The Arrow of Time, or Sorry Marty and The Insidious MRC

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As a young stage-struck theater major, I thought that the first law of thermodynamics was that you always moved to the center of the brightest spotlight. I have since learned that it is the first of the three absolute laws of the universe that declares that the amount of energy and matter in the universe is constant. Neither can be created or destroyed. But they can transform; H2O can be ice, water or a gas, but the molecules that make up those three states must remain constant. I have also learned, I think, that information, as a phase of energy, is similarly immune to destruction. 

Perusing that last assertion will make your brain hurt if you are not fairly well versed in theoretical physics. Even Physics for Dummies - and, yes, there is such a publication - fails the Distilled Harmony mandate to Distill Complexity.  But as I said, I think that information slips in there with mass and energy in the first law of thermodynamics as “things in the universe that cannot be destroyed.”  Maybe it can - but only at the edges of certain types of black holes, and if you are Stephen Hawking, because most of the other physics biggies seem to disagree.

As I lie here in bed at 3 AM staring at the LED of the speaker playing a thunderstorm, this strikes me as important.  It would seem that entities, particles, people, puppies, what have you, in the course of existence, move from a state of less information to a state of more information. To reverse that process, for time to run backwards, energy would have to be lost, which contradicts said "first law of thermodynamics." Hence the arrow of time runs one way. From the past into the future. Which, it appears, puts the kibosh on the idea of time travel, at least on a round trip to the future, a realization that, seemingly will always prevent Marty McFly from going Back to the Future.

Whew. Now that we have taken care of that, let us move on to a more complicated issue: the stairwell memory repressing condensate hypothesis. The phenomenon is common enough. I am sitting at my desk in the downstairs office and I sudden realize I need something from the floor above. I get up and begin to climb the stairs. Upon reaching the landing I realize I have no idea why I am going upstairs.  The phenomenon can also be observed in reverse - unlike the one way arrow of time. I can be upstairs and realize that I need something on the main floor. Once again, upon reaching the landing, all knowledge of my objective vanishes.  The secret lies in the fact that if I continue, clueless, to the floor that was my original objective, either up or down, after a moment or two I can recall why I needed to be there. Hence:

The Stairwell Memory Repressing Condensate Hypothesis

There is something - let us call it MRC for Memory Repressing Condensate - that gathers in the stairwell landings that interferes with the normal neurological process we call "memory."  When we move through the MRC it ceases to affect us and memory returns. I would posit two solutions - ceiling fans or a nap. 

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Downsizing the Upgrades

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I run a values clarification exercise in my classes that asks the students to give serious consideration to their core beliefs; what those beliefs are, and where they came from. The idea for these technology classes is that when we encounter a new app for our phone, or a new piece of technology like virtual reality goggles, we need to decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing. We need to ask questions. Should the government be able to access your email? Should your phone always report where you are? Can people say anything they want about you on the Internet?  The idea I try to stress is that they need to run everything they encounter through the filter of their values; people, careers, technology, their own behavior.  Everything needs to be evaluated in terms of that core set of values.

I nudge them toward the idea of constructing a nice tight set of hierarchical core values that can serve as a “first pass” set of criteria as they move through their lives. Foster Harmony is the first tenet of my “hierarchical core” - Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, Oppose Harm. So Foster Harmony becomes my first filter for new elements I encounter in my life. With people it is pretty simple. People who are discordant, rude, racist bullies simply drop out of the “worth my time or consideration” category. It doesn’t matter if they are neighbors, colleagues, or presidential candidates. Which of course brings us to the topic of this essay which is, no, not politics, it is software development. And the tenet under consideration is the third one: Distill Complexity.

The problem with upgrades, you see, is like the Hogwarts Staircases.  In the Harry Potter movies, more than in the novels, the staircases at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry seem to be in constant movement. The older students navigate them with nary a second thought, while new students seem in danger of imminent death by nasty knocking newells. It is a delightful cinematic device. Everything is in a perpetual state of change, you never know quite where you are or where you will end up. Delicious. But when the notion of constant chaos becomes the default for your computer, laptop or phone, the novelty quickly wears thin. 

“Upgrade” is a word whose meaning and impact has shifted significantly over the past few decades.  Think of that old movie from the early 1990s, “Sleepless in Seattle”: “Bing. You’ve got mail!” There was time when getting email was kind of exciting - someone you knew was reaching out to you across that Internet thingy to communicate with you. Now, when I awake to fewer than 50 new emails it may be an easy day.  And that, of course, is the crux of the matter.  Computers, the Internet, smartphones, etc., everything that makes up our digital world was originally designed to make us more efficient, more creative, better, happier. “Bing. Not so much."

Distill Complexity points to that failed promise.  In my life my technology should do those promised tasks, let me write, paint, draw, and contact people more easily and efficiently.  What software developers obviously do not understand is that if you continually develop and release “upgraded" suites of software that may correct existing flaws in the software, that same “upgrade" actually introduces undesirable complexity into my world.  The developers may, like the older students at Hogwarts hopping up and down the shifting stairways, see these upgrades as really excellent and intuitive improvements. 

However while coders see features like automatically sorting my mail into predetermined categories, asking if I want to save a website’s URL to the cloud, popping a text message on my screen while I am composing a document - as improvements, to many of us they are just messing up our digital world. What I did one way in the older version, I now have to do a different way in the “upgrade.”  The coders seem to have lost track of the fact that for me - and I would assert for most of us - software is just a tool, like a hammer, or paint brush or screwdriver. The software is not the element of importance in a task, it is simply a route to that more important objective; the document, the images, the song, that allow us to Enable Beauty - realizing the second tenet.

I would like to suggest a new tenet for coders based on “Distill Complexity”: Invisible Improvements.  The basic idea is that the improvements are “under the hood.” What I do, my “click route” to a task remains the same - the coder’s “better, faster, more stable” parts of the process are invisible to me. I don’t have to relearn how to use the software. And please, please, don’t change what I see on the screen.  While a coder might think it is “better” to have a neon hammer with four interchangeable heads with variable density, I just use it to hammer a picture hanger on the wall. Leave it alone.

Another analogy: Think “Upstairs Downstairs”. Think "Downton Abbey”. The servants were invisible, but absolutely vital. They made things happen, but never, never, did they interrupt the smooth flow of life above stairs. The code, the applications, and the people who create them should live downstairs. The test of their quality is measured by how invisibly they make sure that life above stairs functions smoothly, beautifully.

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