Pecha Kucha 6/7: Words Need Context

Slide 6

This is the neighborhood where I grew up as a kid. Well, it's really more limited to the area in the blue square. Really, it's the houses and the alley that's outlined in red. The word "neighborhood" worked just fine when I first said it, but once I defined it in detail, the original use seems incorrect and ambiguous.

Slide 7

Other words, like "Culture," we accept in most conversations when it is used, but the actual definition is quite complex, and it's actually changed significantly in meaning over the last couple of centuries. How many people are enough to form a culture? An entire country? A tribe? A corporation?

And can an individual represent a culture? Suddenly the word itself has no borders, no Form. With too much scrutiny and not enough context, the meaning eludes us.

Pecha Kucha 4/5 : The Power and Weakness of Words

Slide 4:

 

Words are terrific, really. If I tell you go to Wittgenstein's house, here's the address, and when you get there, his is the BLUE door, you're set. You've got no questions, you nod, and when you arrive you knock on the correct door.

Slide 5:

But that doesn't mean that the word BLUE is going to always be so helpful. Plato says there is an ideal BLUE out there, but sometimes it's just not that simple, and with a whole host of competing stimuli that all meet the inadequate criteria "is blue," then our minds cannot find that comforting certainty.

Pecha Kucha 2/3 of 20: Hardwired to Simplify

In the first slide I talked about how we humans tend to leap at conclusions (where “at” implies a little less accuracy than leaping “to” conclusions) in conversation, taking words we hear and say and assuming their meaning is absolute.

Here’s slide 2:

We are happy when things are really clear. Shallow rapid processing, snap decisions, black and white.

Grey areas require more processing and contemplation and are therefore not easy, they have no nice edges. Where does black stop being black, and when is it really white? Hard for our minds to figure that out.

These color words are a good example of how we gravitate to definite meanings, and how we describe things that are ambiguous – looking for edges and sometimes not finding them.

Slide 3:

We have had this ability of rapid shallow processing for a long time. Plato was a deep thinker and wondered about it. He suggested there were ideal “Forms” that existed independently that our minds accessed so we could compare reality against them, resulting in recognition and confidence. Clever. We see a chair, compare it to the Form, it's a match (but never as pure).

 

Pecha Kucha 1 of 20: Two Misperceptions about Communicating

Well, I'll tell you, twenty slides of twenty seconds apiece is quite a challenge if you try to say too much (more info on "Pecha Kucha"  or ペチャクチャ here). At several points I felt like Doctor Who running around gesturing like a madman and speaking a thousand words a minute. It went well however and I enjoyed it, the high-speed transfer of information. Maybe that'll just have to be my style, although I think I can get to the point quicker with practice.

At the time of this blog entry then, I've presented "Grains of Sand" once. Slide one:

Two diagrams, completely symbolic, representing two key misperceptions we have when communicating.

The first, when I speak, I'm certain that the other person hearing me knows exactly what I meant.

And the second, when they speak to me, I'm certain that I understand exactly what they meant.

We understand, but only to an imperfect degree, which is usually but not always sufficient for communication to be considered successful.

Pecha Kucha

There's a phenomenon called Pecha Kucha that's like a combination of beat poetry and PowerPoint presentations. It's a standardized format simply restricting the presenter to 20 slides, each lasting exactly and only 20 seconds.

Apparently there are gatherings, where folks get up and for 6:40.0 show you slides and talk about something.

My boss recently offered a few of us on the team a chance to give a Pecha Kucha presentation to the entire team here in Seattle, about 40 of us, and I'm giving mine tomorrow.

I have 16 slides in no particular order although it's starting to take shape. The topic is meandering but I think that's OK, it's not necessarily about making a single point per se. The title is Grains of Sand, it's going to be roughly about humans tending to perceive groups and patterns, how we process everything in our brains and how words are just like our other groups.

All in six minutes forty seconds, with twenty slides. I'll post each of them in order here with essentially what I said, I'll be improvising.

Why Now

There are two significant contributors to my decision to write about the idea of now. The first is my passion for motorsports and my fascination with marquis prototype racing. The second is a lifetime gift I have had that lets me improvise freely on piano, which I have studied and nurtured. What an odd combination those make, but they share a unique metaphorical relationship (ooh that's a rough go) or perhaps an image they share in common. It's like the Golden Gate Bridge but with one central tower, and its reflection.

This report only covers the first, stay tuned for the second, which should set the stage for musical now.

I love this concept and probably could write a lot about it; not that I know everything, that's not what I'm implying, it's that I'd want to see if I could ever get the idea right. Here's a go: imagine a world hero-type motorcycle racer, a champion at muscling and finessing a 337-pound, 230+ horsepower bike at speeds of over 200 miles an hour. And while that's fast, what's amazing is how they then brake so hard their rear tires skip around, at the very last moment tipping into a corner at the exact speed they wanted that lets them lean deeply over, dipping their knees down to sense how close the tarmac screaming by underneath them is.

While riding a motorcycle at these speeds, the rider’s sense of now is, in my opinion, significantly elongated, and in two ways that are highly related to time. First, if you for any reason might be day dreaming and thinking about those umbrella girls back in the paddock, and you end up a long straightaway getting on your brakes just too late, then the bike has gotten away from you, and it will carry you off of the track or well off the line, so you cast you mind far, far ahead, and steer a course that will keep your bike most stable in dizzying turns. When you see a corner, you see three more corners ahead too because how you enter this one sets you up for the quickest run through them. So their mind, their consciousness and the information pouring in their eyes combine; they are present in the next three turns already, and a ghostly part of them has already stored the line through all the remaining turns on the track.

Bright here, but sprawling forwards like the cables running down and away from the bridge tower in the center, dimming but present.

And second, that ghost track in their minds is counting 25 laps or more, inhabiting longer-term stratagems, and dashing for sudden opportunities, all experienced with relationship to the final lap and the finish line, where suddenly their now snaps in tightly in whatever reflections spring into their minds.

It’s a highly rarified experience but for those who do know it, now is bright and all around them; they can feel their momentum hundreds of meters ahead of them, and it is that self they are propelling with every action they take with their bodies. Every choreographed and rehearsed movement is only setting the riders up for the next three corners, which are several and even many seconds away from their bodies. Their now is so powerfully absorbed with their life or death trajectory (RIP SuperSic) that it must have stretched, either straight from their eyes, ahead from them away into the distance, or starting even behind them where they keep in mind a rival world hero-type rider there, who jockeys and scrambles, looking for opportunities…

 

Hemispheres

In the opening scene of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, his character Chayce considers a friend’s theory of jet lag as she confronts her own, recently arrived in London from across the Atlantic. The theory is that the soul can’t keep up with a jet airplane and gets left behind, towed on a stretchy and ethereal connection that ensures a reunion, but not for a while.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the theory but I like the idea of it, and having just returned home after 16 hours of air travel from Buenos Aires it seems easier to consider. I’m sure Gibson’s intent was not to suggest it as a serious proposal, more as just the very kind of slick metaphor that the fictional Chayce’s friend would come up with. I think the idea doesn’t work quite as well for longitudinal travel, especially if the origin and destination have fairly similar time zones, as long as you get enough sleep during the “night” which I didn’t. Five hours difference is still plenty however, so I’m feeling pretty tired.

The odd part is that when I was in Buenos Aires, it was summertime. Every part of me that had adjusted itself to winter and to the long darkness was deeply and unnaturally confused. It was hard to inhabit a world in summer in a way that wasn’t tinged with an ongoing sense of wonder and disturbance; only in a tiny part of human existence has there ever been the possibility of changing seasons in a day. Now that I am home again, it is stranger to think “now it is winter” than it was before I left. Before I left, my life had made the slow and significant adaptation to winter; all my decisions for warm clothes and the cold outdoors, my sensations when waking in the dark mornings, my preferences for foods like winter greens and squashes, so many subtle adjustments that as they slowly manifest determine the obvious answer to the question “what season is it now?”

And here I am, thinking about my new friends and recent adventures in a place where it is still warm outside despite being five hours ahead at two in the morning; they cannot hear the cold rain on my skylights or the pop of the fire next to me as I write. Now, it is winter, but not in the same way as it was before. My answer to the question now is, “where?” which would ordinarily be a pompous and academic response, but it isn’t to me because two days ago I slept with only a sheet and tonight there will be deep covers.

It makes me wonder what would happen if we somehow brought a farmer from ages ago and took him to the other hemisphere. So much impossibility that we take for granted, yet even so causes a visceral disharmony when we really experience the actual sensation of having the world around us so dramatically altered. Seasons are supposed to mark time at a stately and almost imperceptible pace; our bodies are adapted to long cycles.

Now it is winter again, but it is summer too, in a faraway storybook land filled with strange trees and different languages and mysterious customs; now, I am not sure.