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News Tagged ‘Knowledge’
5.972 sextillion tons
Wednesday, October 21st, 2015It is Friday night and I find myself at a corner table in the pub, as if by accident. I look up and there I am staring at a freshly pulled beer anticipating the extraordinary first mouthful. I don’t drink very much but what I do drink I enjoy. It is interesting that drunk is a past tense of drink, as if it is an inevitable consequence of drinking, but I can’t remember the last time I was drunk, probably because I was drunk. Beer and alcohol are not the same thing. Beer is wondrous, true this is partly because it has ethanol in it, but beer is much more than a drug delivery system, it is discourse delivery system, why else would I pay five pounds for a pint of the stuff in a pub when I could buy three pints for a fiver in Sainsbury’s? In England we have always communed in pubs, we are an island of drinker thinkers, in every beer there’s an idea, admittedly a lot of those ideas are rubbish, or forgotten or potentially illegal but occasionally a great one comes up. I proposed in a pub, no hold on, I was proposed to in a pub, if you met my wife you would understand, anyway I said yes in a pub. I write in pubs, eschewing the cafe and the dreaded flat white, I will not become a coffee botherer. I am writing this in a pub, in a theatrical allusion, the Bottom’s Rest, previously the famously convivial Conqueror, but on this occasion the beer I am staring at is alone, for want of a babysitter the company is lost.
Friday nights in the Conqueror used to mean something, the gathering of a loose coalition of the self opinionated, well met men and women of undetermined age and profession, making noise about nothing in particular. We were the very definition of half full or half empty vessels, conversing on everything from the corporate body politic to how much the Earth weighs. We would raise our heady beers with orbiting ancillary shot glasses, laughing and pouting blue smoke, voices thrown overhead like school cap frisbees. But things change. I am the last of my tribe that comes here to imbibe, we drifted away, our ranks thinned by time. The Conqueror is now conquered, renamed, sweet-smelling and occupied by the fleeting, the ephemeral, the passing through, their uplit faces waxing and waning, conversations polite, contrite, screen centric. The few odd regulars that remain exchange furtive glances, we share a history but were never friends, rather veterans from different regiments of the same defeated army.
None of this is necessarily bad, I still love the pub but for new reasons, the rhythm of the waves, the human flotsam, the murmuration of the pebbles, and on those nights that I come here by myself I wait to see if anyone I know gets washed up. More vigil than ritual. Sometimes I return home having spoken only a few words to the bar staff but other times my patience is rewarded and tonight it is the turn of the tall man. Closer to seven foot than six he spots me from the door, his head bobbing towards me upon the swell. He stops at my table and looks down and down. ‘Hello Rich,’ he says. ‘Fancy a pint?’
Average, penniless, monogamous, misanthropist
Tuesday, June 9th, 2015It has been said that we gauge our own intelligence by the intelligence of our peer group. We might have the impression that we are incredibly clever but that could simply be because those we associate with ain’t too bright. We can never truly know how smart we are because maybe we have never known a truly smart person.
But how would we even recognise one? Not every clever person carries on like Tony Stark (genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist). How can we be sure that the people we think are clever, though not quite as clever as ourselves, actually are? And what does clever even mean? Is clever purely intellectual? Should I get all my friends to sit an IQ test? Does being really good at sport count, because my mum is a genius at badminton, well better than me.
Which raises another question, how much better than everyone else does a truly smart person have to be? I am only too aware that the difference between being very good at something and being brilliant can be agonisingly small. I was once really clever at drawing freehand circles but my friend Graham Flood was uncanny, perfect circle after perfect circle. I began to suspect he was using a sly compass, checked every circle for a tell tale pinprick but no. He was just better at it than me. Not sure how useful a skill it was though, I would be surprised if he’d made a lucrative career out of it but it does show that thinking you are good at something is not nearly enough. Deeds then.
How many smart people would you need to build an iphone? I mean from scratch. I suspect a lot. You can be sure that there isn’t a single person who could claim to know how to do it. You would need hundreds, Jony Ive couldn’t, all he did was a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. ‘Make it look like that’, he told a group of very but less clever people. And they did. I don’t think I would feel too good about myself in their company, but then again, being specialists, maybe they are only good at one thing. Perhaps they would get pummelled by a posse of polymath plumbers in a pub quiz. So does that mean that truly clever people excel at everything ? And will that help me identify them. Not necessarily.
When I was at school there was a kid who was the very devil at chess, he could thrash everyone in chess club, could play half a dozen of us at once and never lose. Anyone who got to know him thought he was a prodigy but not many did because away from chess he could barely put a sentence together, always wore his cap and his Mother tied his shoe laces.
I had a friend from college whose general knowledge was astounding, any question we asked she would provide an effortless answer. She was confident, funny and modest, this was someone who genuinely seemed to know and have it all. We thought she was the very best of us until she sat her A levels, failed the lot.
I know a neurologist, his name is Brian, which is an anagram of brain, how cool is that? That man paddled in my shallows, waded out into my depths, told me things about my mind that were hard to imagine. And yet. He has the handwriting of a eight year old and can’t spell anything with more than two syllables.
One thing I know for certain is that these are all really smart people, just not at everything. The chess player may have been socially inept but who cares when he won every game of chess he played, the college friend was a genius just rubbish at exams and the neurologist can diagnose idiopathic, intracranial hypertension from a conversation, he just can’t spell it.
None of them would seem that clever though without the cleverness of other people. Individual human brilliance may provide a light source but it requires the lenses of association and context to focus it. Perhaps we shouldn’t compare our supposed intellect to those around us but accept that it is their intelligence that defines our own, for better or for worse.
I still associate with partially brilliant people, people who are all incompletely brilliant but in very specific ways. Together we make a functioning whole. Despite the coruscating company I keep I am perfectly happy to admit that I am not as clever as I think I am. But then again, no one is as clever as I think I am.
The joy of telling Siri he’s a dick
Sunday, June 7th, 2015When I was young and had my whole life in front of me I wanted nothing more than to be older. To have less life in front of me. I had time to burn. But this was the seventies, the pre information age, so my longing for the years to pass was based only on my desire to be a grown up, to know things, to be able to make decisions and do stuff without asking. Grown ups were cool. Not any more.
My eleven year old son wants to be older, eighteen to be precise, not nineteen and God forbid twenty one, twenty one is old, and old is for old people. What he doesn’t realise though is, compared to me at his age, he is already forty.
When I was a kid if I wanted to know something I had to go to the town library, find it in a book, who does that? My idea of information overload was poking the spilt insides of a dead rabbit with a stick, I got my sex education from Monty Python.
Innocence is simply a lack of information, we keep our children innocent by withholding the truth, by maintaining the fiction, the lie. My son has known there is no such thing as Father Christmas or the tooth fairy for years, he pretends to believe in them not because he thinks the presents and coins might stop but because it makes his mother and father happy.
Parents are an unreliable source of intelligence, when my son wants the facts he asks Google or Siri, the given answer is no secret and he carries the burden of knowledge lightly. He doesn’t know that innocence is eroded, he doesn’t worry about it, that is the job of the grown ups but grown ups rarely understand what innocence is. We think it is a natural state, a blissful state, that it has to be protected at all costs and most typically we always confuse it with sex.
Of course sex is a part of it but only in the sense that sex is information, often information we would rather our children didn’t have. Our response as parents can be to further restrict access, we fear the internet, the perilous undertow but it is the ocean our children swim in. They are fish while we stand on the shore with our fishing rods and keep nets. I have to trust my son not to swim in dangerous waters.
I don’t want my three boys to be men any day soon, I will miss my children but there is nothing I can do about it. My eldest son understands and only wants the best for me, he is kind and patient and teaches me minecraft.
