Don't Read My Blog

It was revelationary in its time. By modern standards “A Discourse on the Method” is a peculiar little book. At times, sharp, intriguing, instructional and worthy. Though elsewhere it is woolly, cryptic, impenetrable and introverted.

Scholars of Descartes will no doubt have built up more understanding of this societal misfit, by first reading around the subject. With no more than Ian Maclean’s valuable preface and the notes in the 2008 edition from Oxford University Press, this exceedingly short book is still an exacting read.

Maybe I chose the wrong approach, but with my basic general knowledge of Descartes I dived straight in to the academic challenge of reading the English version of Descartes’ 1637 French original. Maclean’s invaluable preface over the first 75 pages is longer than the 63 pages written by Descartes himself! That’s followed by a further 21 pages of notes, leading to a total of 159 pages of deep, intense musings about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Two things stood out in particular:

Descartes’ Maxims
The Simplicity Model

It is alleged that Einstein said “make everything as simple as possible, and no simpler than that”. However, you won’t find that paraphrased quote in any of Einstein’s material. It’s a 1950 quote from Roger Sessions in The New York Times. Sessions was a composer who discussed why he writes such difficult violin pieces! Whatever Einstein is alleged to have said seems to be rooted in what Descartes said.

It’s a trait of modern life that the work of earlier luminaries is recycled. Sessions implicates Einstein when it’s actually Descartes’ original idea! Henry Gantt rebranded Karol Adamiecki’s Harmonogram as the Gantt Chart without attribution! Peter Drucker borrowed much of his material from Henri Fayol without attribution! Stephen Covey nicked Dwight Eisenhower’s time management matrix without attribution!

Descartes’ Maxims

Descartes’ Maxims are his, not mine, and this is my summary of the salient detail.

1. Stay within the law. For better or for worse, the jurisdiction where you live has laws, probably written that way for good reason. “Always obey the law” is probably a better maxim than “always break the law”.

2. Travel along straight lines. Life is a melting pot of ideas, concepts, good intentions, bad habits, and eleventy billion people trying to influence what you do. Learn to ignore the distractions. See the forest analogy below.

3. Accentuate the positive. And eliminate the negative. For the best of reasons, parents, teachers and our peers have burdened our early lives with their views. Jettison the unnecessary baggage! But retain and improve the valuable bits!

Descartes suggests that at some poignant moment in your life you look back (consciously or sub consciously) at all things you’ve done, and decide that there has to be a better way! For me that was in my mid twenties. At that point the analogy says that you are in the middle of a dense forest, unsure of which direction to travel. You could explore, and find yourself going in circles (consciously or sub consciously), and never leave the forest. Or you could choose to follow a straight line.

Which straight line? Does it matter? Whichever straight line you choose, it will lead you out of the forest. By all means exercise some judgement about the direction of travel. And then stick to it as best you can. In a dense forest your straight line may not be perfectly straight, but a conscientious mind will help you focus on keeping it as straight as possible. Do not question your resolve and change direction, because you may end up going around in circles again.

At some point you will exit the forest. Your judgement back in the forest ensured that you would leave it behind, and you may even have arrived at something approaching the ideal new place. No matter whether you encounter mountains, lakes, plains or suburbia, your path will become clearer. You can then make a fresh judgement call and if necessary select a new straight line to follow.

This is a metaphor for life, and it involves dismissing all the unhelpful thoughts and baggage that you may have picked along the way. Ultimately, according to Descartes the objective is “acquire all the virtues and other goods we are capable of acquiring – and when certain that we have what we sought, we cannot fail to be happy”.

This is the fundamental part of what he calls his “method”. Obey the law, travel in straight lines, jettison the crap, and assemble worthy knowledge and possessions.

I had always though that “the method” was something bigger and more abstract, like “evolution”. It’s basically Descartes writing an early self help book which should have been titled “My Method”.

The Simplicity Model

Modern innovation is based on Descartes’ two rules.

Rule One: apply methodical doubt. If somebody says something is definite, think of it as probable. If he says it’s probable, think of it as possible, and if he says it’s possible, forget it.

Rule Two: be reductionist, that is, reduce your view of everything down to its simplest component elements. That way you can see how it works and if it breaks, how to fix it.

Breaking things down into smaller and smaller elements is the method Descartes used to overcome procrastination. The challenge is to break down a trivial task into a series of amazingly trivial tasks so that the brain can be tricked into starting one of them. It’s a strategy that Peter Checkland recommends in his classic book “Systems Thinking, Systems Practice” and he acknowledges that it came from Descartes.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Peter Bregman discusses the “break it down” process and then urges us to avoid procrastination by focussing on the first step in a series of simple steps. And that normally means moving away from doing something comfortable (watching light entertainment) to doing something uncomfortable (reading a serious text). He suggests we need to be good at “moving from comfort to discomfort”.

That first step for me is often “stand up”, followed by walk away from the screen, followed by pick up the book and sit in my comfy chair.

Is there something that you need to do, but you’ve been putting it off? What is your first step to starting that challenge?

Early on Sunday morning 29 Dec 2024 I went out for a walk in central London. Instead of going down along the river like I often do, this time I walked to Spitalfields Market. It was early, some traders were busy setting up, the public were few and far between, and there was nothing really open yet.

Then, for the first time, I noticed an outlet called “Jenki”. It’s a Matcha bar. It’s a poor imitation of Japan. The word “genki” has a hard “g” as in “get” so why they called the shop “Jenki” I have no idea. As with much Japanese language, the word “genki” is not easy to translate. But Japanese speakers like me know that the word is a blend of “vitality” or “spirited” or “energised”.

More importantly, Japanophiles like me (with dozens of visits to Japan) also know that Matcha is not really green tea. Its colour and its flavour are forced unnaturally.

The humble tea bush is largely the same across Asia. If you dry out the leaves, you have the basis for green tea. If you roast the leaves, you can create black tea. That’s basically all there is to it! Green tea from green leaves, and black tea from black leaves.

Should your tea plantation want to produce more tea more quickly, then there are ways to accelerate nature, and you can make a powder version of green tea. You can also do the same sort of thing with your roasted tea leaves and you can have instant black tea. Coffee beans too! Have you ever seen instant coffee powder? Have you ever seen an “instant coffee powder” shop? One that charges you £4.95 for one cup of Tesco value brand coffee?

So the aficionados of Matcha are getting excited about instant green tea in a way that nobody would ever get excited about instant black tea or instant coffee powder!

Matcha tea leaves are grown in the normal way, but about three weeks before harvesting, they are covered in black plastic! That forces the plant to produce more chlorophyll (the green pigment) as it searches vainly for usable sunlight. And that gives Matcha its extra strong flavour, and its unnatural deep green colour. You can also produce more tea from fewer square metres!

I don’t like Matcha. I have a feeling that the UK public will eventually tire of it too, because it’s the equivalent of instant black tea or instant coffee powder. And I believe that places like the Jenki Matcha Bar will wither and die in the foreseeable future.

I drink Sencha. And not just any old Sencha, I prefer the better quality brands. Think of it as equivalent to Assam or Darjeeling. I don’t want the Sainsbury version of Assam or Tesco’s own Darjeeling, I want the nice ones from places like Whittard of Chelsea. So I order my Sencha from Hashimoto, a small specialist shop in my adopted home town in Japan.

At High Street outlets in the UK I will settle for an Assam tea from Twinings, or sometimes a simple PG Tips. I have never found a decent green tea on any High Street anywhere in the UK. Whereas in Japan I can get a nice Sencha almost anywhere, and a knowing smile from the staff who understand why I do not drink Matcha! Or Mugicha, or Houjicha!

The term user friendly originated in the days when computers became more widely available. Firstly in the 1960s across bigger businesses, then in the 1970s with the advent of the early personal computers. By the 1980s the concept of user friendly had matured and the desktop computer revolution was in full swing.

It was originally termed human computer interaction (HCI). That had a focus on user interface (UI) design. And it referred to systems or interfaces that are easy for users to understand and interact with.

Nowadays, if you check a dictionary you will find that user friendly is usually defined as an adjective that describes something (such as a product, a system, or an interface) that’s easy to use or to understand.

So user friendly is a term that describes products, interfaces, or systems which are designed with the user’s ease of use and convenience in mind. It’s supposed to signify that the item in question is intuitive, easy to understand and to navigate, and it enables users to accomplish tasks with minimal effort and frustration. Whilst the term came about due to the advent of computers, it can be applied to everything. Think of travelling by roller skate, or pogo stick, or bicycle. Consider boiling an egg by using a campfire, or a gas stove, or a microwave oven.

Back in 1994, after 30 years in the field of technology and human computer interaction, Jeffrey Rubin wrote an excellent book entitled “The Handbook of Usability Testing”.

http://www.wiley.com/go/usabilitytesting

As early as page 4 he says:

“When a product or service is truly usable, the user can do what he or she wants to do, the way he or she expects to be able to do it, without hindrance, hesitation, or questions.”

If your product or service . . .

• has too many hoops to jump through to even get started; or
• places obstacles in the way of the user; or
• has inadequate documentation; or
• has a bland customer support system which offers nothing but platitudes;

. . . then your users will vote with their feet and walk away.

I recently sold my one year old BMW because I didn’t like the gimmicky dashboard, especially the heater controls. Correspondence with BMW in Farnborough (UK) proved so bad that I wrote to the head office in Munich. Nobody was listening me, and the responses (even from Germany) made it clear that they didn’t care what their customers thought.

I do not want to take my eyes off the road in order to adjust the ventilation. Particularly in bad, wet weather! If I suddenly want maximum heat and fan directed at the front windscreen, I want to reach for familiar tactile controls which I can operate without looking at them. The BMW arrangement had me looking down repeatedly in bursts of 2 to 5 seconds at a time. On a motorway at 70mph there was no way I was going to take my eyes off the road for the 10 to 20 seconds it needed to fiddle with the touch controls.

I replaced the one year old BMW with a one year old Volkswagen, the last in a line of cars which had tactile controls for ventilation. As a bonus the VW does not have a stupid computer that keeps telling me how I should drive.

For example, I rarely use the radio. It’s always off on short trips. The BMW has an onboard computer that automatically turns the radio on, loudly, and interrupts me with every single travel bulletin. In London in the morning rush hour there are travel bulletins every 10 minutes! Frustratingly, disabling the many unwanted “safety features” has to be done every time the engine is started. There is no global setting that I could invoke once and for all. As I explained to BMW, I want to drive the car, I do not want the car to drive me.

In comparison, my new Volkswagen is a delight. The first time I bought a secondhand VW was in 1982, and I switched later when my wife and I wanted an automatic. In 1998 automatic BMW 3 series were plentiful on the secondhand market, and were cheaper than any automatic Golf. Twenty six years later, and after a succession of 6 BMWs during that time, I am back to buying Volkswagens.

The next time you have issues with something ask the vendor to consider the “no hindrance, no hesitation, no questions” approach to being user friendly. Point them to Jeffrey Rubin’s book.

See what they do. Just talk the talk, or actually walk the walk?

I will add more to this when I have time. For now . . .

turn off enhancements in Microsoft Office or you will be sharing everything you write with them

it’s a default opt in – you have to opt out

does the Govt know about this?

the Police?

the armed forces?

your employer?

your students?

your friends and family?

go to

File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings

Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > uncheck “enable” > OK > OK

restart MS Office