Rehabilitation

Today I saw a marvellous spectacle which quite displaced my flow of thoughts on examinations for a while. So this is a post that has nothing to do with being an examinee. Rather, it has to do with a flow of a different kind.

As I was walking up the hill, I realised that the last few days of loud machines and aromatic diesel fumes had been because of something called (according to a large blue official-looking sign) the 'Sewer Rehabilitation Program Phase 3'. Not only that, but the agency responsible for it was named the 'Water Reclamation Board'.

I was alternately amused and horrified — amused at the thought of the criminal sewer undergoing interrogation, debriefing, and rehabilitation in some isolated waterway; horrified at the thought of what the juxtaposition of 'sewer rehabilitation' and 'water reclamation' meant. Did it mean that once-criminal sewers had been purged of their water, which in turn was to be given back to society as in Frank Herbert's Dune sequence? Or did it mean that the sewers were being converted to marinas? Or what?

Life is wonderful when you stop to sniff the diesel and read the signs.

Engineering Failure

Sometimes I think that zero-tolerance (or at least, very low tolerance) engineering is the downfall of many things in the modern world. Here is an excellent quotation from Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human (Vintage Books, 1992), p220.

The successful transportation of men to the moon and back has demonstrated that lack of experience alone does not necessarily condemn a design to failure. It is rather the combination of inexperience, distracted by overly restrictive requirements, coupled with the pressures of deadlines, and aggravated by concerns for profit margins that initiates the cracking up of bus frames and designers. [stress added by me]

It is the same set of stressors that drives men to multitask, a special talent which men are far less suited to possess effectively than women. Women, after all, are able to locate missing children and animals without so much as line of sight and even in the absence of noise (which is as effective a signal as noise itself, to many of them). Men aren't very good at multiple targets, due to the easily-focussed (some say 'distracted') nature of the male brain.

The American Psychological Association, often the focus of much contentious debate as to its pronouncements, has something to say about the matter which makes a certain amount of sense. They contend that multitasking has a built-in cost associated with switching rule-sets on and off, back and forth. A few tenths of a second are required to activate such switching, and this can make a life-and-death difference in efficiency of response.

I used to feel lousy about not being good at multitasking. I'm glad, for once, to feel normal.