Another book I’ve recently finished: Edward De Bono’s Lateral
Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity. This is the book that defined
the term “lateral thinking” and defines it as orthogonal to traditional
thinking, which De Bono calls “vertical thinking”. De Bono warns the
reader that he may repeat himself to drive his points home, and he
certainly does repeat himself a lot. His central point is that lateral
thinking involves a deliberate suspension of judgement in order to
enable people to hold onto arrangements of ideas that would usually be
dismissed out of hand.
I’m back from another five days at sea. The weather didn’t give us
exactly what we wanted, but we motored down to Recherche bay, where I
saw one of the best sunrises I’ve seen so far. Naturally, the camera did
a poor job of capturing it, but here goes:
A couple of days later, we headed out the southern end of the channel
to meet up with the HMB Endeavour
replica.
On the first day of a voyage, we pull down a whole bunch of weather
charts from a number of sources. One of those is the wind charts from MetVUW. On the Port Davey voyage I had
to download the MetVUW charts, and I was disappointed to see that it was
done entirely by hand. This will not do! The result: metscrape.
My first impressions upon starting the book was that Edwards has a
very high opinion of himself. He quotes himself on the back cover, calls
himself “Australia’s Greatest Shipwreck Hunter” on the front cover lays
on the literary references in the first chapter and frequently reminds
you that he’s written other books. For someone who spent a lot of time
in the newspaper industry, the book has quite a few spelling and grammar
errors.
I didn’t get through as much reading as usual on my most recent voyage. There
were too many opportunities for useful study that reading came a distant
second. That said, I did finish a few books, and John Toohey’s Quiros is the
first of them.
It’s been a tough but rewarding eight days. We’ve just returned from
the twice-yearly trip to Port Davey and Bathurst Harbour. The trip
around was pretty interesting, as it involved the usual several hours of
motoring into the wind (which tends to come in from the west). The ship
got some pretty decent rolls going; 30 degrees on one side and 38 on the
other. Check out the ship’s clinometer:
One of the things we have to do before we go to sea is have a
bunkplan and watchbill: each person is assigned one and only one bunk
(except when hotbunking) and are assigned jobs and watches (red, white
and blue watch rotate through keeping watch so everyone gets to
sleep).
Currently, the watchbill is an excel spreadsheet and each cabin has a
word document detailing its occupants and their watches. The watchbill
is the canonical source for bunk assignments and watches, and the cabin
sheets can be derived from the watchbill. Preparing them also takes a
lot of time, meaning they don’t arrive until a day or so before we
leave. What’s a lazy and impatient
programmer to do?
I can’t find this book anywhere online, but I found it
thought-provoking and will write a few words regardless. Zen is one of
those things where I see its praises sung but the more I try to read
about it, the less I understand.
Like I said in my previous post, I’ve made it through a couple of
books. One is Jennifer
Government, written by Australian author Max Barry. It’s set about
20 minutes into the future, in a world where corporations run rampant.
People take the last name of the company they work for, the police and
the NRA are little more than guns for hire and Nike is testing a new
marketing strategy that involves killing a few people who buy their
products.
Jennifer, a government agent (i.e., “Jennifer Government”), manages
to secure funding from the families of those killed by Nike and spends
most of the novel trying to find justice. There are four or five
narratives running concurrently, but it somehow works.
As the novel progresses, things get crazier. Kinds start wearing
corporate tattoos, corporations arm themselves, Burger King and
McDonald’s have a shoot-out and somehow the madness is reined in just
before the end. Most of the story is powered by personal vendettas than
high-minded principles, which fits a world where everything is for
sale.
It reminds me a bit of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, in that
it sounds a little far-fetched, but not much. Jennifer Government is a
bit more a caricature than Little Brother, but it’s still an
entertaining read, and a warning.
Well, I’m back from the ship’s latest voyage: 10 days at sea helping
to run Deakin University’s Audacious
Leadership course. These are some of my favourite voyages because
the trainees are always very enthusiastic and don’t complain when things
get a bit tough. Anyway, we finished getting the ship ready, moved into
our bunks and then we were off!
