I can see an A380 flying outside my window. Which is, I guess, an appropriate sign of the new year in the third millenium. The strange thing about watching the plane fly is not that it defies gravity (after all, all planes do that, and for a little bit of time so can we); no, the truly amazing thing is how slowly it flies, just hanging in space.

Watching the plane land makes me think about perseverence – or stubborness, if you choose the name on the other side of the coin. If the plane had personality, then you can imagine it saying:

Look, gravity: I acknowledge your existance.  But I demonstrate my contempt for your force by taking the path that I choose. And just to rub it in I will do it really, really slowly.

Of course, the plane is not a person, and what is really happening is the application of aerodynamic principles and engineering to a natural, and fairly well understood, force. Or to simplify: the plane flies without emotion and in accordance with a precise (and pre-determined) route.

Now at this point I considered saying something about the intractable conflicts in the world today – festering sores that pop up in the same parts of the world, and for the same reasons.  Maybe – I would have said – the conflicts are not emotional at all, but are instead just the natural consequence of the environment (just like the geometrical emptiness of the plane’s descent). But that would be obvious, unhelpful and callous.

Despite Marx, we are not molecules in a river without control over the direction of the river bed. As human beings, one of our greatest gifts is the belief that order can be found in chaos. We spend our entire lives training and the applying pattern-matching abilities, and we are educated to view history in the same way that we read novels: as a nice story with overarching themes.

Of course, this is necessary. But I am starting to think it is a necessary evil. True, no human can comprehend a war as the separate flows of thousands of people and millions of interactions between those people, and so it is necessary for us to try and abstract something that makes sense. The problem is, if we do too much of this, and allow it to become our only way of thinking, then we lose the knowledge that this is what war actually IS.

So for the new year, and for all the conflicts, crises and conflagrations that are to come, I resolve to look closer at the video screen, and to try and figure our how each individual pixel looks and changes.

This is the best kind of resolution (for me), because it is a further step along an intellectual path that I was already taking anyway. And it’s not cheating, as far as I am concerned, because I think that the only resolutions with half a chance are those where your (generally conservative and slow to accept change) brain gives them half a chance.

So here we go: it’s post-2008 and let’s hope it’s an era of compassionate individualism.  But how do we make it happen while preserving the motivation for collective action and investment that created engineering materpieces like the A380?

The first post is the easiest. After all, nobody bothers to create a page and fuss over a design (like the décor for a new apartment) without having something to say. So here I am, after the world’s easiest registration process, with a funky Web2.0 web page and a stack of mental analogies between the web and pulpits, or possibly lecturns, or maybe the little household stepladder of the crazy guy in Hyde Park. Of course, given that this is the giz-illionith blog, finding imagery less tired and used than my favourite “I’ve been to Asia and her’s a t-shirt to prove it” t-shirt will be something of a challenge.

Returning to the point, everyone knows that the web page maintenance curve resembles most people on diets, or exercise kicks, or just about any New Year’s resolution. Frantic activity followed by maintenance that becomes tedious followed by “it won’t matter if I miss one” followed by:

“I have a webpage, but it’s been the same since 1994″

“1994?”

“Yes, 1994. The important thing is that I was first. Plus I had all those ideas before those Google guys (etc…)”

So what is the secret to deciding to adhere to a practice, custom, habit or conscious change of any kind?

No answers today, but that’s question number one that I would like to think about. The second question (and as of today there are only two) has to do with the title of the blog. It comes from a textbook that I read during my undergrad course, which talked about a frequently seen phenomenon in new IT products. First, the product is successful. But then there is a lull, when nobody buys it (and at this point I guess a whole lot of products go away for good). However, for the lucky few, widespread acceptance finally arrives, and the product’s popularity takes off – until it reaches its end of life of transmutes into something else.

If you plot this pattern on a graph, with time on the horizontal and popularity on the vertical, there are two big bumps, and a big trough in between. This is the “death of two elephants”, and it always makes me think about two huge, ancient beasts that died next to each other, and then as the years passed the only thing that remained was two smooth hills. For me, though, the interesting thing about this image, and my mental picture, is not the elephants.

Rather, the interesting thing is the gap between the two passed pachyderms. The most obvious example of why this is the case is a consumer product. For this kind of product, the gap is the best time to buy, since you are likely get a bargain price for a product that has already been tested enough not to be too buggy.

So I started to think about the elephants, and a number of things came to mind. For starters, there is the concept that I have turned into a tagline (look up, if you haven’t already). I will dig into this a bit next time, but for now I will end by just stating the second question (you thought I had forgotten, right?):

How can we use the obvious to identify the important?