- For a little over a year, I've been buying dry-roasted peanuts from Safeway that do not contain MSG. Recently we noticed that the packaging had changed, and checked the ingredients. MSG returns, gakkh. Dry-roasted peanuts are a much better snack than their rep would have it, but MSG makes me feel weird in the head, so the search for MSG-free dry-roasted peanuts resumes. Interestingly, I had a couple of Planter's dry-roasted peanuts the other day (knowing full-well that they have MSG in them; I had a few, not handfuls) and they do not taste any different. Not better. Not worse. Not a little bit. Not at all. So the companies that print “monosodium glutamate (flavor enhancer)” on their peanut labels are being ripped off. MSG does not enhance flavor. What it does do is mess some people over (like me, and countless others) and cost the vendors money. MSG is cheap, but not free. When will food packagers realize that they could save money and increase their market by just dumping it?
- Pertinent to the above, Jay's Barbecue Potato Chips also lack MSG, and are the only barbeque potato chips I've ever seen that don't have it. They are a Chicago brand, and so far we haven't seen them in Colorado Springs. But when I'm here, I gorge.
- I'm a big fan of lashup railcars, but I startled a little when Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a model of a pink Galloping Goose. The paint schemes are described as “authentic.” So was there ever a Rio Grande Goose in pink and white livery? I've not been able to determine that—but whoa, somehow I doubt it. That's a spit-and-baling-wire, real-man's tin-roof rough-and-tumble item that reminds me of Mad Max as much as it does of the Old West. Pink? Sheesh!
- A tenured professor at the University of Minnesota has put out a call for Catholics to send him consecrated Eucharistic hosts…so that he can desecrate them. I had hoped this was an urban legend, but the Washington Times generally knows better. I wonder if he (and his clueless university) understand that this doesn't hurt the Church at all, but makes higher education in general and university professors in particular look mean-spirited and ridiculous. (Quick: Somebody test that guy for toxoplasmosis…)
- From Michael Covington comes a link to a Modern Mechanix item from 1933 that may be the original “watt dog” cooker, which spawned a famous Carl & Jerry story cautioning young tinkerers about the hazards of messing with line current. A board with nails pounded through it, facing up…with 110V on the nails. Wow. (And while you're there, click on the cover image to get a closer look at what was prompting young geeks to buy magazines in 1933. Maybe the Flynn Effect really does exist.)
- On second thought, probably not.
- Thanks to Baron_Waste, I discovered that the United States' net carbon emissions declined by 3% between 2000 and 2006. Of the top 17 carbon emitters, only France reduced emissions more—and I'd wager that that's because France has had the good sense to stuff their antinuclear crackpots in the Bastille and forget about them.
- Nertz. Wrong. France closed the Bastille in 1789. Well, hey: Today is the 158th birthday of the ice maker.
Odd Lots
Rant: Idealism and “Settling”
I catch a certain amount of shit for my longstanding conviction that idealism is a Bad Thing. (I just got another nasty email on the subject, hence my very bad mood this evening.) The reason is simple: Idealism consists of demanding the impossible—and the human response when the impossible predictably fails to appear is to throw various kinds of temper tantrums, from looking like an idiot to making other people miserable up to and including imprisoning and killing those who fail to conform to your personal idealisms. I've read of this happening back into history as far as the eye can see, and it boggles me that in the 21st century we still idealize idealism.
An issue or two ago, The Atlantic ran a wonderful article that sheds some light on the issue. In “Go Ahead, Marry Him!” NYC overachiever Lori Gottlieb finally endorses what some women dismissively call “settling;” that is, marrying a man who is something less than precisely what they demand, which is usually rich, brilliant, gentle, pliant, egalitarian, and unerringly able to incite sexual passion every weekend for the rest of their lives. As Lori tellingly puts it:
Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.
Well, duhh. The downside to perpetually holding out for someone better is the possibility of spending your entire life alone, cursing all men because they refuse to conform to your fantasies. This sort of mental illness is not limited to women. I knew a guy in college (of average looks, smarts, and ambition) who flatly refused to date any woman who did not “look like a Playboy centerfold.” (Those were his precise words.) He finally and recently married, in his early 50s, and his spouse is bright, funny, and warm. However, I doubt she was ever Playboy material, even in her 20s. Figuring it out late is better than figuring it out never. But had he figured it out early, he might have had a lot more fun and been a lot less lonely for a lot more years.
Life is about settling. All of life, all the time. Life's circumstances are graphed on a complicated set of curves, and we can either calculate the minima and make the best of it, or we can rage against the shape of reality, and make things even worse while blaming those who do not share our idealisms. Churches and political tribes are aces at this. Conservative religions (Christianity being only one, but the one we know best in the West) have a peculiar obession with sexual idealism. Roman Catholicism condemns both abortion and preventive birth control, because these do not conform to a complicated and ancient sort of moral idealism that in essence demands that people be sexless beings except when they're married and willing to conceive a child. Endorsing birth control would reduce the number of abortions, but that would be settling for less than the ideal. And so hundreds of millions of people defy Church teachings or even leave the Church entirely, and the abortion rate remains appalling. In refusing to settle for the achievable, the RCC has held out for the impossible and reaped catastrophe.
Idealism's prints are all over the political realm. We could end gun violence by eliminating guns, so the ideal goes. But by only eliminating some guns, we make gun violence worse. Crisp gun laws that define legal use and training people in their legal use would not end gun violence, but it would probably minimize gun violence. I'll settle for that. Idealists will not. Idealists tell us that if we would all just take public transportation, live in the nasty little coffins that some call New York studio apartments, and give up air conditioning, we would have neither global warming nor an energy crisis. Whether or not the math actually makes sense, you have to say, Well, good luck with that.
Marxist idealism, of course, has been the greatest murder-generator in all of human history. To pragmatists this is common knowledge; to Marxist idealists it's a heresy that they can never accept. There's not a lot of benefit in belaboring the point. The two sides are not even talking.
My objection to idealism cooks down to this: Idealism refuses to consider embracing lesser evils and thereby generates greater evils. We can argue about the identity of the lesser evils. We can argue about whether the lesser evils are in fact evils at all. (Many are not.) We can argue about whether embracing a lesser evil will in fact minimize a greater evil. (This is not always the case.) But idealism refuses to engage in the debate. That would be settling. And there's no point in settling for less than the ideal, right?
The Conundrum of AVG LinkScanner
Just before we left Colorado, and after several weeks of furious nagging by the software, I upgraded version 7.5 of AVG Free Anti-Virus for the new V8. I did it on Carol's machine only, as the upgrade required some damned thing or another that was missing on Win2K SP4, and I didn't have time to research it. (Carol uses XP.) With version 8 came something I had not heard about and did not expect: AVG LinkScanner.
It's an interesting idea, and at first glance sounds like something truly useful: LinkScanner works with Google and Yahoo to prescan search results for evidence of malware injection. At a rate of 2-20 results per second, LinkScanner visits each displayed search result link, looks at what's on the other side, and displays one of three icons to the right of the search link: Good, questionable, or bad. I didn't even know the feature was present until later that day, when Carol was doing some Google work and asked me what the icons were. All were a reassuring green, but when I Googled on “warez” almost all of the search results came back with icons of alarming red.
This seemed reasonable to me, and I was too frantic getting ready for our trip to think too deeply on it. But a few days later, I started to run across Web articles howling about an avalanche of Web hits spawned by LinkScanner. The Register provides one of the saner descriptions of the issue. Traffic on some smaller Web sites has spiked by 80%, and Slashdot says that as much as 6% of its massive clickthrough comes from LinkScanner's user agents.
LinkScanner, it seems, tries its best to look like an ordinary user. Well, duhh: If LinkScanner's probe announced its presence, malware artists would serve up an innocuous version of their sites, keeping the malware for ordinary Web surfers who could be discerned as such. I can understand the logic, but given that AVG has as many as seventy million users worldwide (few of whom have yet upgraded) widespread adoption of the technology could make ordinary Web traffic analysis meaningless. Traffic on duntemann.com started rising about April 1, but I couldn't quite figure what was going on. May was a record month for me, even though my traffic has been fairly steady since I launched my LiveJournal mirror of Contra in early 2006. Things leveled out in June, but given the proportion of my traffic that now reads Contra on LiveJournal, I would expect aggregate traffic on duntemann.com to be falling slowly.
Having had a little time to think about this, I can raise a couple of points:
- AVG has not made it entirely clear what its probe looks for when it prefetches search results. A site tagged as “safe” might not actually be safe—especially once the bad guys reverse-engineer the probe and figure out how to dodge it. People might trust the utility a little too much, and assume that there is no possible downside to visiting a green-tagged site.
- Obviously, AVG actually visits all sites in a search results list, even those most users would shun as obviously dicey. If the bad guys discover an exploit in AVG's probe, AVG could unwittingly become the world's largest malware installer.
- The probe does not mask or alter the user IP in any way. As far as remote site logs are concerned, the local user clicks on every link in a search results list. Meditate on that for a moment, and then read this article from Slashdot. If you're not at least a little freaked out yet, read it again.
I'm going to uninstall the feature on Carol's machine when we get home, and may try one of the alternative lightweight AV products like Avast, especially since AVG Free V8.0 barfed on my main Win2K machine.
I've begun to see indications that AVG is patching V8.0 so that LinkScanner is not enabled by default, but haven't gotten anything crisp enough to link to. Supposedly, the patched version becomes available today. We'll see. In the meantime, spidering sites with some sort of malware-detection probe may not be as good an idea as it seems on the surface. Better, perhaps to completely sandbox or virtualize the browser, which would be better protection at a bandwidth cost of…zero.
Almost Done with Souls in Silicon
We got back from Wisconsin yesterday, having had a very good time getting soaking wet and eating perhaps a little too much. I had forgotten how pretty that part of the country was, even though my family went there often in the early 1960s. It was where my mother grew up, between the little whistle-stop of Shennington and the larger town of Necedah. (That's her at left, as Necedah High School's drum majorette in 1942, posing with her band teacher.) Carol and I explored the area a little bit while we still lived in Chicago, but that's been thirty years now, and it would be worthwhile to go back and hit Baraboo, Mauston, Mill Bluff State Park, and a number of other places we remember less well than we'd like. We want to return to Perot State Park along the Mississippi, where I proposed to Carol in 1975, as well as nearby Wyalusing. Next summer, fersure.
We're still in the Chicago area (currently in Crystal Lake) but this trip isn't entirely vacation, and I'm pushing hard to get some work done. Today was productive: I finished laying out and proofing the body of Souls in Silicon, the first of two collections I am preparing of my own SF. Souls in Silicon contains all of my published stories pertaining to strong AI, including “Guardian,” which was on the final Hugo ballot in 1981, and “Borovsky's Hollow Woman,” my 1983 collaboration with Nancy Kress, which originally appeared in Omni. Other stories in the 9-story lineup include “The Steel Sonnets,” “Silicon Psalm,” “Bathtub Mary,” “Marlowe,” “STORMY vs. the Tornadoes,” and “Sympathy on the Loss of One of Your Legs.” The collection will conclude with an excerpt from my 2005 novel, The Cunning Blood.
With the body done and the page count frozen, I can get to work on a cover. I commissioned custom cover art from Richard Bartrop, and just approved his final color concept sketch. By the time Richard is done, I should have a cover to drop the art into, and we'll have us a book. Richard is very well-known in Furry circles, but he's actually a formidable hard SF artist, and the concept, from my story “Guardian,” is terrific. Bodies are easy. Covers are hard. My mother was an artist, but I think she left her talents in Wisconsin; neither Gretchen nor I inherited them. I hope to have copies to show around at Worldcon in Denver this August, but that means I had better get to work.
Sploosh!
We're at the Chula Vista Resort in the Wisconsin Dells for a short family vacation, and I think I've identified the first significant cultural contribution of the 21st century: the large-scale water park. I'm not talking about a pool with a single slide, or even two slides. I'm talking about a fifteen-acre indoor/outdoor complex with twelve separate water slides, some easily fifty feet high, with coils of people pipes that go outside the building and then come in again, some in several different loops. One slide even has a Men In Black 2 style “flusher” at the end. There is a sort of aquatic roller-coaster-in-a-garden-hose, and a short, simple flume that pretty much drops you vertically for about thirty feet. I looked around, and I boggled—but then I started having fun.
It's a species of fun that simply didn't exist when I was a kid. We were delirious to have a simple swimming pool or even a muddy lake to paddle around in. I think I frst saw a water slide when I was thirty-five. And I have never seen anything even remotely like this. There is constant motion (much of it from incalculable numbers of eight-year-olds) and water pouring, squirting, and spraying everywhere, in every direction at once. Buckets of many sizes, from a gallon or two up to a multihundred something the size of a hot tub, slowly fill while on pivots, and when the buckets fill, they tip over and dump their loads on anyone who happens to be below. There's a zero-depth baby pool, a one-foot deep toddler pool, a four-foot-deep activity pool for preteens, a hot tub for exhausted old guys, and a very interesting thing called a “lazy river,” which is a linear pool about two feet deep and eight wide, propelled into slow motion by angled jets in the walls. You grab an inner tube as one drifts by, and just lie on your back and follow the flow around the periphery of the complex. Carol very bravely tried every single water slide in the place, spurred on by our strapping twentysomething nephews and their svelte, althletic girlfriends. I did the bunny slides and the “croc walk,” which is a pool across which you go by hanging from a suspended net while stepping on floating faux alligator body sections. I myself was never one for thrill rides, and I deeply admire my beautiful wife for being wiling to shoot through pipes at thirty miles an hour.
One fascinating thing about our Fourth of July day at the water park was how international it all was. We had chairs next to a group of people speaking a Slavic language (Russian? I can't tell) and Carol's mom heard more than one group speaking Polish. A pair of guys were speaking French on the elevator with us, and I know enough German to identify it when I hear it. Lots of Spanish, and possibly Portuguese. Many Asian families were there, including one whom I suspect were Phillipinos speaking Tagalog. A group of young Black folks were in the hot tub with us for awhile, speaking a language that was like nothing I had ever heard. Clearly, the Wisconsin Dells is a global draw, which I found interesting, since when last I looked the Dells were kind of like Las Vegas without hookers. On the other hand, the last time I looked was in 1961, and the really big thrill was riding an Army-surplus amphibious truck on now-defunct Lake Delton. (The Delton vista was a little surreal: acres of mud, sand, and century-old tree stumps where Tommy Bartlett's skiers used to roam.) But it makes sense: The States is a cheap date these days, and all those good people from overseas were throwing cubic meters of money into the local economy.
We spent the evening at a local park, tossing a frisbee around while waiting for a pretty spectacular fireworks display. We saluted the birth of the American idea, which has seen better and worse over the years. We survived the Civil War. We survived the Depression. We will survive $5 gasoline.
The American idea is not over. It has not failed. It has not even fully matured. I'm not, in fact, sure that anyone entirely understands it—but I will celebrate it, for what has been and for what is yet to be, now and forever, amen.
Odd Lots
- Text messaging has always struck me as more than faintly ridiculous: Spend a quarter to cramp your thumbs sending a handful of characters to another cell phone, when you could call that same cell phone and talk for a full minute for less. And even though texting costs phone carriers almost nothing, the cost of texting to consumers has more than doubled in the last three years.
- I was at Barnes & Noble a little earlier today, prowling the history section as I often do. (The history section is now about the same size as the computer book section. This was not always the case…) I remembered something I had noticed many times in the past: B&N stocks an absolutely amazing number of books on the Knights Templars and Freemasonry. (By contrast, I counted three—three!—books on Ubuntu Linux.) The history section at Borders stocks almost nothing on these two topics. Do people actually buy this stuff? Or is there a Templars/Masonry fan club at the highest levels of B&N?
- Xandros has purchased Linspire. Linspire tried their hardest to create an OEM market for desktop Linux, but annoyed FOSS purists by including commercial software in their CNR installation service, which was actually the only part of Lindows/Linspire that I really liked. Ubuntu has mostly swept the desktop Linux field, but I admit, they haven't gone after OEM installs as vigorously as Linspire did, nor as vigorously as they'd have to to get some traction against Windows. Ubuntu's parent Canonical is developing a mobile version that will be sold preinstalled on subnotebooks, but we're not quite there yet.
- Mike Reith sent me an interesting little utility called IsDelphi, which will scan a directory, inspect any executables it finds, and report which ones were written in Delphi. The most interesting revelation: Skype is a Delphi app. I hadn't heard that.
- In case you weren't already worried about whether you should take that trip down the hill to get a latte, I suggest a spin through Dark Roasted Blend's collection of weird car accidents. You Could Be There.
- And in case you're not steamed out or punked out yet, head down to the closest Greek restaurant, order some calimari, and curl up with an anthology of squidpunk. Damitall, when are we gonna see glyptodontpunk? I'll show you escapist and whimsical…
Mainstreaming Sit-Down
I find much or most of the debate on the obesity explosion puzzling. Many major American cities are trying to pass laws severely limiting fast food outlets or banning them entirely, blaming them for our increasingly fat population. The sheer violence of the debate (cruise pertinent online discussions and you'll see what I mean) suggests that more is going on here than a discussion of nutrition, but I'll be damned if I can figure out just what, though I will speculate below.
As I've said here more than once, obesity, like most health issues, is more complex than most of us would like to admit. It's about calories but not only calories, and contrary to conventional wisdom, one calorie is like any other calorie…if you're a calorimeter. Sugar calories do different things in the body than fat calories, yet you wouldn't know this trying to get a grip on the problem online. The speed with which I dropped belly fat when I basically gave up sugar was startling. Sleep loss is also a factor, according to the Mayo Clinic. (Alas, the Mayo Clinic still believes in the BMI, which does not distinguish at all between fat and muscle. Ummm…and you guys are doctors?)
I've read a lot of speculation as to what kicked off the obesity epidemic in the midlate 80s. That's when high-fructose corn syrup went mainstream and drove cane sugar out of soft drinks. It was when our high-speed, high-stress always-on culture kicked into high gear and 60-hour weeks became a commonplace. It's when the overall inflation-adjusted price of food fell to historic lows. And it was also the time when something else happened: an explosion of low-end “sit-down” restaurants fielded by national franchises. You see them everywhere: Red Robin, Applebees, Black-Eyed Pea, TGI Friday's, and so on. They are legion. And if you're a true calorie believer, the caloric content of their dishes will take your breath away: One order of Outback's Aussie Cheese Fries appetizer contains 2,900 calories. Even expressed by weight, it is to boggle: A large Maggiano's pasta dish gets you over two pounds of noodles on a 15-inch plate.
Wow.
The tirade against fast-food restaurants is peculiar in that it does not recognize that fast-food portions are generally smaller than those at sit-down restaurants, and more to the point, fast-food items are what old-time IT guys would call “unbundled”: You can get menu items separately if you want them. You can get a single small burger—or a Triple. You can get fries or no fries, and fries in sizes. On the much simpler sit-down restaurant menus, you must get the potatoes with the steak, and the portion size is always…lots. And anyone who says with a straight face that there's more fat in fast food than at casual dining sit-downs is either lying or doesn't get out much.
We didn't go to restaurants much when I was a kid, in part because back then, sit-down restaurants were higher-end, and expensive. We had to dress up on special occasions to go to Llandl's or the Kenilworth Inn in Lincolnwood. The notion of “casual dining” was still pretty uncommon, and probably considered a contradiction in terms by dining purists. (What there was fell into the separately interesting category of “greasy spoons.”) Since 1985 or so, sit-downs went mainstream on a huge scale, as corporate restaurant franchises gobbled up key slots at the corners of megamalls and major intersections. Your average American went from dining out a few times a year to a couple of times a week, with portion sizes that I still find boggling.
My point here is that crucifying fast food as though it were the sole cause of obesity (or even the major contributor) is magical thinking, and has more than a whiff of politics in it. (When reading things like Fast Food Nation I see union opportunism and attacks from the Vega System.) Nothing is ever that simple, and if we keep insisting that it is, no progress will ever be made. It's not about McDonald's. It's about genetics, metabolism, portion control, exercise, sugar, stress, and sleep—and probably fifteen other things, most of which we still haven't defined. Let us not pull the trigger with the wrong guy in our sites, just to be shooting something.
A Fine Wander
I generally don't go a whole week without posting here, but Carol and I began our summer trek out to Chicago this past Friday, and like a loon I left my Web presence thumb drive in my keyboard groove in Colorado. I have my backups with me, but they do not include the longish entry I prepared on the 26th, which you now won't see until I get back home.
Anyway. We're here again, in the land of Green River soda and two-section concrete basement washtubs. White Hen Pantry has been engulfed and devoured by Southland's 7-Eleven, but miraculously, the legendary White Hen coffee bar is still there in the converted stores and still good. The weather was fantastic on our leisurely three-days-and-two-nights journey; in fact, we did not encounter any rain until we were through Marengo, Illinois and only twenty minutes from Crystal Lake.
We drove from Colorado Springs to Kearney, Nebraska our first day out, and took a couple of hours to sneak up to Lake McConaughy and see how it's faring. The lake has been greatly diminished by a near seven-year drought, but this spring the rains started returning to western Nebraska, and the lake now has six feet of depth it didn't have last year. The water was still coldish: 69° on the white-sand north shore, and 74° on the brown-sand south shore (above), where northerly winds have apparently been blowing the warmer surface layer for some weeks. It was still as clear and clean as we remember, and we're planning on stopping for the night in Ogalallah on the way back for a little quality beach time. QBit and Aero both wanted to jump in, but since we still had 150 miles to go on Friday and didn't want to spend all of it in a car full of wet-dog smell, Carol kept them on a short leash and dried their feet before we loaded up and went on.
We spent our second night in Newton, Iowa, best known for being the home of the Maytag Corporation and its bored repairmen, at least until Whirlpool acquired them and shut the company down last year. Newton is one of those “pretty-how” towns that e.e. cummings used to write about, with a real Midwestern town square surrounding the 1911 stone courthouse and Jasper County offices. With dirt-cheap housing, near-zero crime, and lots of office and manufacturing space opening up, you'd think some forward-looking high-tech entrepreneur would begin building routers or laptops or something in the old Maytag space. I can't figure it—oh wait, forgot, there's no Thai restaurants there. Damn. (But there are 100 women for every 87 men. C'mon, guys. You can always truck in the khao pad.)
Sunday was my 56th birthday, and we took a little time out to visit the Amana Colonies, and had lunch at Henry's Village Market in Homestead. Andrew, the owner, made us up some ham sandwiches on bread baked right there, and partway through had to run out to the garden to pick some more lettuce. We watched for flood damage in eastern Iowa, but apart from a submerged park along the Cedar River near Iowa City, we saw nothing we could unambiguously ascribe to the recent torrential rains.
So we're here, and will visit with friends and family and see our new niece Juliana Roper baptized. I hope to get some writing done here at the condo, and will try to keep up with Contra as time allows.
Odd Lots
- Good grief! Salvia is a hallucinogen! How in hell did I get to be 55 and not know that? (We used to grow it as a ground cover years ago.)
- Nick Hodges wrote to say that the Easy Duplicate Finder utility I mentioned in my June 20, 2008 entry was written in Delphi. A lot of no-install apps are written in Delphi. They're fast, compact, and don't crap DLLs into your WindowsSystem32 directory. Too bad they're written in a Kiddie Language™.
- Speaking of no-install apps, I've tried a few more. One good one (if of limited use) is TreeSize Free, which scans a drive or a directory tree and shows you which parts of the hierarchy are the ones that use the most drive space. Another that I've just discovered is the FastStone image viewer, which isn't quite a digital photo manager but comes pretty damned close. So far, I can recommend both.
- Jason Kaczor sent me a pointer to Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope, and it's worth a look, especially if you've got a big-screen TV that can display at least 1024 X 768 graphics. Needs XP SP2 and some middling computer horsepower, but man, what a show!
- Any time anybody anywhere experiences any weather that they don't like, environmentalists jump up and do the Global warming! Global warming! cheer—but when environmentalists block brush clearing in a fire-prone area and the whole place subsequently goes up, as Santa Cruz recently did, do we hear but a peep? Heh. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Productivity Theater
Slashdot recently aggregated an article from The New Atlantis suggesting that multitasking makes us stupid. This is old news to a lot of people, myself included, but it's interesting how today's pervasive multitasking culture is finally engendering a healthy dose of backlash. Last November, there was an even blunter piece in The Atlantic Monthly that I had hoped to comment on here, but…I was interrupted. Turn your cellphone off and read both.
In human cognition as in computer systems, context changes are costly. Rational thought (as opposed to pure subconscious ideamaking) is strictly linear, and depends utterly on bringing a network of pertinent facts and relationships among facts to the forefront of the mind for easy reference. Lose that network and you will lose your train of thought; in fact, that's what “losing your train of thought” actually is. Some people may be better than others at picking up the train and slapping it down on another section of track without spilling the coal cars, but nobody delivers the load faster than the one who just brings it to the destination in uninterrupted linear fashion. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling himself.
That's the gist of both articles. The deeper question is this: Why do we believe that multitaking is better than focus? In part I think it's because our culture demands productivity, and multitasking is a sort of productivity theater: It makes our managers think we're productive because it gives the impression of furious constant activity. Alas, it makes us think we're productive as well, when in fact most of that furious constant activity is just us dodging what we really ought to be doing.
I've seen this effect in myself: When I'm working on something and hit a difficult spot, the less disciplined parts of me start looking for a context change. Hey, I haven't read email for awhile…hey, wasn't I supposed to call Keith? Hey, there's that corner of the basement that I keep meaning to tidy up…and so I drop my current task precisely when it would benefit the most from renewed and intensified focus.
This is hardly a modern phenomenon; what's different is that in the past it was considered a temptation to scatterbrained-ness and a failing inherent in weak minds. Today it's considered the hallmark of a truly modern intellect. Modern, sure, but hardly efficient: Allowing yourself this sort of unwarranted context change trains the mind to bounce from the easiest parts of one project to the easiest parts of another, making little genuine progress and getting very little to the finish line.
Much of the blame falls to a modern educational system that doesn't reward focus, followed by overworked managers who lack the time, the tools, and the gut instincts to understand “how things are going” in their organizations. HR doesn't help; people who insist on the time and the solitude to focus are often disparaged as “not team players” even when the work in question is not essentially collaborative. In my experience, most real productivity is achieved during “heads down” time, and most “teamwork” cooks down to kibitzing. In fact, the most productive meetings I recall were the ones where that obnoxious guy kept yelling “focus!” (Most of the time, that obnoxious guy was me.)
Flow follows focus. Systematically breaking focus leads to a state of mind that, irrespective of what it happens to be doing, is constantly wondering whether it should be doing something else. This way lies madness; nay; this is already madness. Resist it with everything you can muster.
