The Numbers Game

There is something weird in our collective psyche that seems to think quantity counts.  Deep down, on a fundamental level, we equate value with numbers.

Take juggling, for example.  If you tell someone you juggle, and they are not jugglers themselves, one of the first questions you will be asked is "how many balls can you juggle?"

Not "do you juggle knives?" or "how long can you go without dropping them?" (and certainly not "contact or toss juggling?" - because only other jugglers ask that).  No, all they care about is "how many?".

Now numbers juggling can be interesting to watch, but so often the routine just devolves into keeping the balls moving, rather than trying to move them in an interesting way.  Personally, I prefer to watch the routines which involve juggling smaller numbers of props but with a wider range of interesting manoeuvres.  I once heard someone say that the mark of a good juggler was what they could do with three balls.  I think there's a lot to that.

It's the same question, regardless of what you seem to be talking about.  Always "how many?"

"How many books has he written?"

"How many times has the article been cited?"

"How many downloads has it had?"

"How many tickets were sold?"

"How many native speakers does the language have?"

I think the biggest problem with the numbers game does not come from confusing the value of quantity with the importance of quality; I think it comes from the slow death that is often inflicted on things with low numbers.

High citations beget high citations (whether the content is worth it or otherwise), but articles without high citations are often overlooked in favour of their highly cited cousins - and many people won't even bother looking at them.  It's possible they will never be cited again.

Languages with low numbers of speakers will dwindle and die, as everyone makes the decision "what language shall I learn?" based on the answer to the question "how many people speak it?"

As we make decisions based on numbers, we condemn things to obscurity, rather than just "poor numbers".

It's better to have low numbers than none at all...

Posting on the Other Blog

Sometimes I don't know which of my blogs a post rightly belongs in, but I've recently spun out something a bit long and vaguely scholarly, which I thought wouldn't be embarrassing on my other blog.  So it's over there:

http://thesharonb.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/a-fantastic-language.html

Borrowed energy

I'm currently running on borrowed energy.  Sadly, I'm actually borrowing it from 2010 - specifically the 2010 Oslo Eurovision Song Contest.

I decided, in a weak moment, to buy the Eurovision albums from 2010 and 2011, seeing as I've been using the 2012 album to keep conscious for the past few months, and am starting to worry about the fact that I think I'm beginning to understand the lyrics from the Italian entry (whadaya mean it was in English?  That doesn't seem right...)

The 2011 album was unavailable through the shop I used, and they cancelled my order, but I've been listening to 2010 for the past few days.  If I start muttering "Allez allez allez" in the middle of otherwise normal conversations, or talking about the blue underwear I bought just the other day, you'll know why.

It was actually much better than I remembered.  Mind you, this is coming from someone who is using Europop to stay awake.

I haven't been able to think coherently for more than a few minutes at a time for a while now.  The music helps.  Well, it helps with the task at hand - it's not quite capable of making me remember the other things I have floating around on my lists of things to do.

I have no good reason for being so out of it.  I'm just tired.  I live most of my days backwards, waking up feeling exhausted and then beginning to perk up and get things done just as I should be thinking about going to sleep - and then I hit a point where I know I'm definitely over-tired and I should have gone to sleep hours ago, but for some reason I'm still doing something else.

I'm not alone in this - there are others who have it worse, so I really have nothing to whinge about.  I'm just feeling the effects of what amounts to self-inflicted exhaustion.  I do get at least 5 hours' sleep most nights, so I actually have it pretty sweet for an insomniac.

But I'm tired.  I'm physically tired, and only seem to wake up when I'm moving (and finding it harder every day to actually start moving).  And I'm mentally tired and only seem to be able to keep going when there is some sort of rhythm feeding through my ears.  And I feel tired on a deeper level - I'm tired of trying to figure out what I want from life and coming up empty every single time.  I thought I knew what I wanted earlier in the year, but now I'm back in limbo.  I'm so tired of being in limbo.

And I'm completely resigned to being tired.  When I was younger I used to have these one-sided arguments with God, asking him what stupid lesson I was supposed to learn and why he hated me so much ("for he grants sleep to those he loves" Ps 127:2).  But these days I'm like, "Eh, God hates me.  Whatever."

I spend so much time in this place where nothing moves that I've stopped expecting movement.  I've spent so much time in this place where all I feel is "tired" that I've stopped expecting to feel anything else.

I suppose that sounds depressing.  It doesn't feel depressing.  I've been depressed so I know what depressing feels like, and this isn't it.  I feel happy enough, cheerful on most occasions, just tired and washed out.

So I whistle a happy tune, and it keeps me upright.  I remind myself to keep functioning, and I keep functioning.  I'm just running on music until I can find some reserves.  I must have some somewhere...

And they went to sea in a sieve

There are days when I feel like my brain could
If it wanted to
I suppose
Although I must admit that it doesn't
Not really
Not often
And very rarely does it make any
Although,
It must be said
That I never really
And that's what I've been
Kind of
All at sea in a sieve...
One day I'll remember to sleep

Everything done is a minor victory
Everything not done is my own damn fault
I have no one to blame but myself
That I'm all at sea in a sieve

I know what I do and I know what I should
And if only I'd listen to me, I'd be good
But all of it ends in a heap at my feet
And I'm all at sea in a sieve

And I'm all at sea in a sieve, my dear
I'm all at sea in sieve.
And in the end it's my own damn fault
That I'm all at sea in a sieve...

We all got problems

There are days I call "Squid days".  Days where I walk into a room to do one task, and find myself thinking:  

"Before I can do this, I need to that, but I can't do that until after I've finished the other thing... and while I'm thinking of it I should really get this fourth thing out of the way or it's going to be a problem later... oh, but I needed to do this before I could finish that... and I should do this other thing instead because it's a quick job and I can get it out of the way..."

And, before I know it, I've wasted the last 10 minutes reading a piece of paper I was going to throw out, and I can't remember what I had come into the room to do...

These are days when I think of the Wondermark comic above, and wonder how long it's going to be before the whole building is just rubble.

Don't Eat the Crab in Shanghai

I saw the most horrifying thing on TV the other night.  I was so disturbed I actually lept off the chair and lunged for the off-switch on the TV itself, because I knew changing the channel on that particular TV set would take too long and I wanted it gone.  I couldn't bear to see one more image and I wanted it gone.

It was a cooking show.

I came into it part way through, so I'm a bit hazy on the details.  It was, I think, Singaporean, and involved a TV chef from Singapore doing the whole "chef on tour" thing in Shanghai.  When I came into the show he was buying crabs in a local market and talking about one of his favourite crab dishes, which is made with lots of chili.

We then went to the restaurant kitchen of a local chef and watched him (the local chef) prepare the meal.  He prized the top shell off the crab and started scrubbing the exposed muscles with a stiff brush under running water to clean it.  So far, not too horrific, right?

Then the TV chef asked him why it was so important that the crab should be alive while he was cleaning it...

And suddenly I realised what they were doing.  They had ripped the shell (skin and backbone combined) off a live crab and were in the process of brutally torturing it - quite without care or remorse - all because they think it has better texture if it is "cleaned" this way.

I couldn't stand to watch it for one more second.

Every day of the week, we do a hundred thousand horrible, painful things to the creatures with whom we share this planet.  We do it because we are big and clumsy and not paying attention.  You can't walk through this earth without causing death and pain.

However, we should never - NEVER - cause avoidable pain and suffering to another living being just because it tastes better.

It is reprehensible and wrong, and whatever gods you believe in will surely punish you for that.  The more extreme the pain, and the more avoidable it is, the more you deserve a slow and painful retribution.

When I visited Hong Kong I thought the way the Chinese kept live animals in their markets (the cramped, dirty cages with chickens that were clearly freaking out; the shallow Styrofoam boxes containing a few inches of water that didn't quite cover the gasping fish...) was an absolute disgrace . This was just...  Unspeakably wrong.

You don't flay something alive.  You don't rake stiff brushes over living, exposed muscles.  Surely anyone could see that was cruel and wrong?  What is wrong with these people that they think this is okay?

If you want to eat something, you catch it and then you kill it as quickly and humanely as you can.  Otherwise every second of torture that animal experiences is one that makes you more of a monster.

I have a feeling I'll be going vegetarian if I ever go back to Asia.


For the record, I'm not a big fan of a lot of Australian practices when it comes to food production, either.  Live exports are not good for the animals, or for your soul.  Battery farming is very bad.

I think every culture in the world would greatly benefit from a decision to cause less pain.

Things that must exist

I have a theory that some things must exist.  The universe will keep shopping the idea around until it finds someone who actually follows through.

I base this theory on the fact that I'll often have an idea for something that I think would be pretty neat, and then about five years later someone goes and produces it.

Take this, for example:  http://zike.net/products.html

For years I've been thinking about combining a scooter with an old treadle-powered velocipede.

No, seriously.

Years ago I read about the treadle bicycles - a stage between the foot-pushing-against-the-ground draisine and the direct drive pedals of the boneshaker, and I thought it had potential as something to come back. Not as a bicycle, obviously, because it's kind of daft - but perhaps as a variation of a scooter...

It was, after all, not far removed from some popular exercise contraptions I'd seen in gyms.

If you look at my note books from a few years ago you'll probably find drawings and scribblings of something based around the idea of a pair of 20inch wheels propelled by something like a sewing machine treadle.

My idea was less chunky than the execution the zike people have come up with, and involved something more akin to the articulated arm thing of 19th Century treadles than the stair-master thing they have going, but the basic concept is more or less the same.  My treadles probably wouldn't have supported much weight, anyway.

When I saw one in the toy shop this morning part of me said "Oh, darn, someone's beaten me to it..."  but then I realised it was a bit daft for the universe to give me this idea in the first place.  I'm not an engineer - I don't know anyone who is, and I have absolutely zero back-yard inventor skills.

I can think things out, but I can't commit to buying stuff that I can use for tinkering or building up the skills necessary to make things stick together in a useful manner.  I've tried it in the past and I end up with a collection of useless things.  I spend about a fifty bucks on a project that probably needs about three hundred bucks worth of bits and bobs (and better quality bits and bobs than I'm willing to pay for), then spot the error of my ways and distract myself with something more cerebral - like learning German.

So, it's not surprising at all that someone else gets the same idea and then does something much more useful with it.

Mind you, now that I've seen these things in action, I'm convinced the execution would be much better if there was more of a skiing motion than a stepping one - which would bring back the treadles as a viable option...