Mobile hypnosis for shoppers
The other day my wife wanted to go to Meijer to investigate some items they have on sale. Yes, this is what my life has been reduced to. Anyway, guess what we saw there? One of these.
Look at that! It's a shopping cart with a little cabin under the actual shopping cart for the kids to ride in and it plays videos of kids programs. The ones in Meijer offered a choice of Backyardagians, Dora the Explorer, or Thomas and Friends. Only the latter is a show my kids actually watch. You have to pay a $1 fee to rent this thing which you pay directly to a little vending machine like apparatus there. The cart wont come off the charging station until you do. The cart will lock up and shut down five minutes after you check out so you have to hurry to get it back to its station. But, for $1 you can push your kids around as they watch TV. This is what we have come to. Kids sitting in shopping carts watching TV. You know, my moral indignation was so strong I nearly hesitated to rent one.
What? Look, moral outrage is one thing. But at heart I'm practical. Meijers are huge department stores and the maze of aisles and shelving are great places for kids to get lost. I speak from experience. This very store was the one where my own kids decided to go on a walkabout and we had to get the store to lock the doors as I ran around looking for them. Since that time we have made sure the kids never think it is okay to walk an inch out of our sight even for a heartbeat. I nearly had several heartattacks and after dashing madly about the store and finding them about ten feet from where they initially ran away, I picked them both up and ran to the front of the store. A lot of running around for my sedentary butt so I nearly caused another heartattack then. Yeah, so now they are restless and bored and I am paying a buck to keep them quasi-entertained for part of the shopping trip.
That is the crux of my defense. It keeps them closer and less likely to run away. I know the moral outrage is bubbling out there about hypnotising our youth or the expectation of nonstop entertainment or how in your day they didn't have TVs on shopping carts and you were required to climb a mile and half down in the Earth on a rickety ladder to mine iron ore in pitch black where you would carry it back up that same ladder a bucketful at a time. Then you would smelt it down in the kitchen oven even though that meant you couldn't eat for six days just so you fashion it into wires where you would build a shopping cart out of these wires, a 2x4, and your favorite pair of rollerskates. You then had to walk sixty seven miles, uphill the whole way, to the only shopping center in the tri-state area where you would would quietly and obediently as your mother shopped for the least moldy wheat so that she could later strap you to a mill and make you walk mile after mile in your weakened state to grind down the wheat into flour so she could bake the single loaf of bread you got to eat before having to climb back into the mine to smelt another cart. Because, no matter how hard you tried, violent gangs of shopping cart thieves would somehow steal or manage to ruin your newly crafted cart.
Yes, I realize that you turned out just fine and your entire shopping trip was character building and a learning experience. I mean, learning the proper amount of carbon to introduce alone in forging process requires a lot of skull sweat. So, yes, I am depriving my kids of the wonderful education we all grew up with in metallurgy, mining, and how to knock an eyeball out of its socket with a broomhandle as your mother crushes someone's foot with the half ton cart you forged. Lets face it, though, shopping cartsmithing is a dying art.
So, granted, I am robbing my kids of a valuable education, they are going to be less character developed, and I am contributing to the rapant attention deficit problem with see with today's youth. Whatever. I can't raise my kids if I am found dead in the sporting goods section clutching my flabby chest. They can develop character later on when the real world beats all their dreams and ambitions out of them and they have to settle for a life of numb dissatisfaction and apathy that is the norm of adulthood.
Thus my shopping tale is done . . . what follows is just pure rambling.
In other news I am trying to cobble together a draft of a novel length story that I sort of got a basic framework going last year in November for NaNoWriMo. Don't expect anything for another month at the very earliest. This story keeps changing shape on me and it is difficult to get the framework ironed down. Sometime in mid summer I hope to have this draft ready for a test audience. So, if you or someone you know would like to read this in exchange for providing, you know, useful feedback then feel free to sign up.
Additional news, because I'm lazy and I only do one post every couple months, is that I have nearly talked myself into learning Python. The reason is that same novel I was just talking about. What's the connection? Well, okay, here we go . . .
The thing is that I have to have extensive notes to write a novel. It's just important for consistency and to make sure that I have something to work with if I ever decide to expand out into a sequel. The thing is, after looking at the tips and tricks I find out there from other authors, I find that I seem to organize things a bit differently than other people. So, whenever I am looking for software to help me out with this project I usually find I can't find something that does what I want. So, put it simply, I got to the point that I found myself saying "If it doesn't exist then I may as well make one myself."
This is the way I learn most skills. I have a problem or a need and I decide to fix it myself. The thing is, this is a family trait. I thought it was fairly normal. I knew nothing, really, about cars until I got one of my own. I learned how to wire phone jacks, electrical switches, install ceiling fans, basics of plumbing, and carpentry after I got my own house. When I counted up keys and realized that the guys who sold me the house kept at least one key for themselves I figured out how to change out locks pretty fast too.
Here's the thing, I thought this was fairly typical because almost everyone I knew was like this. I have since found out that this sort of uberanalytical mindset is not a common trait and even those who have it may have it focused only in one area and can't apply those same sort of tricks to other areas. Chances are that if you are my friend you probably have had a similar experience to the ones I have. If you were on a desert island that someone had dropped medical textbooks and surgical equipment on and another castaway had a ruptured appendix, that baby would be OUT. Sure, the textbooks would be covered with blood and that would be sloppy stitchwork, but odds are they'd survive it. Yet, you run across other people that you would not trust to open a can of baked beans unsupervised. It isn't even that they are stupid. It's just that when they ask you how you did something every time you try to explain it to them it is like you are speaking in a foreign language.
"How did you fix your car?"
"It was a blown fuse."
"How did you figure that out?"
"Well . . . the lights were working one day and the next they were not. These are electrical systems so the problem would almost have to be electrical."
"Why do you say that?"
"Um, because . . . they need electricity."
"Okay, so how could you tell it was a fuse?"
"Well, it's sort of strange for a bunch of LEDs and lightbulbs to all die at once. So I figured it was something further back blocking power. I looked it up in the manual to see if these were all on the same circuit and they appeared to be. So I pulled out the fuse box and looked for a black and crispy fuse."
"How did you know to check for that?"
"Didn't I just explain this?"
Over and over again I have seen this happen. People with otherwise perfectly functional brains seem to switch off when they need to solve an unfamiliar problem. They can't even figure out a good plan of attack. They come across a problem and that may as well be Mt. Everest in the middle of the freeway.
I tried to make my way through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" where Prisig tries to address a similar issue which he calls Classical and Romantic. I put the book down unfinished because he seemed to be operating under and false set of assumptions and I couldn't mesh with his way of thinking. In essense his view could be taken as there are two types of people. Artists and engineers. Artists view things as a gestalt whole and engineers view things as a sum of working parts. Too simplistic. Most geeky/engineering types I know can view a complex system and view it as art. Artists can breakdown huge art ideas into a variety of interworking subtlies. The thing seems to be where the person views the art as taking place. Is the crafting the art or is the end product the art?
So, with that in mind, here is my take on problem solving with the analytic versus non analytic types and I will use the idea of cooking to illustrate my point.
You take a non analytic type of person (not necessarily an artist or a Romantic type, just someone who doesn't do the analysis thing very well) and give them a recipe for a cake. They see if they add flour, milk, eggs, and sugar in this way and put it in the over at this temperature for this long they will get a cake. It works and it gets results, but the reason behind it may as well be magic. Thus I call this the magic-box approach to problem solving. You take this mushy mess of batter which the sorceror told you to mix in this order and place it in the magic box and you get the cake.
Analytic types view the whole process as a series of events yielding a result. The flour provides protein for structure. The eggs provide binding proteins. The sugar is for sweetness. So on and so forth. The heat is just a process for activating the chemical reactions. But, because the processes are not viewed as pure randomness this allows the person who is even mildly analytic (and I view this whole analytic/non analytic thing as a continuum and not a either or like Prisig did) to alter and experiment with the recipe. Add vanilla, alter baking time, do a partial bake and add ingredients halfway through that might otherwise burn. If something goes wrong you have the ability to backstep to the problem and figure out why it went wrong and can try something else. Yes, I am saying you apply the scientific method to cooking.
The reason I bring this up is that I am a source of abject frustration for my older brother. Why? He is the manager for a rather sizeable IT department. He's incrediably knowledgeable and is like a computer demi-god. The problem is that he really is way too good. Whenever it hits the fan, they bring him in to stop the splatter. Part of the problem is that he works with far too many people who take the magic-box approach to problem solving. They have been shown that if they do these steps in this order, this problem will go away 80% of the time. Scary thing is that a lot of these people may even be in IT and hold IT degrees.
Meanwhile his younger brother, who is not in IT and only has a passing familiarity with most of the inner workings of computer systems and even then only if it was necessary for something he was working on, can causually toss out comments like "I need a good programming language to learn because if I do not find a fricking program that does what I want I am going to write it myself" and it actually means something. He tells me that whenever I come to him with a computer problem he already knows it is a dozy because that means I have already tried the simple stuff, gone onto the intermediate stuff, checked forums for the harder stuff, and experimented with a few ideas of my own before going to him. After working with people all day that just come to him with any little thing and saying "It broke-ed" it only adds to the frustration to know that, with no formal training, I can do something he can't seem to teach other people to do. The sad thing is that its not so much that I have some sort of deeper intuitive understanding of technical systems, I really don't. I read and I reference certain sources constantly. It feels like borrowed intelligence to me. I may not be able to solve a problem on my own, but if I learn how to ask the problem correctly then I can usually find someone who is clever enough to have already solved it on their own.
Here's the irony for you. Remember that the reason I want to program is entirely because I have a very specific need. A program for writing fiction. Fiction is not technical, it is an art. While it is easy for me to discuss the strengths of being very analytical when it comes to technical skills, it sort of falls flat when it comes to artistic skills. I have asked two dozen different people what defines a measure in music and I have gotten two dozen different answers. I have taken advanced English classes where we have talked about symbolism and themes and the answers seem to change depending on who you ask and when. Symbolism and imagery seem to be unintentional byproducts of writing as far as I can tell and it is an end-user specific incident that has almost nothing to do with the authoring of said product. As you might imagine, I have always, and I mean always, had problems with this subject. When I was in a literature class I wrote an entire essay about the symbolism, imagery, and themes of a novel I never read. I skimmed an opening chapter, a middle chapter, and an end chapter and watched a movie based off the book. I then made up a bunch of stuff. I talked about the imagery of the physical as well as literal class distinction as the upper class lived on top of a hill while the lower class lived in the areas below. I discussed the imagery of various colors and what they represented. I talked about themese of isolation and themses of man versus man and man versus himself. It was gibberish as far as I could tell . . . I got an A+ and the teacher complimented me on my insight and how I had clearly paid very careful attention to the book.
Non analytic problem solving is very good when the subjects are about emotions and subjective impressions. I can't figure out figure skating for the life of me because, while I see a lot of stuff that would break my neck if I tried it, I'll never be able to figure out which team was technically or artistically more proficient. For all I know gold medals are handed out thanks to a blindfold and a dartboard. Well, unless it is ice dancing and then it apparently goes to the Russians.
So here I am, trying to use analytic techniques to build an analytic tool to help me create an art project. Yeah, I don't think it'll work either.
Look at that! It's a shopping cart with a little cabin under the actual shopping cart for the kids to ride in and it plays videos of kids programs. The ones in Meijer offered a choice of Backyardagians, Dora the Explorer, or Thomas and Friends. Only the latter is a show my kids actually watch. You have to pay a $1 fee to rent this thing which you pay directly to a little vending machine like apparatus there. The cart wont come off the charging station until you do. The cart will lock up and shut down five minutes after you check out so you have to hurry to get it back to its station. But, for $1 you can push your kids around as they watch TV. This is what we have come to. Kids sitting in shopping carts watching TV. You know, my moral indignation was so strong I nearly hesitated to rent one.
What? Look, moral outrage is one thing. But at heart I'm practical. Meijers are huge department stores and the maze of aisles and shelving are great places for kids to get lost. I speak from experience. This very store was the one where my own kids decided to go on a walkabout and we had to get the store to lock the doors as I ran around looking for them. Since that time we have made sure the kids never think it is okay to walk an inch out of our sight even for a heartbeat. I nearly had several heartattacks and after dashing madly about the store and finding them about ten feet from where they initially ran away, I picked them both up and ran to the front of the store. A lot of running around for my sedentary butt so I nearly caused another heartattack then. Yeah, so now they are restless and bored and I am paying a buck to keep them quasi-entertained for part of the shopping trip.
That is the crux of my defense. It keeps them closer and less likely to run away. I know the moral outrage is bubbling out there about hypnotising our youth or the expectation of nonstop entertainment or how in your day they didn't have TVs on shopping carts and you were required to climb a mile and half down in the Earth on a rickety ladder to mine iron ore in pitch black where you would carry it back up that same ladder a bucketful at a time. Then you would smelt it down in the kitchen oven even though that meant you couldn't eat for six days just so you fashion it into wires where you would build a shopping cart out of these wires, a 2x4, and your favorite pair of rollerskates. You then had to walk sixty seven miles, uphill the whole way, to the only shopping center in the tri-state area where you would would quietly and obediently as your mother shopped for the least moldy wheat so that she could later strap you to a mill and make you walk mile after mile in your weakened state to grind down the wheat into flour so she could bake the single loaf of bread you got to eat before having to climb back into the mine to smelt another cart. Because, no matter how hard you tried, violent gangs of shopping cart thieves would somehow steal or manage to ruin your newly crafted cart.
Yes, I realize that you turned out just fine and your entire shopping trip was character building and a learning experience. I mean, learning the proper amount of carbon to introduce alone in forging process requires a lot of skull sweat. So, yes, I am depriving my kids of the wonderful education we all grew up with in metallurgy, mining, and how to knock an eyeball out of its socket with a broomhandle as your mother crushes someone's foot with the half ton cart you forged. Lets face it, though, shopping cartsmithing is a dying art.
So, granted, I am robbing my kids of a valuable education, they are going to be less character developed, and I am contributing to the rapant attention deficit problem with see with today's youth. Whatever. I can't raise my kids if I am found dead in the sporting goods section clutching my flabby chest. They can develop character later on when the real world beats all their dreams and ambitions out of them and they have to settle for a life of numb dissatisfaction and apathy that is the norm of adulthood.
Thus my shopping tale is done . . . what follows is just pure rambling.
In other news I am trying to cobble together a draft of a novel length story that I sort of got a basic framework going last year in November for NaNoWriMo. Don't expect anything for another month at the very earliest. This story keeps changing shape on me and it is difficult to get the framework ironed down. Sometime in mid summer I hope to have this draft ready for a test audience. So, if you or someone you know would like to read this in exchange for providing, you know, useful feedback then feel free to sign up.
Additional news, because I'm lazy and I only do one post every couple months, is that I have nearly talked myself into learning Python. The reason is that same novel I was just talking about. What's the connection? Well, okay, here we go . . .
The thing is that I have to have extensive notes to write a novel. It's just important for consistency and to make sure that I have something to work with if I ever decide to expand out into a sequel. The thing is, after looking at the tips and tricks I find out there from other authors, I find that I seem to organize things a bit differently than other people. So, whenever I am looking for software to help me out with this project I usually find I can't find something that does what I want. So, put it simply, I got to the point that I found myself saying "If it doesn't exist then I may as well make one myself."
This is the way I learn most skills. I have a problem or a need and I decide to fix it myself. The thing is, this is a family trait. I thought it was fairly normal. I knew nothing, really, about cars until I got one of my own. I learned how to wire phone jacks, electrical switches, install ceiling fans, basics of plumbing, and carpentry after I got my own house. When I counted up keys and realized that the guys who sold me the house kept at least one key for themselves I figured out how to change out locks pretty fast too.
Here's the thing, I thought this was fairly typical because almost everyone I knew was like this. I have since found out that this sort of uberanalytical mindset is not a common trait and even those who have it may have it focused only in one area and can't apply those same sort of tricks to other areas. Chances are that if you are my friend you probably have had a similar experience to the ones I have. If you were on a desert island that someone had dropped medical textbooks and surgical equipment on and another castaway had a ruptured appendix, that baby would be OUT. Sure, the textbooks would be covered with blood and that would be sloppy stitchwork, but odds are they'd survive it. Yet, you run across other people that you would not trust to open a can of baked beans unsupervised. It isn't even that they are stupid. It's just that when they ask you how you did something every time you try to explain it to them it is like you are speaking in a foreign language.
"How did you fix your car?"
"It was a blown fuse."
"How did you figure that out?"
"Well . . . the lights were working one day and the next they were not. These are electrical systems so the problem would almost have to be electrical."
"Why do you say that?"
"Um, because . . . they need electricity."
"Okay, so how could you tell it was a fuse?"
"Well, it's sort of strange for a bunch of LEDs and lightbulbs to all die at once. So I figured it was something further back blocking power. I looked it up in the manual to see if these were all on the same circuit and they appeared to be. So I pulled out the fuse box and looked for a black and crispy fuse."
"How did you know to check for that?"
"Didn't I just explain this?"
Over and over again I have seen this happen. People with otherwise perfectly functional brains seem to switch off when they need to solve an unfamiliar problem. They can't even figure out a good plan of attack. They come across a problem and that may as well be Mt. Everest in the middle of the freeway.
I tried to make my way through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" where Prisig tries to address a similar issue which he calls Classical and Romantic. I put the book down unfinished because he seemed to be operating under and false set of assumptions and I couldn't mesh with his way of thinking. In essense his view could be taken as there are two types of people. Artists and engineers. Artists view things as a gestalt whole and engineers view things as a sum of working parts. Too simplistic. Most geeky/engineering types I know can view a complex system and view it as art. Artists can breakdown huge art ideas into a variety of interworking subtlies. The thing seems to be where the person views the art as taking place. Is the crafting the art or is the end product the art?
So, with that in mind, here is my take on problem solving with the analytic versus non analytic types and I will use the idea of cooking to illustrate my point.
You take a non analytic type of person (not necessarily an artist or a Romantic type, just someone who doesn't do the analysis thing very well) and give them a recipe for a cake. They see if they add flour, milk, eggs, and sugar in this way and put it in the over at this temperature for this long they will get a cake. It works and it gets results, but the reason behind it may as well be magic. Thus I call this the magic-box approach to problem solving. You take this mushy mess of batter which the sorceror told you to mix in this order and place it in the magic box and you get the cake.
Analytic types view the whole process as a series of events yielding a result. The flour provides protein for structure. The eggs provide binding proteins. The sugar is for sweetness. So on and so forth. The heat is just a process for activating the chemical reactions. But, because the processes are not viewed as pure randomness this allows the person who is even mildly analytic (and I view this whole analytic/non analytic thing as a continuum and not a either or like Prisig did) to alter and experiment with the recipe. Add vanilla, alter baking time, do a partial bake and add ingredients halfway through that might otherwise burn. If something goes wrong you have the ability to backstep to the problem and figure out why it went wrong and can try something else. Yes, I am saying you apply the scientific method to cooking.
The reason I bring this up is that I am a source of abject frustration for my older brother. Why? He is the manager for a rather sizeable IT department. He's incrediably knowledgeable and is like a computer demi-god. The problem is that he really is way too good. Whenever it hits the fan, they bring him in to stop the splatter. Part of the problem is that he works with far too many people who take the magic-box approach to problem solving. They have been shown that if they do these steps in this order, this problem will go away 80% of the time. Scary thing is that a lot of these people may even be in IT and hold IT degrees.
Meanwhile his younger brother, who is not in IT and only has a passing familiarity with most of the inner workings of computer systems and even then only if it was necessary for something he was working on, can causually toss out comments like "I need a good programming language to learn because if I do not find a fricking program that does what I want I am going to write it myself" and it actually means something. He tells me that whenever I come to him with a computer problem he already knows it is a dozy because that means I have already tried the simple stuff, gone onto the intermediate stuff, checked forums for the harder stuff, and experimented with a few ideas of my own before going to him. After working with people all day that just come to him with any little thing and saying "It broke-ed" it only adds to the frustration to know that, with no formal training, I can do something he can't seem to teach other people to do. The sad thing is that its not so much that I have some sort of deeper intuitive understanding of technical systems, I really don't. I read and I reference certain sources constantly. It feels like borrowed intelligence to me. I may not be able to solve a problem on my own, but if I learn how to ask the problem correctly then I can usually find someone who is clever enough to have already solved it on their own.
Here's the irony for you. Remember that the reason I want to program is entirely because I have a very specific need. A program for writing fiction. Fiction is not technical, it is an art. While it is easy for me to discuss the strengths of being very analytical when it comes to technical skills, it sort of falls flat when it comes to artistic skills. I have asked two dozen different people what defines a measure in music and I have gotten two dozen different answers. I have taken advanced English classes where we have talked about symbolism and themes and the answers seem to change depending on who you ask and when. Symbolism and imagery seem to be unintentional byproducts of writing as far as I can tell and it is an end-user specific incident that has almost nothing to do with the authoring of said product. As you might imagine, I have always, and I mean always, had problems with this subject. When I was in a literature class I wrote an entire essay about the symbolism, imagery, and themes of a novel I never read. I skimmed an opening chapter, a middle chapter, and an end chapter and watched a movie based off the book. I then made up a bunch of stuff. I talked about the imagery of the physical as well as literal class distinction as the upper class lived on top of a hill while the lower class lived in the areas below. I discussed the imagery of various colors and what they represented. I talked about themese of isolation and themses of man versus man and man versus himself. It was gibberish as far as I could tell . . . I got an A+ and the teacher complimented me on my insight and how I had clearly paid very careful attention to the book.
Non analytic problem solving is very good when the subjects are about emotions and subjective impressions. I can't figure out figure skating for the life of me because, while I see a lot of stuff that would break my neck if I tried it, I'll never be able to figure out which team was technically or artistically more proficient. For all I know gold medals are handed out thanks to a blindfold and a dartboard. Well, unless it is ice dancing and then it apparently goes to the Russians.
So here I am, trying to use analytic techniques to build an analytic tool to help me create an art project. Yeah, I don't think it'll work either.