Mind like water

As I go through life I find strange parallels. I am not in anyway a mystic and view such things with a healthy (in my view) scepticism. It was thus with a little surprise that I found myself using a metaphor I recognised, from old oriental teachings, when I was trying to define how to get things done. I had in my mind a colleague who had a negative outlook and who could find the objections to anything. I was trying to classify the differences between this attitude and my own as I thrive on problems people claim are impossible.

I started by thinking about the fact that I am happy to throw out ideas even if they are a shade ridiculous. Occasionally one of these ideas, when examined closely, will be practical despite being ridiculous. It will approach things from a different angle. Once you have seen how it might work you explore all around it and you either end up with a new approach, or more likely a set of objections. You then look for ways of getting around all of the objections. Sometimes this will kill the idea off and you go back to throwing out ideas, but sometimes you will manage all of the objections, and in the process develop a new view and a new approach that makes the whole thing look obvious.

The analogy I saw was of a vessel to contain water. Let's imagine one of those stone ponds the Japanese supposedly have in their gardens. The pond has great workmanship to make it water tight. The water does not think "this is a watertight pond, let's give up" it just seeps into anywhere it can. Most of the cracks and crevices will not go anywhere, but it fills them anyway. If there is a route through it will try to fill that too, and end up leaking very slowly out through it. The leaking will slowly wear away at the sides and, ever so slowly, widen the path. In the end you will have a hole so large you cannot see how it could ever have been thought of as water tight. This is the process for doing the seemingly impossible.

I thought about this for a while and was struck by the tie up with many philosophies. Then today I was looking at an article about getting things done and noticed it had the phrase "mind like water". On first glance it seemed to be using it quite differently, but looking closer I am not sure that it really is.

He is talking about 'the ready state of the martial artist, poised and stress-free" and goes on to suggest that “Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax,”. If you think about it the water simply relaxes into the shape available and everything else follows. A less relaxed substance like earth would never make it out.

This could all be just coincidence, but I like to think that I am just seeing the same things as others because I am looking at the same sorts of people doing the same things. Human nature is probably much the same regardless of geography and chronology.

Rufus Evison

Children: a corollary on automation

First time you do something for your child you just do it.
Second time you show them how to do it for themselves.
third time you ask them to do it for you.

When to automate...

The first time you have to do something just do it.
The second time you have to do something think about how to do it with less effort or automatically.
The third time don't do it, automate it and get it done for you.

RufusM Evison

Privacy Online

I was just working on something completely unrelated when it was forced home upon me how little online privacy there is. I came across a snippet of information in my web analytics that told me that someone who works for Threshers is researching a certain view of someone who works for Marks and Spencers. I will not go into any more detail about this view, just that while I do not know either of the people involved I could possibly have relations with either in a work context. It seems almost frightening that in the course of my work, which is actually potentially related to both of these companies I could see things that neither party thinks has been made public.

I already knew that when you do anything online you leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind you. These allow people to follow you around if they want to do so. So why does it surprise me that these facts come to light? It surprised me because it is a concrete example where before I only had hypothetical examples.

Hypothetically you might be looking for a way to get back at a neighbour and so you might search for "bad things neighbour's-name" and then find a site which talks about your neighbour in a good way. You then leave, but your neighbour’s friend who runs the site sees the search engine term and goes to your neighbour and tells him that this referral occurred. Worse than that you searched from work and your company name was on the request. Your neighbour knows where you work. Now your neighbour can probably guess it was you. Small world online isn't it?

Things can get worse however. The site owner is a curious type and does a Google for the same terms and cannot see his site. He wonders how you came to be there and perseveres a bit. He discovers that for these terms he ranks 153 in the rankings and realises that to get there would involve paging though 16 pages of search results (standard config, it could be less pages if there are more results per page). That shows a certain amount of determination and implies strong feelings on behalf of the searcher. He can also see the snippet Google shows and realise that by this time you were clutching at straws. So now your neighbour knows you hate him with a vengeance (or were just drunk and stupid?). A little innocent web analytics has revealed something quite personal to someone you did not really want to know.

It all sounds pretty unlikely, far fetched and a bit of a stretch. Far fetched though it is, this is the equivalent of what has just happened. Given the snippet I have seen I am not going to take any action based on what I saw, but I could. I am an amiable sort, not given to giving people black looks, but if I were to give someone a look of hatred you can rest assured i would be looking over my shoulder first.