It is said that we live in the information age. Unfortunately, we’re not vouchsafed any guarantees as to the veracity or accuracy of the information on offer. And, paraphrasing C. Northcote Parkinson, to make matters worse, information increases in volume to fill the means available for its transmission. It has always been so.
All forms of primitive communication over distance, from the bullroarer, known throughout the world, to African drums and Native American smoke signals, have one thing in common: lack of bandwidth. This means that any message that is to be transmitted must be both simple and important. Clearly, there is no point in a message being capable of more than one interpretation, so there is no room for subtlety, and complex messages are impossible. Everything must be direct and to the point. I leave the question of who adjudicates in matters of importance for the moment.
Now look what happens with the invention of the electric telegraph. First, it becomes possible, thanks to Morse code, to transmit messages that are precise in meaning; second, there is a huge increase in the speed and range of transmission. And both greater precision and faster transmission mean that more messages can be sent in a given time. It is inevitable that some messages will be less important than others, and as the technology spreads, it also becomes inevitable that some messages aren’t important at all, whatever criteria you choose to adopt.
As new means of message transmission have come on stream, the trend towards unimportance and/or irrelevance in messages has intensified exponentially and has now reached the point where it has become almost impossible to avoid being swamped by what can only be described as ‘noise’. Only a very small proportion of the messages being transmitted in the modern era have content that is useful.
What I will call the information pyramid succinctly describes the current state of play. At the base are the billions of messages that are ephemeral, irrelevant or simply pointless. The messages posted on social networking sites and published in celebrity gossip columns fall unequivocally into this category. The next step in the hierarchy can be described as ‘information’ and has this characteristic: that it is useful beyond mere amusement or titillation. However, if that information is used only once before being allowed to sink back into the background noise, then its potential may be wasted.
On the other hand, translating this information into ‘knowledge’ requires a level of intellectual engagement that has become ever more difficult to sustain in the modern climate of triviality and superficial discourse. It also requires the ability to discriminate between the merely useful and the genuinely important.
Attaining the apex of the pyramid, which can be described as ‘wisdom’, is a lonely endeavour that few will attempt and that requires a superhuman effort. And, in a bizarre reversal of definitions, the attainment of such wisdom is likely to be seen by those who cannot distinguish between noise and information as pointless and irrelevant. Unfortunately, wisdom is always denigrated by people who do not or cannot understand it. Clever people are invariably viewed with suspicion.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Sunday, 28 March 2010
mystery
People are strange. To illustrate my point, I’d like to describe a phenomenon that I first noticed about ten years ago in a small shopping mall adjoining Tsuen Wan station. The Luk Yiu Galleria is like any other out-of-town shopping precinct. No fancy atrium, no escalators spanning more empty space than you want to think too closely about, no glass-walled elevators. In short, no flash. Just two longish corridors with shops on each side, and at each end two pairs of double glass doors that hinge both ways. Any door will remain open if opened to precisely ninety degrees, but the default position is that the doors are closed.
Outside the end nearer the station there is a small open square with flows of people to and from the station, the galleria, the top of a flight of stairs leading up from street level, a bridge crossing the main road, a walkway that skirts the station and gives access to other bridges crossing the road, and the foot of stairs leading down from the upper level (luckily, just a supermarket). I’ve never seen the square really crowded. Everyone is free to walk at whatever pace they choose to adopt. However, as you may have noticed, given the possible permutations of exit and entry points, flows of people must be moving in at least three and possibly four independent directions. But guess what? Nobody breaks stride. They instinctively plot a course through the gaps in everyone else’s trajectories. Naturally, this has the makings of a splendid game. Moving quickly through crowds is a keen test of mental and physical agility, and this is somewhere to practise your skills, not learn them.
However, that was a digression. The other end of the galleria leads to a housing estate, so there is quite a lot of traffic through the doors, but not so much that if you see that someone is approaching from the opposite direction you can’t easily choose another door to go through. Which is what happens. Nothing unusual so far.
For reasons that I’ve always assumed were completely arbitrary, one of the outer doors would occasionally be left in the open position. Straight away, the game changes. Now when two people approach from opposite directions, both go for the open door. And whoever reaches the door second politely waits for the other to pass through before proceeding. Why not immediately choose another door? It’s what you would do if all four doors were closed. It’s what I always do. I’ve never been able to answer this question to my satisfaction, although I do have a theory.
People think only when they think they need to. Which, when you think about it, is a serious waste of resources.
Outside the end nearer the station there is a small open square with flows of people to and from the station, the galleria, the top of a flight of stairs leading up from street level, a bridge crossing the main road, a walkway that skirts the station and gives access to other bridges crossing the road, and the foot of stairs leading down from the upper level (luckily, just a supermarket). I’ve never seen the square really crowded. Everyone is free to walk at whatever pace they choose to adopt. However, as you may have noticed, given the possible permutations of exit and entry points, flows of people must be moving in at least three and possibly four independent directions. But guess what? Nobody breaks stride. They instinctively plot a course through the gaps in everyone else’s trajectories. Naturally, this has the makings of a splendid game. Moving quickly through crowds is a keen test of mental and physical agility, and this is somewhere to practise your skills, not learn them.
However, that was a digression. The other end of the galleria leads to a housing estate, so there is quite a lot of traffic through the doors, but not so much that if you see that someone is approaching from the opposite direction you can’t easily choose another door to go through. Which is what happens. Nothing unusual so far.
For reasons that I’ve always assumed were completely arbitrary, one of the outer doors would occasionally be left in the open position. Straight away, the game changes. Now when two people approach from opposite directions, both go for the open door. And whoever reaches the door second politely waits for the other to pass through before proceeding. Why not immediately choose another door? It’s what you would do if all four doors were closed. It’s what I always do. I’ve never been able to answer this question to my satisfaction, although I do have a theory.
People think only when they think they need to. Which, when you think about it, is a serious waste of resources.
Saturday, 27 March 2010
unsympathetic magic
During my recent illness, my wife has steadfastly refused to allow me to drink coffee.
“Coffee makes you cough,” she says, citing some arcane point of Chinese medicine.
“In that case,” I suggest, “eating toffee should make me tough.”
My wife laughs, but the result remains the same.
No coffee.
“Coffee makes you cough,” she says, citing some arcane point of Chinese medicine.
“In that case,” I suggest, “eating toffee should make me tough.”
My wife laughs, but the result remains the same.
No coffee.
Friday, 26 March 2010
birdsong
I bought an MP3 player a couple of years ago, because I listen to music all the time at home, and I thought it would be a good idea to be able to listen to music while on the move. I hardly ever use it. For obvious reasons, I wouldn’t consider using it while cycling, but even when I’m merely out walking I’d rather listen to the birds.
In fact, I’ve heard it argued, plausibly, that birdsong was the inspiration for the development of music in primitive human societies. However, I’m not suggesting that Fanling is awash with natural melody, because it isn’t. My conjecture is that had early music been inspired by the birdsong around these parts, we might have ignored Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and the Beatles, and all other intervening steps in the development of music, and jumped straight to Michael Tippett, John Cage and Harrison Birtwistle.
One thing that is certainly absent is an authentic songbird, a local equivalent of the English blackbird or thrush. Instead, every bird around these parts has a disappointingly brief, albeit distinctive, call. Some are more mellifluous than others, but most are shrill and at least slightly discordant. I’ve found it impossible to formally identify any of the main ‘players’, which tend to remain well hidden in the foliage when they kick off, so I’ve taken to giving names to birds based solely on their calls.
The ‘demented referee’ is a typical example: I’ve never actually seen one, but I’ve given it this name because its call sounds like a sequence of perhaps four short, sharp blasts on one of those old-fashioned whistles with a pea in it. It is almost possible to hear the pea rattling round inside the whistle, and you can sense the red card being pulled out as the referee rushes to the point of some particularly nasty piece of foul play.
Another is the ‘swanee whistler’. This ‘performer’ has a call that sounds like a swanee whistle as the plunger is pulled out. This is usually repeated between five and twenty times at roughly one-second intervals, and the amusing part is that it starts quietly, almost as if the whistler is tuning up, but then gets progressively louder. It is as if the bird thinks “not loud enough; try again”. And, as often as not, as the calls grow louder the note cracks, as if the swanee whistle is being overblown to produce a higher harmonic rather than the natural note.
Did I mention that the birds around here are LOUD? And none is louder than the ‘telephone ringer’. This bird’s call sounds like a higher-pitched version of the two-note ringtone of a 1970s telephone fed through one of those old-fashioned reverb amplifiers that used to be popular in the 1970s. If you were to hear it for the first time from fifty yards behind you, you would turn around and exclaim:
“What the hell was that?”
It is that loud. In fact, I suspect that some plant in the neighbourhood is a natural source of amphetamine, which then gets into the local food chain by being eaten by cicadas (which are also extremely loud). These are then eaten by the birds. Even the spotted doves, which are also common, coo three or four times louder than I’ve ever heard doves coo anywhere else.
There is also a bird that sounds like a malevolent cross between a kookaburra and a rooster, and another that sounds as if someone has inadvertently triggered a burglar alarm, although this latter may be the telephone ringer in panic mode, so I’ve refrained from giving it a name. And then there are the birds whose calls are not especially distinctive but that grab my attention because they usually turn up in groups of three or four in the tree in front of our house and sound as if they’re arguing over something or other, perhaps over who is loudest. When they appear early in the morning, they are as likely as not to drown out the alarm clock, which does make me wonder, on some mornings, why we bother with such a device in the first place.
It is sometimes said that birdsong is the music of the gods, but if this is the case, on the evidence of my own ears, then the heaven inhabited by these gods is the same heaven that was reduced to a state of chaos by the Monkey King in the well-known Chinese legend. Monkey, with his famous ‘as-you-will’ cudgel, would have felt right at home in the countryside around here.
In fact, I’ve heard it argued, plausibly, that birdsong was the inspiration for the development of music in primitive human societies. However, I’m not suggesting that Fanling is awash with natural melody, because it isn’t. My conjecture is that had early music been inspired by the birdsong around these parts, we might have ignored Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and the Beatles, and all other intervening steps in the development of music, and jumped straight to Michael Tippett, John Cage and Harrison Birtwistle.
One thing that is certainly absent is an authentic songbird, a local equivalent of the English blackbird or thrush. Instead, every bird around these parts has a disappointingly brief, albeit distinctive, call. Some are more mellifluous than others, but most are shrill and at least slightly discordant. I’ve found it impossible to formally identify any of the main ‘players’, which tend to remain well hidden in the foliage when they kick off, so I’ve taken to giving names to birds based solely on their calls.
The ‘demented referee’ is a typical example: I’ve never actually seen one, but I’ve given it this name because its call sounds like a sequence of perhaps four short, sharp blasts on one of those old-fashioned whistles with a pea in it. It is almost possible to hear the pea rattling round inside the whistle, and you can sense the red card being pulled out as the referee rushes to the point of some particularly nasty piece of foul play.
Another is the ‘swanee whistler’. This ‘performer’ has a call that sounds like a swanee whistle as the plunger is pulled out. This is usually repeated between five and twenty times at roughly one-second intervals, and the amusing part is that it starts quietly, almost as if the whistler is tuning up, but then gets progressively louder. It is as if the bird thinks “not loud enough; try again”. And, as often as not, as the calls grow louder the note cracks, as if the swanee whistle is being overblown to produce a higher harmonic rather than the natural note.
Did I mention that the birds around here are LOUD? And none is louder than the ‘telephone ringer’. This bird’s call sounds like a higher-pitched version of the two-note ringtone of a 1970s telephone fed through one of those old-fashioned reverb amplifiers that used to be popular in the 1970s. If you were to hear it for the first time from fifty yards behind you, you would turn around and exclaim:
“What the hell was that?”
It is that loud. In fact, I suspect that some plant in the neighbourhood is a natural source of amphetamine, which then gets into the local food chain by being eaten by cicadas (which are also extremely loud). These are then eaten by the birds. Even the spotted doves, which are also common, coo three or four times louder than I’ve ever heard doves coo anywhere else.
There is also a bird that sounds like a malevolent cross between a kookaburra and a rooster, and another that sounds as if someone has inadvertently triggered a burglar alarm, although this latter may be the telephone ringer in panic mode, so I’ve refrained from giving it a name. And then there are the birds whose calls are not especially distinctive but that grab my attention because they usually turn up in groups of three or four in the tree in front of our house and sound as if they’re arguing over something or other, perhaps over who is loudest. When they appear early in the morning, they are as likely as not to drown out the alarm clock, which does make me wonder, on some mornings, why we bother with such a device in the first place.
It is sometimes said that birdsong is the music of the gods, but if this is the case, on the evidence of my own ears, then the heaven inhabited by these gods is the same heaven that was reduced to a state of chaos by the Monkey King in the well-known Chinese legend. Monkey, with his famous ‘as-you-will’ cudgel, would have felt right at home in the countryside around here.
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