Dilly-Dally Dither Dance

Time’s beauty — reducing complexity of human activity to one serialized dimension.

Who we are is defined by as much of what we do as the order in which we do what we do. People chase success by performing goal-directed pivots along a series of adjacent possibles to pursue a perceived plausible future. Folks also add ‘noise’ to give life character, i.e., create a sense of ‘me’. This combination of planned and random experience, yields our identity, and by extension, our respective perceived reality.

Given our increasingly technology-driven world, with its emphasis on empirical science, there is a tendency to live life by the planned and predictable. Ironically, PageRank, and other methods to select and sort web search results are predicated on a random surfer or similar models. In the extreme, people may wholly rely on such algorithms to package and filter our incoming streams. To minimize force-fed filtering, we should consider injecting some randomness into our lives, as alluded to in DuckDuckGo’s manifesto, “Don’t Bubble Us”.

Some folks may plan ‘randomness’, e.g., by salting the crowd with tango dancers as seen in the video to liven up a government function. The remainder of this post explores practically inserting randomness, planned or otherwise, in or between our planned activities.

Click to read more on leveraging dilly-dally dither dancing in the technical and not-so-technical aspects of life.

36 Symbols – Hey, Circumlocution

We introduce our 36 Symbols series, whose name was inspired by the manifesto from the team at 37signals, along with their book, Rework. The style and content of 36 Symbols is motivated by Ernest Vincent Wright, the author of the short novel, Gadsby, which contains no instances of the letter ‘e’. This ingenuous writing exercise reportedly required the author to tie down the corresponding key on his typewriter and to leverage circumlocution – the fine art of talking around something.

Circumlocution is often cited with respect to operational security (OPSEC) when people ostensibly communicate without revealing sensitive information by talking around classified. In movies, books, and intelligence reports, such circumlocutions create tension-filled plots — in life we mundanely refer to decoding circumlocution as “reading between the lines”.

Thus, each post in the 36 Symbols series ostensibly involves restricting ourselves from using one of the twenty-six letters in the English alphabet or one of the ten Arabic numerals. Each post also attempts to contain a circumlocution within a circumlocution in homage to the movie, Inception, or dreams within dreams. In this first post, we eliminate the English alphabet’s famous first letter, ‘a’, while musing on how we’d live without “just one more” post, tweet, link, or option. Now, enter the circumlocution zone » read more