Author: JP

For the first twenty-three years of my life, I’d never known a home other than Calcutta. I’d visited other cities, sure, but never actually lived anywhere else. And I’d never left the country.

So when I came to the UK nearly twenty-seven years ago, I came unprepared for many things; there were many situations and environments where I felt out of place and needed to adjust myself. The culture shock I experienced wasn’t big and immediate and in-your-face, it felt more like a disjointed series of very small events over a long time. Maybe I’ll write about them one day.

But in the meantime, here’s a for-example. One place I felt distinctly uncomfortable was the supermarket. I could not conceive of a whole aisle containing things to do with something like dental care. When I was young, buying toothpaste was simple. You walked to the local shop and asked for toothpaste, and the shopkeeper gave you toothpaste, usually Colgate, maybe Macleans. [You could also have asked for vajradanti twigs, or “sweet” tooth powder, usually Colgate, or “salty” tooth powder, usually Monkey Brand. The last named was truly something else, seemed to be a mixture of salt and charcoal and sand….]

That was it for most of my life in Calcutta. Maybe towards the end, with Signal entering the fray, it was possible to ask for toothpaste with go-faster stripes; every child my age probably remembers taking apart a tube surreptitiously in order to see how the stripes worked. Binaca was probably around from the start, just never got popular in my household; see the power of product placement in those days? He who had the distribution took the market. And I’d nearly left before “swadeshi” hybrid approaches like Vicco Vajradanti came along, merging the herbs of the east with the packaged tube delivery of the west. [My thanks to Maddy for reminding me of the little charms that came with the toothpaste, that took me back a while].

For most of my life, therefore, I’d just been asking for toothpaste, almost never mentioning a brand or any sort of feature or function. So when I walked into a supermarket I felt way way out of my comfort zone. So much so that at least once I went home with denture polish….

At first I didn’t realise that the discomfort was anything to do with too much choice. Or that I could even have too much choice. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to choose. I was fascinated by the theme from an early stage, and then something else happened. I had the privilege of being able to read James Montier regularly while we were both at Dresdner. Incidentally, as Sean (also there at the same time) reminded me, James now has a blog. And, for those who are interested, his latest book started shipping this weekend, I hope to have my copy tomorrow.

Incidentally, a few years ago, Barry Schwartz wrote a book on The Paradox of Choice which gives you an easily comprehensible introduction to the subject.

What does any or all of this have to do with enterprises and information? It’s simple, really. Have a look at what happened when I wondered about something yesterday. In a post headlined None of The Above, I asked two questions. One was this: How many people would be able to give a one-song answer when asked “What is your favourite song of all time”? And the second was this: “What’s yours?”

In effect I was asking two related questions. The first was to do with our ability to respond with a single answer in a given context, and the second was the answer itself.

I’ve had a few comments back now, and they are revealing, they help underscore what I was thinking. Ali Choudhury actually came back with an answer to both questions by answering the second one with just one song. Now all I have to do is listen to it, I must confess I’d not really heard much of Stan Bush. Hazel just about kept to the rules, choosing one under duress as it were wanting to choose more. Stephen, after telling me “in all fairness, I think on a longer time-scale than you do”, and after pointing out a whole series of other things, also came up with a one-song answer. Andrew, Benoit and Ric all felt the tension of having to choose just one, and in fact Benoit, unusually, nearly agreed with my choice. Unusual for me, not him. And later, Davezilla also kept to the rules, offering precisely one, and thereby giving me something else to try out. I’d not really heard much of the Virgin Prunes before.
Where the enterprise meets information, we have four very powerful things happening:

• Everything is digital and connected
• Everything is miscellaneous
• Everything is everywhere, ubiquitous
• Everything is all the time, 24×7

Complexity increases as a result, particularly as we see more and more people and devices getting connected. There is therefore a natural instinct coming into play, a wish to go “rule of one”. To simplify, to make the chessboard a little less crowded. To exchange queens.

And we’re finding this hard to do. We find all kinds of strange arguments as to why we can’t just pick one. And after a while, I’m beginning to think that the problem is a lot less to do with what we pick. And a lot more to do with our inability to pick something in the first place.

This is a theme I will be expanding in days to come, once I’ve finished the Facebook series (now on Part 9), the Wikipedia series (now on Part 2) and the Opensource series (as yet unpublished). In the meantime, comments welcome as usual.

Over dinner at Rasoi a few nights ago, the conversation meandered all over the place, and at one point touched upon the kind of music people listened to. Someone was trying to describe Rick Wakeman’s Six Wives to someone else, and one thing led to another and I found myself extolling the virtues of Steve Howe playing Mood for A Day. Probably my favourite guitar instrumental.

And it got me thinking. How many people would be able to give a one-song answer when asked “What is your favourite song of all time”?

If I had to choose, Mood For a Day would be up there. As would Season of the Witch on Super Session. As would Take Five. And Peter, Paul and Mary doing Rocky Road.

Can’t Find My Way Home when done by Blind Faith would be there or thereabouts. But in the end, I would have only one answer, and it wouldn’t be any of the above.

If I was forced to live the rest of my life with just one song to keep me company, it would be Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. Magnificent.

So far I have met only one other person who may choose the same song as his all-time Number One, and that’s Hugh.

What’s yours?

It’s been a very long time since I wrote any code at all. [And a good thing too, I hear you say :-) ]. As I get older, I find myself seeking (and occasionally finding) vicarious proxies for many things; one of the commonest proxies I use is reading.

So. While wandering around, I found this article, How To Write Unmaintainable Code. And enjoyed it. Maybe it shows my age.

London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls

The Clash, London Calling

I’d heard about an unusual little burst of activity on Wikipedia over the last few days: people were frenetically editing and improving an article listing songs that were about London or parts of London.

You can find the article in Wikipedia here.

I found the rules for inclusion and exclusion fascinating.  I quote:

This is a list of songs about London. Instrumental pieces are tagged with an uppercase “[I]”, or a lowercase “[i]” for quasi-instrumental including non-lyrics voice samples.

Included are:

• Songs titled after London, or a location or feature of the city.
• Songs whose lyrics are set in London.

Excluded are:

Songs where London is simply name-checked along with various other cities (such as “New York, London, Paris, Munich”, lyrics of “Pop Muzik” by M

It struck me that this was an excellent example of crowdsourcing, of applying opensource processes to a research task. More importantly, based on the qualifying criteria, it seemed to me that here was a case where the crowd will always beat the computer, where it was actually quite difficult to write a program to compile the list.

Comments? Any other examples?

When I was a mere stripling I used to enjoy playing text-based adventure games; as I grew older, I watched them morph into graphic representations,  as games like Larry The Lounge Lizard came out.

But I never really made the cut into the later rounds of MMOG and virtual worlds. I did venture into Second Life, but realised quite soon that I just didn’t have enough passion for it, so I gave up. Nevertheless, there was something about virtual worlds that kept dragging me back; I kept on seeing possibilities open up, possibilities of using virtual worlds as means to a very specific end, that of empowering disenfranchised people.

I had to find a way of keeping my hand in, vicariously if possible. Which is why I dip into Terra Nova on a regular basis. If you are curious about virtual worlds, it’s a good place to go.

This evening, while idly flicking through Terra Nova,  I came across The Image of the Undercity by Greg L. A fascinating article, leading me to decide to re-read Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City. [Thank you Greg]. More importantly, it took me on to this article, and consequently on to these comments by Richard Bartle. I quote:

Overall, I suppose to an architect yes, it would seem odd that a virtual house would have a sloped roof if there’s no virtual weather, or a door at street level if people can fly. I can also see how they’d be grumpy about looking for innovation and seeing a lot of what are basically 3D paintings of imagined real-world structures.

However, virtual space is not like real space, and the users of both have different criteria by which they judge it a success. People want to feel they’re in the world, and that means the architecture has to be faithful to genre. Exciting new architecture is possible, but if it intrudes then it must do so for a reason. I expect it will be a long while before the architecture award goes to a building in a contextualised (ie. game-like) world, rather than a less themeful one such as SL.

Also, because each virtual world is physically different, architecture that is successful in one may not be successful in another. Does the virtual world need staircases? Does it require structures to self-support under gravity? Are there materials that you can see through from one side but not the other? How about materials that change what they look like depending on who’se looking at them? What’s possible in one virtual world may not be possible in another – unlike the real world, they don’t all use the same physics.

Important stuff, helps me keep my vicarious perspective right. They don’t all use the same physics. I have to keep on understanding things like this in order to be free in my thinking.