The Bowl of Curiosities: 22 January 2019
In the Bowl of Curiosities, I keep the objects that catch my attention or peak my curiosity. In 2019, my intention is to be disciplined about curating and publishing the things I find interesting.
The image for this post is by Shaouraav Shreshtha and is available from Unsplash
Article(s) of Interest
This section has articles that I read, and thought were interesting.
A mix of interesting things this week. First, some fiction in the Nautilus Magazine by Sarah Batkie, Echoes.
What happens when someone is simultaneously lost and found?
Peter H. Diamandis, How the spatial web will transform every element of our careers.
What is the future of work? Is our future one of ‘technological socialism’ (where technology is taking care of our needs)? Or is our future workplace completely virtualized, whereby we hang out at home in our PJs while walking about our virtual corporate headquarters?
The World Economic Forum, We used AI to study the world’s toilets. This is what we found.
The era of Big Data has unfolded over the past five to ten years, with engineers and business people focused on building new technologies to deal with both the quantity of data and the speed of its transfer. Today, data is generated in profound volumes and, as the era progresses, data is no longer solely considered a commodity by companies who can leverage it, but a fundamental catalyst to solve some of the world's most complex social issues. With reams of public data and open-source artificial intelligence at our fingertips, the challenge for businesses does not lie in access to data, but in how to use data creatively to stay competitive, innovative and philanthropic.
Kevin Berger, How We’ll Forget John Lennon. Our culture has two types of forgetting. Nautilus Magazine.
Last month Hidalgo and colleagues published a Nature paper that put his crafty data-mining talents to work on another question: How do people and products drift out of the cultural picture? They traced the fade-out of songs, movies, sports stars, patents, and scientific publications. They drew on data from sources such as Billboard, Spotify, IMDB, Wikipedia, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the American Physical Society, which has gathered information on physics articles from 1896 to 2016. Hidalgo’s team then designed mathematical models to calculate the rate of decline of the songs, people, and scientific papers. The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years.
From the Library
There are so many leadership and management books produced every year. Most, in my view, are filled with meaningless drivel. So, I am revisiting the books that shaped my thinking about people, work and organisation.
Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in Sydney in 2014.
The View from the Bridge collects together Ryckmans 1996 Boyer Lectures. Ryckmans writing is wonderfully engaging and clear. The subject of these lectures are Learning, Reading Writing, Gong Abroad and Staying Home. As he always did, Ryckmans covers all sorts of topics. In his own words:
These topics will not be methodically tackled in symmetrical segments; their treatment will be uneven; at times their connections may seem loose, or their contents may overlap. But the experience of life itself is not always coherent. Often it is fragmented, and never tidily cut and packed, and on these issue it would certainly not be wise to veer to far away from life.
My copy of The View from the Bridge well thumbed and covered in notes. It is one of my favourite books.
Peter Cravens reflection on Simon Leys life is here.
Ghost Stories
I have had a copy of ‘Ghost: 100 stories to read with the lights on’ by Louise Welsh on my bedside table for, maybe, three years. I don’t remember buying it. I only dip into Ghost infrequently and have made no progress in getting through the 100 short stories. In 2019, I intend to work my way through this book and document my progress here.
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)
The narrator tries to convince the reader of his sanity by explaining in detail how he went about killing an old man with a ‘vulture-eye’. The plan is highly rational but the purpose behind it not so much. Ultimately, the police pay a visit to a house that shows not sign of disturbance (the body has been dismembered and carefully hidden under the floorboards). Anyway growing dread at being caught, possibly guilt, or just not being entirely together leads the narrator hear thumping sound that he thinks is the dead mans heart. It all gets too much and the narrator blurts out his guilt.
It’s a good short story. I enjoyed it. Again, the clarity and craft of writing are on show.
Progress on Projects
I stared 2019 with three projects I wanted interested to advance. I am reporting my thinking and progress here. It’s an accountability thing. The rationale for the projects is briefly outlined in the 1 January 2019 edition of the Bowl of Curiosities.
Project 1: Finding Meaning at Work (with Sally Dorsett)
Having decided on the broad scope of our interests we are now getting together the material that will support the conduct of the research eg ethics and information forms. We also have an opportunity to announce our project through a short blog piece, which we need to write.
Project 2: Trust and Technology
I read ‘Who pushes the button?’ by Rachel Poltnick published in Aeon. Good article.
The act of pushing a button is central to how we work, play and communicate, but opposition to buttons and what they represent has a long history. In 1903, a French nobleman, the Marquis de Castellane, lamented in a newspaper editorial:
It is no longer necessary to speak to be served. You step into a hotel, press the button, and a succulent luncheon appears suddenly before your delighted vision. Ten seconds later you feel chilly; you press another button, and presto! your fireplace is lighted up as if by magic. Electric buttons have become the masters of the world, overcoming distance, doing away with the necessity for forethought and, for that matter, for thought at all.
Like many observers at the turn of the 20th century, caught between romantic optimism and moral panic over industrialisation, de Castellane wondered: ‘Do you not think that this prodigious diffusion of mechanism is likely to render the world terribly monotonous and fastidious? To deal no longer with men, but to be dependent on things!’ Pushing buttons made life too easy, too simplistic, or too rote, when a single finger-action could conjure one’s desires. For de Castellane, a reliance upon machines tipped the scales in favour of ‘things’ over human beings, and he anxiously predicted that ‘the result of too much simplification will be to suppress the joys of life altogether’.
Project 3. Meditations on Faith, Hope, Leadership and Management
I was listening to Faith by the Cure (off the album of the same name).
The lyrics include: I went away alone/ With nothing left/ But faith.
Faith as resignation once hope has failed. In leadership and management is there a time when hope fails and we are left with faith. What does that look like?
A Thought to End
I would like to end with someone else’s thought. In this case, Pierre Ryckmans.
In fact, reading not only transforms your life, sometimes it completes it—even eclipses it—a situation which has memorably evoked by Logan Pearsall Smith: “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading”.
