – which costs the supplier no additional freight or other charges to reach our market.

The local distributor was going to charge about $350 more for what I wanted than if I ordered from the US and had it shipped by fedex. So I ordered from the US shop.

I got an email the next day saying that the manufacturer wouldn’t allow them to ship to Australia due to their distributor agreement.

Nice! So, it looked like I was going to be taxed a little extra for living in Australia. Again. So I went to order on the Australian distributor’s site, only to find that the ordering options didn’t allow for nearly half of the specifications I could apply to the US distributor’s site, which meant I couldn’t choose colour, or certain sizes, and so on. So I sent the distributor a politely worded request for information on what I really wanted (instead of the limited options on their site) – and shared my frustrations with ordering from their site.

They came back the next day and my questions were answered – and they’d provided an offer which was about $150 less than what the US distributor was going to charge – about $500 off the retail price.

Which makes me wonder – is talking to the distributor the only way to get a good deal? Is online ordering really just for chumps? If the online ordering industry kills off retail chains, will online prices just rise back to what the retailers were charging?

David Farland and Writers of the Future

The Writers of the Future workshop is on again at the moment in Sunny LA, and I’m sparing a thought for the participants as they get run through the workshop material, lectures and event. I found it a very packed week back in 2011.

But even more so I’m particularly keeping David Wolverton (David Farland) in my thoughts. David, who lectured when I attended WotF two years ago, has taken over from the late K.D. Wentworth as one of the writers running the workshop. About a week ago, David’s son Ben suffered massive injuries following a longboarding accident, and has been in an induced coma ever since. Having experienced a loved one be through something very similar a few years ago, I know how traumatic this can be for family – and I can only imagine how hard it must be for David to be away from Ben in order to carry out his responsibilities in LA. So I hope that the prognosis is good, Ben can start the long road to recovery, and wish David all the best during this difficult time.

And if you want to help out, you can find one way to help the Wolverton’s here on David’s site.

Kat suggests that before I buy any more RC aircraft, I rationalise my existing fleet*. When she says ‘rationalise’ why do I hear ‘crash’**?

Hey, maybe I could find a way to crash impressively…

* _{‘fleet’ makes it sound much more impressive than it is.}
** _{So far my record with fixed-wing RC is pretty good – the closest I came to wrecking one was when it got damaged in the car. Those little indoor helicopters though, are another matter, but they don’t really count, do they?}

Until yesterday I’d somehow missed the whole code.org phenomenon. So it was with both surprise and a little pleasure that I came across this video.

My opinion is undoubtably coloured by the fact that coding has been good to me these last 20 years. But even before I began my career I was coding for fun at school, and it’s partly an effect of this style of coding – learning analytical skills – that I think the video promotes best.

Developing the confidence to know that we can tackle any problem, the skill to break it down into manageable processes and the diligence to tackle them one by one through to completion is, I think, something that coding affords young people in a ready-made package.

And while my kids are a bit young to be coding in Java or C or LISP, not long ago we discovered Light Bot 2 (a fullscreen link may also work), in which they can “program” an on-screen robot through a series of mazes, using blocks representing its discrete actions. And surprisingly, at ages 4 and 7, both kids can get quite far through it.

I’m not expecting my kids to become programmers. But showing them a little of how computers work, and making it fun, can only be enabling.