I've been lucky at the art of getting lost just enough. If you've walked with me while I'm thinking you've probably noticed my sense of direction and local awareness can be low. If I'm by myself awareness comes into focus, but getting lost - just enough - is something I enjoy and can be a source of serendipity. I should probably explain.
Alarm was the order of the day when Sputnik went up on October 4, 1957. A big military threat from the USSR , satellites needed to be tracked. Some folks at MIT put together do-it yourself plans to enlist amateur satellite trackers across America. All you needed was a knowledge of your latitude, a simple sighting device, a pivot and a clock. Thousands of homemade sighting scopes were made overnight in home shops and within a month a factory was mass producing a kit that was set out to high school science classes around the county.
It turned out a good clock was centrally important. Knowing the time of a position reading to a second or two was necessary. Shortwave radios were common in the 50s and satellite trackers were asked to tune to WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado to listen to the reference time signal.
A couple of physicists considered about the inverse problem. What if you had a lot of good clocks in well defined orbits and could read their times? That's enough (well, sort of) to figure out your position on the globe. You'd have a global positioning system.
It seemed like an extremely hard problem at the time. You'd need to orbit atomic clocks and there were any number of issues. But navigation was a hard problem - a really hard problem. DARPA eventually went to work on it and, armed with boatloads of money, made it happen. Mix in the revolution from Moore's Law, add a few dozen years and navigation had been democratized.
Many of us get around following instructions from our GPS systems not paying great attention to what's around us. Kids in the backseat watch videos or play games. While this may be ok for some types of travel I think a lot has been lost.
I like to pay attention to areas I visit regularly to see change that is otherwise invisible. There's an undeveloped and heavily wooded swamp next to where I live and, assuming I'm home, I take spend an hour or so every day around noon. Over the sixteen year I've been doing this a richness of change from year to year rather than season to season emerges. You get to know about certain animals and plants. Stop and listen. Let your mind take flight. Try it at night with the fireflies and crickets knowing a coywolf or two is watching. It's here that a lot of ideas seem to present themselves.
Cities are great too. I live reasonably close to New York City. If I have the time I'll go somewhere very unfamiliar and learn something.. I'm not a terribly outgoing type unless I know someone, but curiosity can take the lead. It's not so much being a flâneur as it is looking, listening and asking questions.
The same for universities. Some of the places I've gone to school and worked encouraged cross-disciplinary collaboration. Sit in on a departmental lecture outside of your field, ask questions afterwards, walk into people's labs, ask them what excites them now. And for sports - you can learn a lot about a sport if you spend a bit of time with a competitor.
Waylosing (a wonderful term I heard a few year ago) is very efficient in its inefficiency if you're after more than getting from point A to B. And normal travel is getting more and inefficiently efficient.
As you get good at it you find yourself asking questions .. why are things the way they are. Start out with simple things for practice. Why are stores arranged the way they are? What about the open lots or failed businesses along a route you take? How many types of ants can your find in Central Park? How does someone react when you give them a harmonica or a balloon:-) A lot of this is mental exercise that just comes in handy. There's a certain pleasure to working out something yourself. Of course you don't need to - and can't - do it all the time, but it's fun when you do.
I worry that the technologies that isolate us from our environment lead us to making poor use of our travel time (and time in general). They can be very useful, but use them appropriately. Other technologies like cameras, binoculars and microscopes can extend your question asking capabilities. Choose appropriately.
The weather is good this time of year for most of the readers. If you're planning a trip try the classic road trip stopping randomly along the way - get lost, ask questions and look. The journey can be where serendipity lurks.
Many of you have developed deep waylosing skills. I'm up for walks...
Finally it has been observed that very efficient operations tend to stifle creativity. That doesn't mean that inefficiency guarantees creativity.. There are a lot of issues . clearly a lengthy subject for another time.
If you ever get a chance to explore with Steve you’ve got to do it.
Posted by: Jheri | 06/23/2018 at 03:06 PM