What a master pickpocket can teach us about storytelling

...In that Empire, the Art of the Story attained such perfection that the Decennial Census of citizens was replaced with an Annual Census of all stories found within the borders. Politician, businessman, janitor all knew that having a story that framed one’s life and experiences was the only way to be counted among the living. In time, having a nation of citizens preoccupied with story-building was not enough. The all-powerful Story-collectors Guild decreed that it was a treachery against the empire to trade stories with other peoples and other nations; it was the sworn duty of every citizen to contribute ever bigger epics to the Empire’s formidable stockpile. The Generations that followed continued this arms race, but neglected honing the allied art of telling the stories. Since all were busy every waking hour collecting and crafting stories, there was none left to listen to them. In the Deserts of the West, there can still be found abandoned piles of stories half-buried in the sand; in all the land there is none alive who can narrate them¹.

— Šahrzâd, ‘On Mutually Assured Narration’ (1706)²

* * *

Apollo Robbins³ is a pickpocket and a gentleman. A theatrical showman, he returns wallets and watches with the same practiced ease with which he pilfers them⁴. Often to applause, but always to astonishment.

He is also an uncommon pickpocket for one other reason. Not every plyer of his trade aspires to - or has achieved - Apollo’s ability to unravel and articulate the principles that underlie the art of the pickpocket.

His insights have earned him a dedicated following of neuroscientists (and consulting gigs with the DoD⁵ and many corporations) and even become the basis for a scientific paper⁶.

But there’s another lot whom he can teach a trick or two - us aspiring storytellers, if only we can tear ourselves away from our quest for the ‘what’ of stories - their hidden structures, blinkered archetypes and sublimated plots.

Because storytelling is as much - or even much more - about the ‘how’, the telling, as it is about the stories themselves.

Storytelling is about the audience, and about knowing if they are willing to play.

“When I shake someone’s hand, I apply the lightest pressure on their wrist with my index and middle fingers and lead them across my body to my left. The cross-body lead is actually a move from salsa dancing. I’m finding out what kind of a partner they’re going to be, and I know that if they follow my lead I can do whatever I want with them.”⁷

Storytelling is about attention, and a narrator’s ability to shape it.

“Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”⁸

Storytelling is about the sensitivity of the indirect over the direct.

“If I come at you head-on, like this, I’m going to run into that bubble of your personal space very quickly, and that’s going to make you uncomfortable. So, what I do is I give you a point of focus, say a coin. Then I break eye contact by looking down, and I pivot around the point of focus, stepping forward in an arc, or a semicircle, till I’m in your space.”⁹

And storytelling ultimate’s trick? To invoke a calculus of computational hurdles offered by arcs and curves over the predictability of straight lines.

Pickpockets may move their hands in distinct ways, depending on their present purpose. They may trace a fast, linear path if they want to reduce attention to the path and quickly shift the mark’s attention to the final position. They may sweep out a curved path if they want to attract the mark’s attention to the entire path of motion.¹⁰

Neuroscientists think that these two forms of motion engage different parts of the visual system. Short linear bursts trigger saccadic eye movements—rapid but discontinuous focusing of the eyes during which visual awareness is suppressed for intervals as brief as 20 milliseconds—while curved movements activate smooth-pursuit neurons, brain cells programmed to follow moving targets.¹¹

This adaptation makes sense given that a straight line is a relatively predictable path, so your eyes can safely jump ahead, while a curved trajectory is less predictable and must be tracked more closely.¹²

The simplest way to achieve a captivating narrative is to offer and resolve multiple tangential possibilities, every single step of the way¹³. Leaving the audience with no obvious straight line to DIY.

For millennia, storyteller and pickpocket have worked the same crowd (often at the same time.) We’ll be the ones losing the plot - by foregoing the sweep of the arc for the misplaced gratification of the straight line - if we seek inspiration from only one of them.

References and Notes:
1. I have adapted this from Jorge Luis Borges’ famous short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ ("Del rigor en la ciencia"). The original short story imagines the consequences of desiring absolute precision in place of the necessary abstraction of maps (Wikipedia : On Exactitude in Science). I have retained much of the underlying structure of the original (as seen in this translation by Andrew Hurley), repurposing its payload to instead imagine the consequences of desiring stories in place of storytelling.
2. The original Jorge Luis Borges short story is written as a literary forgery, fictionally attributing it to a Surarez Miranda. I’ve attributed the story to Šahrzâd (or Scheherazade) - the raconteur’s raconteur who spunkily wagers her own life on her storytelling abilities in The Thousand and One Nights. Who better to chronicle the death of storytelling than one who owed her life to it?
The title ‘On Mututally Assured Narration’ refers to the Cold war game theory-inspired stratagem of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). I imagine (in the story and outside) a time in the future where everyone is armed with an epic story to tell and is programmed to deploy their own the instant they encounter another’s.
The short story is dated 1706 to mark the year of the first English translation of The Thousand and One Nights (Wikipedia: The Thousand and One Nights).
3. Apollo is a stage name (New Yorker: A Pickpocket’s Tale).
4. You can watch Apollo in action in this Youtube clip.
5. Says a Special Operations Command official who recruited Apollo Robbins: “It’s no big secret that a lot of Army Special Forces guys have a very big interest in magic and deception and being able to manipulate attention. Apollo is the guy who actually gets into the nuts and bolts of how it works, why it works, and oftentimes can extrapolate that into the bigger principle.” (New Yorker: A Pickpocket’s Tale)
6. Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, a husband-and-wife team of neuroscientists have collaborated with Apollo and tested the basis of his insights in the paper Stronger Misdirection in Curved Than In Straight Motion. Apollo is credited as a co-author.
7. Apollo’s words taken from New Yorker: A Pickpocket’s Tale.
8. Apollo’s words taken from New Yorker: A Pickpocket’s Tale.
9. Apollo’s words taken from New Yorker: A Pickpocket’s Tale.
10. These are not the words of Apollo Robbins. This and the next 2 paragraphs are a splicing of two different articles referring to and explaining Apollo’s insights about misdirection in curved motion. This paragraph is taken from Scientific American : Magic and the Brain by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, Apollo’s neuroscience collaborators.
11. These are not the words of Apollo Robbins. This, the last and the next paragraph are a splicing of two different articles referring to and explaining Apollo’s insights about misdirection in curved motion. This paragraph is taken from WSJ: Stealing A Watch Made Easy by Alex Stone.
12. These are not the words of Apollo Robbins. This and the last two paragraphs are a splicing of two different articles referring to and explaining Apollo’s insights about misdirection in curved motion. This paragraph is taken from WSJ: Stealing A Watch Made Easy by Alex Stone.
13. In the words of Ira Glass of ‘This American Life’ : “Narrative is basically a machine that’s raising questions and answering them.”

Where to look for ideas you may have misplaced

A couple of days ago, I riffed a bit on research findings about how walking through doors seems to have an adverse effect on memory.

Folks at Lifehacker read about the research too - and had their own angle on it, dictated in part by the site's raison d'etre. Their take was the tip 'to write down what you want to remember before you move into another room' - the emphasis being on ideas that you come upon and may subsequently forget, as happens all too often.

That conclusion is only partly true. Walking through doors affects only one kind of memory - episodic memory which relates to specific events, places and times. The other kind of declarative memory - semantic memory - is responsible for meanings, understandings and concept-based knowledge unrelated to specific experiences, and is immune to doorways.

If the idea or thought had anything to do with the latter, you're not going to forget it even after repeated mishaps of walking through doors. But ideas are also often related to sequential events or thinking around events - this thought leads to that and that leads to an idea.

It is here that the risk of forgetting something as a result of a new memory episode (related to the simple act of leaving a room) is high. But even here, from my own experience, one tends to forget not the idea in particular but the whole chain of thought leading up to it. All it takes is remembering a link in the chain and, sure enough, the idea comes back with the eagerness of a lost puppy.

To be fair, the original BPS Research Digest post doesn't actually clarify these distinctions of memory - but there's something more that it does clarify that Lifehacker gets positively and absolutely wrong.

Here's what the Lifehacker goes on to say:

Another interpretation, BPS Research Digest says, is that the increased forgetting wasn't about the "boundary effect of a doorway" but that the context had changed. In other words, participants had better memory about objects in the room where they created those objects.

The original post mentions the plausibility of context playing a possible role, but only to report that further research doesn't support that hypothesis :

Radvansky and his team tested this possibility with a virtual reality study in which memory was probed after passing through a doorway into a second room, passing through two doorways into a third unfamiliar room, or through two doorways back to the original room - the one where they'd first encountered the relevant objects. Performance was no better when back in the original room compared with being tested in the second room, thus undermining the idea that this is all about context effects on memory. Performance was worst of all when in the third, unfamiliar room, supporting the account based on new memory episodes being created on entering each new area.

In other words, if it's an idea you have misplaced and forgotten, don't bother going back into the original room and looking for it there.

The machine code of story-telling

According to Wikipedia, the stock phrase "Once upon a time..." has been in use in some form since at least the 14th century. And its prevelance is not just limited to the English language - the Wikipedia page lists variants in dozens of languages from around the world - as also the modern variants, "A long time ago..." and even "Not so long ago..."

While all of us have heard at least one story that began "Once upon a time...", we are also acutely aware that some lines make for great story openers - if only because they unambiguously announce the intention to narrate a story.

(The line that did the trick for me during my childhood was "For those who came in late..." enshrined in the opening panel of every Phantom comic book.)

But is there something else at work here? Do great (or stock) opening lines do more than just build the expectation of a narrative?

I would like to think so. At least after reading up research findings that the mere act of passing through a doorway clears up your memory and begins a new memory episode. Making it less likely that you'll remember something that happened in the room you just left. The unlikely result of simply walking through a doorway to another room is akin to wiping your memory slate clean.

The effect itself is not dependent on the distance walked but only on the act of walking through a doorway. As the reserachers put it "Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one's event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]."

The findings also complement so-called episode markers in story-telling - phrases like "a while later" seem to create a temporal boundary within the narrative. As a result, test subjects found it difficult to remember the sequence of sentences in an episode prior to the narrative divide vis-a-vis sentences in the current episode.

So, here's what I think is happening with the stock opening phrases or with great opening lines.

An effective opening line creates a temporal boundary between what you were doing or thinking before the story began and afterwards. Or in other words, the opening line is transporting you across an imaginary doorway - if not to another world, but at least to the adjacent room.

Of course, most people know or would readily believe that great stories transport them to another world or another time and place. But what this research, coupled with my conjecture, could suggest is that it is a cognitive trick related to memory - and in particular episodic memory - that creates that illusion.

It also suggests that certain key phrases or lines serve as subliminal commands - in effect, setting up, or even resetting, a new memory episode in your mind. Often, without your knowledge.

From here, it's not hard to imagine a  programming language of story-telling - yielding the machine-readable (or is it mind-readable) source code of every story. Don't you think so?

Ganesha, The Mahabharatha and Complexity as a narrative device

In a recent post, Bobulate concludes that "Well-placed complexity has a place. If only to encourage us to think more deeply and globally about simplicity."

 En route to that, she quotes this fascinating passage by psychologist Adam Atler :

"What complexity does is it acts as a cognitive roadblock. …. If you have a communication that last 30 seconds or a minute or even five minutes, if you know there’s a particular point that you really want people to pay attention to — you’ve already hooked them in, they’re interested and they’re motivated — if you introduce complexity even briefly, that changes the way people think. They go from thinking in this very shallow, very superficial way … to thinking much more deeply about whatever you say next.
You still want to keep the message simple, but if you pick that moment of complexity carefully and appropriately, you can lead people to believe whatever you say after that moment of complexity very deeply. If the message is a complicated one … that’s a really effective technique."

I found this fascinating because the opportunistic use of complexity to draw an audience deeper into what's being narrated is a technique that's referred to even in the ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharatha.

At roughly ten times the length of both the Iliad and Odyssey combined - and with a total of over 1.8 million words - The Mahabhratha is the world's longest poem. It is a narration of the great war between rival factions of a royal clan, while also incorporating philosophical and devotional discourses along the way.

According to legend, the epic was composed and narrated by the great poet and sage Ved Vyasa. He was instructed to pray to Lord Ganesha, a deity in the Hindu pantheon (pictured above), and request him to be his scribe.

Ganesha agreed to be his scribe on one condition: that upon commencing dictation of the epic, Vyasa wouldn't pause the recitation until the very end.

That put Vyasa in a fix. How would he then go about life - eating, resting, etc.? However, he did agree  to Ganesha's clause but with a clever counter condition of his own. That Ganesha would comprehend every verse Vyasa was dictating before penning it down.

Ganesha agreed and the recital and transcription of the world's longest poem was on.

But with his counter condition in place, every time Vyasa wanted a break, he would compose a particularly complex passage. And while Ganesha laboured to decipher it and then write it down, Vyasa would take a time-out to attend to his needs and be back.

While the story itself may be a ruse to explain the origins of complex passages within the Mahabhratha (in mythical terms), the passages themselves may be an early use of complexity as a narrative device - inserted skillfully to draw the listener deeper into the story and to view what is essentially a princely skirmish over royal power within the expansive context of the very universe itself.

How to improve Dan Ariely's compliment-dishing iPhone app

Dan Ariely - unpredictably rationally - has created a free iPhone app that gives you a compliment (and hopefully cheers you up) every time you open it. Tap the screen and you get another one. Click on the thumbs up/down icon if you like/dislike the compliment and it'll learn which ones work better. If you're feeling particularly good, you can enter your own compliment for other strangers.

The problem with this, of course, is that there is no correlation to what one knows and thinks about oneself and the compliments one receives. Even the most delusional user will, no doubt, have the occasional fleeting suspicion that all these well meaning words weren't written or said with him/her in mind.

One way to counter that is to bake in some targetting into the compliment or the context - convincing all users that while everyone else can read it, the compliment really is meant only for them or for a narrow, unique and special group of which they are a member. It would also help if the user could be drawn in hoping to find something else - only to end up being foisted with a feel-good compliment instead.

But don't we have daily horoscope apps (and columns and books) that already do all that?

Know it, but don't include it

The New York Times brings this story of an economist who has been predicting - disconcertingly accurately - the medals tally for the last few Olympics. Daniel Johnson - the economist in question - is currently in the news for his predictions for the current Winter Olympics.

The strange thing about Daniel's predictions is not that they have a record of 94% accuracy with actual medal counts. It is his methology. Rather than basing his predictions on individual athletes, the events or even any knowledge of sport, he bases them on something far more removed.

According to NYT, "his forecast model predicts a country's Olympic performance using per-capita income (the economic output per person), the nation's population, its political structure, its climate and the home-field advantage for hosting the Games or living nearby."

It no doubt raises interesting questions about what success in the Olympics might be an indicator of. It even unearths counterintuitive findings, like this one: "Single-party regimes, traditionally Communist regimes, do much better than their democratic peers."

What I found particularly fascinating, however, was this summation of his method:

"It's just pure economics," Johnson says. "I know nothing about the athletes. And even if I did, I didn't include it."

That completely derailed me. In a world where endless data and information (and the ability to gather more of it) is at our fingertips, how many of us would dare to say "We probably knew it, but we didn't include it." I, for one, haven't opened my register on that one yet.

What's amazing about this is that contrary to our cherished beliefs, more information - especially more 'relevant' infomation - isn't always necessary or indispensable towards acquiring knowledge.

True, it is often information that seeks us out and makes itself comfortable in our already cluttered minds. We may not be able to do much to prevent that from happening.

But what I have discovered now is that we can turn the tables. All it takes is the self-belief to say, "I knew it, but I didn't include it." "I know it, but I won't include it."

The architecture of un-blink

Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh points to an interesting study that estimates that we may be missing as much as 15 minutes of a 150-minute movie through the very act of blinking. What's even more interesting however, is the discovery that most movie-watchers tend to blink in unison - at non-critical moments of plot or action.

This leads Geoff to wonder if "there is an architectural equivalent to this: a spatial moment inside a building in which it seems safest for us to blink." And he suggests some intriguing possibilities that could be explored as a result.

It is a legitimate thought-experiment and one in line with Geoff's 'what-if' philosophy - but it set me thinking if those architectural 'blinkspots' could actually exist - and more importantly, why are they unlikely to exist. Of course, I have the no expertise in architecture to speak of; but I am not letting that hold me back for the moment :)

In a time-bound, curated and predominantly mono-sensory environment like a movie, working on the blinkspots can yield benefits - indeed, as one commenter points out, a book by a leading film editor, Walter Murch's 'In The Blink Of An Eye', elaborates a whole editing theory based on blinking and synchronised blinking.

But I'd like to argue that it is primarily a defensive tactic - necessitated by the bounds of show time and the human compulsion of blinking.

In contrast, the viewing time for an architectural piece varies from anything between a fleeting second to an entire lifetime - whereby the above limitations almost vanish. In fact, it's extremely unlikely that any two people will spend an equal time looking at a building - except probably when they are on a guided tour. (Or when they are driving by something on the highway at a constant speed, in another one of Geoff's examples.)

Faced with such extensive variations, I'd like to believe it's impossible to anticipate 'blinkspots' with any precision - and unlike in a movie, the viewer can always turn back to catch a glimpse of what he may have missed. (Movie-goers can do that by watching movies repeatedly - or rewinding on a DVD - when they usually report having caught details they initially missed.)

Which is why I think great architecture eschews this defensive tactic for a pre-emptive one. By building views that compel each individual to forgo blinking for some time - to gape with open-eyed wonder.

Not only has blinking been banished for a time, this open-eyed gaping also reframes much of our day-to-day seeing to something as-good-as-blinking, where our eyes are seeing but not taking in the information present in the visual field. Before the gaping moment, our eyes were open but there's wasn't much to distinguish it from blinking - a state they will return to soon after.

In fact, when considering competition from other movies (both at the current box office and in time) rather than from blinkspots, some films do indeed adopt the pre-emptive tactic of architecture - by including jaw-dropping visual set pieces that last for a fraction of the movie length. A tacit acknowledgement that you can blink all you want at other points during the movie.

Or so I believe. What do you think?

Donations that progress against the mean

In his agony economist column for FT, Tim Harford last week tackles a question about how to lure donation money from contributors.

The conundrum faced by the questioner was whether to suggest predefined contribution amounts and risk losing larger donations or not to prompt any amount at all and risk losing micro-contributions from a large majority.

In response, Harford references a study that prompted would-be contributors with 'typical donation' amounts and found that the higher the amount suggested the lesser the impact it had on the money donated (after a certain amount.) He concludes by offering 3 pieces of advice: make realistic suggestions, offer a spread of suggestions and try out a few combinations to see which works best.

I also wondered what other kinds of strategies can one adopt in such a situation - especially considering that one isn't limited to only a couple of alternatives while seeking donations online.

One option is to show the last 5 contributions as suggestions - there'll be the width there to suit most donors, and suggest what's acceptable and useful while still nudging those capable of giving more. An extreme case of this strategy would be to throw up only the last contribution as a suggestion but that may lead things to getting stuck in the the low donation rut for a long time - or result in 'donor's block' when faced with a high donation, until someone breaks the impasse. On the other hand, an experiment with this strategy might yield a goldmine of information.

Another strategy that I would like to explore is to inform the potential donor of the average donation until then. Considering that it's an average, it's unlikely to be a daunting amount. Plus, in my opinion, it will try and maximise the number of people who pay more than the average - as each person who can pay more than the average will do so (for the very reason that 80% of the people think they are above average.)

The pitfalls of the above strategy are that someone who can pay much more than the average will probably pay up only a little more than the average running at that time. Two, if the number of donors is small or if the collection is run for a limited time, this strategy may risk not optimising the collection. Plus, it tends to collect more towards the end of its run more than in the beginning.

However, in case where the collection drive is running for a long time and there are a lot of potential donors I think it would work splendidly.

I'd like to think to think of this as a 'progression against the mean' strategy. Now all that remains is for someone to check to see if it actually works as advertised :)

Maps and why Nassim Nicholas Taleb is wrong about them

This FT review of 'Lecturing Birds on Flying' points to a quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in the book's preface: "Giving someone the wrong map is worse than giving them no map at all."

It's a sort of maxim that seems an ironclad un-contestable truth. No doubt, it was quoted by Taleb as such - to make the case for the arguments in the book.

I am not qualified to say anything about the quant mathematical models - the "wrong maps" - that led to the current financial climate and are the subject of the book in question.

But I have more than a sneaky suspicion that Taleb is wrong to assert that a wrong map does more harm than having no map.

In fact, a wrong map is almost always the first step towards a right map. Because it represents what we already think we know and allows for our individual or collective experience(s) to verify if that's true - and to change the bits that don't match. Ad nauseam.

It was true in the times of Christopher Columbus - when map-transforming expeditions could be undertaken only by a handful few. And it is especially true now, when the wonders of digital technology make everything around us a palimpsest - thus enabling each one of us to embark on micro-explorations that result in the continuous refinements of our "maps." (Something I wrote about in a piece some time ago.)

Strangely, the quote is the sort of thing that Taleb stands against - something that seems intuitively right, but is in fact far from it.

A far more instructive and appropriate quote for the occasion would have been Alfred Korzybski's assertion: "The map is not the territory."

And that's something all of us - including the financial academics currently in the dock - would do well to remember.

The perils of Science by Twitter

In a recent blog post, Neil Perkin notes the adoption of Twitter to announce major scientific discoveries.

It indeed is interesting to see the changing dynamic between the high priests of science and the common man. What once seeped in through many time-consuming layers of seeming scientific red tape, now arrives as tweets from an alien world heralding major discoveries to all who would care to listen. Instantaneous, authentic, unfiltered and unstifled - almost like Archimedes' naked eureka outburst.

I am all for the greater and quicker spread of scientific knowledge and discoveries - especially in this case, where the discoveries are being funded by tax-payer money (the US citizens', not mine :)

However, the use of social media to do that presents some pitfalls.

Scientific American recently carried a feature titled Science 2.0 which delved into the the use of blogs, wikis and the like by scientists to share what is best described as 'work in progress.' It seems what concerns scientists most about social media is the risk of being scooped and losing credit and lucrative patents.

But when dealing with the public dissemination of science, there's an even greater risk. The spread of premature science - or sometimes, even false science.

And water on Mars is indeed a good example of that - it is a claim that has been made for almost a century. Most notably by Percival Lowell (hailed as a hero whose work led to the first American discovery of a planet; undone now by Pluto's demotion) - who 'saw' canals, oases and advanced civilisation on Mars. His claims created great excitement amidst the public - only to be proved wrong.

The moral of the story: science is not only about making claims. It is about observation, reasoning, proofs, counter-claims, peer review and the like, a process of rigour that is essentially institutionalised as the scientific method.

The failure to adhere to these processes before making scientific discoveries public is only bound to cause confusion - and probably even disillusionment with the claims and with science itself. This comment by one reader left in the WIRED article announcing Twitter's announcement of the Mars water discovery, says much:

"I fail to see what's so big about these recent discoveries of ice. I mean, haven't we known that there's water ice on Mars for some time now?
Evidence of water ice at Mars' southern pole, in 2004: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3426539.stm
From 2007: http://jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-030"
Posted by: Gadren | Jun 19, 2008 6:37:17 PM

To be honest, I have heard of the discovery, re-discovery and conclusive proofs of the discovery of water on Mars for some time now. I have no idea what's the real significance of the current discovery (though I am convinced there is some significance). And Twitter, with 140 emotion-bursting-from-the-seams words has only served NASA's cause - that of creating public excitement - and not that of science.

[A more relevant example of how Twitter can make science more accessible comes from the work of Tom Taylor. He has taken the unwieldy NASA Near Earth Object Database to create " @lowflyingrocks, a Twitter bot that speaks whenever a rock passes within 0.2 AU of Earth."]

Finally, here's one of the many laws attributed simply as Murphy's Laws :

"Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he’ll have to touch to be sure."

As Percival Lowell would attest, the same holds true for 'water on Mars' stories. With or without the mediation of Twitter.

For want of an aphorism

So, the travesty that was this years Formula One world championship has finally come to end.

But long before this seeming drama wound to an anti-climatic finish in a courtroom, the victors and the losers in this year's championship had already moved on. Even as McLaren lodged their appeal over a month ago, Hamilton had already made it clear that he wants to win 'fair' and on the track.

But what he didn't reveal was whether he had grasped or learnt why he didn't win the world championship in his rookie year - an unprecendented feat that he more than richly deserved.

Other people would see differently. But as  someone interested in seeing how, why and where information flows and also a firm believer in the power of aphorisms (see my white paper 'The Intranets of Babel'), I think the failure was not just Lewis' and McLaren's alone but of the entire F1 knowledge ecosystem. After 57 years of competition, F1 should have distilled the wisdom that would point to how a championship leader should conduct his title chase - and more precisely how he shouldn't. (Contrast that with chess, which has reams and reams of literature on how precisely to conduct an endgame - from every possible position, and especially from positions where one is ahead. And that logic extends to world championship matches too.)

It's Jackie Stewart who's supposed to have said that 'one should win a motor race by the least amount of margin possible.' (Unfortunately I couldn't find any place online where I could find the exact quote.) For casual fans of the sport that might sound like a ridiculous thing to suggest - after all, what else is Formula One but a contest of raw speed?

If F1 was ever that, it has moved on. It's a contest of strategies and tactics - and in a minor way - of speed. What Jackie Stewart's smart observation notes is that after the strategies have unfolded (pretty much after the last set of pitstops), building a huge lead over the second-placed rival behind you pays no extra incentive - either in points or money. On the other hand, persisting in driving a car to its limit puts the very win one is chasing in jeopardy - by straining the machinery, which at best walks a thin line between fragility and reliability. That risk, even to the dumbest driver, is not worth taking.

That's the reason why, more often than not, one sees the leading driver in a grand prix slowing down drastically in the last few laps. Having put his nose in front, his task now is to do the minimum it takes to keep it there.

After his brilliant rookie year in F1, someone (Ron Dennis perhaps?) should have whispered in young Lewis' ear an aphosrism that extends Jackie's astute observation. This championship cliniching wonder-drug is a simple statement that re-inforces an essential truth - 'one should win a world championship by the least number of points possible.'

If Lewis had grasped that reality he would have raced differently - very differently - at the Chinese Grand Prix. When you are leading by 12 points over your nearest rival and there are a maximum of 20 points available (from the two remaining grand prixs) all Hamilton had to do was aim at scoring a total of 9 more points in the remaining two grand prixs. That way no matter what Alonso did (including win both the races), he would be the champion.

But taken in by talk in the press about the possibility of sealing his championship in the penultimate race itslef, Hamilton chased a race win and put himself under tremedous pressure - a move made all the more riskier considering the fickle weather conditions. Even that would have been fine, as long as things were going their way.

And when rain threatened, McLaren would have been better advised to heed the aforementioned aphorism and change tactics - by ensuring Lewis takes the safest route possible (which in this case was a speedy change of tyres regardless of whether the rain came or not) and scores a minimum of 5 points (out of the 9 he needed for the championship). Rather than trying to outwit the competition in a short-sighted bid for a victory in the race - which is what they ended up doing.

The result is, of course, well-known. The ridiculous sight of F1's wonderboy lying beached in a gravel trap - the humiliation furthered by the fact that he was driving in the pitlane when it happened.

Ron Dennis later admitted that they were racing primarily against Alonso - a tactic I found absolutely stupid. If anything, they should have let Alonso pass at the earliest - thereby putting him under pressure to chase a race win. Remember, Alonso needs to win both races - and chances are that in trying to do that he'll break his car down (as it happened Alonso didn't win either race). Meanwhile, Lewis should have been doing just the optimum necessary to keep his championship on track.

For Formula One's sake I really do hope someone has noted down one more line to add to the collective Formula One wisdom in the paddock. A simple aphorism that might make a difference to someone else's championship in the future.

One simple trick to master any language

When I was in school, I struggled with the many languages I had to study. Although I knew how to read and write the script, I hardly understood what I was reading - let alone being able to string together anything that made sense. Not surprisingly, I hated the language subjects - except English ie.

It was only later in life I figured the one surefire way to learn any language - and all I can do now is wish I could go back to school and make short work of all those seemingly unsurmountable assignments.

So, what's this trick? Just watch the TV news in the language you're trying to learn, every single day for 2 to 3 months. And that's all you'll need to do.

When I share this with others, most people instinctively react that it won't be enough. They suggest maybe one has to supplement it with books and audio tapes - and probably even a tutor. It can't be as simple as listening to gibberish all day - how do we find out what the words mean and more importantly, how do we know where one word ends and the next begins? And what about grammar?

But each one of us - as a child - learnt at least one language by listening to it all day , whether we understood it or not. And that's our mother tongue. We didn't need phrasebooks, audio tapes or crash courses for that. We listened to all of it - trying to understand and grasp it through the context. We used and practiced what little we knew and used that to understand some more and then some more.

When we become adults however, we lose faith in the process. The need to control the learning process takes over. We need to have specific starting points, we need to make tangible progress, we start tracking how much time and effort we are putting in. And frustration - and the possibility of abandoning the task - is never far away.

By doing away with starting points, any externally imposed tests tracking arbitrary progress, and even an expectation of mastering the language in a given time - this trick ensures that we start concentrating on the language and listening to it.

At first it seems like a steady stream of gibberish. Then some words start standing out. They become familiar though  one might still now know what they mean. Then the context provides a clue. And then you deduce what the adjacent words mean - not getting it right all the time. But if you do made a mistake, soon enough you'll figure out. Soon you'll also develop an ear for the language, ensuring you understand the way words can and cannot fit together.

The trick also works with listening to the language in any form - in a language movie or TV soaps for eg.

But TV news gives you a ready and constantly changing context that you already know (broadly, at least) from the newspapers and from people around you. This makes the assimilation of words and meaning double quick. And in the course of a couple of months - you're very likely to hear everything you need to get started.

If you can't find a TV news channel for the language you're seeking to learn, you can try searching the web for an Internet radio station that carries news in the language. The two problems with radio are that it's easy to get distracted and lose focus on what you're listening (especially when you can't understand anything.) Secondly, the lack of images does make it a bit more difficult to figure out the context.

The un-simplicity of Aphorisms

Some time ago, I had written a white paper on intranets and how aphorisms can come to the rescue in information storage and retrieval. Richard Huntington, who is a believer in aphorisms himself, recently wrote a post alluding to the paper and arguing for the power of aphorisms.

His post drew a comment questioning if aphorisms simplify things to the point of being simplistic - in a world where consumers are looking for some complexity in the messages they receive. Gareth Kay and Graham Furlong have clarified in their comments that aphorisms 'compress' rather than 'reduce' and the best ones are often packed with meaning.

Reading all these comments reminded me of a further quality of aphorisms which I omitted mentioning in 'The Intranets Of Babel' - because I felt it was outside the purview of the paper.

While they seem one-dimensional to begin with, the very best aphorisms, in fact, embody a multi-faceted nature that becomes apparent only with time. For aphorisms to survive in the evolutionary battle between other aphorisms, they need to display a 'chameleon-like' ability to be different things to different people at different times.

Take the aphorism 'Honesty is the best policy' for eg. Nothing can be simpler - and there doesn't seem to be much written between the lines. But there is.

At its most basic, the aphorism reminds people that being honest is good - for the God-fearing, there also is the hidden warning that not being honest means not making it to heaven.

At another level, the aphorism is also stating that honesty is the best policy simply because you don't have to keep track of the lies one has told - to whom, when and about what.

And there's more. Honesty is also the best policy not because of what it does to you but because it helps other people cope with reality - something that won't happen if you are hiding it from them.

It is to accomodomate this plurality of applications that this particular aphorism is stated in the way it is. And not as 'Honesty is the ticket to heaven', for eg.

An aphorism, therefore, is a master key that opens many different locks - it is a line of code that runs in mind's operating system yielding different results in different circumstances. The beauty of the aphorism structure is that all the locks don't have be unlocked for it to be useful - it is useful, no matter at what level you access it.

Of course, aphorisms may have limited applicability in advertising. But that's because the processes of creation of the best advertising and best aphorisms are at two ends of the spectrum.

The very best aphorisms are created through the process of continuous and dynamic evolution - constant repetition and mutation, coupled with the survival of the 'fittest'. Advertising on the other hand is the result of 'intelligent design' (and worse, is shortsighted) - and therefore, in my opinion, unfit to create aphorisms.