Sunday, May 14, 2023

Timing

(NOTE: This essay is from 2006.)

The graceful rhythm of a baseball game is as good a place as any to start with in this post. Because baseball is all about timing. One thing leads to another.

There's a wonderful children's book called Buzz Buzz Buzz It is about the random interconnectedness of life. A bee stings a farm animal, which races away, triggering a series of unlikely events that eventually reach in a circular way all the way back to -- you guessed it -- the bee.

This underlying principle expresses itself in my life almost every day, often in simple ways. One thing leads to another.

That, combined with the realization that standing in line at Safeway may indeed be as good as it gets, leads me to a mathematical puzzle I'm confronting. Let's say I already know the answer, and that it is (to select a random number) 30.

Now, let’s say the only way to get to 30 is in increments of one, and we currently are at, let's say, point 7, though tonight we will reach point 8.

Now, any school child can deduce that we have 23 more steps to go. If we can only achieve at most one of those per day, and today is the 4th of the month, it is clear that the soonest we could reach our goal is the 26th of the month.

An interesting wrinkle to this problem is that the hard deadline for reaching our goal is also the 26th. Given the many competing priorities, and the random distribution of unanticipated disruptive events, it's virtually impossible, therefore, to reach our goal.

We have options. We could reduce our goal from 30 to a lower number; or we could increase the steps we take per day to more than one.

On the other hand, faced with particular dilemma, we might change course entirely, realizing we were asking the wrong question in the first place, giving far too much weight to one particular outcome (that represented by 30), when other, deeper questions remain unaddressed.

BTW, this is the kind of problem people face every day in Silicon Valley. This is a place of puzzling patterns mixing questions needing answers and answers seeking the right question.

An algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, usually expressed as a mathematical formula. In the world of high tech, algorithms drive virtually every outcome.

But I don't intend to write much about my professional life, despite the descriptor of this blogspace as existing at the "intersection of the personal, political and professional." For that, I maintain another blog: Editor's Pick.

So, what does any of this have to do with Safeway and Buzz Buzz Buzz? Well, last night was the best night I've had at Safeway in a long, long time. We were shopping for the components for a late dinner, and with a little persistence, we found them all. I get strangely excited at the prospect of cooking a meal for other people, partly because I never follow recipes and the experience is therefore destined to be one big experiment. If it is successful, that's nice, but it will most likely not be repeated, not precisely, because I add or subtract ingredients at will and according to what catches my eye.

So eating me with is like a one night stand. Over time, however, since my culinary range is so narrow, just a few main dishes appear over and over -- though as my kids would be the first to testify -- never quite identical to the time before.

This morning, I was racing through my routines, headed for an early meeting at work. I almost forgot my lunch, which was to be leftovers from last night's meal, but at the last moment before dashing out the door, I remembered it.

Had I been better organized, I would have slipped the Tupperware containing this food into a bag, but instead I balanced it precariously on top of a book containing algorithms and a newspaper wrapped in plastic, as I walked the block to where I'd parked my car last night after midnight.

As I neared the car, which was parked headfirst at an angle, I veered out into the street to angle in toward its trunk. As I did so, a young woman emerged from her apartment and started hustling down the sidewalk on her way to work. She was a pretty young woman, and I called out, in my newly hyper-friendly way, "Good morning!"

I'm not sure why I have become so hyper-friendly this summer, but talking to strangers seems to be my new habit. There's hardly anyone that if you smile and say hi won't return the favor. But this woman did more than that. She stopped, looked at what I was carrying, and backed up to her apartment door. "You reminded me I forgot my lunch!"

She rushed back upstairs, yelling "thanks" behind her. I drove south to my office and a few minutes ago I finished those leftovers, while someone, somewhere is eating her leftovers as well. Do you see? Buzz Buzz Buzz. Had I not arrived at that precise spot at that precise moment, balancing my Tupperware container awkwardly while being my hyper-friendly self to a passerby, she would have had to buy her lunch today.

That's it. A rather simple little story, unless you consider the math behind it all.

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