Salt and Pepper

Looking into the mirror over the last few days (you need to do that to shave), I've noticed a distinctively salt-and-pepper appearance beginning to develop. I now have sufficient white in my hair so that the stubble looks like markedly heterogeneous. At the same time, an objective count shows that less than 0.1% of the population (yes, I counted more than a thousand hairs, vanity of vanities) has gone white.

But it's good to have more salt, I guess. If you're going to be the salt of the earth, maybe too much pepper is a bad thing. That was the thought that came to me as I heard incoming news from my social aggregator (Wyvernet) about the goings-on at the old place.

You see, they're hosting the local Odyssey of the Mind competition. This year's different though. The seasoned old veteran lady with the mad skillz has been replaced by a team which knows naught about OM set-up. No taped-off areas, no waiting areas, a lack of planning... sigh. It's not that I want to denigrate the place, but two things occur to me at this point.

Firstly, the tacit working knowledge of a place and a system is something that really runs the show. You can lose the old staff but you will also lose the practical working knowledge that they carried in their heads. This will eventually show up if you don't put a plan in place to transmit, record and store it while it's still available.

Secondly, I actually have a citation for my services (as part of a group) to this programme. The whole bunch of us are mostly no longer there. If you're going to get rid of elements in your organisation, it's probably not a good idea to uproot an organ without proper replacement.

Connected with that is the idea of what an organ really is. Some organs are more obvious than others: the liver, the kidneys, these things look like concentrated bundles of stuff. But the skin, the lymph network, these things are distributed organs. If you were to eliminate sizeable chunks of them, you'd die in a most uncomfortable way. Think about what would happen if you lost a third of your skin or a third of your blood vessels, or a third (distributed) of your guts...

So... more salt, a bit less pepper. Life is good.