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Karakoram has been one of my must visit places since before I’d ever heard of  bucket lists. Heard Karakorum mentioned several times in today’s BBC R4 In Our Time as Marco Polo interacted with the Grand Khan of the Mongol Empire. In fact the Mongol Empire is itself a fascinating piece of history.

Political instabilities notwithstanding, I first saw Karakoram as a road trip holiday through Gilgit after visiting Baluchistan, Pakistan in the aftermath of the Russian / Afghan war and becoming fascinated with the peoples of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact if you take northern Iraq as the early cradle of human civilisation, then all points north of Karakoram into the central Asian republics – Tajik, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Turkmen – are its crossroads.

So what does the Karakoram Highway, in Northern Pakistan, named after the Karakoram Mountains have to do with Karakorum / Qara Qorum still further north between Urumqi and Ulan Baatar in modern Mongolia ? Maybe nothing apart from a common root in naming the “black place”.

Wisdom has been a topic of Psybertron since the beginning. Several different initiatives trying to move the focus from narrow definitions of knowledge (of so-called objective facts, etc) to wider understanding of how the world really works, and what is …. for the best, for the world and humanity within it. Cosmic man. Of course the whole Pirsig / Quality thread is in the response to the question – so what is “good”, what is of value. And there are plenty of “story-telling” avenues from Al MacIntyre’s “narrative” of a given culture’s “bibles” through to modern social business emphasis in say “Anecdote” (linking recently to Seth Godin example here). More explicitly, Nick Maxwell’s “Knowledge to Wisdom” and Chicago University’s “Arete Initiative” in science and academe.

The less wise often get hung up on “defining” wisdom. Being based on “experience” is clearly part of it, but that just shifts the definitional problem to what counts as experience, and what counts empirically as “evidence”. Clearly also the process of decision-making is a part of it – though if you suggest “how” people communicate with each other is part of some logical /rational objective on-line debate, you are very quickly accused of being a tone-troll or worse.

More life lived = more experience, so one dimension is age. But it’s not just the authority of age – in a nutshell, if someone with more experience says “that’s not right”, it should count for something independent of any immediate logical rationale. But it’s more than that. The life lived is always lived within the context of some constituency, some institutions, whether that’s a “career” or simply the day-job on which the resources for satisficing life’s needs, or providing life’s freedoms, depend. Even as an “elder” within an organization your life has a dependency on maintaining the workings of that institution – your narrative has to cohere with that of the constituency around you – to use the jargon. There can become a point however (before or after “retirement” from the institutional “game”) where life’s valued resources (*) no longer depend on the institution. Independent Elders.

And by way of contrast – see the value of a mix of old and young heads – in a football team. Old heads are “worth their weight in gold” (*).

[ (*) Valued …. see, and what is good. Resources … whatever is valued … freedom, platform, reputation as well as tangible “rewards” and needs – see good old Maslow.]

Wonderful to read these two stories in the same day.

He’s staying. He’s going.

Lawrenson:
“I can’t believe for the life of me that they would say,
Thank you, but no thank you”

Kenny should indeed have a figurehead / upstairs role at Anfield, but his time as the manager of a team of players was well and truly up.

[Post Note : It’s only fair to point out as others have, that Kenny only came back to manage the team because he was asked to in time of dire need.]

Latest news item from Ant McWatt’s robertpirsig.org announces a 90 minute BBC Radio 4 dramatization of ZMM (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) to be broadcast 23rd June.

[Post Note : Broadcast Link Here.]

Iain McGilchrist talking with Bryan Appleyard at the Wellcome Foundation brain exhibition. Thanks to David Morey for the link on Facebook.

Timely in view of my reading of Haidt’s Righteous Mind.

Interesting, the idea that the right brain understands why it needs the left, but the left doesn’t understand why it needs the right – echoes Haidt’s political left and right distinction, that republican / conservative right has a greater balance of moral understanding than the liberal / social left. Spooky.

I mentioned previously, dreadful queuing arriving early morning at LHR T5 , despite (or perhaps because of) new staff trying to organize queues.

Latest news story here, I can confirm coming through LHR T5 again last Wednesday, mid-morning this time, but dreadful again. People directing passengers to queues, but no visible strategy as to why / where – queues to connections security as well as passport control ? As I’ve said before, I’ve seen longer queues in US and Aussie and Hong-Kong and Moscow immigration in the years following 9/11, but they seem to have got their act together. Again, it’s not the absolute time, but the equity of the queuing, and the validity of the information, that frays tempers.

The combination of the border-control staff working to tougher rules and the “greeters” not appearing to know what they’re doing is a disaster.

[Post Note 1st May – After yesterday’s parliamentary question on waiting times, both parties trading numerical stats on “times” – national averages – huh ? Forget the numbers folks, it’s the queuing equity that matters. And getting to immigration is part of the time to get through border control. Baggage and customs are a separate issue.]

[Post Note 3rd May – Apparently April 30th was in fact the worst day in recent experience.]

Hadn’t noticed the copyright case regarding the Men at Work “Down Under” flute riff – allegedly ripped off from “Kookaburra sitting up the old gum tree” folk song.

Sad for Greg Ham, but really ? I can’t hear the song in the riff.

Brilliant. The very antithesis of “precious“.

Just a quickie, but I keep alluding to this:

The whole trilogy from the original Don (Brando / DeNiro) is a morality tale (that much is obvious). Clear tribal boundaries to what is considered right and wrong and who is fair game for the mob’s brutal forms of justice. There are few “innocent” victims of their evil – even though evil it clearly is, zero ambiguity. He who lives by the sword often dies by it – and the victims clearly all know and accept the rules.

By Godfather III, Michael (Pacino) has seen where the excesses lead, and experienced the desolation of tit-for-tat law-of-the-jungle justice. When he says his aim is for the family business to go “completely legit” – he (probably) really means it. None of which excuses the evil past on which his power-based was built – but he knows that too, in fact it’s his driver to go legit. History is in the past. Even with that genuine quest – circumstances demand some Machiavellian moves to make progress in big business and national politics – it may even be all he knows.

III itself has some great content too – The intertwining of the real-life historical events around the pope’s banker (and more) make it ring even more true; The cultural background of his son’s performance at the opera in Palermo, and the tale of the opera itself, and its passionate musical background; Vincent’s collusion with Connie to continue the old line of business; Michael’s own frailty and the ambiguity of his “accepting” the inevitability of that continuity, despite his efforts to break the family from it; And finally, the undoubted worst outcome for Michael.

In fact, that 30-second, silent scream as the death of his daughter sinks in, has me welling up just typing these words. If there was any ambiguity in his drive before then, now we are left without doubt. The single best scene in cinematic history for me. The cynics say she was a front for his evil empire, in fact she was carrying all his hopes for the alternative future. The fact there is no Godfather IV seals it. No future without hope.

[Without Godfather III – the trilogy has no meaning.]

I was thinking this as I came through Heathrow T5 early this Monday morning. A busy holiday weekend, lots of full (grossly overbooked) intercontinental BA flights arriving early morning. T5 has a problem of being spread over 3 and 4  levels with many “express lifts” that theoretically beat using the long slow elevators, and stairs that can bypass both once there is congestion. Of course it’s all a matter of queuing optimisation – and margins / buffers for queuing capacity.

BAA said immigration waiting times during peak periods at Heathrow were “frequently unacceptable” and it had “called on Border Force to address the problem as a matter of urgency”.

The now separate Border Force said it was “well-prepared… with additional staff available for busy periods”.

They had extra staff, sure enough, but they could just not enforce any queuing segregation – different routes leapfrog each other – before the chaos arrived at the immigration hall – Electronic Passports, UK Passports, EU Passports, Other Passports, Priority Short Flight Connections. In fact they were unwittingly making it worse for priority connection customers, by directing them in routes that had them leapfrogged by others. Partly because the rest of us couldn’t see the chaos ahead, even if we wanted to be community spirited, and partly because they didn’t start (and enforce) the segregation soon enough. Once a crowd loses confidence that those giving directions actually know what they’re doing – the outcome is inevitable – chaos and fraying tempers ignoring the well intentioned authority. Even the frustrated staff were shouting at each other. Good news is the airlines have spotted the problem.

The culture committee’s concerns follow warnings from four airlines – British Airways, bmi, Easyjet and Virgin Atlantic – that passengers could face “severe delay and disruption” during the Olympics.

“While visiting tourists will understand that the Olympics is a busy time, if the wait (at immigration) is in excess of an hour it may deter tourists from returning.

No-one minds being asked to queue, if they believe the queuing is being fairly managed. But no-one is going to be a mug standing watching the crowd pass them by. It’s not the absolute length of the wait – Jeez, I’ve waited over 2 hours at several US immigration lines before now – it’s the fairness in managing the mix of selfish and genuine urgency. Let’s not confuse quality with quantity just because we can count and read the time.

[BTW – this is part of whole series of problems with over-optimised air travel these days, partly created by the fact that we have greater technical (scientistic) means to optimise operations – with no margins for humans or quality – no spare capacity to cope, anywhere. I suspect the state-of-the-art design of T5 is simply another symptom of the problem causing the problem.]