brelson.com the long-form thoughts of brendan nelson

In the early days of my son Aidan’s life, his mum Cathy & I kept a log of pretty much everything he did. I can, for example, tell you his first audible fart occurred when he was precisely 7 hours and 9 minutes old. This obsessive note-taking didn’t last, however. Its usefulness faded as we adjusted to the relentless rhythms of parenthood, so we forgot about our log and worried instead about the fortnightly baby-weighing sessions and their nervewracking scatterplot diagrams. We no longer updated Evernote after every burp and fart.

But there was one piece of data that I kept tracking, and it had nothing to do with his bodily functions. Whenever we took Aidan further away from his birthplace than he’d yet to travel in a particular compass direction, I’d keep a note of the time and place and save it for posterity.

At first I wasn’t sure what to do with this information. Maybe it’d be of interest to Aidan when he was older. Maybe it’d help us identify holiday destinations if, say, we wanted to push back his western frontier one year. Yet all these ideas seemed kind of long-term and I wanted to do something now. Then it struck me – I should turn the data into posters.

And so a project was born: every December, I’d make a poster-sized infographic to depict the extent of Aidan’s travels in that year. Here are the first two, which can be viewed in more detail if you click on them:

You can probably tell, but the 2012 poster was the first one I made. Aidan was only around for the final three weeks of 2011 and didn’t travel very far, so I had expected it would be the more boring map, but as it turned out the London street map made for a more interesting backdrop and I just think it works better.

The process of making these posters wasn’t just fun, it was educational too. As well as the usual design challenges, there was also the surprisingly fiddly job of getting the geophysical data in order. Embarrassingly enough, I started out under the impression that lat/long co-ordinates could be mapped directly to geographical distance: an approach that would have worked out well if the Earth was flat, but because it’s actually globular I ran into a dead end and had to start over.

With that sorted out, I’ll hopefully be able to create new posters each year without shameful cosmological misconceptions getting in the way. If they’re interesting I’ll share them here – but as for that data about his early pooing habits? I’m sorry, but some things are better left unshared.

In Gustave Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple (1877), Félicité’s nephew Victor has travelled to Havana. An uneducated and illiterate domestic servant, Félicité doesn’t know where Havana is and can’t form a mental picture of her nephew’s whereabouts, so she asks the solicitor Bourais to show her on a map.

He reached for his atlas… picked up his pencil and pointed to an almost invisible black dot in one of the little indentations in the contour of an oval-shaped patch on the map. ‘Here it is,’ he said. Félicité peered closely at the map. The network of coloured lines was a strain on her eyes, but it told her nothing. Bourais asked her what was puzzling her and she asked him if he could show her the house in which Victor was living. Bourais raised his arms in the air, sneezed and roared with laughter, delighted to come across someone so simple-minded.

Poor Félicité: she wasn’t simple-minded, she was just ahead of her time. If Bourais had a laptop running Google Earth her request would have been perfectly reasonable.

I can still remember my first encounter with self-checkout machines, at the Sainsbury’s near Angel. I thought they were great, that they’d change the world. And they did, I guess – just not in a good way.

Back then this Sainsbury’s was the only serious supermarket in the area so it got pretty busy. Weekday evenings were so crowded that shoppers unable to cope with the queues would dump their baskets and storm out enraged to the point of tears, while a large clock on the wall reminded the rest of us just how much of our lives were being wasted there beneath the bright supermarket lights. It was hard to handle.

Maybe the horror of shopping at this branch was why it became a trial site for self-service checkout machines. Initially, though, they seemed to make matters worse. Shoppers feared these new devices so piled into the other lanes, making the existing queues longer. Sainsbury’s responded by forming a kind of evangelism team who would lure people away from the queue and into the glorious new world of the self-checkout. Gradually they chipped away at our resistance to change.

Me, I didn’t take much convincing. After my first try I was hooked. I particularly loved how they repelled other shoppers. For some time the self-checkout machines, untroubled by the masses, offered we who understood them an opportunity to escape Sainsbury’s early and enjoy our lives.

Eventually the appeal of the self-checkout machines spread beyond the early adopters. The Sainsbury’s evangelists spent less time frogmarching shoppers to the machines and adopted a peacetime role offering support to willing users. The machines had been accepted; they had gone mainstream, which meant they had their own queues and no longer represented a queue-free exit from supermarkets. The golden age was at an end.

One major benefit remained, however: the avoidance of conversation. Londoners famously like to minimise interactions with strangers. Think how rare it is for anyone to greet bus drivers nowadays: the only interaction is between our proffered cards and the businesslike beep of the Oyster machine. The self-checkout appeals to the same tendency. It avoids conversation about what we’re buying, the weather, not wanting a bag for that single item in our basket. Like the Oyster reader, the self-checkout wants nothing from us but a proffered object and gives nothing back but a businesslike beep. It satisfies our yearning for the impersonal.

Along with many others I embraced the alienating aspect of the experience. Even in empty supermarkets with vacant manned tills I would veer towards the machine rather than the human. I was glad for the choice and thought it was the way of the future. But I now realise I was wrong.

I recently moved house and now live near a Tesco and a Sainsbury’s where the self-checkout has become central to the routine of shopping rather than an auxiliary exit lane for the anti-social and technically adept. Adoption is so widespread there that the early days of the technology seem like a distant era; the fear and confusion with which we once approached those machines is a behavioural relic, like the firm-jawed way Victorians once posed for photographs.

No-one needs help any more, apart from when the machine actually breaks. Grandmothers and schoolkids alike process their shopping like seasoned professionals. The dwindling human staff linger unoccupied, a legacy technology, needed only for fetching cigarettes or to green-light alcohol purchases.

I don’t like it. It wasn’t so bad when only a few people used self-checkout, but when everyone does it feels faintly dystopian, like airport security or Argos. In the queue we don’t know where to look. We certainly can’t rest our gaze on the bored staff – they inspire too much guilt, because deep down we all know that by choosing the self-checkout lane we’re telling them they aren’t needed. We’re all dehumanised. The worst thing about it is the broken contract, the polluted relationship between customers and staff, how we now occupy the same space but have nothing to do with one another.

So every now and again, when given the choice, I opt for the checkout with the human being behind it. The self-checkout still has its place if we want to leave a supermarket quickly – but if we want to change the world, let’s do something else instead.

The apology Apple published after losing a UK court case to Samsung has not gone down well with the judge who told them to publish it. If you’ve read it you probably won’t be very surprised.

The statement was meant to clarify that the Galaxy Tab did not copy the design of the iPad as Apple had claimed. Instead, it mainly painted Apple in a positive light by talking about cases in other countries that had gone in the company’s favour and quoting the judge’s favourable comments about the iPad. It didn’t take a legal expert to realise that the court would want to have a word about it.

Looking past the specifics of this case, however, there’s something to be learnt from how the statement is written – especially its first section, which contains what is effectively the legal payload of the entire message. Here are the first two paragraphs:

On 9th July 2012 the High Court of Justice of England and Wales ruled that Samsung Electronic (UK) Limited’s Galaxy Tablet Computer, namely the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Tab 8.9 and Tab 7.7 do not infringe Apple’s registered design No. 0000181607-0001. A copy of the full judgment of the High court is available on the following link www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2012/1882.html.

In the ruling, the judge made several important points comparing the designs of the Apple and Samsung products:
“The extreme simplicity of the Apple design is striking. Overall it has undecorated flat surfaces with a plate of glass on the front all the way out to a very thin rim and a blank back…”

The most artful thing about the statement isn’t the point-scoring that follows (and which I’ve not included – see the full wording here) but the placement of the legally required statement within a thicket of technical-looking jargon that acts like chaff to the reader.

The eye starts tripping over the words as the various Galaxy Tab model numbers are repeated and then, upon detecting the intimidating-looking patent number a bit later on, decides to move on the more welcoming second paragraph. With any luck many readers will abandon that first paragraph before they read the three legally meaningful words – “do not infringe”.

Here’s that first paragraph again with the legal payload highlighted; see how it hides away from the reader, surrounded by stuff that your eye just wants to avoid:

On 9th July 2012 the High Court of Justice of England and Wales ruled that Samsung Electronic (UK) Limited’s Galaxy Tablet Computer, namely the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Tab 8.9 and Tab 7.7 do not infringe Apple’s registered design No. 0000181607-0001. A copy of the full judgment of the High court is available on the following link www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2012/1882.html.

It’s a deceptively simple trick but one that any devious writer would do well to master. If you’ve got an unwelcome message to deliver, boil its essence down to the smallest combination of words as possible, put it in a much longer and generally upbeat text, then clog up the sentence around the unwelcome words with as many numbers, hyphens and other gibberish as possible.

Next time you have an awkward email to write, why not give it a go? Although admittedly it may be difficult to pad an “it’s not me it’s you” type of email with technical specifications and patent numbers…

Yesterday I was coming home from work on my bike. I rode up Goswell Road, then turned right on to the cycle lane that connects City Road with St John Street, keeping cyclists at a safe distance from Angel junction and its constant, deadly game of bus Tetris.

If you cycle from north or east London into the centre you might know this cycle lane. It’s shared with pedestrians and has a few red lights where it crosses the major roads. You never have to wait all that long at the red lights, but being London cyclists, it’s fairly common to see people jumping them anyway.

So yesterday I was waiting at the red light on City Road, facing east, when one cyclist zipped past me. I did my usual thing of tutting but the road was quiet so it didn’t seem like much of a big deal. Then another cyclist came past. She crossed on to the northbound lane of City Road right into the path of an oncoming bus, which was – quite legitimately – about to drive through the green light we were waiting at.

The next bit seemed to happen in slow motion. An emergency stop was carried out by the bus driver, and the bus tipped forward as it came to a halt. The cyclist didn’t stop, but instead continued on a bit more slowly, looking at the bus in confusion, perhaps wondering if the bus was the transgressor. Another waiting cyclist behind me shouted “idiot!”, which probably cleared things up for her. She cycled off.

I looked inside the bus. The driver looked rattled. Buses that do crash stops are dangerous places, especially at rush hour – when gravity goes horizontal all of a sudden and people start flying along the aisle, serious injuries can happen. Luckily though this bus was nearly empty so it didn’t look as though anyone on it was hurt.

The cyclist who caused that bus to do a hard stop may or may not have considered the safety of the bus passengers. What seems more surprising is that she didn’t seem to consider her own safety either. There are enough dangers facing cyclists in London, enough deaths and injuries, but it doesn’t help at all when cyclists put themselves and others in danger to shave a couple of seconds off their journey time.

The guy who shouted “idiot!” had a point.

“It fell off the back of a lorry, honest”

There are lots of great things about living in London. If there weren’t, why would we stick around? For the weather?

But life in a city as big as this has its challenges, not least of which is the sheer number of people here. With millions of Londoners trying to go about their busy lives, we rely on the politeness of others to keep us sane. And when this politeness breaks down – when fellow Londoners cross the line into outright rudeness – it can make even the most patient of us lose our cool pretty quickly.

Rudeness in London can take many forms. Failing to stand aside to let others leave the tube. Talking loudly on the phone in restaurants or cafés. Showing scant regard for the (admittedly archaic) rules of the bus queue. Nearly everyone who lives in London has a personal bugbear, a rude behaviour that winds them up beyond belief.

Getting wound up is one way to respond to rudeness, but it’s not the best: life’s stressful enough already so why let more tension into our lives? We need to handle rudeness differently, to keep our stress levels down and those grey hairs at bay. And there are three options: to Flee, to Fudge, or to Fight.

1 – Flee

Do you hate rudeness so much that you just want it out of your life for good? Then Flee might be the strategy for you. Taking drastic steps now can significantly reduce the levels of rudeness you’re exposed to. We’re not talking about moving out of London here – let’s not be silly. We’re talking about changing your daily routine so that when rudeness is on the cards, you’re out of sight.

What makes people rude? Lots of things, from bad weather to bad coffee, but one thing that’s guaranteed to make people behave rudely is other people. Especially when there are lots of other people. Ever felt snappy and irritable when standing alone on sun-drenched shore? No, me neither.

Learn the times and places where your routine will bring you into contact with rude people, and avoid them. This is the essence of the Flee strategy. Some ideas for how you could put it into practise:

• Seek obscurity – London is a huge city with lots to offer. So why do so many of insist on frequenting the same jam-packed bars and restaurants as everyone else, when we’re just going to encounter stress and rudeness? Do some research online and find the hidden gems in your area, where there will no doubt be lots of pleasant, quiet places. Heading off the beaten track will get you away from the crowds and you’ll find that people are politer.
• Early bird – The morning rush hour reaches its height at around 8.30am. This is when the tube is busiest and commuters become the most brutal. Because this is when most of us are trying to get to work, we end up experiencing a lot of rudeness – in fact it can take nearly all day to unwind from the stress of the morning commute. So why not try to adjust your daily routine to start the day earlier and leave work earlier? London is a nicer place when the streets are quiet.
• 

  Walk a bit further to the quieter stop, trading a bit of time for a rudeness-free journey

  One stop ahead – Another Flee tactic is to think about the bus stops and tube stations you use. Maybe you’re exposing yourself to unnecessary rudeness levels by getting on at busier stops. If so, consider using stops a bit further back on your route even if it means walking slightly further. Getting on buses or trains when they’re quieter might take more time, but if rudeness is seriously getting you down, it might be worth your while.

If Flee is the right strategy for you, you’ll no doubt have lots of other ideas about how to adapt it to your own lifestyle or routine. You might even discover a calm, hidden side of London that no-one else knows about. If you do, please tell me about it.

2 – Fudge

The British are globally renowned for their passive aggressiveness. It helps us make others know how we feel, without committing the grave faux pas of making a scene in public.

The only problem is that passive aggressiveness is only effective when it’s understood, like a language. All the passive aggressiveness in the world won’t have an effect on someone who’s oblivious to its signals. This is why tourists often persist in having a good time in London despite our pointed stares and aggravated tuts – they’re completely oblivious to them.

This doesn’t mean that passive aggressiveness can’t be a solution to Londoners’ rudeness problems, however. It’s worked for generations of Londoners so why can’t it work for us? Here’s how we can respond to rudeness by simply fudging it:

• Non-verbal disapproval – Tuts, exhalations. Younger Londoners might want to try sucking air through their teeth, but if you’re over 25 don’t try this, you’ll look and sound daft. (Make sure you don’t do it too loudly though, otherwise people might think you’re mad)

• Silent venting – Experienced rudeness? Venting can help. Maintain your cool, get out your smartphone, and share a snarky update with the world via Facebook or Twitter (or if you’re old-fashioned about these things, text your best pal). Lots of people do this: search Twitter for “on the bus” and you’ll see a stream of commuters venting about the inconsiderate, unsanitary and downright rude behaviour of people on buses around the world. It might not send a message to the rude person but at least you get to air your frustration to the world at large.
• The secret posse – rudeness is easier to cope with if we feel like we’re getting other people involved, and there are ways to do this without causing an unsightly public confrontation. The technique to master is eye contact. By making the right sort of eye contact with other victims of the rudeness – disapprovingly raised eyebrows, subtle head-shakes, rolling your eyes to the sky – you send the signal that you’ve noticed the rudeness and that you don’t approve. If you get eye contact in acknowledgement, congratulations: you have a secret posse! Your distaste at the rudeness is shared with fellow Londoners and you will all feel much better for it.

But this strategy is only useful because it makes us feel better. We end up thinking we’ve done something about rude behaviour through passive aggressiveness, but because rude people don’t understand passive aggressiveness they’re completely oblivious.

If you want to really get the message across to rude people, you have to do better than fudge: you have to Fight.

3 – Fight

It would be great if rude people were challenged in public about their behaviour. Before too long they’d be shamed into being better citizens and life would be easier for the rest of us.

But this isn’t New York – this is London, where people hate making a scene in public so don’t like to confront rudeness openly. This means that the third strategy, Fight, is a tricky one for Londoners to adopt and needs to be carefully calibrated if it’s going to work.

Imagine you’re queuing for tube tickets and someone with a rucksack and camera appears to be pushing in. Maybe they’re doing it on purpose, maybe they aren’t: well-meaning tourists often get these things wrong and tube stations can be confusing. Even still, you’re thinking that something needs to be said.

Just as you’re clearing your throat to correct this errant individual, a man behind you loses his patience and shrieks in rage. His outburst has something uncontrolled, frantic, almost animal about it, and although largely incomprehensible there was definitely a swearword in there. Rather than rallying around this unwanted hero, everyone in the queue averts their gaze, embarrassed on his behalf. He is now the social pariah and the tourist’s transgression is forgotten.

This is an example of how fighting rudeness can misfire and cast you, not the rude person, as the villain. To prevent this happening you must follow the three cardinal rules of the Fight strategy:

• No fudging! Clearly register your disapproval with the rude person
• No hysterics! Establish yourself as the most socially adjusted person in the situation
• Take the lead! Make sure others are aware of what you’re doing

Each of these points is as important as the other. You must make sure that the rude person is aware of your challenge – if they aren’t you’re simply Fudging, which is something else entirely. You can’t get too angry or hysterical and you have to know when to stop – if you seem unhinged or furious the rude person could turn this to his or her advantage. And you have to make your challenge public – don’t just take the rude person aside, they have to get the impression that it’s not just you who is offended by the behaviour.

All this sounds difficult, but there is a weapon we all have up our sleeves that can help: humour.

As this diagram shows, it’s sometimes possible when fighting rudeness to actually be rude yourself. On the other end of the scale though you can be assertive, you can be funny, or – best of all – you can be both assertive and funny. This is the best way to fight rudeness.

Being funny can get a laugh from everyone around you, making the confrontation public; it establishes you as the socially adjusted person, rather than a scarily intense vigilante; and it makes the rude person get the message without feeling like you’re picking a fight.

So let’s go back to our example of the tube ticket queue, where someone has pushed in. Rather than losing his rag and screaming, the vigilante could have used humour in his response:

• Gesturing at the queue and saying, “Not so fast! You’ve got to suffer with the rest of us” – this works because it includes everyone else through body language and directs the blame towards the general chaos of the station, not the queue-jumper
• Ironically praising the queue-jumper’s enthusiasm for getting to work
• Directly telling the person that they need to queue, then saying to everyone else “We’re obviously not queuing hard enough!” – again this involves the others but still gets the message across to the rude person

You have to be concise, otherwise people won’t understand what you’re saying; avoid condescension, so you don’t come across like a snob; try to work in a sardonic reference to your circumstances, to create a bond between you and everyone within earshot; and don’t be too self-deprecatory as this can take you into passive-aggressive territory.

Of course this is easier said than done! But practise makes perfect.
And don’t worry if you don’t feel up to fighting rudeness – you can always Fudge or Flee, and your fellow Londoners won’t think any less of you for it.

Last year I wrote a piece about the strategies commuters use to get seats on trains. I ended up appearing on a few radio programmes that portrayed me as an expert on the social rules of public transport, or at least someone who was unreasonably obsessed with that topic.

So I’m heartened to hear about Esther Kim of Yale University, who has “chalked up thousands of miles of bus travel to examine the unspoken rules and behaviors of commuters” while working on a paper called Nonsocial Transient Behavior: Social Disengagement on the Greyhound Bus.

“I became what’s known as an experienced traveler and I jotted down many of the different methods people use to avoid sitting next to someone else,” said Kim. “We engage in all sorts of behavior to avoid others, pretending to be busy, checking phones, rummaging through bags, looking past people or falling asleep. Sometimes we even don a ‘don’t bother me face’ or what’s known as the ‘hate stare’.”

And I thought I was brave to spend 90 minutes a day on an Overground train from Highbury to Kensington. Esther’s exhaustive research has truly put me in the shade.

Read more at EurekAlert or try accessing the actual article, which is behind an academic firewall I can’t penetrate

Does it break the game if the answer is “both”?

Yesterday Apple revealed the new iPad. You can read all about it elsewhere or go right to the source if you want to buy one.

As usual the announcement was preceded by feverish speculation. Would the new device come with iOS 6? Was it going to allow users to ‘touch’ pixels (or tixels) through advanced haptic feedback technology? And what about Siri?

The answer to all these questions turned out to be “no”, but some new features did make it in. First and foremost was the Retina display, which doubles the screen resolution. It’s easy to underestimate the importance of this – talk about display resolution never really captivates ‘normal’ people – but it does matter.

The other enhancements possibly fall into the “so what” category. Take the support for 4G and LTE connections. If you’re in the UK you might well ask, support for what? These are new standards for mobile networks that are becoming common in north America, but they’re still some way off here. So that enhancement isn’t really relevant to British users.

And then there’s the new quad-core processor. The less said about that the better. It’s not that it isn’t important – it’s just that it really doesn’t excite consumers. Remember in the early 2000s when Windows devotees would mock the lower clock speeds of PowerPC CPUs, believing this proved the inferiority of Apple machines? You probably don’t: it turned out that no-one cared. Apple refused to join a CPU arms race and it turns out that they were right.

So this leaves Apple with a new product announcement that is evolutionary rather than evolutionary. No freaky futuristic stuff, no “one more thing”. But does it matter?

I don’t think it matters at all really. The iPad dominates the tablet market and there’s nothing on the immediate horizon that’s going to change that. When Windows 8 launches it’ll be in a battle against Android for second place, but that could end up being a pretty small prize to fight for. There’s a more tangible threat to the iPad from the Kindle Fire but Amazon has work to do if it’s going to convince people that these products belong in the same device category. Apple’s dominance of the tablet market is ensured for the foreseeable future.

Given all this, throwing new features at the dominant product in an attempt to revolutionise it would be a bad move. When you’re behind, the “hail mary pass” – a single recklessly ambitious scheme to stave off disaster – is a good strategy. But when you’re ahead that’s the last thing you want to do. It’s what Microsoft did with Vista, and it ended up spending millions giving the world a product it didn’t need. Apple isn’t going to be “doing a Vista” with the iPad any time soon.