Distracted From Distraction By Distraction

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
(T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, No. 1 of Four Quartets)

A troubling essay in The Sunday Times by Bryan Appleyard should give you pause. Appleyard realized that he was being "Distracted from distraction by distraction" because of the modern technological tools that inundate our daily lives these days. It worried him. Perhaps it should worry you as well.

On Wednesday I received 72 e-mails, not counting junk, and only two text messages. It was a quiet day but, then again, I’m not including the telephone calls. I’m also not including the deafening and pointless announcements on a train journey to Wakefield – use a screen, jerks – the piercingly loud telephone conversations of unsocialised adults and the screaming of untamed brats. And, come to think of it, why not include the junk e-mails? They also interrupt. There were 38. Oh and I’d better throw in the 400-odd news alerts that I receive from all the websites I monitor via my iPhone.

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

I'd urge you to concentrate and read the whole thing. It is worth it. I suspect there is a lot of truth in what Appleyard has written. There are so very many distractions, busily distracting us from our distractions these days.

One of the reasons posting here has been so light of late is that I am working very long hours every day in a job that requires fierce concentration. When I get home after 12 hours, I have little desire or ability to surf the web trying to find interesting things to discuss. Much of my day is spent fighting the distractions of relentless email and, to a lesser extent, phone calls. I get home and simply don't want to post. In my way, I'm fighting the distractions.

Is it as bleak as Appleyard paints it? Possibly not. But I do see the lack of focus in younger workers where I am. They try to do engineering while listening to their iPods. They don't focus the way those I started with in this field used to. To this day, I still never have a radio (or an iPod) playing in my work area. It is too distracting.

Read the whole thing.

T Party

While I generally find The New York Times news coverage and editorial positions to be badly skewed to the left, the still carry wonderful feature stories. Such as this little gem describing some of the ways people customized their Model T automobiles. The Tin Lizzie turns 100 this year, so this is a fitting tribute to American ingenuity, both on the part of Henry Ford and of his customers.

No duty was too mundane or extreme for the wildly popular T, which became known by the nickname flivver. By jacking up the rear end and replacing one wheel with a pulley and leather drive belt, the Ford made a fine stationary power plant for milling grain or spinning the saw blade of a mobile lumber mill.

Even years after its heyday, the T continued as the Swiss Army knife of automobiles. In the 1930s, a group of New England ski enthusiasts created the first tow rope on the slopes of Woodstock, Vt. Their initial source of power was a well-worn Model T equipped with a Pullford tractor conversion, its huge steel drive wheels turing at just the right speed to reel skiers up the mountain.

Even when the original bodies and frames had rusted away, T owners would swap out the nearly unburstable Ford engines and drive axles to power boats, oil derricks, stationary pumps and other devices .

The car’s do-it-all utility sprang from a combination of stout basic design and widespread availability, said Robert Casey, curator of transportation at The Henry Ford museum and Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Mich., and author of “The Model T: A Centennial History” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

There are some great pictures along with the article. Here's The Henry Ford Museum's pages on the Model T. This is the Model T Ford Club's website. And here is a short illustrated history of the Model T.

ZAP!

Generally speaking, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard do not recommend trying what 33-year old Jessica Lynch of Guemes Island, Washington did. That is, hanging out of a second story window while holding on to a metal railing to take video of a thunderstorm. There is a certain inevitability about what happened next.

Jessica Lynch can be heard screaming in fear after the lightning blew a hole in the ground just feet from where she was recording, in astonishing footage posted on the internet.

Mrs Lynch, 33, says an arc from the lightning struck her on her left thumb, before passing up her arm, across her back and out the other arm. Arcs are electric currents that flow through the air, similar to lightning itself.

Ms. Lynch was able to post the "unedited screaming version" of the video she took. She also has admitted that her strategy for filming thunderstorms requires a little fine tuning. We're not pointing fingers at Ms. Lynch, incidentally. We have been known to send the rest of the occupants of the Crabitat to the basement during violent storms while personally standing outside to take pictures. Having seen Ms. Lynch's video, we will take additional precautions when we photograph storms.

We'll wear brown trousers.

‘Roo Rampage

A 65-year old Australian woman was hospitalized after being savagely attacked by a killer kangaroo. Fortunately, the family dog intervened and drove the marauding marsupial off.

But then, a large male kangaroo inches taller than the 5’6 foot Mrs Neal, suddenly lunged at her.

“The kangaroo has just jumped up and launched straight at her,” he told local newspapers. “He hit her once and she just dropped and rolled. My dog heard her screaming and bolted down and chased him off.

“If it wasn’t for the dog she’d probably be dead.”

Mrs Neal was discharged from hospital, but her son said she was in “a bad way”.

“Her face has been ripped apart, her hand has been mauled, and she’s got scratches all over her back and concussion,” he said. “Her whole body is sore where she has dropped to the ground.”

Up until now, kangaroos have pretty much been concentrating on trying to kill Irish actors. It is a pretty sordid turn of events when they start mugging pensioners. If you read the article, you'll be informed that the family's home has a serious 'roo infestation. They basically can't take a step in any direction without tripping over a kangaroo.