More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 17 - December 27, 2024
The second element takes advantage of individual expertise. There is a certain bias in everyone’s perspective that has been named, by the French, déformation professionnelle: the tendency to look at every context from the point of view of one’s profession.
Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.
“Health to you, Victoria, and wherever you are may you sneeze sweetly” is still inscribed on one wall, at least two millennia after Victoria stopped sneezing for good.
Like building styles, lettering goes through fads, trends: what looks modern now will look antiquated soon enough; what is brash may soon be ordinary.
“When I do walking tours, I forget to look where I’m going.” With all the signs, a person could get lost.
After a tour down and back the aisles, we met again by the exit. Kalman spotted a wooden sign over a recessed area in the wall. POOR BOX, it read—a label at once no longer valid (there was no box) and also apt: Poor box! Gone missing from its alcove! She snapped a photograph.
“Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,” the researchers wrote.
“Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking.”
First, Avoid bumping into others (while staying comfortably close).
The second rule: Follow whoever is in front of you.
The final rule: Keep up with those next to you.
These rules of “avoidance,” “alignment,” and “attraction”—keeping apart while staying together—are sufficient to explain all herd, school, flock, and swarm behavior.
One psychologist I walked with described a quasi-mind-control game she used to play with unsuspecting fellow bus riders. She would try to “seat” people on the bus by making eye contact. “Nobody likes to be looked at, so they keep walking” as long as they noticed her looking at them.
The ball-tossing boy was wearing orange high-tops, and I tried to match his foot movements to the squeaking I was hearing. It was a basketbally sound. So basketbally, in fact, Lehrer said, that televised pro basketball places microphones on the court itself to pick up the sound of the squeaks.
wondered if the engineers ever ramped up the sound for greater effect. “Oh, absolutely!” said the sound engineer.
But, of course, no dog is polite or impolite. It is we who attribute these characteristics to them. Dogs are perfectly culturally ignorant. Despite their neat insinuation into our homes, they do not notice or concern themselves with our customs. Perhaps a dog may learn to “not stare” if an owner punishes him each time he does, but not necessarily: the dog may just learn watch out for your owner, she’s coming for you. Politeness is a human concept, and it is at best bizarre to imagine that dogs have it.