I have wrote before of the nature of design, of how it invades our lives in every way, of how everything right down the clothes you are wearing and the food you eat has been created by design. One part of our lives where that is most ambiguous is perhaps in the food we eat. I said it was created by design and it is true, not just of processed foods and food that does not occur naturally, but of the things we don't really associate as being unnatural.
For the sake of this post I define unnatural as being anything that you could not find in the wild. When you have that definition and you start to take a closer look at the things we eat we start to realise that most of it we would never think of being wild. Even the products that come from animals, like chicken, we don't imagine being wild. The image of a wild chicken for example isn't one most people in the UK could picture, the image of chickens that we think of are those on farms, or in battery farms depending on how much you pay for it. The idea of chickens running through fields is completely alien to us, yet wild chickens do exist, not so much in the UK but in other countries and they are not a case of chickens kept for food escaping - that would be putting the cart before the horse, the chickens we eat after all are descended from chickens that were wild and were caught and kept to provide food.
Go beyond the meats we eat and enter into the realm of vegetables, something we consider wholly more organic and earthy - when was the last time you saw a wild carrot? Would you even know what a wild carrot looks like or where you would look? Before writing this post I didn't either. This whole post came from the thought of growing carrots and thinking I would need seeds then thinking where do carrot seeds come from - carrots of course but I've never seen a carrot with seeds, or even a flower from which to harvest them. The carrots we eat today are descended from wild carrots. They would not occur naturally in the wild, not in the form we eat. The common carrot today is the result of a long and arduous selective breeding process that eventually produced what we eat today.
The word 'wild' inspires visions of feral animals but we forget the fruits and vegetables and all else we eat. The truth is that there is so much that we survive on that has been designed, even the food we call organic is still the product of human intervention, it may be grown free from additives and preservatives and pesticides et al but they still wouldn't occur in nature in the form we eat so can we really call them organic?
Failure
When I want to write, but I do not know what I want to write about, I just start writing. Even if it is complete gibberish, meaningless or a plethora of clichés mixed with stock sentences the point isn't what I am writing but the fact that I write something, anything.
I do this, because if you try to think of what to write and never put anything down in the hope that the perfect idea will come to you, then at the end of the day what you will most likely end up with is a blank page. This extends beyond writing though, into every part of our lives. If you do nothing for want of waiting to know what you want to do then you'll end up doing what you are doing - nothing. If you want to do something then you have to do just that, you have to do something.
When it comes to writing as I start to write I often think that something is wrong, or that something doesn't work, or that I would rather it take a different direction, at which point I rework what I have done. Changing things, adding more, or sometimes starting over. The point is the more you do it the more the wheels of thought turn. Doing something even if it is something that isn't worthy of your skills or your talent opens your eyes to what you want to do. Knowing exactly what you want to do is as much about knowing what you do not want to do. The more you know what you do not want to do the narrower the possibilities become until you realise what it is you do want. With writing this takes the form of abandoning various story lines and concepts that you know would never work, but in trying them out you often discover what would work better than what you tried. In Mathematics this is called trial and improvement, in life we call it trial and error, in either case the key word is trial. If you don't try then you will never succeed, yes, you may fail, but if you never try then you have already failed before you have even begun. As they say the only true failure is the failure to try.
We often look on our failures as things which we would rather forget. As things that are negative, that have no merit and no place in our lives. The truth is that the learning process no matter what it is we wish to learn, involves repetition, it involves accepting our failures and trying again. No human ever crawled across the floor as a baby, stood up and walked and never fell over. Learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to read and write, these are all things that we try and fail and try again and keep trying until we get it right. We may not remember the trials we went through to master these skills, but we do not think anything less of anyone who made the same mistakes. Making mistakes is part of what makes us human. Why then do we try to hide our failures from others? Why is it when we meet people we feel embarrassment about admitting the things we did wrong? No matter who you are, no matter where you work, or play, or study, or dream, or think, or plan, or scheme, we all make mistakes at some point.
There are two types of people I do not trust instinctively, those who say they have never failed at something, and those who always smile. I don't care how happy you are in your life if you constantly smile all it tells me is that you have something to hide and you are dishonest. You can be as defensive about that as you want. I am not the only person that thinks this way either so if you are one of those people then all I have to say is you are fooling no-one but yourself. At the end of the day if you can't be yourself and be true to yourself how can you ever expect anyone to trust you to be honest to them.
I do this, because if you try to think of what to write and never put anything down in the hope that the perfect idea will come to you, then at the end of the day what you will most likely end up with is a blank page. This extends beyond writing though, into every part of our lives. If you do nothing for want of waiting to know what you want to do then you'll end up doing what you are doing - nothing. If you want to do something then you have to do just that, you have to do something.
When it comes to writing as I start to write I often think that something is wrong, or that something doesn't work, or that I would rather it take a different direction, at which point I rework what I have done. Changing things, adding more, or sometimes starting over. The point is the more you do it the more the wheels of thought turn. Doing something even if it is something that isn't worthy of your skills or your talent opens your eyes to what you want to do. Knowing exactly what you want to do is as much about knowing what you do not want to do. The more you know what you do not want to do the narrower the possibilities become until you realise what it is you do want. With writing this takes the form of abandoning various story lines and concepts that you know would never work, but in trying them out you often discover what would work better than what you tried. In Mathematics this is called trial and improvement, in life we call it trial and error, in either case the key word is trial. If you don't try then you will never succeed, yes, you may fail, but if you never try then you have already failed before you have even begun. As they say the only true failure is the failure to try.
We often look on our failures as things which we would rather forget. As things that are negative, that have no merit and no place in our lives. The truth is that the learning process no matter what it is we wish to learn, involves repetition, it involves accepting our failures and trying again. No human ever crawled across the floor as a baby, stood up and walked and never fell over. Learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to read and write, these are all things that we try and fail and try again and keep trying until we get it right. We may not remember the trials we went through to master these skills, but we do not think anything less of anyone who made the same mistakes. Making mistakes is part of what makes us human. Why then do we try to hide our failures from others? Why is it when we meet people we feel embarrassment about admitting the things we did wrong? No matter who you are, no matter where you work, or play, or study, or dream, or think, or plan, or scheme, we all make mistakes at some point.
There are two types of people I do not trust instinctively, those who say they have never failed at something, and those who always smile. I don't care how happy you are in your life if you constantly smile all it tells me is that you have something to hide and you are dishonest. You can be as defensive about that as you want. I am not the only person that thinks this way either so if you are one of those people then all I have to say is you are fooling no-one but yourself. At the end of the day if you can't be yourself and be true to yourself how can you ever expect anyone to trust you to be honest to them.
Like
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked. I think most people want to be liked. It's part of growing up, we want to have friends and we want everyone to like us. As we get older though we inevitably meet people we don't like, people who no matter what we do we just do not like. It takes a little longer for us to realise that this is a two way street and that the same applies to others - namely that there will be people that do not like us. No matter what we do, they will never like us.
One of the hardest things to learn is perhaps the ability to recognise people who we should avoid. We all have first impressions of people that often grow as we see more of those people. The problem with taking first impressions as the basis for how we treat someone, is that our first impressions are often wrong. If you are in any way shy or reserved you will know from your own experience that you will find it hard to open up to people and that you will be acutely aware that the first impression you give others is not accurate. People who are shy by nature are usually not shy at all around people they know and feel comfortable with. Around these people they can be the exact opposite.
For those reasons the first impressions we experience are often judged and banked - whether good or bad we want to see more of that person before we form our conclusions. How long it takes us to realise whether our judge of character was accurate will vary - not just between you and I but between people we meet - some people show their true colours sooner than others.
It's natural to want people to like you, and it's natural to want to like others. After all we don't actively seek out conflict - unless you're a troll. Accepting that some people just aren't worth it is something that is hard, because it goes against what we want - our desire to be harmonious.
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked, now that I have grown older and wiser I don't care whether people like me or not. I treat people the way they treat me. Be nice to me and I will be nice to you. Be a cunt to me and I will be a cunt to you. Do not play games with me because I am capable of more than you could ever know. As the saying goes:
One of the hardest things to learn is perhaps the ability to recognise people who we should avoid. We all have first impressions of people that often grow as we see more of those people. The problem with taking first impressions as the basis for how we treat someone, is that our first impressions are often wrong. If you are in any way shy or reserved you will know from your own experience that you will find it hard to open up to people and that you will be acutely aware that the first impression you give others is not accurate. People who are shy by nature are usually not shy at all around people they know and feel comfortable with. Around these people they can be the exact opposite.
For those reasons the first impressions we experience are often judged and banked - whether good or bad we want to see more of that person before we form our conclusions. How long it takes us to realise whether our judge of character was accurate will vary - not just between you and I but between people we meet - some people show their true colours sooner than others.
It's natural to want people to like you, and it's natural to want to like others. After all we don't actively seek out conflict - unless you're a troll. Accepting that some people just aren't worth it is something that is hard, because it goes against what we want - our desire to be harmonious.
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked, now that I have grown older and wiser I don't care whether people like me or not. I treat people the way they treat me. Be nice to me and I will be nice to you. Be a cunt to me and I will be a cunt to you. Do not play games with me because I am capable of more than you could ever know. As the saying goes:
"It's the quiet ones you have to look out for"
1 Billion Breaths
Imagine if you will, a world where the length of our lives was predetermined by our number of breaths. That is imagine a world where every human being breathes 1 billion times, with the 1 billionth breath being their last.
If you maintained a constant rate of breathing that consisted of you taking 1 second to breathe in, 1 seconds to hold, 1 second to breathe out, that would amount to 3 seconds per breath. At that rate you would live for 3 billion seconds - or 95 years, and 1 and a half months give or take.
This of course relies on the unlikely scenario where your breathing remained constant your entire life. That's not likely to happen regardless of any degree of self control as we are not always conscious of our breathing - we're not always conscious either for that matter. When we are in an agitated state, moving about a lot, doing exercise or playing sport, or even just sleeping our breathing changes pace.
Imagine a world where we knew that we would at most live to exactly 1 billion breaths. This isn't conducive to a fixed time period. The more active we became the shorter our lives would become. If this were a reality for humans, our behaviour could dramatically change. For one neonatal style classes teaching people how to breathe would probably be taught in our schools. Having children and raising them would be one of the biggest blows to your breath allowance. Having sex would also have a big impact on how long we live - would that stop us doing it so much?
Would people shift geographically? Would you move to a climate that made it easier to breathe or one that was conducive with a relaxed state. Or would you just say fuck it all and live your life like nothing was any different and know that your days are numbered and there's nothing you can do about it?
If you maintained a constant rate of breathing that consisted of you taking 1 second to breathe in, 1 seconds to hold, 1 second to breathe out, that would amount to 3 seconds per breath. At that rate you would live for 3 billion seconds - or 95 years, and 1 and a half months give or take.
This of course relies on the unlikely scenario where your breathing remained constant your entire life. That's not likely to happen regardless of any degree of self control as we are not always conscious of our breathing - we're not always conscious either for that matter. When we are in an agitated state, moving about a lot, doing exercise or playing sport, or even just sleeping our breathing changes pace.
Imagine a world where we knew that we would at most live to exactly 1 billion breaths. This isn't conducive to a fixed time period. The more active we became the shorter our lives would become. If this were a reality for humans, our behaviour could dramatically change. For one neonatal style classes teaching people how to breathe would probably be taught in our schools. Having children and raising them would be one of the biggest blows to your breath allowance. Having sex would also have a big impact on how long we live - would that stop us doing it so much?
Would people shift geographically? Would you move to a climate that made it easier to breathe or one that was conducive with a relaxed state. Or would you just say fuck it all and live your life like nothing was any different and know that your days are numbered and there's nothing you can do about it?
11
Your mobile phone number is 11 digits long. All I need is those 11 digits to be able to speak to you, hear your voice, see you, and for you to see me. Not to mention a whole host of other forms of communication that our smart phones now open up to us.
I think about the people in my life and how much we stay in touch. I think about the impact they have had on my life and I often wonder and sometimes wish that I had met them sooner than I did. It's incredible to think that 10 years ago my life could have been so different if I had been in touch with the people I am today. All it would have taken was a phone number, their number, obviously since I knew my own, what I needed was theirs.
11 digits separated us, well if you're in the UK it would be 9 actually since all UK mobile numbers begin 07, so all that would have been needed was the other 9 digits. I think it's human nature to look back on your childhood, or your teenage years or your young adult life and think if only I knew then what I know now - that sentiment is usually connected with some deep understanding of the world we have gained or some invaluable experience or sometimes just a warning not to do something. We often think of those messages we would give our past selves as something magnanimous, the thought may not ever cross our minds that something as incredibly simple as a string of digits could completely change the course of our lives [unless you're a lottery dreamer].
I look at my phone and the numbers of the people I speak to most and it makes me smile when I think that whoever I meet in the future, wherever they are now, if they read this, their 11 digits are all that separate us. Posting mine would be the easiest way to remove that separation. I am not going to do that though because for every person that could come into my life and make it better there are hundreds that could make it worse. This isn't really aimed at anyone in particular or an effort to reach out to people it's more of a contemplation of the reality that those lyrics - "somewhere just beyond my reach there's someone reaching back for me" - once meant a lot more than they do today, our reach is far wider than ever before and that gap between yours and mine, or whoever you are reaching out for is a lot narrower than we realise.
There is however a question which allows us to dance with destiny, that is, how different would our relationships with those people be if we had not met at the exact time and place and under the circumstances that we did? Would we ever have even engaged with them?
If you really want to wank your mind then think if you ever had a text from a number you didn't recognise had a brief conversation establishing they had the wrong number and parted ways. What is the likelihood that you would text the wrong number? For one don't most people have contacts saved in their mobiles, even our old 'brick' phones had that capacity. If a future version of yourself had ever travelled through time the one number you're probably most likely to remember is your own and if you take into account the paradoxes and causality complications that arise from meeting a past version of yourself, communicating by text would probably be the safest way. I'm sure at some point you've lived somewhere and moved, whether it was into University halls of residence or whatever, had a phone number that years later you rang out of curiosity to see who had moved into your room - I know dozens of students from my halls of residence that did this, most simply hanging up when someone answered, some actually having conversations with the people who took their room after them.
The temptation to know that your past self was indeed alive would likely compel most people to try it. I will admit I would try it, I still remember my first mobile number.
Yahoo Answers and Death by Design
I've been a member of Yahoo Answers since 6th of June 2006 - I know, ominous date - I've seen the site be quite busy at times with the rate of questions being asked too much to keep up with. My regular haunt was the Programming and Design section where I was often a top contributor and still hold my place in the top 10 contributors for that section.
In the last year or so Yahoo has slowly changed the design of it's site, and in the last few months it has begun migrating each of the regional variations to the new design. The old one was green and instantly recognisable, to the point where many of you who were no doubt sent there at some point by Google can probably recall. The new design however in my opinion is horrible, and it would seem I am not alone in that opinion, to the point where the backlash from users has been quite vocal. A backlash which Yahoo has decided to ignore.
Many sites redesign themselves periodically and while sites like facebook often have outspoken critics who reject their new designs, the masses eventually "like it or lump it" - however in most of those scenarios I would argue the redesign is most rejected due to the fact it's a change, not because it's inherently bad. Yahoo answers I believe falls into the latter category.
Earlier today I had a look at the activity on Yahoo answers and found that in a 2 hour period there had been 18 questions asked in the programming and design section. Looking at the All Categories page there had been around 140 questions asked in 5 minutes across all categories on the site.
There are 23 categories devoted to Yahoo Products. There are a further 1,522 categories totalling 1,545 categories in English alone - I might have missed some, and many of them were empty when I was looking through the site.
These figures are all taken from Yahoo Answers, set to show all English questions. Looking at those figures as a whole if that rate is maintained then there's approx 1,700 questions being asked per hour in English across all categories on the site that's just over 1 question per hour per category. Restricting the view to questions from the UK only there had only been 200 questions in the preceding hour - that's 16 questions ever 5 minutes in comparison to the 140 asked across all English sites [11.4%]
As for the engagement of people answering the questions, across all English questions within the last 3 weeks there have been approximately 600 questions that have received 20 or more answers. That's approximately 30 questions per day that manage to get more than 20 responses. The same search restricted to UK only returned 100 questions in the last 3 weeks that gained 20 or more responses, approximately 5 questions per day.
For a site that had 200 million active users worldwide, with 25 million unique visitors in the US per month alone, racking up 62 million visits to the site, that's incredibly low levels of engagement, far below the 1% rule which I have mentioned on this blog before.
It beggars the question, has Yahoo killed Yahoo Answers?
Addendum:
Upon request for date and time clarifications I have gathered new data. At 15:00 on the 23rd of January, there had been:
13 questions asked in Programming and design within the preceding 2 hours [All English]
2 questions asked in Programming and design within the preceding 2 hours [UK only]
120 questions asked in All Categories in the preceding 5 minutes [All English]
This extrapolates to 1,440 questions being asked per hour across all English sites.
18 questions asked in All Categories in the preceding 5 minutes [UK only]
This would extrapolate to 216 questions per hour for the UK only however the time period and number of questions was low enough to count, there have been 137 questions in the UK in the preceding hour - approx 64% of the extrapolated figure so if that applied to the global rate too then that 1,440 would be reduced to 922
Update:
It will come as little surprise to anyone but Yahoo Answers formally shutdown on May 14th 2021 after a period of sustained decline. The writing was on the wall it seems now looking back at this post.
It Gets Better
Life has its ups and downs, and sometimes it can seem like you're being dealt more downs than up. It can seem like there's nothing on the horizon or like your life is never going to change. For some of us that's a hard thing to consider and it scares us. People do incredible things when they are scared both good and bad.
I am a survivor. There aren't many who know my whole story and I don't think there are many who ever will. What I went through, and what I did, are not things I feel comfortable sharing with the world so you'll forgive me for not going into detail here. What I do want to share with the world is hope.
At my lowest, I did not believe it was possible to meet anyone in this world who had compassion. I did not believe my future could bring anything that would make me happy. I was fixated on everything that was bad and everything that had gone wrong in my life and I had been trapped in a vortex of negativity surrounded by dark clouds.
No-one knew and I never told anyone how I felt. I survived, but for a time that's all my life was, survival, I lived for the sake of living with nothing spurring me on. I ate and I slept, day after day. My monotony was eventually broken, little by little things changed. Small glimmers of hope shone through. Fast forward through the years up to today and I look back on all I have been through and the one thing I take away from it all is this, the future is never as dark as we fear it will be.
I know where I am today, I know where I was that day and I know that I couldn't imagine being here at the time. I am glad I survived because my life did change. I had more and more ups and less downs to contend with. I have had moments since, when I have felt like there is nothing on my horizon - but to borrow from something my teenage self once wrote - "A world exists beyond the horizon, just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there. Seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing" - just because it may seem like there's nothing coming, doesn't mean that's the way it is.
You just have to make it through. It gets better, it really does, you've just got to hold on and believe and it will come to you. I felt alone, I felt afraid, I felt like no-one cared - but I was wrong. There were people around me who cared about me, I was just too blind to see it. When I think about the people in my life now, I am eternally grateful, and to all of them I care deeply for them. I know a few of them are having a hard time at the moment and that things may seem dark or bleak, but I believe in them, I believe they are worth so much more than they feel right now. Even the most beautiful, precious and magnificent diamonds in this world were all found in the midst of coal, surrounded by darkness and buried deep under mountains of Earth. Where you are does not define who you are and how you are treated does not define how you deserve to be treated.
I am a survivor. There aren't many who know my whole story and I don't think there are many who ever will. What I went through, and what I did, are not things I feel comfortable sharing with the world so you'll forgive me for not going into detail here. What I do want to share with the world is hope.
At my lowest, I did not believe it was possible to meet anyone in this world who had compassion. I did not believe my future could bring anything that would make me happy. I was fixated on everything that was bad and everything that had gone wrong in my life and I had been trapped in a vortex of negativity surrounded by dark clouds.
No-one knew and I never told anyone how I felt. I survived, but for a time that's all my life was, survival, I lived for the sake of living with nothing spurring me on. I ate and I slept, day after day. My monotony was eventually broken, little by little things changed. Small glimmers of hope shone through. Fast forward through the years up to today and I look back on all I have been through and the one thing I take away from it all is this, the future is never as dark as we fear it will be.
I know where I am today, I know where I was that day and I know that I couldn't imagine being here at the time. I am glad I survived because my life did change. I had more and more ups and less downs to contend with. I have had moments since, when I have felt like there is nothing on my horizon - but to borrow from something my teenage self once wrote - "A world exists beyond the horizon, just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there. Seeing isn't believing, believing is seeing" - just because it may seem like there's nothing coming, doesn't mean that's the way it is.
You just have to make it through. It gets better, it really does, you've just got to hold on and believe and it will come to you. I felt alone, I felt afraid, I felt like no-one cared - but I was wrong. There were people around me who cared about me, I was just too blind to see it. When I think about the people in my life now, I am eternally grateful, and to all of them I care deeply for them. I know a few of them are having a hard time at the moment and that things may seem dark or bleak, but I believe in them, I believe they are worth so much more than they feel right now. Even the most beautiful, precious and magnificent diamonds in this world were all found in the midst of coal, surrounded by darkness and buried deep under mountains of Earth. Where you are does not define who you are and how you are treated does not define how you deserve to be treated.
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