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Beauty, tfurrows (circumlunar.space), 5/7/2018
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I was chatting with a retired fellow yesterday. He used to
work for the US Postal Service, specifically in process
optimization. By his own account, every waste in a process
was painful to him. In his retirement, he and his wife found
a side-job of auditing medical records, which pays
exceptionally well if he can optimize his use of the
required software.
"Even one extra mouse click drives me crazy," he mentioned,
noting that his goal when they had an audit was to figure
out the absolute fastest way to get it done to maximize his
profit.
I asked him if he made use of all the keyboard shortcuts
that the software packages had to offer, and his eyes glazed
over a bit. To be fair, he had told me previously that he
was "more of a wrench turner than a computer guy." Whenever
I hear about mouse clicks, the first word that comes to mind
is "inefficient." For me, having to take my hands off the
keyboard counts as a gross inefficiency for many tasks.
Which leads me to the subject of this little meandering
virtual walk (sorry Thoreau[1], the "wild" and the "west"
aren't what they used to be, so would-be walkers have to do
what they can,) and that is: shortcuts are beautiful.
Perhaps I'll limit my perception of beauty only to shortcuts
in software interfaces. If I can keep my hands on the home
row, login, start three terminal windows that are
automagically arranged (thanks spectrwm), change to two
other desktops and start all of the software I need to work
with only a few keypresses and zero mouse clicks; that's a
beautiful thing. If I can move around during my work without
having to strain with a mouse, that's wonderful as well; of
course, certain tasks are outrageously more efficient with a
mouse or a digitizer, and that's beautiful too.
In the real world, I'm not sure if shortcuts are beautiful,
but I'd like to explore the thought. The thing that comes to
mind immediately are the shortcuts that people take on
established trails. There you are, walking in the woods
properly as Thoreau intended, when you see a shortcut carved
through the landscape by someone who was on the trail but
apparently didn't really want to be there. They wanted to
get from the beginning of the trail to the end of the trail
as quickly as they could, and they didn't care if they had
to desecrate nature, destroy wildflowers, and increase
erosion risk in the process. Those shortcuts, to me, are
ugly.
The shortest route (could that be considered a shortcut?)
isn't always the most beautiful. We're living in Columbia MO
right now, looking at buying a house in Fulton MO. There are
two main routes to travel between the locations, and both
take about the same amount of time. But, the freeway route
takes about two minutes less, so it's kind of a shortcut.
It's straight and flat and fast and crowded. The other
route, through the rolling hills on the roads WW, J, and F
(the names roads are odd here, but they have a nice
backstory) is much more beautiful.
It's settled in my mind: software shortcuts are beautiful.
With other shortcuts, you get what you get and it's not
always pretty.
Now, in all of this shortcutting and working in one attitude
for long periods, there is a risk that is not so comely at
all. Oddly, Thoreau touched on it a bit, I think, he said:
"I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without
acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth
for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o'clock in the
afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of
night were already beginning to be mingled with the
daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be
atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished at the power of
endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my
neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the
whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost
together. I know not what manner of stuff they are
of—sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as
if it were three o'clock in the morning."
The modern "desk job" is far more onerous than anything that
existed in Thoreau's age, and the health risks are far
better understood. (The capitalists are also far more
accountable, but that's another phlog post.) Hunched backs
and carpal tunnel aren't beautiful. Missing out on the world
is not beautiful. Shortcuts are therefore doubly beautiful
in that they preserve more time, perhaps, that could be used
for walking across this wide world as we ought.
[1]
gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Walking (Thoreau)
