How much we know …

"Into the white wild"

I have been on snowshoe-hiking vacation for the past 2 weeks. We stayed in a beautiful hotel in the Wildschönau in Austria, not far away from Kufstein. Photos from the awesome trip and hikes we made can be found in my flickr account.

The hotel publishes a little morning news paper every day and one day they had a nice quote in there I like to share here:

"Only a few know how much you need to know to know how less you know"

From the "Fliegende Blätter", a humorous-satiric magazine, published in Munich between 1845 and 1944.

Common knowledge doesn’t exist.

Over the weekend my wife and I visited some relatives living in Regensburg and we have had some good discussions about several topics – from blood cholesterol level to politics to the magnetic polar reversal scheduled for December 21, 2012. 

"Big Moon" by KM&G-Morris.

I noticed: common knowledge doesn’t exist. People know, what they want to know. They filter and interpret facts according to their believes. A common body of knowledge doesn’t exist for human mankind, nor for any group of people, for any culture, community or company. People are different, and everyone is having his own version of the truth.

I was reminded to this when reading this quote today by Edwin Abbott Abbott:

Men are divided in opinion as to the facts. And even granting the facts, they explain them in different ways.

And so I sit, poor silly man No wiser now than when I began..

––Faust, lines 354–59.

For every fact you can come up with evidences, but you can also come up with evidences to refute it. It is more a question of belief which evidence you accept and who you trust, who’s book you read and who’s you criticize, probably without even reading it. Do you trust your doctor more than one who you don’t know and who has written a book titled “The Cholesterol Lie” ? Do you believe those who announce world’s end knowing that so far the world never ended before, which of course is no evidence that some time in the future it might happen ? Do you think our politicians are telling us the truth, our leaders really lead us, scientist and experts acknowledge wisdom and insight more than their carrier ?

“I know that I know nothing” said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. This is probably the only truth you can come up with, besides certain facts from mathematics where true evidences really exist – as far as I can tell.

Information Mining … in unusual times

Facing the tragedy in Japan I am not posting any my_favorites type of posting this week. Instead I want to elaborate just a bit about the topic of information mining, “truth” and “trust”.

I believe information mining is what we all do a lot in these days. We watch the news, read the papers, may be seek further sources of information to grasp what is really going on in Japan, what the impact will be in Japan, in neighbor countries and around the globe. I am actually not writing about the massive earthquake and tsunami killing thousands of people, I am more focusing on the serious trouble with those nuclear reactor in Fukushima.

I don’t know about you, but I have consumed a lot of information about this. Did it make me smarter ? To some extent. Did I find the truth about what has been happening and is going to happen ? No. Can I trust anyone, the smart looking, or sometimes very anxious looking speaker in TV, the “experts” they call in ( some of them are experts, everyone is an expert in something, how do I know, how do I verify ? ), the politicians in Japan, our politicians in Germany, the management of TEPCO ? I don’t know. Which basically is a no.

Where is the truth ? Everyone has his or her own agenda, and is “speaking the truth” part of it ? Would the truth may be hurt more people then help ? Is the truth simply unknown, but experts can’t show this to not cause more panic ? And finally, doesn’t everyone have his own version of the truth ? And depending on what you tend to believe you pick the people you believe as trusted sources of information. In other words: you hear what you want to hear.

The best article I found so far was “Fukushima Nuclear Accident – a simple and accurate explanation” on the bravenewclimate site, their latest update is here. As valuable as the article are the hundreds of comments I saw there.  What I liked about these articles is that they try to come up with as much facts as possible and with a more scientific and fact-based attitude, more than any of the news reports I saw in TV or the internet. Are these facts true ? I don’t know. Who is sponsoring this site ? I don’t know. Can I trust this site ? No. Only to some extent.

Where is the truth ? Somewhere in between all these pieces of information I receive. To some extend.

I need to do my own information mining again. I admit I went out to Wikipedia to learn about Sievert:  what is it, what is a natural dose, where is the limit to call it harmless, where is the limit when it starts to harm your health ?

There are so many ways to measure radiation ( and Sievert was invented to more normalize and focus on the impact on the human body no matter what type of radiation we encounter ) and this unit of measure is not something we use every day and are very familiar with. Even the speaker of TEPCO confused micro-Sievert with milli-Sievert some days ago.

Let me conclude: even in the era of knowledge management and the power of the internet with all its search and hyper-linking capabilities and all the media we have at the end we are left alone when it comes to find the “truth”, the ultimate knowledge. May be actually “truth” is a myth, there is only “knowledge”, and everyone has its own. Which basically is “belief”.

My favorites for week 41, 2010

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about technical knowledge

Documentation is always important, not only in your life as a professional, but in your private life as well. Think about the special knowledge you possess, for instance about your finance matters or technical equipment in your household. Does your family depend on your availability all the time, or do you have enabled them to fix problems on their own through some documentation or training you have provided ? This comic strip from “Herman” is nicely drawn and funny, but there is also a lot of truth and food for thinking in there. How much does your team in the company depend on your availability ? Have you been professional enough to provide good documentation about your job and responsibilities and enabled them to solve problems on their own ? Or do you prefer them to be dependant on you ? Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. What is true for a man might be true for a woman as well, right ? Knowledge is the best charity. To learn a lesson is a far better reward than to receive a gift.  It is better to know how to help yourself than to beg from others. Give and take is fair play. (Source: wikipedia)

Something to watch: my favorite video clip of the week – about communication and language

We all know: communication can become quiet difficult. This funny sketch demonstrates how difficult it can become if someone starts to speak a very uncommon "language": "Funny Hugh Laurie & Stephen Fry Comedy Sketch! ‘Your Name, Sir?‘ "

Something to surprise: my favorite "I really didn’t know this" of the week – about space shuttles

The last Space Shuttle mission is scheduled for February/March 2011: Space Shuttle Endeavour is supposed to deliver some parts to the ISS and an antimatter measuring instrument into the orbit. To acknowledge the end of the Space Shuttle Program bild der wissenschaft – my regular monthly science read – published an article with some interesting facts about that program. Did you know that 132 Space Shuttle missions have been accomplished so far, 2 more are scheduled, 2 ended with a complete disaster ( Challenger in January 1986 and Columbia in January 2003 ), making that program less reliable than attempted. 5 shuttles have been in the fleet: Columbia ( 28 missions ), Challenger ( 10 missions ), Discovery ( 39 missions ), Atlantis ( 32 misisons ), Endeavour ( 25 misisons ) More than 2000 tons is the weight of a space shuttle during take off, 24 tons is the weight of the cargo it can lift into the orbit. 355 astronauts have used a space shuttle to get into the orbit, among them 332 US astronauts and 7 Germans. Taking into account those who used it multiple times 787 human beings have been taken into space using this program. Discovery is the shuttle with most missions ( 39 ), spending 363 days in space, orbiting Earth 5.400 times, flying a distance of 213 million kilometers in total. All shuttles together have orbited Earth 21.000 times and flew 850 million kilometers. Longest mission was performed by Columbia in November 1996 lasting 17 days and 15 hours. Discovery reached the largest height in December 1999 with 609 kilometers during the third Hubble repair mission. 32 times a shuttle docked at the ISS, 9 times at the Russian space station Mir. Shuttle astronauts have delivered 63 satellites into the orbit plus 13 research units which returned to Earth. Source: “bild der wissenschaft 10/2010”

Something to learn: my favorite tip of the week – about the touchpad on your thinkpad.

Does it sometimes gets into your way ? You are typing in a lot of text and suddenly your windows starts scrolling automatically like crazy ? Because you have somehow touched the touchpad ? Sometimes it might be a good idea to simply disable it, especially when you don’t use it usually anyway. Head to Start –> Control Panel –> Mouse, then open the “UltraNav” tab ( at least that’s how it works on my Lenovo W500 thinkpad with Windows XP installed ), then uncheck “Enable Touchpad”. Now, what if you need it sometimes ? If you check on “Show UtraNav icon in the system tray” you get that little icon into the system tray which allows you to enable or disable it any time with just two clicks. Left-click on that icon, that click on the menu item “Enable Touchpad” or “Disable Touchpad”.

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about shadow and light

"Illa de Arousa" by Noel Feans. I like this photo because of the nice light and shadow effects and the interesting atmosphere it generates. It has been taken by Noel Feans somewhere in Spain and is called: “Illa de Arousa”.

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about fish and knowledge

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak. ~ Jay Leno (1950 – ), US comedian & television host ~ While I was googling for that quote I used above – Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. – I was surprised to see how many variations of that quote exist: <—see this one “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he’ll eat for weeks!” by Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005 “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.  Teach a man to fish; and you can sell him fishing equipment.”—Author unknown “Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.  Unless he doesn’t like sushi—then you also have to teach him to cook.”—Auren Hoffman, Herald Philosopher “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.  Teach a man to fish, and he will sit in the boat and drink beer all day.”—OldFox

My favorites for week 40, 2010

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about evolution

Sometime it really pays off to grab the right book to learn something new. Like I grabbed "Beginning JavaScript and CSS Development with jQuery" by Richard York recently and not only learned a lot about jQuery, but also CSS and how to structure web applications the intelligent way – one of the best reads for several years ! There is probably something wrong with this comic strip from “Reality Check”: I am not aware that books have been available in those early phases of evolution. Well, that’s probably why this series of comic strips is titled “Reality Check”. Anyway, funny it is ….

Something to watch: my favorite video clip of the week – about facts

Knowledge consists of facts, but what are facts actually ? Facts are pieces of information which have been verified – sort of. At least we think so. Anyway, this is where a Fact Checker Unit comes in. Fact checking -  a new profession in the realm of knowledge management ? Facts can be verified – or made. This funny video featuring Bill Murray is not only well done, it gets us some food for thought.

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about mountains and insects

Three impressive creative-commons-licensed photos showed up in my flickr feed this week: A “Breathtaking View” from the top of a mountain on the Lofoten, taken by Ram Yoga from Norway. "Breathtaking View" by Ram Yoga. "Tiger Swallowtail caterpillar" by Vicki DeLoach. A “Tiger Swallowtail caterpillar” photographed in a butterfly bush by Vicki DeLoach from USA. “Mt Rainier in the sky”, photographed by Kyle Wang on his flight to LAX. "Mt Rainier in the sky" by Kyle Wang.

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about reality

Humankind cannot stand very much reality. ~ T. S. Eliot ~ I guess that sentence is true somehow. Reality is that my 3-week-vacation is over now and I am back to work. And after reading 285 e-mails, filling out some strange forms and hearing about upcoming org changes and obscure political maneuvers in my company I have to say: I can’t stand it.

My favorites for week 32, 2010

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about golf

I didn’t know we played golf already B.C. According to Wikipedia this started in the 15th century. Anyway, this little comic clip is a nice example of a complicated solution which usually looks more interesting than the simple way to success. But only if it works. If it doesn’t it suddenly might look pretty stupid. Something to keep in mind next time when designing a solution for a customer.

Something to discover: my favorite bookmark of the week – about unsucking corporate language

A nice recommendation from Lifehacker this morning: “Unsuck It Translates Awful Corporate Speak into Plain English”. How do you like this one: “Accelerated Emergence of High Maturity Behaviors” ? If you need a translation, visit http://unsuck-it.com/. I was wondering whether “Low Hanging Fruits” are in there as well, one of my favorites. Of course they are ! How is “learning” expressed in corporate speak ? “Knowledge Acquisition”. “Sharing information” ? Check it out yourself.

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about Stonehenge and London

"Stonehenge" by Marcel Germain. Here is a nice shot of a famous place from MarcelGermain from Barcelona: “Stonehenge”. Just today he came up with another awesome photo: “A postcard from London II”. "A postcard from London II" by Marcel Germain.

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about fear and knowledge

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. ~ Marie Curie, French (Polish-born) chemist & physicist (1867 – 1934) ~ I don’t necessarily agree to the first part of the quote, but definitely to the second part. Usually we fear the unknown, and as the unknown becomes better known to us fear usually goes away. Like when you join a new project: at the beginning you might be full of fear and uncertainty. As soon as you get more into it and start knowing more and more about it you know how to put your hands around it and how to deal with it. Even if you realize you ended up in a troubled project, as soon as you know this and where the trouble is you have means to address this and thus move your fear aside. The fear becomes a challenge then, may be even an exciting one.

My favorites for week 31, 2010

Something to laugh: my favorite comic strip of the week – about another cheap flight

We have had that topic already in week 25: the joy of travelling and cheap air lines. Here is another one: Welcome to Air Ma…. whatever. How about: Air Madness ?  Nice one from Herman.

Something to discover: my favorite bookmark of the week – about Ice Breaker

In week 27 I showed you Miniclip.com, a nice gaming site with lots of fun little games, ideal for a quick play anytime. One of my favorite games is Ice Breaker, a really new type of game for me. You have to cut Vikings out of ice blocks and depending on how you cut you get very different results. Either they get stuck or miss your boat. The physics of sliding and falling pieces of ice are nicely modeled in that game. So far I did not get beyond level 9, it suddenly became quiet challenging. The screen shot on the right shows level 4. Not so difficult, but you can easily fail with the left most guy: one wrong cut and it won’t work. It is one of those few games currently which makes me coming back again and again.

Something to learn: my favorite tip of the week – about some useful short cuts in MS Excel.

Recently I joined an interesting educational phone call about MS Excel. Most things I knew already, but here are three interesting short cuts I did not know before: CTRL+END allows you to jump right away to the last cell in your spreadsheet ever used. CTRL+SHIFT+Down or CTRL+SHIFT+Up allow you to quickly mark a block of data from your current position to the next blank cell. Without the SHIFT key to’ll just jump there. CTRL+SHIFT+END allows you quickly mark a block of data from your current position to the last row ever used in your spreadsheet. CTRL+SHIFT+HOME does the same thing up to the top most row of your spreadsheet.

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about crew members from the Space Shuttle Atlantis

"P072610PS-0024" by The White House. The offical photo stream of the White House on flickr. is worth to check out once in a while.  Here is one of their last postings: “P072610PS-0024”. In the description to this photo we read: President Barack Obama greets crew members from the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station in the Oval Office, July 26, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about knowledge and wisdom

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. ~ Immanuel Kant, German philosopher (1724 – 1804) ~ Super quote by a German philosopher, don’t you think ? Especially since we can not simply rely on knowledge, no matter how good we organize it. It is actually the job of scientists to question existing knowledge every day and to probably turn what is valid today into the invalid knowledge of the future. Which might become valid again in a much later future. Anyway, knowledge simply can be wrong, and even the knowledge of the crowd can be wrong, as this great Lifehacker article this morning emphasized: “Think Twice About What "Everybody Knows"”. Part of wisdom probably is how you handle knowledge.

Lessons Learned: Players change too often

Today (this blog posting has been originally published in my internal IBM blog more than 4.5 years ago, in February 2006) I had the opportunity to read a lessons learned document about a customer project I have been involved with as a business analyst last year. The project has been closed and overall has not been very successful in terms of customer satisfaction and future engagement. Our project manager did a great job in documenting all these lessons and he obviously did not hesitate to name all the root causes.
It was frightening for me to see how many of these lessons had something to do with people changing or leaving: key players supporting the project changed, critical skill went away, people retired and have not been replaced.
Our business environment is very dynamic if not to say chaotic nowadays and suffering under an extreme cost savings attitude. This is no news for anybody and it does not help us crying about it. But we should face the impacts. And the impact is that is hurts our business and our capabilities to reach our goals dramatically, not to talk about the quality of our deliverables.
Yesterday I had to review another project and I saw similar symptoms like I have them with my own project: teams do not stabilize, people are going in and out permanently. Why ? Because we are constraint on resources and need to fill gaps at some place by opening gaps somewhere else. This also leads to the necessity of "multi-tasking" for all of us, a topic I wrote about here some time ago and from which I believe it reduces our productivity as well. There is almost no way today to build a team and get it settled and increase its productivity. From high level management point of view replacing a programmer (or any other type of expert) in a project does not seem to be a big deal. A programmer is a programmer and writes that many lines of code per day. Period. But in reality, somewhere down there where projects actually take place you see that each programmer is an individual with own ideas, own working and communication style, own skills and relationships to others and exchanging a programmer in a project team usually has a real big impact. There is a very true saying about project management: "Adding man power to a late project makes it later". This is true because of the time needed by the newcomer to become familiar with the project and all information associated with it, because of all the extra communication effort and because of the effort of other team members to get him on board.

The never ending journey through knowledge …

It’s amazing, isn’t it ? I read “Ajax: A Beginner’s Guide” by Steven Holzner and learned basics about Javascript and Ajax, and I learned that there are many Javascript frameworks out there making it easier to use these technologies – one of it is Dojo, a quiet popular one. I read  “Learning Dojo” by Peter Svensson and through this book I learn about alternate Javascript frameworks like e.g. JQuery, another popular one. Since also some people argue this to be better than Dojo ( certainly others argue the other way around ) I become curious and now started reading “Beginning JavaScript and CSS Development with jQuery” by Richard York. Among the first things I learn from this book is that there are other Javascript frameworks out there: base2, Yahoo UI, Prototype, SproutCore.

* Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, Juristerei und Medizin, Und leider auch Theologie Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn. Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;

Well, that’s Philosophy I’ve read, And Law and Medicine, and I fear Theology, too, from A to Z; Hard studies all, that have cost me dear. And so I sit, poor silly man No wiser now than when I began.

~ –Faust, lines 354-59. ~

Wow, you can’t win that game, can you ? You can become smarter, but never smart. With every question you answer you get a whole bunch of new ones. With every piece of knowledge you start discovering you also discover tens and hundreds more waiting for you to be discovered.

Goethe’s Faust already said it: “I know that I know nothing!”. The more you learn the more you know how true this is. And since in these fast changing times your learning pace might never be good enough to catch up with new knowledge you are always behind, aren’t you ? A single man never can catch up with knowledge “produced” by millions and billions of people.

Suppose it would be your job to recommend the best Javascript framework for a given project ( and let us assume for now and for the sake of simplicity this would be a well defined project with well established requirements ): how would you do this ? Learn about all available Javascript frameworks and come up with a decision on your own ? Hardly possible. Learning about all these Javascript frameworks actually wouldn’t be sufficient, you would have to be an expert for all those through having actually used all those for at least a few projects. Not realistic – your project would never start.

Your other option would be to find experts for all these Javascript frameworks, make them familiar with your project, put them all together and see with what decision they would come up with. If any. Hardly possible either. A little bit more realistic may be, but still almost impossible. It starts with the hurdle that you never would find all those experts nor get them all together for your project. If you would overcome this problem most likely you would see each of your experts fight for his favorite framework without getting to any decision. If a decision would be made it is most probably not made based on objective judgment, it is most likely a result of group dynamics and politics.

What will be your realistic option ? You probably will only consider the few ( one ) framework you know about and pick it. You won’t have the time nor the resources to dig deeper into knowledge available and start your project smart with the optimal decision and best framework you could get for your project. You will start it in a sub-optimal and semi-smart way, won’t you ? And you and the project will suffer because of this for the remaining duration of the project and longer, for the life time of whatever your project is putting into existence.

While this might sound a bit negative it is the natural way projects go, the way of business and life. Knowledge is changing all the time and there is never such a thing than an absolute true statement or a best answer to a given question. You always start with compromises, weaknesses and problems-. You might fix some of those later on, may be as part of your project, and this will be the root of more change to come. The cycle of change so to speak, and the reason why project managers and engineers and scientists and experts will always be busy with what they do. We will never sit back and say: “Done!”. The day this happens might be the end of everything.

The year of the astronomy

2009 not only is the year of Charles Darwin ( read more about this also here in “The bamboo raft” ), it is also the Year of the Astronomy, as has been decided by the UN and the International Astronomic Union (IAU) on December 20th, 2007.

Exactly 400 years ago Johannes Kepler published what he had discovered about the physics of the sky, the laws of planetary motion: "The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus." And: "A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time." (The third law has been added at a later time). Galileo Galilei, not the inventor of the telescope, was the first to use it – after making some improvements – to look at the sky. When he saw mountains, lowlands and the landscapes of the moon and when he observed the moons of Jupiter he discovered that planet earth is nothing special in the universe, just an orb like many others.

The knowledge those two gained was in total contradiction to what human mankind up to that time thought about the fundamentals of our world. Described more by philosophers like Aristotle and Ptolemy and strongly supported by religions and the Christian Church the picture of the world up to this time was a “geo-centric” one, describing planet Earth as the one and only centre of the universe. Some say that this gain of knowledge initiated by Kepler and Galileo has been the most dramatic one in the history of human mankind, it definitely was part of the Scientific Revolution, as well as Charles Darwin’s discoveries.

Geo-centric picture of the world according to Tycho Brahe.
Source: wikipedia.

You must imagine this time when only a few people knew what Kepler and Galileo knew at that moment. What they had discovered was not just a little improvement of our knowledge about the world, it was a revolutionary change in total conflict with traditional knowledge, an attack against religions and church.  People probably were not that open minded anyway these days but under these circumstances people like Kepler and Galileo had to make a tough decision whether they wanted to practice what we would call knowledge sharing nowadays. It probably was not really an option for them to hold back their knowledge, but with that they started a fight against those forces who claimed to know everything about our world at that time. Sharing knowledge in these times could easily have a major negative impact on those attempting this. Galileo actually found himself in front of the Inquisition where he had to argue about his findings and  finally confess that he was wrong. especially also in regards to his support of what Kepler had published.. At the end he has been found suspect of heresy and has been put under house arrest for the rest of his life. It took the church until 1992 to come up with an excuse how the Galileo affair had been handled and to admit that our planet is not stationary.

Knowledge sharing in these days is much easier, isn’t it ? At least for us as we live in an open and democratic world – which is still not the case everywhere on this planet. Nevertheless, who of us would ever be in the position to discover something as spectacular as Kepler and Galileo did ? Sharing knowledge about information technology or project management, discussing things like social software or SOA is by far less dramatic compared to those topics “discussed” 400 years ago. But still we have big discoveries to make: finding the theory of everything, explaining what happened during the first sub seconds after the big bang or even before it,  finding ways to produce the amount of energy we need without killing us and our planet, findings cures against our major diseases.

Source: bild der wissenschaft 2/2009 (article “Die Astro-Revoluzzer”) and wikipedia