Light is the Way

Once we had chosen the building that we wanted to buy our new flat in, we were faced with the decision of which of the remaining unsold flats would suit us best. We knew what size of flat we required, and that it had to be far enough away from a main road that we would get some peace in summer when we had the windows open. Our old flat overlooked a main road, including one of the most frequently used bus stops in the city - you can imagine the noise in the summer when we had to have the front window open to get some air in, and what the air quality was like when a smokey diesel bus pulled out from the bus stop.

The block lies on a north-south axis, the south end overlooking the pleasant gully and the larger flats there have windows on two sides - although this was not a concern for us with as these had already sold. There was another block to the west, and a company had permission to build a block a similar distance to the east, so no benefits there. Did we want sun in the morning or in the evening, well if it was in the morning it would be bright to wake up to but dull in the evenings when we were more likely to be home. The clincher was the alignment of the flats - those on the east had their shortest dimension against the outside wall, meaning they only had two sets of windows and poor light penetration to the rear wall, while those on the west had their longest dimension against the outside, giving them three sets of windows and fair light penetration into the depths. We wanted light and we knew what we wanted to do with it.

Light is life, and that natural stuff is much easier to block out when you have too much than to regain when you have permanent obstacles in the way. We would have preferred larger windows, but this is Lublin where the need to hide from the neighbours is still a prevalent belief. The original design of the flat meant that the bedroom was shut off on its own with a single window, while the other two sets lit the combined living room and kitchen. The entrance corridor ran along the rear wall and could only be lit by natural light if you opened either the bedroom door, the living room door or the front door. The bathroom, at the opposite end of the corridor from the entrance, had no window. By engaging an architect to create suitable drawings, we had the opportunity of change the location and even existence of the standard walls. In the end we had fewer walls than the standard model, and the reduced amount of materials required offset the cost of the redesign.

Light coming in from one window does not simply light the space in front of one window, it goes everywhere it can, gradually being absorbed by the surfaces it is expected to bounce off. If you walk into a blackened old railway tunnel the light is quickly absorbed and it gets dark quickly. If, on the other hand, you walk into a new concrete tunnel, it remains light further into the tunnel as less light is absorbed by the walls on each bounce. Light coloured, shiny walls keep the light from being absorbed longer, unlike curtains or most furnishings. Those curtains, carpets and sofas absorb light like a vacuum cleaner does dust, and we have no curtains, no carpets and only a small leather sofa.

The wall between the living area and the corridor disappeared from our design, and the corner of the bedroom, helping to hide the front door from the living area, was shaved off and replaced with a diagonal wall, this diagonal wall being invisible in the bedroom as it is hidden inside the built-in wardrobe. These changes made the living area much larger, we having no fear that someone entering our flat can see the kitchen area immediately, and allowed the natural light to penetrate throughout the flat, including into the bathroom through the small translucent windows mounted in the door. Eventually the wall opposite the windows will have a large mirror to help maintain light levels in the areas furthest from the windows.

The door to the bedroom was supposed to be almost opposite the front, but we removed that so that end of the bedroom could be completely used as a wardrobe; if the wardrobes were on the side walls they would reduce the effective width of the bedroom and form a block for light entering the windows. Any fat objects, such as cupboards, wardrobes, bookcases and chests of drawers should ideally be placed on the far wall, where they will not block light entering the windows. The wall dividing the living space and the bedroom was cut down so it finished about a metre from the ceiling, high enough not to see over but low enough for light to spill over.

The bedroom wall also finished about a metre from the external wall, leaving a gap that we could pass through and hence removing a significant amount of light absorbing material in that vital zone close to the window. If you lose 10% of your light near the windows, that loss affects all the space; but if you lose 10% of the light at a point half way into your space then that really only effects the lighting levels from that point on. Visually this low, short wall increases access, increases total light sharing in the flat and makes the flat appear much larger: the long external wall with the windows is clear from end to end, and when standing in the kitchen much of the bedroom wall can be seen.

To control sunlight in the late afternoon is essential as we live on the top floor and so shortly before the sun sets its rays are dazzling. We have blinds on two of the windows, while the kitchen has a window and glass door to the balcony, but these do not have blinds as we have chosen to install an awning on the balcony instead. The awning converts the balcony into another room, with no loss of communication with the kitchen area, useful since it is pleasant to eat in this much airier place. The awning is orange, one of the few strong colours in the flat, and reminiscent of sunlight at sunset. It also reminds me of childhood camping holidays, but that is another story.

As a result of this our flat is better ventilated, better lit and less prone to causing feelings of claustrophobia than the other flats in our block, and is a much friendlier space as light has a remarkable effect on our feeling of well-being. As darkness falls we have a range of lighting options to choose from, ensuring that the good feelings the space generates continues until it is time to go to sleep.

Quality by Quantity

Yes, we all know what quality is, it's something better, something that lasts longer. OK, accepting that we know what quality is, and how important it is, why then do we ignore it and pursue quantity instead? Is it because we measure winners in terms of quantity as an indirect measure of quality, and is quality a fixed thing anyway?

If a new sport was created, and the original best time for one circuit was twenty minutes, does this remain a quality time if within a few years the best time drops to eighteen minutes? If you achieve twenty minutes now, are you as good as the original people were? Assuming that the techniques used by everyone had remained essentially the same and only training had improved, then yes, your time is of the same quality, just the sport lacks that feeling of edginess for your time because it has long been improved upon and you are too late to be recognised. If you are unable to improve despite making your greatest effort then you are operating at your point of maximised quality, and you should be happy because your mind and body can do no more for you.

From this we can see that there are two types of quality - the quality of the individual and the quality of the individual society. There are many possible ways of dividing up humanity, such as by nation, by era, by sport etc, and each individual may easily be compared with the society that they exist within, but to compare one individual with another individual, or one society with another society, then we must be aware of the differences in each individual or society that makes them what they are. If we enter a race we are choosing to compare our quality with that of other others prepared to undergo the same event, we have in common a desire to race and this makes us similar. All our racing qualities become comparable because we decide to train for that event, or at least we should train if we wish our quality to be comparable, and our racing qualities no longer becomes comparable with others who are not training - for they are not attempting to maximise their quality in that field. Our bed-ridden granny's racing quality is not challenged by our racing quality, because we each inhabit different societies.

However, if the same bed-ridden granny managed to overcome her disability, hopped out of bed and beat us in the race, her personal quality must be much higher than ours, and our ego may suffer because we still perceive her as inhabiting another society, that of the old for instance. Individuals from what we understand to be poor quality classes should not beat us, or so our ego may believe, but this is a problem that would not have occurred if we had simply put her in our class, the racing class, and left it at that.

We often fail to understand quality because we allow invalid classes to cloud our judgement, or fail to understand that no classification system can ever be perfect. 'You are woman, your job is to create new life' is a common religious theme, forcing women to be perceived as being best quality only when used as baby machines. Whether any individual woman has the ability to produce children is a question that is generally avoided (perhaps because words are cheap while intelligent actions are much more difficult). What is happening is that any class of objects or people has a perceived quality, and the 'baby machine' quality is forced onto each woman under the 'Rule of Should'. Why should I? Because you should! Imagine that a woman is born without ovaries, or they are damaged due to no fault of the woman - what mental pressure does the Rule of Should Make Babies put on that woman? What effort does the society make to deal with the individuals problems? Should it? I say of course, because by not dealing with it the overall quality of the society drops.

The Rule of Should is a symptom of the controlling faction being more interested in quantity over quality, and the more that quality and quantity appears to diverge then the more that the Rule of Should may be applied in an attempt to control the problem, but which instead creates more divergence until more violent measures of control may be considered in order to sweep the issue more firmly under the carpet. This is what is often happening when you meet religious or political extremism, a part of the population is unable to define quality of people as all they see is the quantity of people in what they perceive is their and other groups, and how much money, power or success their or another group has.

If the Rule of Should creates divergence between quality and quantity, does this mean there is any relationship between the two? Well, imagine that you have no cats: your quantity of cats is zero, therefore the quality of your cats must also be zero since quality exists only in possession, in the same way that having no cats also means you have no pink cats. Imagine also that you liked cats and I gave you one cat: how much would you get to know that one cat, and that cat to know you? Imagine instead that I gave you two cats: how much would you get to know those two cats by observing how they relate to you and to each other? Imagine now that I gave you two thousand cats.

No cats means you have no quality relationship with cats, while one or two cats means you have a high quality relationships with them. However, the average quality of relationship with each of the two thousand cats would be low. If we plotted the average cat-relationship quality for zero, one, two... two thousand cats we would see the quality curve would rise rapidly from zero cats to one cat, rise some more between one cat and two cats, but beyond that point the the average cat relationship quality would start to fall as we become unable to spend enough time with each cat to bond well with it. Eventually we might bond with a few cats, but mostly we would see the cats as things to be fed that we might or might not recognise. We might not even notice if we lost a few or gained a few strays.

By finding someone to buy and prepare all the food our cats needed should allow us more time to bond with a larger number of cats, although attempting to maximise quality over a larger quantity of cats results in us having to sacrifice something else in our lives as we simply do not have enough waking hours every day to do everything. Attempting to maximise too many qualities results in having to abandon other qualities, and eventually this might have an impact on our health, our circle of friends or, in the case of cats, the patience of our neighbours.

To maximise satisfaction in our lives it might be better if we chose fewer interests, and invested the freed up time in the chosen interests. Even so, we must be careful how much time and effort goes into these remaining interests because we are surrounded by people who care about us and they need our attention too.

Finally, mention must be made of one special quantity, that of duty. For most people their home life is very important, and yet they will impede success here by either avoiding duties or by allowing duties to take over. Duties can be seen as a set of tasks that need to be done to achieve a certain level of quality, but the pursuit of too many or taking some too far will again reduce quality because we must sacrifice other things, such as time spent talking with other family members. Work can also form a duty, as can being part of a social organisation, but all these duties need to be examined in terms of the needs of each group member, rather than having the results of duty or the lack of them being impressed on the individuals. By avoiding examining the feelings we have tied up in our need for fulfilling duties we apply pressure to the rest of the group, often leading inadvertently to a struggle for control of the group.

Every few months I reassess how many computer related tasks I have, and seek to slim down any areas that begin to dominate my time to the detriment of my home life or of the life tasks that would give me more pleasure by completing them. Trying to decide which elements of one's life one should pursue and which to drop is generally best done with someone else's help, someone who cares enough to observe the effect on your total life.

Knowledge and Understanding

There has been a lot of talk over the past few years about the creation of a knowledge society, with little consideration about what you do once you have access to all that information. It is part of the reasoning behind the government's support for the internet in schools, just as the acquisition of books was before that. However, once you have amassed all that knowledge, what are you supposed to do with it? I suspect that the reason that libraries have failed to live up to their expectations, despite generations of huffy people telling us that it would be good for us to visit them, the libraries I mean.

I used to have a lot more books than I do now, but to be honest the effort required for their upkeep in terms of dusting, loss of space that could be used for other purposes and the basic fact that they stood there unread, other than the paperback novels. The novels remain, the other books have been decimated, yes, only one in ten or less remain. I gather most of the knowledge I need either from the internet or from basic research on my part; books are very low on my priority - except the three I use to support my screen at the right height at work.

Wherever you find your knowledge, how do you use it, or, more importantly, how do you know what information is useful, and then how to get any effective work out of it? The secret is understanding, a concept very much misunderstood and left almost abandoned on the byways of the human intellect. Knowledge is much like a car, very useful but will not do anything for you. What you need is a driver, for the driver is our understanding, and the driver has the choice of which car to drive, or whether to simply walk instead. Car and driver, knowledge and understanding, they are complimentary but essentially alien.

Understanding creates new knowledge from old, and this is the mechanism that we need to create use out of knowledge. Imagine that we were burgling a house, if we had never been in the house before we would use our knowledge of all the other houses we have known to understand what we were seeing in this new house and therefore make decisions on what we should take and where we should look for it. We are not afraid of learning this new knowledge, although we might be afraid of being caught, because we both understand the kind of information and value it.

Understanding is a thinking process that can leading to success (I understand) or failure (I don't understand), the success being more likely to occur if we can match it to previous knowledge, such as a specific experience. The closer to what we are comparing is to our prior knowledge then the quicker the match can be made. If you see a cup, for example, the match will be made so quickly and successfully that you will not be aware that your brain has done anything. However, the further something is from our prior knowledge then the more you become aware of the lack of understanding concerning it, and maybe your brain will disregard the information.

Large volumes of information have to be broken down into smaller chunks so that we can process it, but this does not all happen at once. Some things that we do not understand get put into the subconscious and the results from this can appear in dreams or when we relax our hold on our consciousness for a moment, such as just before we go to sleep. Because the brain takes such varying amounts of time to process information at different levels of familiarity, we should not expect instant solutions to problems that we are working on. Instant results should be viewed with suspicion in cases where new solutions are required, they will be too close to the current solution.

Since new knowledge is based on old knowledge, everything that we know is also very similar and creating the understanding of a completely new experience is incredibly difficult. Putting ourselves in situations where we gain different types of new experience helps us to understand things that are very much different to knowledge from our normal and working lives. If our lives are regular, we are limiting our potential to understand changes because the changes feel more alien than it would be to someone with a wider experience, not because they have a different kind of intelligence or way of thinking.

Since understanding is a process of the brain, we can do things to improve our ability to understand. Taking our understanding out for a jog around the mental park frequently will help stop it from becoming a knowledge potato. The brain has many different ways of processing information: eyesight, sound, touch, body movement - anything that the body controls or uses to gather information is able to store and process information. Learning how to repair a shoe is an intellectual exercise as much as doing a crossword, practicing both gives you greater chances of understanding new situations. We use these different areas of the brain in conjunction, mostly with the visual side. Shutting one's eyes when attempting a common task can help us learn more about the total experience of doing that task, as the brain can focus more resources on sound, touch, smell.

Our vision consumes huge amounts of our brain's resources, and to think about something our brain often moves our eyes off what we are looking at and defocuses them to reduce input from that source. Going somewhere quite and shutting our eyes can help us enormously when we need to think, but if the thinking involves a stressful subject it might be better to modify our surroundings so that the problem can sink into our subconscious.

Intelligence is not about how much knowledge our brains can contain, it is about how effectively we can use that knowledge. Perhaps it would be better if we spent our time optimizing how we use information rather than acquiring new information.

Material Facts

When we were young, my younger brother and I were taken by dad to the seaside on a beautiful summer's morning, one that became greyer and less bright the closer we got to Folkestone. I have no idea why we went on that trip without mum or our older brother, but the memory of the rain and the Rotunda amusement arcade remain clear, especially the greenish plastic water-squirting cigars we managed to extract from the crane game. With their red plastic tips and 'Made in Hong Kong' in small raised letters they were everything we needed, something to squirt water around with. However, even by then, the the toys we possessed that were marked as originating from Hong Kong seemed to be cheap and easily broken, while those proudly bearing 'Made in England' were fine quality items, or so it seemed at the time to me at seven and brother David at five.

But where are those English manufacturers now? Were they really competitive, producing the kind of goods we really wanted at prices our parents could afford, or was my analysis biased by being limited to reading the manufacturing locations on a plastic cigar, a plastic horse and cart, and a blue metal tractor? Was this enough to reinforce an idea commonly found in the society around me that plastic was bad, and foriegn bad too? Was my pleasure greater in playing with metal English toys than plastic foriegn ones? Why, then, do my memories equally contain plastic and metal, foreign and domestic toys? Is this of any importance to me now, as an adult, or is it OK to love plastic as a child and then to learn that quality lies in other materials as an adult?

The New Idea Generation

I think my life is too busy, because I keep having all these good ideas and then later someone else beats me to market because I am so busy having new ideas. Do I simply lack the time to deal with the old ones or am I not making the most effective use of my time. I believe that success in a new market niche is not so much about quality but getting there first. I can also see that there is a wide gap between the people who generate ideas and people who need new ideas, often people from both groups not understanding the depth of their potential or their need. Human society seems to be very fragmentary, since nations, companies and social groups build barriers to block loss of their ideas to the competition, and yet by the same process block soultions to their problems from outside.

Imagine you have a small company and you need some good ideas to really make your business stand out. You cannot afford to employ someone to generate ideas, and anyway what is the chance that you could trust them anyway since whoever you employ is unlikely to understand your needs or your business field. Part of the problem, and a significant part at that, is what I call 'classicalism', the philosophy of giving things names, breaking them down into smaller parts like a child pulling the petals off a daisy and then giving those parts names. Eventually, people come to believe that these named categories, and their names, are more important than the material they attempt to describe. An example is the catergorising of fields of study: "Let's call this area of study 'physics', and let's call this part of physics 'nuclear physics', and lets call this part of nuclear physics 'xxx' etc.". You then create an education system to fit these fields and soon you have specialists who are unable to communicate or, as a consequence, trust specialists from other specialisms. If you spend you life in one specialism it becomes easy to believe that the further away that another specialism is, the less it resembles yours.

We can observe the problems with classicalism in the alienation of science from art, for example, an alienation that is totally dependent on the catergorising of some things as art and others as science.

Write by design

While standing in the shower the other day, I came to realize why my writing is so awful. I remember that my mum was so often distracted by what she was currently doing that she would forget a task that she had started earlier - and it seemed that hardly a week would go by without her burning some part of the dinner because she had become involved in another task while leaving dinner to simmer. Have you ever noticed that when a pan of peas boils dry, it leaves all the peas standing apart? I used to believe that she was simply forgetful, now I understand that it was not a case of forgetting but that she used her mind so intensely on her current task that it excluded memory calls to other tasks. So, standing there with the water pouring down my body I was able to forget whatever else I was working on and let my subconcious have access to some current resources - and there it was! When I write I focus on what I am writing about, and if I want the text to be readable then I need to do a separate edit job on it.

Here is an example of a sentence I added to someone else's article on uncyclopedia; grammar has to run hard to keep up and often trips up while tracking the undulations of my thoughts when I write. Try reading it aloud to yourself and feel how I have just banged a series of concepts together in a line:

"XXX is the kind of profitable organization that would undoubtedly bring you great pleasure to invest in, and may even turn you a profit if making money on investments is your game."

After editing my own work, I can still feel the concatenation of phrases spraying across the page like a highly focussed fire hose. It's a brutal style, but my way of handling my essentially minimalist nature. Here is another example, this time from one of my own entries on uncyclopedia and after I have edited it down to something that could almost be read by a human:

"The earliest that is known about this ancient village, for want of extensive archaeological research beyond that undertaken by Bob Perkins in the garden of 3 Church Lane during the potato harvest, is that it formed one end of the defensive line for the fair people of Kent against the foreign Romans."

After several years of trying to teach other people how to write in a foriegn language, I began to notice some typical patterns in how they created sentences. One of these I call the 'phrase drift', and it seems clear to me that people often write by concentrating on the phrase they are writing now with a vague idea of where they want to go, and are incredibly strongly influenced by the most recent phrase they have written. It is a bit like those games where you say a word, and then someone else says the first word that they think of based on your word. As the sentence creeps forward, phrase by phrase, it drifts away from the course the author originally plotted to take the words to their destination by the end of the sentence. At some point the phrase-trail peters out and the author suddenly becomes aware of by how far they missed their destination and inserts a final phrase to get back on course. Rewriting the sentence rarely seems to be an option, and a similar process also takes place on a paragraph and text level, often destroying the essential sense of the piece.