Think

Think

Think was apparently at one time the watch word within IBM when that company was the dominant force in the IT world. I don’t know how well that worked for the company but I believe it should be the watch word for everybody today.

I recently had an article published in a reputable English IT journal but had difficulty trying to access the published article. There had been recurring problems, the journal admitted, over access for new subscribers (not financial, subscription is free). I took a look and the soution became immediately clear and my problem was resolved. I passed the problem resolution on to the journal. So, no problem?

Well, my background is in IT and when I retired many ears ago one of the great benefits I felt was that I no longer had to try to keep up to date with new software releases. It used to take me at least half a day a week to do that when I was working. So I am well out of date on new software and quite generally on new developments in IT. Yet I easily found the problem with this website when their own IT personnel, who must have been much more up to date than I was and much more familiar with their website , apparently couldn’t. How can that happen?

I believe it’s to do with thinking, not rocket science, just ordinary but rigourous thinking. The article I wrote focussed on the importance of what I knew as the ELSE clause, part of a logical construction used in programs of my day: IF, THEN, ELSE. IF (whatever) occurred/applied, THEN all possible reactions, ELSE because you are not God and may have overlooked some possibilities. As I understood it, even if you were totally, absolutely sure you had covered all possibilities in your THEN clause, thinking as hard as you could, you still had to include an ELSE. And it’s the ELSE clause that is so often missing today.

Why? Is it because people (and specifically IT employeees today) are not encouraged to think for themselves? That’s a possibility, though a damning one if it is true.

The other more general possibility lies in education. If you want to judge levels of education by numbers, as governments increasingly seem to want to do, geerally for political purposes, you use tick boxes. They are easy to mark, right or wrong and you can count the numbers. Tick boxes force a limited number of possible responses. So how can anyone think outside the (tick) box?

If you are not allowed/educated to do so you don’t. So how do we bring up people to think independently, out of the box?

There’s an awful corollary. Could it be that governments don’t want people to think out of the box but only within the constraints that they have decided? If that is true we need revolutionaries as never before.

 

A Conjecture On Human Development

A Conjecture On Human Evolution

The weather lately has been dry and sunny but most often with the cold Mistral blowing. When it stops we have 14-15 degrees but the Mistral cuts that in half. So I’ve not been doing a lot outside, more reading and writing indoors. So here’s a conjecture on human evolution.

A friend of mine here has spent a large part of his life in the East, which means there is at least one person here I can enjoy a chilli-laden curry with, and he has acquainted me with some eastern thinking; which leads to the following conjecture.

Hindous believe that human development has not been linearly progressive, as is thought in the West, but cyclic: cycles of development ending in catastrophe followed by renewed development. I find the possibility intriguing.

The first evidence of Homo Sapiens is about 300,000 years ago, humans with intelligence if not a lot of education. Agriculture, on currently available evidence, is estimated to have started around 14,000 years ago. So it took humans with intelligence, even very basic intelligence, 286,000 years to think that planting a few seeds might be a good idea? It’s possible of course but is it probable? Hindous don’t think so.

There’s another interesting calculation. If a global catastrophe were to happen today, a global nuclear war, a large asteroid hitting the Earth or some such, it is estimated that it would take only about 300 years for all evidence of our current civilisation other than that in stone or pottery to disappear, except perhaps for a few chance exceptions.

So…..let’s allow for some margin of error on the estimates. Suppose agriculture started 1000 years earlier than estimated and suppose it takes 1000 years for evidence (other than stone, pottery) to disappear, that gives a possible cycle of around 18,000 years. Eighteen thousand goes into 300,000 rather a lot of times.

All this is just conjecture of course and there is one overriding problem: one of scale.

When discussing the distant past it is common to talk in terms of estimates of “within a few thousand years, ten or twenty thousand years” because we know so little about it. But it is quite possible for a hell of a lot to happen in a few thousand years, as we do know today and, as I hope I have shown. Did it, in the distant past? The possible eradication of all evidence within a thousand years doesn’t help.We’ll probably never know but you could think about it if the Mistral or other factor is keeping you indoors.