Only connect..
[ by Charles Cameron — mostly light hearted (ie safely ignore) except for Goldman & Arquilla quote ]
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Warning:
That’s not only a great warning, especially for someone like myself who is prone to analogies amd patterns — it’s also a terrific DoubleQuote, eh?
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Having said that… let’s get serious for a minute.
The abstract of Cyber Analogies (Feb 2014, 133 pp., Emily Goldman & John Arquilla, eds), which I just ran across, reads in part:
Our belief it that learning is most effective when concepts under consideration can be aligned with already-existing understanding or knowledge. Cyber issues are inherently tough to explain in layman’s terms. The future is always open and undetermined, and the numbers of actors and the complexity of their relations are too great to give definitive guidance about future developments. In this report, historical analogies, carefully developed and properly applied, help indicate a direction for action by reducing complexity and making the future at least cognately manageable.
So analogies — they can be useful.
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Associations, metaphors, analogies.. we poets are obsessed with the things:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; How like a winter hath my absence been
There are cause-and-effect connections, of course, and they can be pretty important — “he hit me first” explains an awful lot of wars, for instance. And there are “acausal” connections — synchronicities as Carl Jung called them. There are magical connections — stamp thrice and pour a little water on the ground, the rains will come! And then there are the authentic, improbable, delightfully eccentric connections like the one referred to in this tweet:
Age test: pic.twitter.com/uHn66b7YCf
— Brilliant Ads (@Brilliant_Ads) March 21, 2015
I’m old enough, I remember — the top thingie’s what’s called a tape cassette, and when the damn thing unspools…
Unspools, dad?
Unh, I’d better not try to explain…
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Here’s another eccentric example:
My son saw this and asked why the sign for "video" was "bunkbed". pic.twitter.com/egrIvOwurj
— Ed Morrish (@edmorrish) March 10, 2015
Love it.
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Anyway, connections. They’re everywhere, they’re far more interesting than “things” as such, and you can collect them free, just by noticing / noting / annotating them.
Only connect, EM Forster said.
