Unreasonable and Beneficial

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, motivation, creativity, nonconformists

Do you know the old song "High Hopes"? Part of it says,

Just what makes that little old ant

Think he'll move that rubber tree plant.

Anyone knows an ant, can't

Move a rubber tree plant!

But he's got high hopes, he's got high hopes;

He's got high apple pie, in the sky hopes.

So any time you're gettin' low,

'stead of lettin' go

Just remember that ant:

Oops! There goes another rubber tree –

Oops! There goes another rubber tree –

Oops! There goes another rubber tree plant!

Then there was Harlan D. Sanders…you know, Colonel Sanders. I am not sure how he lived to age 65; by then he had failed in business a number of times, and in the legends that swirl around his name the range is from seven to more than 1,000. One might think he'd get discouraged, but he was too scrappy to keep an ordinary job; he had to be self-employed. When the timing was right, his fried chicken business finally made him wealthy. Apparently his "business failures" had kept body and soul together until then.

In Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, by Adam Grant, we read of a number of people who didn't settle for the status quo. They didn't conform. That's all it takes to be a non-conformist. The thing is, there are a lot more non-conformists than there are successful non-conformists. But, really, there are a lot more musicians than there are successful musicians. Are you a non-conformist, but feeling dragged down? The book may have some useful ideas for you.

The book's focus is people who caused good things to happen, who were Originals. George Bernard Shaw put it this way:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Thus, each chapter presents and a principle or maxim that an Original must deal with, and shows how someone did so. We learn quite early that it is risky to go against the grain (or against the tide). The first chapter, "Creative Destruction" (headed by the Shaw quote above) tackles that notion. The author highlights the origin of the online eyeglasses industry by four young men who started Warby Parker, in the face of enormous, "Nobody will want that!" -style criticism. I've used Warby Parker. I heard of them long before I tried them out. They're actually losing the marketing edge to some even less reasonable competitors, but they're the big dog in that arena. Adam Grant had passed up the chance to invest in WP in 2009, "…the worst financial decision I've ever made…", he tells us.

As much as we might idealize those who "speak truth to power," we recognize that most of those who do so get effectively squashed. In Chapter 3, "Out on a Limb", we find that we need to build credibility and status to be heard by the powers that be, assuming that is relevant. In the CIA of thirty years ago, Carmen Medina saw the need for faster communications in all directions within "the Company". She thought electronic communications—which weren't all that new—could help. After persistently speaking up she was "sent to Siberia" within the agency, and lucky she wasn't fired outright. By building credibility and status from her "Siberian" post, several years later she was able to co-create Intellipedia. Now it is indispensable. 

That reminds me of Martin Luther. He was a nobody, a monk in Wittenberg, a rather nowhere place 80 km southwest of Berlin. The changing political climate (and newly invented printing press) set the stage for his "95 Theses" to "go viral". A generation earlier, he'd have soon wound up in prison or the grave. And he soon gained political protection from anti-clerical German princes, or he'd be forgotten today and any Protestant Reformation would have started decades later, if at all.

To quote Shaw again, a quote R.F. Kennedy used:

"You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' "

I count it a character flaw of mine that it seems I always fail at "speaking truth to power", and quail in the face of opposing authority. Yet somehow I build a career on doing things I'd been told not to do by supervisors whom I was able to hoodwink long enough that they saw I was making clients happier, and "overlooked" my insubordination. But it took dying (and being resuscitated) on the operating table to give me the gumption to take a stand and stick to it when I thought it was warranted, which capped my career with significant success.

Few of us are in such a position that being a non-conformist will really get us anywhere. But look around. Nearly everything that makes this old world livable started with an idea, but even more, with a person who went against the tide to make the idea a reality. As Henry Ford said, "In 1890 people just wanted a better horse." Ford was not the first to produce a working and practical automobile (that was probably Carl Benz). He was one of a host of dreamers (including Olds, Nash, the Studebaker brothers, Cadillac, and DeLorean) who shaped the industry. The most powerful force is an idea.

I could say that I suggest this as a book to be read by any entrepreneur, (or wannabe). Maybe. Or maybe it's best to let folks with a gleam in their eye dive in and duke it out in the public arena. A key characteristic of Originals is that they are, well, Original! I think they ought to read it anyway.

There is a quirk in the eBook I read. At the bottom of nearly half the screens (virtual pages) I find the first syllable or two of a word, often in the middle of a line that ends prematurely. There is no hyphen. The next screen begins with the rest of the word. I don't find this in any of the other eBooks I have read, so far.

Their own special brand of creativity

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, economics, creativity, human behavior

E. W. Marland, founder of the Conoco Oil Company, and a Governor of Oklahoma, once wrote, "Who knows why people do what they do? I spent money like water on my town and my people, and they thrived and prospered." So during the Great Depression, at least Ponca City, Oklahoma had a thriving economy. But if you aren't an oil billionaire, how do you make life better, for at least some people? Better yet, how do you figure out what is keeping them from thriving, and induce them to better themselves?

Those questions came to me from time to time as I read Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. As they make clear in all their "Freak" books, Economics is not really about money. It is about incentive. Economics seeks to answer, in all ways possible, Marland's question, of why people do what they do.

We all respond to our given environment by adjusting our behavior to maximize our own advantage. Thus, in earlier books by these authors we learn why most drug dealers have to live with their Moms, and why it makes sense for the highest-ranking Sumo wrestlers to occasionally throw a match against a lesser opponent. We find the possible link between the Roe vs Wade decision of 1973 and the dramatic drop in crime rates that began a decade or two later. In this book we learn of a toddler who, offered M&M's as a bribe for more consistent toileting "performance", quickly attained exemplary bladder control, using it to extract maximum candy for minimum excretion; and why advertising executives dared not perform a simple experiment to determine which advertisements were more effective…or whether any of them had any effect at all!

If you're paying attention as you read—and why wouldn't you?—you'll gather new ways to think about many things. For example, the first sentence in the prior paragraph is the word "advantage." We might react to that sentence with, "What is the 'advantage' of self-destructive behavior? Not just taking drugs (the incredible 'high' is incentive enough for an addict), but things like cutting, or like pulling out, not just a hair or two but nearly all of it?"

That last behavior, sometimes called Trichotillomania, afflicted a woman my wife and I knew when we lived in California. She was so embarrassed by her baldness that she always wore a scarf, yet whenever she wasn't paying attention, she'd pull out a few hairs at a time, over and over, clearing a square inch or two in a matter of minutes. She didn't dare to read for pleasure, lest she get lost in the story and find herself with a lap full of pulled hair half an hour later. Unfortunately, we moved away and never learned if she found any clue to this absent-minded impulse or a way to change it. But you can be sure it was fulfilling some kind of internal need. Humans do nothing that doesn't fulfill a need. Call it Freak Rule 1.

Cutters are usually more transparent. A cutter may be extra-sensitive to begin with, but is typically a shy person in a situation of learned helplessness, where nobody "in authority", no parent nor teacher nor minister nor school counselor, and also no friend, pays attention to any kind of request for attention or understanding, overt or otherwise. Such a person feels that nothing can possibly make things better. While cutting causes a little pain, it also brings an odd kind of relief, "At least there's something I can do that has an effect." If the way typically impervious parents react to finding blood on their child's clothes is to go into full panic mode and "get help", it sets up a feedback mechanism: "This kind of attention is better than none at all." It can spiral into unintended suicide.

But more prosaically, why didn't the ad executives dare to suggest an experiment such as stopping all ads in, say, 20% of their market regions? All they could think of was some board member retorting, "What?? Do you propose cutting company revenue by 20%????" Worse, if they were to get backing for the experiment, and revenues were unaffected, then what? You got it: The same board member, now shrieking, "What?? We've been spending millions on you jerks and it makes no difference at all????" NO, No no, the devil you know is ever so much better than the devil you don't know! They may not have been happy with the status quo, but could think of no better alternative.

A Freak is not just an economist. An Economist is ideally data-driven; a Freak is data-obsessed. And, late in the book we learn the most valuable Freakish lesson. Know when to quit. Yup. Got a good thing going? Do you expect it to run on autopilot, like, forever? Even if you watch it like a hawk, can you deal with everything that comes along? When times change, do you?

I retired from DuPont Co. several years ago. It's be nice if their pension lasts longer than I do. What are the chances that it won't? Actually, large enough to worry me a little. The company brass is under attack by Nathan Peltz, for one, and I have little confidence that the kind of people he wants on the board of directors will fully fund the pension fund. But even more to the point, the company is 213 years old. In a year, perhaps less, it may be no more. My brother texted me yesterday, "I hope you have a lot of DuPont stock…" This was just after the news broke that DuPont and Dow are talking "merger". The stock's recent price has been about $66.50. Yesterday it jumped to $74 and has stayed in that neighborhood. That's an 11% hop, which ain't bad if I want to cash in on some profit taking.

But in case you didn't notice, there is no DuPont Chemical Co. any more. They spun off the rest of the "hot" chemical products (those made the old way, using strong agents like acids) into Chemours earlier this year, and are fully invested now in a mix of agricultural and bio-engineered products, talking of "plants as plants", meaning to make stuff by putting the genes for the "stuff" into a plant and just harvesting it. I envision a future "DuPont/Dow Bioproducts Corp." (or Dow/DuPont...). Give it 5-10 years, and both the Dow and DuPont names are likely to vanish in favor of some acronym like DDB. Who remembers that AT&T used to be called American Telephone and Telegraph? The acronym remains, decades after the telegraph vanished from everywhere but the local museum.

So, things change. You can't predict the future, so you adapt when the future throws you curve balls. I have a term for what happens next: Psychological Hysteresis. Hysteresis, as an engineering term, is the tendency of a magnetic material to resist being re-magnetized in a different direction. As the applied magnetic field increases, the induced field lags behind, until at some threshold, it suddenly switches, and almost totally matches it. As you may imagine, there is some energy released when this happens. Now imagine a magnet in a continually reversing field. If the field peaks out strong enough, this switching pulse will occur at both ends of every cycle. Metals used for power transformers in AC power circuits are chosen to have very high switching thresholds, and the smallest possible lag, and the transformer is designed so that the threshold is not approached in normal operation. Otherwise, the transformer core will heat up rapidly, and can explode. As it is, power transformers run rather warm anyway, from the unavoidable level of hysteresis (lagging) even below the threshold. Psychologically, we find that we have a similar resistance to change, but if the stress is too great, we "break". Even when we don't, changing takes energy, emotional and physical energy. Continual change also makes the psyche "run hot".

Now, here you are, livin' your life, doin' pretty good. Things change. You don't, at least not right away. What has worked well for you for a long time, doesn't work as well. Do you:

A) Try harder?
B) Panic?
C) Call your best friend "who's always so together"?
D) All of the above?

Maybe it is best to think like a Freak and

E) Experiment.

If you try a little harder, does it help? If not, think about what might help. Do a little test. One that won't be catastrophic if it fails. And if it does fail? Do you have the guts to quit on that one, think some more, and try something yet different? Thomas Edison once said he and his lab helpers tried more than 1,000 substances before they found one that worked in his first practical light bulb. Someone asked, "How can you endure such a string of failures?" He said, "Failure? Not at all. I learned of 1,000 things that aren't good for making light bulbs!"

Here's an example a lot closer to home. The infertility business makes a lot of doctors rich. Desperate couples, mainly the unfortunate women, undergo many difficult, painful, and expensive "procedures" that the doctor recommends to determine the cause of infertility. One test is almost never done at the behest of an infertility clinic: Thyroid hormone levels, a set of 3 or 4 blood tests that involves no more than a needle stick and costs $100 or $200. More than 1/3 of infertile women have a low thyroid hormone level. Taking a daily hormone supplement that costs a few cents daily will result in fertility for nearly all of those women. For the other 2/3? Very many of them would benefit from getting a suite of endocrine hormone level blood tests in addition to thyroid. Treating endocrine imbalance is also not too costly. Then the greater effort could be focused on the smaller number who need more dramatic intervention to get pregnant.

In my wife's case, her thyroid problem was discovered almost by accident, and the hormone supplement led to pregnancy within a few months. But she was already 42. We have a healthy son, thank God, who is now 27. But it was too late to have any more children. That inexpensive blood test could've been done when she was 30 or 32…

If I wanted to do a truly Freaky analysis of infertility "treatment" in America, I'd gather lots of data on which tests are done and in what order. Whattaya bet the ones that bring the most bucks to the doctors are being done first?

All kinds of situations are amenable to Freaky analysis. I once heard of a law that was passed in a few European countries. The usual suite of environmental legislation is well known to be rather ineffective. The new law did not fill a 2,000 page tome. It simply stated, "An enterprise that takes fresh water from any natural source must emit any and all wastewater from all its processes at a point upstream of all its water inlets." It is a slightly nicer way of saying, you'd better clean up your wastewater, because you're going to be drinking it. Now, I can think of a way to get around this. If the outfall is pretty far upstream, even raw waste could get diluted, so that a smaller waste-amelioration plant next to the inlets might make that water usable for the company's processes. There's probably some optimum, where a little "treatment" of effluent, and further "treatment" of influx, would be the cheapest. So now that practice would have to be outlawed. I can imagine pitched battles in government courts over how much "influent treatment" is justifiable and how much is "effluent cleanup avoidance". And so it goes.

Experimentation is all in knowing how far to go and when to quit. Got a good conclusion? Is it well defensible? Good enough. Find another system to study.

One Freak's rule is that we all remember bad stuff longer and more vividly than good stuff. Forget all the fables about nostalgia and the "good old days". For every "good old day" there was an enemy or two who done you wrong. It took a concerted effort for me to take myself to the Fiftieth anniversary party at my high school. I made a plan, because I'd actually gotten along much better with the teachers than with most of the students (these days it is called terminal Nerdism). I went to the event that some of the teachers would attend. Two of my favorites did attend, but one was too demented to hold a conversation. The other, only six or seven years older than I, was a delight to re-connect with, and was very gratified that his teaching had borne fruit, at least in me (and I am sure in many others. He was very good). And you know what? The enemy or two that I remembered with the most dread didn't show. Things often work out that way! But think of this as the "it all averages out" principle. Not all the good was as good as you remember, and not all the bad was all that bad. And over time, things average out. But a Freak knows that nearly everyone around is driven more by fears than by anticipation, and learns to adjust for that.

It is a basic law of human nature. You get the behavior that you reward. A Freak will figure out, by experiment if needed, what different people actually consider to be a "reward." Then you'll know how to get the behavior you want. And even if you're not so much into actually setting policy and changing behaviors, thinking like a Freak can be quite entertaining. I mean, it would be very hard to change the system of Sumo rankings, but it is sure fun to figure out each wrestler's "thrown match" ratio.

And sometimes you can approach something with suspicion and be happily surprised. We seem to fear dying in a plane crash much more than dying in a car crash. That is in spite of the fact that 30,000+ Americans (and many more elsewhere, about a million) die in car crashes every single year. But the total number who have died in plane crashes, worldwide, since 1918 (end of WWI) is about 125,000, or four years of American auto crashes. But the Freak's mind is churning, "How about we check those death rates by the mile, or the hour?" Here are some facts I've been able to dig up on short notice:

• 1,088 airplane deaths in 2014 worldwide, and an average of around 1,000 yearly since 2000.
• 1,300,000 auto accident deaths in 2013 worldwide.
• In 2006, 2 billion air passengers made 28 million flights. 
• Air travel grows 5% yearly.
• 3 trillion miles driven on all roads yearly (3.15 trillion in 2014).

We have to boil these down to some useful averages, however rough:

• Relatively few roads permit high speed driving. Most of those 3 trillion miles were at speeds averaging 30 mph.
• Most commercial travel is by jets averaging more than 500 mph.
• I have no figures for the average flight length, so I'll analyze for 1,000 and 5,000 miles. The real amount is almost certainly somewhere between.
• 3 trillion mi. ÷ 30 mph = 100 billion hours of driving.
• 100 billion hrs ÷ 1,300,000 deaths = 77,000 hours per auto death.
• 3 trillion mi. ÷ 1,300,000 deaths = 2.3 million miles per auto death.
• 1,000 mi. × 28 million flights = 28 billion miles flying. (for high estimates)
• 5,000 mi. × 28 million flights = 140 billion miles flying. (for low estimates)
• 28 or 140 billion mi. ÷ 500 mph = 56 or 280 million hours flying.
• 28 billion mi. ÷ 1,000 deaths = 28 million miles per airplane death. High estimate.
• 56 million hrs ÷ 1,000 deaths = 56,000 hours per airplane death. High estimate.
• 140 billion mi. ÷ 1,000 deaths = 140 million miles per airplane death. Low estimate.
• 280 million hrs ÷ 1,000 deaths = 280,000 hours per airplane death. Low estimate.

We can now turn these figures upside down, and conclude:

• Per billion miles of driving, 435 people die.
• Per million hours of driving, about 13 people die.
• Per billion miles of flying, between 7 and 35 people die. This is much lower than for driving.
• Per million hours of flying, between 4 and 18 people die. A figure surprisingly close to that for driving.

What do we conclude? Since "between 4 and 18" probably means something like 8 or 9, it is almost certainly safer to fly than to drive, even calculating on an hourly basis rather than miles covered. But not by as much as we might have thought at first! I trust you can do your own analysis for U.S. domestic flying (zero flying deaths for about five years except two in 2013).

Trust the data. Oh, by the way. This book is required reading for anyone with pretensions of actually thinking.

Creative Artist is a redundancy

kw: quotes, creativity, artists

Sometime in the mid-Twentieth Century, composer Dmitri Shostakovich said, "A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one." This quote was the cryptogram in yesterday's newspaper, and once I had solved it, I said to myself, "No way!"

I'll first get this out: To do art is to be human. Everyone has artistic creativity, whether in the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, photography, crafts, scrapbooks and collages, architecture or design; performance arts such as singing, dancing, acting, or playing an instrument (or several, even at once!); or language arts such as poetry, essay writing, all kinds of fiction from "mini stories" of 100 words to novels and trilogies, plus script writing for stage or screen. The terms "skill" and "art" have enormous overlap, and may be entirely synonymous.

I suppose Mr. Shostakovich was talking about his own feelings, that after completing each composition, he felt dissatisfied and impelled to immediately begin another. He must have been so seldom happy! Does the impulse to create truly stem from dissatisfaction? I think not. The natural world, including that mass of human artifice we call civilization, is filled with beauty. Of course, not all. A rundown house may have some majesty left in its structure, but is mainly an eyesore, so of course the impulse to fix it up does arise from dissatisfaction. And a scene of devastation from a flood or other disaster has lost its beauty, but we can either participate in cleaning up, or protect it while nature restores the landscape in her own way. I think of visiting Mount St. Helens a number of years ago. The result of the 1980 eruption was a moonscape, beautiful only if you prefer your scenery lifeless. After just a few years, the biosphere was rapidly restoring itself, and now it provides many a pleasant view.

Of course, some places are naturally devoid of life and yet are beautiful. The wallpaper on this computer consists of many pictures taken in national parks. One on the screen right now is a picture of water-and-wind-scupted sandstone ridges and valleys, situated in the "four corners" area in the American Southwest. Peering hard, I notice there are a few bushes clinging to rock faces, but one does not notice them amidst the scene of geological beauty. This is an area in which life is expected to be scarce. But in southern Washington, with its heavy rainfall, one would expect a thriving biosphere cloaking nearly every inch.

When we have a settled workplace, whether office, cubicle, or the cab of a delivery truck, what do we do? Don't we hang or set some things we like here and there, or even clutter it up with trinkets? Show me an office with no hint of decoration, nothing expressing the occupant, and I'll show you someone with way too much self-control, or perhaps a security super-chief who is too paranoid to allow any smidgen of personality to be known.

Some people make their living from providing art for others. Are they driven to create work after work by dissatisfaction? Each work may be perfect. But there are so many things to express! I had the tremendous pleasure to attend a performance by a talented folk songwriter. She performs others' music on occasion, but she has things to say, and says them well in her songs. I also perform folk music, but seldom perform a song I've written; it wouldn't take long, because I've written only four that I think worthy of public consumption. I get sufficient joy from performing another's work skillfully and with the warmth and affection that an audience will love. So the work of art that I produce isn't the song itself, but the audible package the audience receives. Sometimes I might be dissatisfied with a performance. Thus I continue to practice. But even if it has gone perfectly, that doesn't mean I will do it exactly that way thereafter.

My main area of visual arts is making mobiles. I don't do so frequently; it is time consuming. I typically use found objects. Light ones. Sometimes when I'm done I find the mobile satisfactory, sometimes not. I made one using feathers picked up over many years and kept in the freezer (Always freeze a feather you want to keep, to kill mites and other parasites the bird may have harbored). A feather mobile can be quite beautiful. It also gathers dust quickly and is the very devil to keep clean. So that one is satisfying in one way, but not in another. Only once have I "repeated". Many years ago I made a mobile using pine cones of different sizes, from different kinds of trees. Around 15 years ago I made another one, because the first one had been lost or destroyed; I don't recall which. But I have one photo of the older mobile, so I won't forget it. I gave away the newer one, so perhaps one day I'll make a third.

The reason an artist who is not living of his or her art continues to create is because that is what humans do. We can't stop ourselves, or if we try we go insane.

Creators need armored underwear

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, creativity, sociology

Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door – with tar and feathers. More simply put, "No good deed goes unpunished."

In How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, Kevin Ashton fully exposes and expounds the greatest hypocrisy we face: Nearly everyone loudly touts their allegiance to "innovation" and "creativity", but in the face of any truly new thing, they will hide, protest, or punish the "perpetrator". The book is filled with stories of what really happened to many inventors and innovators. Very few received anything like acceptance, at least during the first few decades after making their discoveries known. Dr. Joseph Lister showed that requiring doctors to wash their hands after every visit with a patient nearly eliminated hospital-borne infections. Even today, there's only a 40% chance that your doctor washes up before examining you, unless you vociferously insist. Dr. Lister's predecessor, Ignaz Semmelweis, was driven to suicide by those opposed to his discoveries.

Why do we create? Why this continual drive for making something new? It is built into us. To be human is to create, or at least, to desire, yearn and long to create. We are defined by our tools. Humans are not the only tool-using animals, but we are the only animals that keep modifying and refining out tools, making more progress in tool development during one lifetime than chimpanzees or ravens have made in tens of thousands of years. In the opening chapter of the book, we read that, prior to about 50,000 years ago (70,000 according to other accounts I have read), innovations in toolmaking occurred over spans of thousands of years. Something changed in the human brain, and there followed an explosion of improvement and modification of human technology that continues to accelerate. Ashton's core thesis is that we are all creators, creation is common, and that the notion that only geniuses can be creators is so false that he denies there is any true meaning to the word "genius". We must all create, or die. In a late chapter he points to stifled creativity as a feature in many kinds of addiction and criminality.

Yet, as Jesus said (Luke 5:39), "No one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, 'The old is good enough.'" No matter how much people may say they value creativity and innovation, their instinctive reaction to anything new is, "It was good enough for grandpa and it's good enough for me." (Apologies to the composer of "Gimme That Old Time Religion"). You might say, "Oh, how about Einstein? He did Relativity and all that stuff, and got a Nobel Prize, and everyone loves him." He had a couple of lucky breaks, and got four articles published in 1905, giving him the stature to generalize his discoveries about Relativity in 1915, but his work is roundly misunderstood by most people who have not done the work to understand it, and every year many "private researchers" try to get articles published that challenge some aspect of Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.

Not all innovators are "punished". The book opens with the story of a 12-year-old slave on a French island who discovered how to pollinate the Vanilla plant artificially. "Edmond's Gesture" is still used, by workers with small enough hands. Only in its native area can the plant be pollinated naturally by a small green bee that lives nowhere else. But there was no assurance that Edmond would get credit for his discovery. Only persistent protection and advocacy by his owner assured that the "Gesture" would be associated with Edmond and nobody else. Later in the book we read of the team that developed America's first fighter jet, in about five months! Only thanks to a particularly clear-headed leader and his "Show Me" principle was it even possible.

Before going on, I want to take partial issue with one portion from the second chapter, that purports to show there is no value to the notion of "incubation." Various studies are remarked upon, in which it was shown that giving people various creative tasks, and having them take a break of 15 or 30 minutes in the middle, did not improve the results, and usually hindered them. I am not sure that my experience falls under the title "incubation", but here is a practice upon which I built a career of nearly 40 years as a software developer:

When faced with a conundrum, I'd work at it for a day, and if I didn't see how to make it function properly, I would step back and think through every aspect of the problem, building a kind of flowchart in my mind. Then I would go home, do whatever needed doing there, and sleep on it. Some time between 3 and 6 AM I would awake with a critical idea, and that would directly solve, or lead to the solution of, the key problem with that part of the software. I called it, "throwing it over the wall to the right brain".

I think the studies of "incubation" did not give nearly enough time for incubation to work, nor were the problems to be solved sufficiently difficult. Half a day (including the overnight sleep) seems to be required, at least the way my own mind works. By the above practice I produced a great deal of software that nobody else had been able to write. Oh, and just by the way, I was also a very unusual computer programmer in this regard: I always documented my work in internal "comment lines" that typically numbered about 1/3 of the total bulk of the code. This saved a great deal of time when I needed to re-use some code later and needed to remember how to hook it up. I once had a boss who gave me a file of subroutines (modules) that he had written related to tracing contour lines on maps. I began reading through the FORTRAN code, and some things were very obscure, so I was having a hard time even figuring out how to pass data into and out of the modules. There was not a single comment line in many, many pages of FORTRAN code! I asked him why, and he responded, "Can't you read FORTRAN?" I said, "If I were your supervisor, you'd have just been fired." Of course I can read FORTRAN, but every programmer uses clever constructions that make sense during the writing, but are very hard even for the original programmer to decode later. I decoded his code and was able to make good use of it, but it could have taken much less time had he been a thoughtful programmer. 'Nuff about that.

Right along with Ashton's thesis that we all create, he dwells much on the incremental nature of innovation. Remember Einstein? One of his huge innovations was Special Relativity, based on the speed of light as an absolute limit to motion. It includes things like time dilation (a speeding traveler ages more slowly), relativistic mass increase (things get harder to push as velocity increases), and length compression (faster yardsticks are shorter). All this from his thought experiments about riding a light beam or driving a very fast carriage with a lamp and clock aboard. But the points just listed are based on others' work, particularly that by Lorentz, who was building on work by others. Einstein had some key insights, it is true, but the power of his system was bringing all the parts together, and showing how they worked together. In a small way, I've had a similar experience. I have published a few articles in journals. The one of which I am most proud uses methods from astronomy and civil engineering, plus a 200-year-old technique first published by Leonard Euler. How many recent scientific articles have you seen that cite literature from the 1700's?

The chapter "Chains of Consequence" trace out a few key innovations, including the chain of innovation leading to the aluminum soda can, which can be produced for a few cents (of the 25 cents you spend for a cheap brand of soda, or the dollar you spend for a Coca-Cola). He shows the origin of all the known ingredients in the syrup that is added to carbonated water to make that Coke. Later on, Ashton even digs into Isaac Newton's statement about standing on the shoulders of giants. Similar statements were made for generations before Newton. We find that there are no giants. Instead, we are standing atop a pyramid of people like us, who made one innovation after another after another.

This reminds me of a joke about engineers and mathematicians. An engineer is brought to a room in which he sees a saucepan containing water to his right and a stove, already lit, across the room in front of him. A piece of paper next to the pan says, "Heat the water". He picks up the pan and places it on the stove burner. Then he is taken to another room with the same setup, but the pan with the water is to his left. He picks it up and places it on the stove burner. Now a mathematician is taken to the first room, re-set to the original condition. He does exactly what the engineer did. Then, when taken to the second room, he picks up the pan, but sets it to his right, saying to the person who brought him, "I already solved that problem." Of course, this sounds silly and we snicker at mathematicians, but the mathematician's principle is how we actually innovate. Based on all the problems already solved, we find an unsolved problem, and add just a little to a known method that had almost solved it. You can get a PhD for doing that.

Politics rears its ugly head in a chapter on credit. According to this Wikipedia article, as of 2014, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 817 men, 47 women, and 25 organizations. Only 15 women have won in Science, and two of them were Marie (twice) and Irène (once) Curie. Quite a number of male laureates won the prize for work not only performed, but invented, by women. This opens up quite a can of worms, so I'll leave it there, reported but not editorialized.

We do not see everything, but a most egregious example of not seeing because of not expecting is found in the saga of Helicobacter pylori, the organism that causes ulcers. Doctors looked at samples of ulcerated tissue from stomach and duodenal ulcers for more than 100 years, and didn't note the bacteria there. Some early "authority" had decreed the stomach too acidic to allow bacterial survival, let alone growth, so every single time bacteria were seen, they were ignored as "contamination". Not so the doctor who finally believed his eyes, and a colleague who was willing to "let the data talk." Ashton doesn't report this, but as I recall, Barry Marshall had to drink water laced with the bacterium, get an ulcer, then cure it with antibiotics, to convince even a few of his colleagues that H. pylori is the true cause of ulcers, not "stress". And it is now known that hundreds of species of bacteria inhabit our stomachs.

What we expect can determine what we see, and what we don't see. Many years ago I went with friends to a road cut in eastern Nevada, where they said we could collect trilobites. We stopped, got out of the car, and I looked at the weathered rock in the road cut. It looked like grainy limestone with a kind of salt-and-pepper texture. I said, "How do we find the trilobites?" One of the guys put his finger next to a black blob half an inch long and said, "Look closely". Suddenly I saw them. Thousands of them. Nearly every black blob on that hillside was a small trilobite! Having seen one, I had "eyes for them". Similarly, on the first fossil collecting trip that my wife and I brought our young son along—he was 5 years old—the leader started the day by showing us several specimens of shellfish that had been found there (it was an abandoned quarry). He pointed to one, saying, "This one is rare and hard to find." Our boy looked for a moment, then trotted off. He came back in 15 minutes or so with three of them. We joked that, of course it helped that his eyes were only 3 feet from the ground! But he was the only person to find any of that species that day.

Innovation is built into us. The hard part is getting over resistance to innovation. We need the new, but we fear it. My father calls it the Moses Principle: in his words, "It takes 40 years in the wilderness for all the old-timers to die off, before the next generation will embrace something new."

A manager's manager

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, business management, creativity, film industry

I had quite a variety of supervisors and managers in nearly 50 years on the job. A very few were both incompetent and unlikable, but most were at least sufficiently likable to be tolerable, while a very few were excellent in both ways. The big puzzle is those who were very enjoyable as friends, but quite out of their depth as managers. Fortunately I outlasted all of them, and my last manager was one of the best: just as technically skilled as I, very likable, and very skilled with people. (And to those who say "a manager is a manager" and think someone with no technical skills can manage technical people, I say a big "B***SH**!!")

A prime function of managers is to be an umbrella. All too often they are instead the primary source of the "rainfall" that stifles those who work for them. I was once given a few people to supervise, to see if I had management potential. It didn't take long for me to find I was quite poor at all those things I wished a manager or supervisor to do well, so I backed out of that track and returned to a purely technical career. I did, however, learn to manage my managers, a necessary skill for most technical people.

Over the years I have read a number of "leadership" books. A quick look at my bookshelf reveals The Peter Principle by Peter and Hull; The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Covey; Who Moved My Cheese? by Johnson; Leading the Revolution by Hamel; Managing From the Heart by Bracey, Rosenblum, Sanford and Trueblood; Where Have All the Woolly Mammoths Gone by Frost, and Mitchell's translation of Tao Te Ching.

Better than all of them by far is Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull. While Ed Catmull has formidable technical expertise, he shines as a leader. He is presently president of three studios, Pixar Animation, Disney Animation, and DisneyToon. That's three pretty big hats for a man pushing 70.

He writes that the book is not a memoir, nor a history of Pixar and his career, but a travelogue of his development as a manager who continually strove to manage creative people in a way that unleashed their potential. In the introduction he concludes, "…managers must loosen controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust…clear the path…and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear." (p. xvi)

It hasn't been easy. The book is organized around the four stages of his own growth, with the titles

• Getting Started
• Protecting the New
• Building and Sustaining
• Testing What We Know

A key understanding is that what is working today may not work in the future; not all measures that incorporate a small group into a powerful working unit are effective in a larger setting—but some are!; and that something that works well may still be better replaced by something that works even better.

All my career, particularly at the company from which I retired after about 30 years, I heard the slogan "Continuous Improvement". Usually, that is what it remained, a slogan. Only in rare instances could a "leader" accept a suggestion for something that might truly be an improvement. Idea after idea died a-borning. Whether the idea killer was "Not Invented Here" syndrome or simply the blazing glare of early scrutiny, the usual reactions to new ideas strongly dissuaded creative people from expressing themselves.

As you might guess, I most strongly identify with the second principle. You know the expression, "A face only a mother could love"? (It goes for fathers also.) This is our son two days after he was born. He already looked a lot better than he had the first day. But this is nothing like he looks now!! This illustrates what Catmull calls the Ugly Baby principle.

A new idea may not need 15-20 years of feeding, cleaning and training, but in the film industry at least, it takes a couple of years to work out a lot of "ugly" and create beauty in its place. As I read, I was astonished at the changes that were made to some iconic Pixar films, such as Toy Story or Monsters, Inc. If the descriptions of these projects in their early stages are at all accurate, a too-early production of any of them would have been truly ugly. Or, at the least, simply bombed in the box office, leaving puzzled and disgruntled audiences wondering why they paid to see it.

From the time Steve Jobs bought Pixar in 1985 until he died in 2011, Pixar Animation Studios grew from less than 50 employees to more than 1,100. A theme that runs through the book could be called "growing pains." It is the focus of the third section, which opens with the chapter "Broadening our View". Just as a skyscraper needs a wider foundation than a bungalow, the large enterprise of the new Century needed to extend its breadth of experience. Among 8 lessons described in this chapter, "Learning to See" impressed me most. At a certain point, Catmull and his team decided to train all new hires—not just animators—to use the Pixar software. Thus was born Pixar University, which really took off once they began to teach art.

Contrary to folklore, we really do use all of our brain, we just use various parts at different times (full engagement of every neuron might produce a meltdown under the 500 watts produced). We use our visual cortex, 30% of the entire cortex, every instant that our eyes are open. Still, we do not see everything. Have you seen the basketball-gorilla video? Asked to count how many times people in white jerseys throw a basketball amongst a group of 10, very few notice when someone in a gorilla suit passes through the midst. Further, Catmull notes research that shows more than half of what we "see" is constructed in our brain by hints picked up in our peripheral vision while we are looking at any scene.

A recently popular video shows a rocky forest trail with signs that warn, "Beware of Migrating Snakes", bearing a picture of a coiled rattlesnake. Hidden cameras show most people jumping or backing away from random pieces of branch on or near the path. Had they not been prompted by the warning sign, they'd have seen the branches for what they were immediately.

Drawing requires the artist to set aside the brain's filling-in so as to draw what is really there. Interestingly, people in Pixar who did well in the drawing classes became better at their work, whatever it was.

Regardless of the size of a creative enterprise, the prime enemy is fear. Catmull and his co-leaders have given huge amounts of energy, thought and time to producing an environment that can "uncouple fear and failure" (p. 123). All our lives we are punished for failure, so of course we fear to fail. Only the most stubborn among us can overcome fear and endure a series of failures on the way to a success. Abe Lincoln failed in business four times, and Colonel Sanders went broke seven times. Aren't we all glad they tried one more time? Pixar leadership recognized that they could not rely on a tiny few stubborn people to have all the ideas and push them to fruition. They needed a culture of embracing (but not encouraging!) failure as a necessary part of the process of creation.

Back to the Ugly Baby. A newborn may look ugly to some, and it will be years before its habits are socially acceptable. But that is no reason to destroy the baby. Just as a human child is a learning machine, a properly constituted team can be a creation machine. I think of Ed de Bono's "thinking hats" methods. He also recognized that at the early stages the Black Hat (criticism) had to be excluded from discussions of new ideas. A Pixar film is typically a 4-year project. It may be 3 of those years before the beauty begins to overtake the ugliness.

Film-making is storytelling. Viewers need to identify with the key character(s), or no amount of technical brilliance will help. A skilled cabinet maker uses various tools such as saws and sanders. In my hands, saw cuts are at best "sorta straight" and I have to be careful with the sander, not to sand right through the veneer. But in the hands of a true craftsman, various bits of material are transformed into a beautiful piece of furniture. Yet the piece must be properly designed. A friend recently had his kitchen remodeled. A measurement error led to a space the refrigerator would not fit into. It is a beautiful kitchen, but a big section needed re-work, which cost less than scrapping the fridge and buying a new one.

In any creative enterprise something analogous to such a "measurement error" is all to frequent. In cabinetmaking, the usual waste ratio is around 50%. In film-making, it may exceed 90%. We need to expect similar levels of "waste" in human affairs also. Management, like creation, is full of hidden and unknown factors. In one place, Catmull writes, "If you don't try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead" (p. 169), and "A large portion of what we manage can't be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences" (p. 219, his emphasis). In the latter quote he is reacting to the popular phrase, "You can't manage what you can't measure". It is a damaging falsehood. Measurement is engineering. Human affairs are not engineering problems to be solved with a computer (I almost wrote "slide rule". Showing my age). That's why we call business leaders "managers" not "engineers". You can't engineer something that has a heart.

Ed Catmull has a heart. A big one. He had heart enough to manage his long-term boss, Steve Jobs. He may be second only to Steve Job's wife Lauren in his years of contact with him. In the closing chapter of the book he seeks to portray a Steve Jobs freed from the pages of popular journalism, where he is either lauded as a peerless genius or vilified as an inhumane jerk. Yes, he was a genius. He was also a jerk. But he was not only these things. He could grow, and he did. The tasty stories of Steve Jobs berating others in public are from 'way back. To his end, he could be challenging; he was prone to toss out an outrageous notion so he could gauge people's reactions. If you were thin-skinned, it was best to stay under his radar, or go elsewhere. While in the early Pixar days, Ed Catmull mandated that Steve Jobs not attend some creative meetings, years later he was a more welcome presence, not because he had "mellowed", but because he'd grown to see the value of the principles under which Pixar operated, and learned the tolerance for ambiguity and failure that underlay its success.

If I could go back and do it all again, I'd demand to take with me the memory of this book so I could seek out and work for people like Ed Catmull.

In the image of the Creator

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, creativity

You know a book is good when it seems much too short. At just over 250 pages, Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer is probably as long as it needs to be, but it seemed the reading was over all too soon. In this volume the author has done his best to gather all the best research and understanding about human creativity. The key finding: humans are creative. It is what we do.

Some people are much more productively creative than others. It may be that we are learning why. There are aspects of both individual and collective activity that foster creativity, and some that don't. But we need to realize that "creativity" does not refer just to "the arts". The handyman who fits a shoe-changing bench into a corner of the entry, or the cook who adds "a little bit of this and a little of that" to a recipe, or the sales clerk who says, "We can make that work," when confronted with a non-standard request, all are creative. So is a room full of kids learning backflips, or a company's employees putting up a makeshift movie screen where they can all watch the Olympics (this last is the subject of an ad for Chobani yoghurt).

Creation typically begins with frustration. The book's first chapter recounts Bob Dylan's disgust with his early career, when he literally headed for the hills. Before long, he wrote "Like a Rolling Stone", the first of an immense outpouring of songs that literally changed modern pop music. His lyrics are so memorable that when I first heard "The Times, They are a-Changin'" on my Dad's car radio, as soon as we got home I sat right down and wrote it out.

Dylan's experience brings out a second key to creativity: change your surroundings. In fact, you could summarize the first five chapters of the book this way: when you have a difficult problem to solve,

• Go somewhere else, from around the house to around the block to around the world. New viewpoints bring new ideas.
• Relax and think about something else. Unhappy people seldom solve anything.
• Recast the problem. Benjamin Franklin records in his Memoirs (published as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin) that, to learn a difficult concept, he would write it out in poetry, set it aside a few days, then translate the poetry back into prose.
• Sleep on it. I built my career as a scientific programmer upon insights that tend to arrive at 3 or 4 AM out of a sound sleep.
• Try to explain to someone who knows nothing about what you are working on (but do spare your beleaguered spouse). That person is likely to ask a question that makes the solution you need pop into your consciousness.

 A few further hints illuminate our need for other people. Your life will be more creative if you

• Involve others. There is a not-too-much-not-too-little aspect at work here. Lehrer calls this factor Q. There is a "sweet spot", sort of like the Goldilocks "just right" amount of Q, that leads to the greatest group productivity.
• Live in a cosmopolitan city, though Lehrer has a few comments about cities to avoid and cities to seek out. Generally, the creative productivity per person increases by 20% every time you double the population. Much of this has to do with having a larger network of loose associations and chance contacts; the "I know a guy who knows a guy" effect. You are also more likely to find a milieu with just the right level of Q.
• Seek an environment in which collaboration is rewarded rather than restricted. Small companies are more productive than large ones, just the inverse of the city effect. That is because cities don't make their residents sign noncompetitive and nondisclosure agreements. Eras such as Fourth Century Athens and Elizabethan England were mightily creative, but as T.S. Eliot wrote, "The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours, but less talent was wasted."

The book is filled with inspiring case studies, such as the Procter & Gamble effort that led to the Swiffer, the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and its stunning record of placing graduates in top colleges, and a surfer with Asperger syndrome who has a maneuver named for him primarily because he didn't know it was "impossible" when he tried it.

I would add a word about group problem solving. In the chapter on Q, Lehrer rightly blasts brainstorming. It truly is the worst possible kind of teamwork. The biggest problem with it is the "no criticism" rule. To use the terminology of Edward de Bono in Six Thinking Hats, you don't want to Black Hat an idea too early, but if everything is "blue sky" without discernment, you don't produce anything useful. A certain level of criticism needs to be fostered. The best ideas are those that can survive the fire. But ad hominem criticism needs to be nipped in the bud. If a team member resorts to personal attacks, get him or her off the team.

I have found that the best teams have a mix of openers and closers. Openers are divergent thinkers. They come up with lots of ideas. Closers are convergent thinkers. They know how to make an idea work practically. And both kinds of thinkers need to enjoy the process.

I have a couple of books that I keep handy: Jump Start Your Brain by Doug Hall and David Wecker, and A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oeck. Imagine is a good companion volume alongside them.

Zero sum or infinite sum?

kw: business, creativity, competition, philosophy, quotes

About twenty years ago, when I was working at a major oil company, the executives began an exercise to "zero-base" the corporation's workforce. Effectively, they declared that upon a certain date, everyone should consider himself or herself laid off, unless "claimed" by one of the new organizations that would be designed over the following several months. Then we all were set to the task of designing those organizations. The claim was made that this would improve our competitive position.

I called it "downsourcing management". What do we pay them their huge salaries for? I prepared a banner and hung it above my office door:

Creators do not need to Compete

Things went along well enough for a while. A number of us revolted against designing new organizations that did not include provision for the work we were doing, and effectively forced top management to actually manage, to make some decisions. They were still carping about "competition" and staying abreast thereof. I made a second banner, to hang below the first:

When running, if you look over your shoulder, you are sure to stumble.

Strangely, I found that not many of my colleagues had a creative mind-set. Having built my career on a continuing struggle for excellence, I found myself surrounded by many whose focus was short-term and excessively profit-oriented. Sometimes, it is necessary to forgo immediate profits in favor of greater success a little later. Many people cannot comprehend that.

I can illustrate this with the matter of investing for retirement. The company had a very generous matching plan to go with the 401-K, fully matching the first 6% that we saved. I jumped on that bandwagon the day it became available! With each raise thereafter, I increased my contribution, until I reached the maximum, at the time, of 15% of my compensation. 15+6=21%, and that, well invested, led towards my getting, if not rich, at least comfortable. (At another company now—with 9% matching!—, I could have retired a few years back, but work because I enjoy it.)

One of my colleagues was also an early adopter of the 401-K, but did things in a different way. He contributed only 6%, to get the match, and then withdrew his money each year. He just used the matching plan as a way to get extra compensation from the company, and lived well. When he retired a few years ago, his 401-K contained only the company contributions, which were substantial enough, but he'd have had twice the money if he'd kept his own money in the plan. Meanwhile, by contributing 21% to his 6% I had more than three times the accumulated value.

This illustrates a maxim by Kant, and here I must paraphrase:

It is a universal fault in man during fair weather to make no provision for the tempest.

Further, the great attention to competition, at the expense of creation, is well expressed by Napoleon Hill:

There are two world views a person can hold: a world view of competition or a world view of creation. Most people have a competitive world view.

I think it safe to say creative effort is responsible for nearly all value creation. The competitive efforts that follow the success of something newly created add little value, except insomuch as they engender further creation. Thus, while I hate to give her last billing, I am compelled to quote Ayn Rand:

A creative (wo)man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Throughout my career, when I have found myself doing work that others could do as well or better, I have turned my attention to finding work that I could do better than my fellows, or what is better, work that I alone could perform because I had created it entire. This has led to a much better course of my life than if I'd stuck to my former occupation as a fair-to-middling laboratory technician and engineer. There are those who take the hand life dealt them, and attempt to gather extra Aces. With a modicum of different thinking, one can create new Aces as needed.

The greatest power

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ideas, creativity

I had extra time to read over the weekend, and added think time also, so I finished reading Where Good Ideas Come From:The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson. The thinking part will take a considerable time yet to come. I pre-reviewed some of the crucial points earlier; Scaling in this post and the Adjacent Possible and Liquid Networks in this one. These last two items are called "idea structures" by the author.

There are five more of them, which I'll touch on briefly:

• the Slow Hunch – The "flash of insight" that we equate with a flashbulb going off typically takes a decade or two of back-of-the-mind cogitation before it occurs. When Friedrich Kekule had his dream about the fiery snake eating its tail, that led to his discovery of the Benzene ring, he had been thinking for a long time about how C₆H₆ could work and be so stable (Linear C₆H₆ is nearly impossible to synthesize, and is expected to soon fall apart).
• Serendipity – Ideas are often monistic, and need the support of other ideas to become a practicable reality. One of the best ideas I ever had arose from a mental collision between astronomy (orbital mechanics) and civil engineering, which I applied to physical chemistry calculations and simulations.
• Error – Most of us know how Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillin; he was a sloppy housekeeper and let a culture plate get contaminated. Also, the cosmological microwave background was discovered only after two radio astronomers got over their conviction that their radio telescope was somehow at fault. When an experiment produces unexpected results, that isn't a problem, that is a golden opportunity!
• Exaptation – This word was first coined for evolutionary uses, such as the conversion of feathers from thermal insulation to their use to aid flight. My example above of astronomy+geotechnology is an example of exaptation.
• Platforms – A city, or a coral reef, or a Darwininan "tangled bank", are examples of Platforms, infrastructure that other developments can rely on. Newton and others wrote of standing on the shoulders of giants. There are actually millions of shoulders out there. I didn't have to invent the FORTRAN or COMPASS languages to have a career as a computer programmer; others had laid the groundwork. You don't have to be a road-builder to be a driver, nor must you lay rail and build locomotives in order to take a train ride.

The author closes with a chapter in which he develops a four-quadrant model of the origin and environment of the great inventions of the past 600 years, taken two centuries at a time, and focusing on the Fourth Quadrant, which refers in software development terms to the Open Source movement. That is where 90% of great innovation is currently happening, in all arenas. The Appendix to the book is a key value: 44 pages limning a couple hundred key inventions from 1400-2000 A.D.

All of this is written with a fluid, easy style that makes reading easy. Early on, I expected I'd need to take plenty of time to read the book. Its thickness and small font made me cautious. But it reads as fast as a novel. That is a danger in itself, for this book is so full of material, it requires a second read to have a chance of grasping more than a fraction. That makes it a good reference work to have on hand. And what fun!

Take the first left between the alphabet and the dictionary

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, languages, creativity

Many years ago, buying gas at an Oklahoma truck stop, I bought this soda can holder/cooler. It has served me well ever since. It has also sparked comment from time to time, as people notice it and falter a bit, knowing that I am the kind of guy who owns two Toyota Camry sedans (one is 10 years old, the other 19). I am just not the bad boy type, and I have never gone to an event to see monster trucks crush "ordinary" vehicles, in between chain races and other sorts of vehicular mayhem (correction: at age 13, I went with a church youth group to a Demolition Derby, an activity that got the youth leader into a bit of hot water).

I am much more the techno-geek type, a lifelong computer programmer, one who can read the encyclopedia or a dictionary for pleasure. It makes me very, very akin to the kind of people who like the Klingon language. Myself, having once been fluent in French (I can still read it), and later flunking a German class or two, and further getting just enough of a smattering of Japanese from my wife to get me in conversational trouble, I have no more interest in acquiring a new language. If I did, it wouldn't be Klingon anyway; it really is a "monster truck" sort of language (I'd pick Esperanto).

Klingon, as created by Mark Okrand and codified by the Klingon Language Institute, is one of four invented languages that has become, to some extent, a living language, with a generous handful of fluent speakers and hundreds who've learned enough to earn a first-level pin. Though this graphic shows a script invented for the language, so far as I know everyone who writes Klingon uses Latinized transliteration: nuqneH = "what do you want?", the closest Klingon equivalent to "hello".

Arika Okrent has earned her first pin in Klingon. As she reports in her book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, LogLan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, she has also become conversant in Esperanto and managed to translate a sentence or two into LojBan (a semi-living "logical language" that spun off of LogLan).

This last is no mean feat. Consider ei do cusku le do se skudji. Though this is intended to translate "You should say what you mean" (as the March Hare told Alice), when translated literally back to English, it comes out "You are obliged to say the desired-to-be-said thing". Because of its hyper-logical structure, LojBan has dozens of words for "is" (Bill Clinton would have loved it). Nonetheless, it has a number of at least competent speakers/users.

The fourth invented language still in use is Blissymbolics, which was intended as a universal pictorial script, but has become of use as a "bridge" script for disabled children to help them learn to communicate in a written language. Preliterate children who cannot speak are not helped by facilitated communication when presented with a board covered with English (or French or whatever) words. If they are first taught the symbols for a few dozen meanings, and these are then presented along with written equivalents, they soon learn to make themselves understood, and in the process, learn the written words.

The Bliss text above means "I like to go to the cinema". Three of the symbols/symbol groups can be figured out by most people, while the fourth, once it is explained to be "house+seeing+showing or projecting", makes sense and is easily remembered. This shows also the concept behind many "logical" languages, in which a "small" (a few hundred) easily-remembered concepts are grouped to express all other concepts. Ideographic languages, primarily Chinese, have a similar basis, but one needs the spoken language to learn the symbols, which do have a phonetic basis.

How many invented languages are there? Prior to the Internet's ubiquity, at least 900 created languages were seriously touted in print after about 1150 A.D., when Hildegard von Bingen produced Lingua Ignota and proclaimed it a language that facilitated (Christian) spiritual communication. Though Ms Okrent writes of "900 languages in 900 years", all the languages after Lingua Ignota were published after about 1500 A.D., so it is more accurate to write "900 in 500". In an appendix to the book, the author lists 500 languages with their creators and publication dates, ranging to 2007.

Few invented languages have hit print since 2000 A.D.; it is so much cheaper to publish on the Internet. Also, the reasons for language creation have changed over time. Prior to about 1950, there was an about equal emphasis on Logicality and Internationality. Since about 1980, these impulses have been reduced to a dull rumble, and "conlangs" and "artlangs" have taken over. The former are languages constructed, as Klingon was, more for interest than for a purpose, and the latter are those created purely for creative reasons. Many of these have decades of work behind them, and there are hundreds of them.

Nearly all language creators are men, and most begin at a very young age. Two women of note are Fra von Bingen, as noted above, and Suzette Elgin, creator of Láadan, with its unique feminine perspective (six words for various experiences of menstruation, for example).

Other than the four mentioned, and a few conlangs or artlangs that have a current following, invented languages fail of their object. Only Esperanto has become a widespread communication medium. Translating Hamlet into Klingon, for example, does not emable Klingon aficionados to enjoy the Bard in Klingon; it is more of a "neat hack", like a computer program that can produce a workable concordance at a single whack (a task usually done with five or six utility programs).

It is no surprise to me that most invented languages fail. Who is willing to learn to parse, or spell, pretzpxn ljbztur frateriorpur ("The price of my brother's book" in "A Universal Language" by James Ruggles), let alone try to pronounce it? Usually, nobody except the lone fellow who invented it. But if the "Simple English" used in some Voice of America broadcasts were ever codified, it would rank as a usable invented language, bringing the total to five.

Among all these, including the few still in use, I have a bit of interest only Ludwig Zamenhof's Esperanto, created and developed in the 1870s and '80s, and published in 1887, when its creator was 28. Zamenhof grew up in an area of Eastern Europe in which you had to know three or four languages just to buy groceries, and also saw the mutual animosities among members of the various language groups. He was motivated to produce a language for everyone, in hopes to foster peace through better communication. Hundreds of others have had the same impulse; what did he do right?

Timing was a key element. An older "universal language" named Volapük was losing ground, stranding adherents who were sympathetic to its goals. Another element was the use of word roots that stood midway between several familiar languages, being derived from Indo-European roots. And a huge element of the success was the use of suffixes to add meanings to the relatively small corpus of root words. Thus while the frat- root denotes siblinghood, frato means "brother", fratino means "sister", and other words that require gender distinctions use the -o and -ino endings to make it. The basic use of the -o ending, however, is to denote "noun", as in vero, "truth". Other endings indicate that a word is a verb, adjective or adverb, with variations of the verb ending to indicate tenses. Esperanto is a very inflected language, but the inflection system is much simpler than that of, for example French, which I find to be endless.

The single most important factor is that Zamenhof was not thin-skinned. He didn't keep tight control of every aspect of the language; he did not treat it as his "inviolable offspring". Nearly every other language creator wound up exhausting himself fighting with those who wished to use the language, but had their own ideas (as absolutely everyone does) about this or that detail. Esperanto became living because its creator let it live and encouraged the creativity of those who could help it become more and more comfortable to speak.

Languages require a certain amount of ambiguity to work well. Our mind is extremely good at detecting nuance; we are good at resolving ambiguity. This puts less of a load on a language's speakers to speak with exactitude. This is the problem with LojBan; it is so exacting that absolutely nobody, even its most ardent speakers, can carry on a conversation without the help of a lexicon to remind them of the precise way to express some exact shade of meaning. Its grammar book masses six hundred pages. English grammar can be conveyed in twenty pages, and you really only need the first two or three pages of the summary you'll find at the end of a good dictionary. Esperanto grammar is even sparser, because the words carry word-type meanings in their suffixes and affixes.

As a lifelong amateur linguist, I am very beholden to Ms Okrent for this volume. It banished in me for good any notion of producing a language of my own or to try a hand at "reforming" English spelling. It also confirmed for me that artificial languages make sense primarily in artificial contexts. I am fluent in Fortran, Pascal and Basic, less so in Visual Basic, and can get by in Perl and C only with the book open constantly (kind of like a LojBan speaker). These are all "formal languages" that are used to direct the operations of computers. Music notation is also a formal language, one that cannot be spoken, only either written or performed. It is like a computer program with the musician acting as the computer. I read music pretty well, but not with the fluidity of a competent conductor.

A final note: the primary impulse driving language creators in the past decade or two has been artistic. J.R.R. Tolkien was an early "artlang" creator, the producer of Welsh-inspired "elven" languages, which he published in 1955; he said more than once that his books were a vehicle to provide a context for the languages, on which he had spent forty years. Have a look at the Omniglot Conlang pages and Artistic Languages in Wikipedia for an introduction to the field. Also, the author maintains a website based on the book that contains lists of languages with dates and creators, and added material about many of them.