Okay bear with me, I have several places to go. Actually I have several places to come from and one place to go.

My Kindle is very sneaky without intending to be. Maybe it is intentional or at least part of some business strategy’s “Hope” chapter. Anyway, here’s what happens: I am going along reading a book I carefully chose for myself (in this case Slaughterhouse Five, by Vonnegut) and it references another book (in this case Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Mackay) in an interesting fashion. Intrigued, I go search for it on Amazon and naturally buy it (it’s in the public domain now so it’s only a couple of bucks). And then I start reading that. And this chains — it’s not clear I will ever pop all the way back up the stack (sorry non-programmers, you will just have to live with this mystery) to the book that kicked it off. And it wasn’t Vonnegut, because I got there like that too. Anyway, I am running downhill here: it’s out of hand. This new book could kick off another — maybe several — more books. Indeed, indirectly it already has as it became part of a discussion at my gaming table last night which wandered into discussion of Joseph Conrad and so now I own the complete works of Joseph Conrad.

I am Amazon’s dream Kindle-owner.

Yesterday also contained an interesting plumbing event. I got up and noticed the toilet was running and had been all night. Gurgle gurgle. So I opened the tank and looked in and see that the exit seal is off the dingus that goes up and down to make flushing go. So water is exiting inappropriately. Gurgle gurgle. I reseat the seal and a lot of it comes off in my hand — the plastic is degrading into a fine powder which, when wet, is basically a little oil slick. On my hands. Anyway, the toilet is fixed. So I flush it. As the tank fills the new water pressure on tank screw seals that have been dry all night causes one of them to blow out. And the exit seal unseats again because it is fucked. So now I have gurgle gurgle and drip drip.

This is getting out of hand. I put a bucket under the drip (though thanks to capillary action it’s not entirely reliable where the drip will be except not at the leak) and get the apartment manager involved. A plumber comes in. He replaces the tank screw seals and my leak is stopped, but he’s having trouble with the bad exist seal. He goes to get new parts and comes back with a whole toilet tank assembly (except the exit seal) and installs that. Gurgle gurgle. No joy. So he goes out for new parts and comes back and installs an exit seal. It’s the wrong size and won’t seat. Gurgle gurgle.

That evening my friend Tim tells me of his own plumbing issues and that he found you can get a whole tank assembly — a tank and all the bits that go inside, all guaranteed to fit — for $45.00. That means you don’t even need to debug these things, really — you just replace the whole thing for half the cost of an hour of plumber’s time (and he spent three debugging the problem and never quite got it).

This morning I was watching a show on television about a near-disaster in an airplane. The flight crew notice one engine on their 747 is low on power. They are flying through cloud. The captain orders a relight on the engine, which is a bad idea because at 40,000 feet it will not relight. Not enough air. The flight engineer, a little confused but trained to follow orders, relights without shutting the bleed off, so not only are they in a rarified atmosphere, but part of that air is still bleeding off. There’s just not enough air for ignition and the engine goes out.

This is not a disaster. 747s run fine on three engines. You just need to step on the rudder a little. However, the pilot doesn’t do this and has the autopilot on and it all looks fine because the disaster is mounting slowly (they can’t feel any interesting changes) and they can’t see a damn thing in this cloud cover. Everything is fine! Except everything is not fine — the plane is banking over. When the pilot notices this on his instruments, this is an anomaly — everything feels and looks fine (except what it looks like is nothing because of the clouds) — and so he assumes that the attitude indicator is broken and does not correct. He assumes the back up indicator is also broken since it agrees with the one he is certain is broken.

The plane rolls over and goes into a dive. The pilot is trying very hard now to control the plane (based on false assumptions mostly but the dive is unmistakable) and pulls back the throttle so he’s at least not accelerating into a dive. First good move of the day. Except he doesn’t say anything.

The flight engineer notices that the engines are all losing RPM, doesn’t know they’ve been throttled back, and  has been concentrating on failed engine number four. Naturally he assumes that all the engines are failing so he shuts them all down preparing to relight.

Plummet plummet plummet.

He relights and all four engines come on because the aircraft is now will below 20,000 feet (at 3 miles minute) and there’s plenty of air pressure. They recover the aircraft and congratulate each other. They land safely even though a lot of the plane was torn off in the violent maneuvering.

Nothing interesting was wrong with that plane except that a redundant part (an engine) failed in a way that is well understood and accounted for by procedures. But shit got out of hand.

Mackay’s book is about shit getting out of hand. It’s ostensibly about how groups of people make decisions that are insane in the context of a single person. Crowds do things that no single person in the crowd would choose to do (and I think there’s a lesson about both corporations and democracy in here somewhere, maybe not buried all that deeply) and part of that is the same sort of thing that all these other things suffer from: focus.

You just get too focused. You have the problem you are trying to solve and aren’t seeing the whole thing and how your solutions are contributing to the greater problem. And shit gets out of hand. You buy a book and it’s smart and it references another book and you trust smart people and you buy that book and indeed it is also smart and has references and you talk with your friends about it and they are smart and they want to talk about related books and…YOU HAVEN’T READ ANY BOOKS.

You want to fix the toilet and you focus on the leak and you fix the leak but you forgot the info you had on the rest of the problem and the toilet is disassembled to you assemble it and it gurgles and that’s usually the thingy and you replace the thingy but it still gurgles and it sometimes is the whojamaflip and you have one in the truck and you get it and replace it and reassemble the toilet and it still gurgles and you disassemble and remember the dingus and you have a dingus seal in the truck but it’s the wrong size but you have an adapter and you reassemble and it still gurgles because it’s the wrong adapter and…YOU COULD HAVE REPLACED THE TOILET FOR LESS.

And so with the plane.

But we (and me in specific right now) are often urged to do SOMETHING. Right now. When the right answer is not to do something but to sit back and think hard. Even for just a minute. Pilots do this with the “scan” — no matter what’s going on, no matter how desperate, you take a moment every now and then to look at — to attend to — each instrument and understand what it is telling you. Reset your focus. You need to have confidence in your ability to reconstruct your logic and find your place again (you got there in the first place — you can get back there) but with new information. And that means you have to be prepared to deal with the possibility that you were in the wrong place before. That new information changes everything.

I have no gaming content. Or space content. The Japanese are unfurling a solar sail that will be used both to maneuver and power a small space craft. It looks like it’s working. They also have a plan to wrap the moon in solar cells and beam power to earth with giant lasers. I can hear Tesla cackling madly.

Take a deep breath. Look around. You can find your way back. Hear that rushing hiss? That’s the blood flowing through your head.

–BMurray