Transition.

The last post was intentionally vague, and was written while I was exceptionally tired. I'd spent some time with my Great Uncle and an Uncle last night, and it lasted longer than I had hoped - my best work is usually done at night. So I wanted to revisit it, and expand on it in my own way as a sort of 'explanation of Taran'. Most people are probably not interested in such an explanation, but I feel like writing something about it, so I will.

There was a project I was working on once - it seems like a lifetime ago - for a navigation system. The navigation system had to transition between land navigation and nautical navigation, and for those of you who don't understand what that means - picture a vehicle which has wheels and floats. GPS works OK, but this was in the context of a Inertial Navigation Unit. For some reason, I was never able to get this problem out of my head because it seemed like such a natural problem. My part of the problem was simulating this transition for testing of the unit, and I think I got switched off of that project since the company needed something else worked on, but I liked that particular problem. Even if you don't understand the differences between land and nautical navigation (and there are differences), the questions arise: At what point is such a vehicle in the sea? At what point is such a vehicle on land? And then, someone who doesn't care or someone who really cares might ask, "Why does it matter?"

Some people stay still in life. I don't know much about these people, but I know that they exist and that they are not better or worse, good or bad - they just exist like everything else. To a passerby like myself, they are like trees and rocks. They are landmarks, and form their own part of a navigation system; sometimes you gauge where you are based on where they are so that you can figure out your own velocity (speed and direction). Because of the nature of these people, you know that they won't change much over the years. They will age. They may have offspring. And sometimes they may move in ways that are difficult to understand, though I must admit a certain joy when that happens because to me, life is movement. Life is transition. Life is change. Everything in life is between two things, not unlike Bardo Thodol¹.

What the internet and other communications technology that make globalization possible should demonstrate to us is that, no matter how much time we spend on things, we only have a certain amount of attention we can spend. Bloggers are a great example of this; cliques of hyperlinks form, and while everyone seems interested in the simulated economic bubble, what interests me most is how little people go outside of their clique. We pick the people we pay attention to, and we stick with them. A few of us choose to expand and explore the clique which takes us out of the clique, and allows us to see the cliques from a distance, to see that there's this insane competition at discussing things - be they problems or solutions, or observations of the two. And a lot of the time, there is 'Rabbit Hole Syndrome', which is very much like the imagined ostrich burying it's head in sand with the distinct difference of the rabbit hole being able to collapse.

Some people believe that the organization of rabbit holes is the answer. I would agree, except when organizing and coordinating rabbit holes, people should be looking for the same things when they usually aren't. Everyone has a tendency to cling to their problem and think nobody else has it - and if they come across a solution, they automatically think that everyone needs the same solution. This is a very strange behavior, one that I don't understand. One size does not fit all. But the power of marketing can allow for people tired of digging to trade their shovels in for a solution. It's an artificial transition. The value of the shovel has not changed; only the relative value of the shovel. The value of the rabbit hole to the people who abandon it devalues the shovels they hold.

It's all very strange. If you look at it in a detached way and try to make sense of it, all you can do is rationalize.

The first time I had a pocket knife, I cut just about everything around me (not to mention myself, accidentally). To see that the knife could cut things demonstrated the value of the knife to me. But later on, when the initial novelty has died away, there's a transition to choosing what to cut, and then there's a transition to choosing when to use the knife to cut something. The same logic applies to a shovel, or any other tool. I wonder a lot of the time how many intellectual shovels are out there in the first stage, the second stage, and the last stage.

It's a bit like a banana shipping company I visited in the region. They wanted to track their bananas, so they contracted an immature company to do this for them. The second company said that each box of bananas had to have a transmitting GPS on it. Something about that struck the banana shipping company as a bit strange, and I got called in - and I asked them at an informal meeting how the bananas were sent. 'By ship'. Ships have GPS. All they needed to do was track which boxes went on the ship, and track the ship. It was as though I had encountered a young man with his first knife, slicing things up to artificially add value to the blade when the true value of the blade was not something he had found.

I do not know why people do this, but they do. I could rationalize it, but that takes a lot more energy than it is worth. I could, as I used to, get angry about it - but that too takes a lot of energy, and doesn't change things. I've found laughter does help. So I laugh a lot, and not in a mean spirited way, but in a 'I read Douglas Adams books' sort of way. When you encounter things you don't understand and which seem silly, you laugh. You have to. To do anything else requires a costly emotional investment that will not change anything. And then you transition.

Developing Nations are, or hope to be, in a state of transition. It's the same as people, though with more excuses since there are more people to blame because of committees and so on. Imagine in your childhood telling your parents that you stole the candy from the store because the 'committee of children who like candy' said it was OK -what if they said, "Oh, OK - if the committee said it was OK...". And that's what I see a lot of the time. There has to be a transition away from that.

Transition can be a good thing, but only if we let it be a good thing.

I suppose this post was just as vague as the last, but I feel better. :-)

¹The Tibetan Book of the Dead