The BANG 25 Writeup Addendum over at Puzzalot gets into a tricky aspect of team puzzle-solving: figuring out who had which insight. It's a hard problem; I've given up on it myself. If Player A tells Player B something and Player C writes down this conversation... we don't know that Player B didn't already know. Player B might be thinking
- "Yeah, I figured out it was Morse at about the same time you did. Yay us. Let's keep going."
- "Of course it's Morse. That's why I was just now suggesting that the ants were dashes and the aphids were dots. That suggestion, I suppose, is how you 'discovered' the Morse."
- "Because my self-worth is totally tied in my puzzle-solving ability, I will now convince myself that I knew this puzzle was Morse all along."
From Player A's point of view, he figured it out first. From Player B's point of view, he figured it out first; Player A was just the first to articulate it.
If Player A blurts out "It's Morse!" no sane team takes the next five minutes to work out who did/did not already know the puzzle was Morse. Instead, they're going to pull out their Morse code cheat-sheet and start to work on the next stage of the puzzle.
Afterwards, Player C's chances of capturing how the idea spread through the group... Yeah, basically doomed. That's too bad. And there's a non-trivial chance that Player B will eventually become grumpy as he keeps reading about all of Player A's insights. "Oh, hey, I'd already thought of some of these, where's my credit?"
Finding out how ideas move through a team is darned interesting. Writing about it is interesting, too. My approach is: leave people's names out of it. If someone pipes up with an idea, I tend to say "someone" instead of "Dwight" or whoever. I talk about the strange ways that theories make their way through a van, but usually stay hazy on exactly who was sitting in which van seat. It seems to keep folks from yelling at me about the writeups. YMMV.
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Thanks, Blogger.com, for five wonderful years of managing this blog!
Sorry that y'all will stop supporting FTP publishing, which I was using.
I've been scrambling this weekend to throw together some simple blogging software. If you can see this blog post, I guess it's working.
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I saw two cousins today, which is good. As of this morning, I didn't hope to see any. But that's not what this blog post is about. This, as you might guess, is a gratuitous blog post to see if I got some stuff working correctly in my home-brewed blogging system. Like filling in some more data in my atom feed... Yeah, I bet you don't really care about the details there. Instead, how about a book report that has elephants in it?
It's Katy Payne's autobiography. Katy Payne listens to elephants. Years ago, folks would notice a rumble around elephants and wonder "Is there some kind of infrasound going on?" Payne recorded elephants and confirmed that, yes, there was. Then she went to Africa to record yet more elephants.
Researching elephants is rough. The work itself is rough—out in the field with predators, stampeding elephants... And you come to care about the elephants. That's rough, because elephants can wipe out all the food in an area, and then their human neighbors don't want them to spread. To avoid a population boom/bust, some parks slaughter elephants. Arguably better than letting them die of starvation, but... who could stand to watch such a thing? And there are poachers and... and... caring about elephants is rough.
There's more to this book than infrasound rumbles and sorrow, though. There's research in the field, interesting characters, prophetic dreams, dirty deals behind closed doors. I'm glad I read it.
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I'm switching blogging software. The good news is that blog posts made via the new system won't clobber my old blog posts. The bad news is that I didn't really try to "weave together" the old stuff and the new stuff. Like, on the main blog page that shows the latest-greatest articles, I didn't try to pull in recent articles made with the old system. So... you'd have to dig pretty hard to find some not-so-old blog posts. Except that I'm about to link to them right here:
...and here is the January 2010 archive.
A lot of things can go wrong with new blogging software. Even more when you write that software yourself. Brace yourselves for a bumpy ride the next few whiles.
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It's a comic book about a stick-in-the-mud architect who gets out of Manhattan, out to the sticks, and there learns to appreciate other points of view. It's pretty artsy. It's pretty, it's artsy. It's nice.
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