The shedding genes appears, at first glance, to be very short sighted.  My house is full of stuff I’m not going to need tomorrow; but yeah I retain to insure against the possibility I’ll need it next week.  The bacteria have stumbled on solution to this problem, they steal genes from each other.  In fact they do it a lot, the percentages are huge.  I think this is amazingly cool.  The community can, and will, shed the gene for antibiotic resistance quickly; but if only a handful of the community retain it then the community can survive the reintroduction.   I do that too.  I discard stuff in my house because I know I can recover it from the city around me.

Much fun can be had with this.  For example here is a fun essay on the evolutionary history of the directories in my Unix PATH.  At each point in time it seemed like a good idea, solved a problem; but now we carry the complexity around.  The essay is written by somebody who is under very different evolutionary pressures; so he’s trying to shed those genes.

I’m reminded of how the 1984 macintosh shed the genes for memory management, because it wanted to reproduce more quickly than the Lisa.  Getting that gene back wasn’t easy, but the design pattern certainly didn’t get lost.

The dialectic between reproducing fast and remembering and copying all the important design patterns is a key challenge in any new product.  It is the curse of experience that you have a deeper catalog of design patterns you feel you must decide if you will or won’t pack them into today’s new product.  I’m always a bit bemused by how casually presumptive some people are about the absolute necessity of packing in this or that thing.   For example: first customer contact v.s. QA?  For example: delivery or modularity?  For example: features or cross platform.

The answer tends to fall out of the R-selected v.s. K-selected nature of your business ecology.   It’s part of what makes small businesses radically different from big ones.  Which reminds me of who eats the bacteria.

So in this amusing game of analogy what plays the role of antibiotic.  QA is a kind of antibiotic, but I think a better example would be the skills that organizations need to have to defend themselves from the dark arts – i.e. the agents that immunize the organization against the numerous bad ideas found in the business cults.

And then finally, let’s says something about how the bacteria draw upon their community much as I draw upon the city around me.  In a business context I think that explains a lot about the survival value that comes from situating your small business inside a geographic region or virtual community from which you can draw in the craft knowledge you’ll probably shed in exchange for fast growth out of the box.

I don’t believe I’ve every eaten these, though they are reported to be very tasty, but you need to act fast.  They liquify into a black ink within hours of picking them. Their spores are distribute in the ink.  I like the story that some collectors carry a pan with them so they can eat them immediately.

Note: there is another common ink cap that’s poisonous.

But, there are always contrarians.  So some wags have suggested that we should plant only female trees.   The cover story for why we plant all these allergy generators is that the female trees produce fruit and seeds; better known as litter.   The wags suggest this problem can be resolved if we don’t plant any males.

Of course that doesn’t work since we already have a large installed base of male trees, desperately seeking females.

It occurs to me that a city could pass a regulation to force the planting of female trees, and if they limited those to a species of tree who’s males are not currently infesting the city … well this might work.  Obviously it’s time to short the drug companies.

(Hat tip)

A hurricane leveled the forest.   A fire leveled the city due to lack of water.  There was a riot.   An economic bubble swept over the landscape.  The troops came home and a swarm of babies appeared.

The system you are gazing at, which seems a given and maybe slightly odd, is the result.   I learned this rule from “Reading the Forested Landscape,”  if you stand in the forest and all the trees are about the same size it tells you when the catastrophe happened.  That works just as well for housing developments.  If you take the rule seriously then one of your first questions is always: what were the catastrophes?

You can turn this rule around.  Pick your favorite catastrophe and ask how it changes a range of systems.  Catastrophe: Moore’s law, modern managerial practice, the great depression and war?  System: healthcare, civil rights, work?

I was reminded of all this reading an interesting book about the work week, e.g. how long.  I read this book some time ago, so my memory maybe fuzzy.  But broadly starting with the industrial revolution and ending with the great depression there was a broad movement and consensus that the number of hours a person should work each week was and should be declining.

The rational for that trend varied and evolved.  One argument was that democracy demands a contribution from it’s citizens and if they were working all the time they could hardly make that contribution.  Civic duty competing with the employee’s duty to his employer.  Interestingly I don’t recall a religous duty argument being mentioned.   Another argument was about productivity, e.g. that 12 hours work day didn’t actually deliver much more output than an eight hour day.  I gather the data on that is compelling.  There was a economic argument that citizens needed more time off so they could consume more.  And others.

The number of hours worked stopped declining during the great depression and have slowly and steadily risen since then.   Apparently that catastrophe changed the framing.  Suddenly people were horrified that the world economy appeared structurally incapable of employing most of the labor.   One reaction to this was that work should be treated as a scarce good with tight regulations to assure it was distributed equitably.  In that framing number of hours worked have an entirely new rational.

The Congress passed 30 hour work week laws twice during the depression.  Both times the President was convinced by industry to veto the new law.  Both times industry assured him that the depression as almost over, so not to worry.  Both times they were too optomistic.

So that’s an interesting example of how a catastrophe helps to explains a system.

But he tells a story my thoughts keep returning to.

Apparently, to hear him tell it, the depression caused a huge shift in the way that Science perceived and explained it’s role in society.  Before getting into that it might be fun to pause and think: “what is Science’s role in society?”  When I was a kid I recall two common answers: to explain how the world works (often v.s. religion), and the arms race.  But then, pretty much everything’s purpose was the arms race.

Before the depression scientists would appear at the government’s door and explain why they should receive funding.  The argument was largely that they were making the world a better place by relieving man of his labors and improving the efficiency of industry.  But then, 60% of the planet’s labor was out of work and the scientists woke up to discover that they were getting a share of the blame.  So they were like “Oh!  No!  … ah …  That’s not we meant!  (Could you put down that pitch fork please?)   Science?  Why Science’s social purpose is … ah … ah … new frontiers!  Yeah, that’s it!  We discover new frontiers; and each of these creates jobs!  Why just look at radio and air conditioning!  Lots of job, right?”

Of course Science is not the only institution who’s entire purpose was remade by the Great Depression and it’s spouse the Great War.   Government’s was too.

The paper says that the leak was dumping 8 million gallons an hour into the river.  167 gallons/day is equivalent to about 7 million gallons an hour.

This water is drawn from some resevours in the middle of the state.  The largest of which holds 417 billion gallons, or 6.7 years to draw down at 167 million a day.

Users of complex tools are familiar with this bimodal problem.  if you use any powerful desktop application (a Microsoft product, or an Adobe product for example) then you’ll have often experienced the second mode.   We have all lost a day or two trying to figure out how to make page numbers work, the bibliography to appear correctly, etc. etc.  These are examples where our skills and the tools conspire to push us into the second mode.  The no progress mode is being made mode.

The more you push the edge of your skills or adopt new tools, or work on fresher problems the higher the chance your going to fall into this second mode.  I suspect some trades spend large portions of their work lives in this second mode.

It is trivial for an outside observer to misdiagnosis the second mode and describe the situation as not working.  He’s happy to point out that no progress is being made.  Duh!  And he’s happy to dust off all the usual suspects; e.g. moral failings of various kinds.

You can see occasional hints that this or that an organizational scheme addresses this by the appearance of terms like “management reserve,” “friction.”  In Scrum the use the term velocity.  But none of these dare to admit that work falls into the second mode.  None of them speak to the puzzle of how to estimate the probability of entering the mode.  None of provide any advise for picking apart what is happening in the mode, which is a precondition for getting out of it.

The skills for thriving in this mode might be called persistence.  That’s really a distinct skill from skills that keep you on task in simpler times.  At least I think so.  The will power to maintain focus is somehow different than the willpower required to survive a long period this second mode where no measurable progress is being made.   And while persistence is one strategic approach an alternate one could be named agility, aka change course.  Again the moralistic outside observer might see that as quitting.  The complementary pair of persistence and agility reminds me of Levy walks.