capacity

when is something too big?

Yesterday we struggled to get to where we were going in the car because a major attraction was so large that all the local roads were backed up with cars trying to get there.

Then we struggled to find a parking space in a nearby village/town where we were going to eat lunch. Despite all the available parking spaces being taken, it was not at all obvious where all the people associated with these cars were, the shops certainly were not busy, we had the restaurant virtually to ourselves.

The maths are not that complicated, any business will need customers, but the number of customers is dependent on the number that will or can get to you. For a bricks and mortar business, they need to be able to get parked or be able to get to you via some other mode of transport, or even just live within walking distance.

For those trying to encourage economic growth, perhaps the best idea is not to focus on supporting businesses, but investing in the infrastructure that lets people access a bricks and mortar business. Putting on more trains, or better buses, or more parking, lets more people get there, let the business focus its efforts on making them want to come.

Too often the problem is a pinch point, the businesses are fine, but there is no way that enough customers could actually visit to sustain them. The importance of modal shift in traffic usage is key. Old fashioned town centres just cannot function if they rely on individual people each driving there, then seeking a parking space. The logistics of the space required to park all the cars driven by enough people to sustain all the shops is absurd. Whereas a few extra train carriages come at relatively little cost in terms of space and infrastructure, but bring in hundreds of extra customers.

graft

Often the only approach that is going to be successful is just sheer hard graft.

We recently had a temporary member of staff, who was also finishing off studying for a legal qualification, and I have never seen anyone work so hard. Everything she was given she just got on with it, when she had a spare minute she pulled out her text books and worked through them.

At the same time I was studying a criminal paralegal course, and I tried to adopt the same attitude, just putting in the hours studying. Applying an element of critical thought, always asking if I was studying the right thing, in the most appropriate way. By the end I had put a lot of hours into the course, and got a result that was much better than I had hoped for.

By stripping out ideas of talent or aptitude, just seeing the issue as one of graft, applying the hours of effort required, constantly making decisions on how best to use your time resource, the emotions get drawn out of the process. It just becomes a more straightforward transaction. There is not a sense of entitlement, or that life is not fair, just a sense that you need to get on with it.

There is a similar lesson in Geoff Colvin's work on Talent is Overrated
http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/talent-is-overrated

Although media coverage has focussed on Malcolm Gladwell's book on Outliers, the Geoff Colvin book actually looks to be the better of the two. It stresses the value of deliberative practice, where you deliberately focus on the areas outwith your comfort zone and practice those, all the time getting feedback on how you are doing, until you finally get better at them. It even puts a figure of 10,000 hours on the time commitment required to be really remarkably talented.

Of course it is always possible to identify people that just seem to have a natural aptitude, but once you start to look into it, by and large their aptitude has been obtained via a huge amount of prior application. I overheard a conversation on the train, some architects chatting, and they mentioned the notebook that one of their number kept, it was packed with hugely detailed and wonderful drawings of architectural features that he had seen, they all kept such notebooks, but his stood out as incredibly impressive. Yet he kept the notebook to himself, never showed it to anyone. It was not a product in itself, it was just part of his creative process.

The designer's notebooks at the ECA were one of the most impressive things there. The endless iteration of ideas.

But what is talent? If we follow the definition that we are talking about a remarkable ability in something, then by definition that is all we are talking about. Media functions to bring to our attention people who can do remarkably well things that we can only do badly.

But what intrinsic merit is there in such talent. Does it benefit the individual? Does it benefit society?

We are not failures because we are not remarkable, we have made other choices, those hours went into something else. Often caring for others. But we can learn from people who just put in the hours of study, who did not just get lucky. People who jot down things, and organise their lives.

Perhaps the remarkable thing about remarkable people is that underneath they are actually not so much different from ourselves, they just put their time into different priorities. The question we should be asking is how wisely we did spend those hours, and how wisely we will use the hours before us.

various shoutouts

Just a quick shoutout for some recent finds on that interweb thingy.



First off, it is a well, you know, a sort of, its like a, well why not just give it a try, play around a bit, play around a bit more,

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix

Secondly, getting bored with your desktop and want to put a clock on it. This works just peachy on my Mac, and there are plenty of templates to choose from, and if you are so minded you can even create your own.

http://vladstudio.com/wallpaperclock/

Thirdly, check out some arty tee shirts. Probably a little pricey, but then when you consider just how much of a part of your visual identify a good tee shirt can be, then paying a bit extra for something that is exactly right seems a small price. There is a myriad of other community stuff that I have not explored too.

http://www.redbubble.com/t-shirts/featured

Finally, Just a cool tune, give it a whirl.

http://www.myspace.com/deadplantstheband

injury

I thought I'd go to a physiopherapist to help with an old ankle injury, but they were just pulling my leg.

Shoutout - Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show

I really must go to more student shows ! Yesterday I spend the morning going round the Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show 2009.

Often with exhibitions they are a bit of a one trick pony, all very good, but quickly turning into variations on a theme. With a student show there are hundreds of students doing their thing, pushing the boundaries out in all sorts of directions, without much regard for practicality or sense.

For me, the stand out sections were the product design - in particular some stackable mugs by Thomas Payne, some twirly jewelry by Sarah Milligan and some superb furniture for children by Emily Greenberg. There was also the entire performance costume department, where not only were the costumes fantastic, but there were notebooks full of sketches and ideas which show just how much hard work and imagination goes into the work. I was also impressed with the architecture work, it is depressing that there is so much unimaginative architecture out there, when there is such creativity and imagination on tap.

Normally I would just link to images, rather than copying and pasting them into my website, but I do suspect that the links might vanish over time, and this stuff is just to good for me to talk about, without some images to look at. I've done my best to provide appropriate links and credits for the designers. If any of the creators have any problem with me including images, or would like me to provide additional links, just drop me an email.



stackable mugs by Thomas Payne


twirly jewelry by Sarah Milligan


the most fund children’s table ever


Performance costume by Eleanor Welch


the Leith Mile by Colin Davidson

The Great Crash 1929 - John Kenneth Galbraith

I bought this book alongside Depression Economics by Paul Krugman, and rather left it to one side. I've only just got round to reading it, and I have been very pleasantly surprised. Knowing that it was a classic text on the subject, I rather expected it to be dry and worthy. It is completely the opposite. After the first few pages, it quickly picks up pace and is an absolute page turner. There are not many books that I find I cannot put down, but this was one of them. I won't pretend to understand everything, and there are many out of date references that go over my head, but the big message is loud and clear. Largely based on newspaper reports, often tracing the story over individual days, people thought they could not lose, and borrowed money to invest. Confidence slipped, and then crashed catastrophically.

It is easy now to imagine you would be immune to such folly, but by the end I could easily envisage myself getting caught up in the mood of the time.

On the minus side, the quality of the printing is poor, with smudgy text. This is not an economics text book, you might learn about the psychology of the time, and think about the economics, but it does not provide glib answers. However, the mark of a good book, it leaves you wanting to know more.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1QOFFE84M9N52/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm