technology – Page 2 – Maker's Dozen

There is a bear at Stanford who sits on top of a filing cabinet. It’s a stuffed toy bear, and it belongs to one of the professors. When the professor’s students get stuck on a problem, and want to ask for his help, they first have to go and explain their problem to the bear.

Most of the time, the bear is able to solve the problem.

Or rather, the students are able to solve their own problems, by talking them through “with the bear”.

I can’t find the right combination of search terms to dig up the origin of this story again. And who knows how much truth has merged with fiction. But whether this teddy bear-tactic professor ever really existed or not, this story is true at our house.

We don’t literally leave a stuffed bear around. And anyways my only stuffed animal options are an alligator, a puffin, a monster dressed as a ninja, and a flying squirrel. As stuffed animals go, they’re solid. Though I don’t know if any of them are good listeners.

But Neil and I are often “the bear” for each other. We work on projects together and alone. If one of us is stuck on a problem, the other person might understand enough about what we’re doing to offer a helpful suggestion, a fresh perspective, or a different tactic. But even when the stuck person is working way outside our expertise, we can still “be the bear” for each other. We simply sit and listen, while the other person explains their problem to us.

Talking to the bear lets you untangle your own thoughts. Brains can be messy, and that’s okay. But sometimes, when we leave a problem in there too long, our thoughts simply pull the existing knots tighter and tighter.

Our minds are capable of holding contradictory or “gappy” ideas. But the plot holes and conflicts often become apparent once we start teasing our thoughts apart into sentences. As we start to untangle our ideas, because we’re trying to communicate them to someone else — even if that someone else is a stuffed bear — we can often uncover the crux. And find our way out of the tangle, all “on our own”. It might even seem incredibly obvious as soon as we begin speaking aloud. A handful of sentences spoken aloud to the bear uncovers the root of, and solution to, a problem you’ve been rolling around in your mind for an hour.

At our house, if we notice the other person is stuck on a problem, we will say “do you need me to be the bear?” and come sit in their office for a bit while they figure it out. Or we might seek the other person out, saying “can you be the bear for me?” And occasionally, when Neil has drifted into explaining a complex coding problem to me that he’s stuck on, I will tuck my arms in to my sides and slowly raise them to a 90 degree angle. Sometimes it helps to get into character.

Anyone can “be the bear”. So often we just need someone to sit still with us, and listen.

~Kate

We’ve had no internet for about a week now. The Bell technician who came out today traced the problem to its source – a mouse nest in the cable box. This is not the first time a mouse has made its house somewhere unfortunate. Last year our mechanic made a similar discovery under the hood of our car. Shelter is shelter.

As a little girl, one of my favourite Christmas stories was about a wee churchmouse, retconned into the story of Silent Night. The tale imagined that Silent Night was composed by Franz Gruber on guitar because the organ was broken – its leathers chewed by the hungry mouse.

Mouse nests are part of the texture of our world now, living nestled in the woods. It’s a fluffy ephemeral texture. The nests we find are lightweight and constructed from all sorts of different materials, yet somehow always distinctly mouse-house-ish.

Stacks of firewood make particularly good places to build mouse houses. My winter fuel is your habitat. I can see it. Neatly stacked wood is not so different from my log cabin. I imagine a jumble of telephone wires looks similarly suitable. It’s usually halfway there after all. Even before it’s been rearranged to suit a rodent, we humans call a tangle of wires a “nest”. Its mousey potential is that evident.

It’s inevitable that mice will get into the nooks and crannies of the human-constructed world. Mice are small and they are multiple. But I wouldn’t want to be in a universe without them. They may nibble cables and carry Lyme disease, but mice are also good food for fox. We’ve yet to have a fox try to get into our hen house, but there is lots of evidence that they regularly help themselves to the abundant local mouse population. The mice are welcome here too in their own role as predator, a natural check on LDD (“gypsy”) moth populations — mice enjoy feasting on LDD pupae.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
~John Muir

Living as we do, thick in the 21st century, most of our work is done online. And despite our extensive and ever-growing book-based library, many of our references are online as well. So having no internet is pretty inconvenient. But in our case it is not life threatening, and even pleasant from time to time. I am no different from the rest of my species: it’s too easy for me to spend too much time scurrying around the web. I can fall down an internet or social media rabbithole with the best of them, and it doesn’t always bring out the best in me. A pause is welcome. I may or may not spend the time composing songs on guitar, but I am happy to have a few silent nights.

~Kate