Figure 1-4. The human body and the Golden Section

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Adapted from Human Factors Engineering, U.S. Air Force Systems Command Handbook, DH1-3, P. DN2B11, 19.

The four most powerful words in any negotiation: “Can you do better?”

You’re sitting in the office of the person who’s dying to be your new boss. He’s just offered you a job that you really want with the title you’ve been craving. The only hitch: The salary isn’t where you’d hoped it would be. Don’t commit–at least not neil you ask, “Can you do better?” It’s the perfect haggle. You sound as if you know there’s wiggle room, and you’re willing to let him work his magic. And note: This works just as well when you’re on the phone with the cable company, at the mechanic for an oil change, talking to a mortgage rep about in a “refi” rate. It even–I know from experience–works with teenage kids.

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There’s no such thing as chump change.

$100 is not a lot of money. Save it every week, however, and invest it in a retirement account where you earn a conservative 6 percent, and keep doing it for 30 years and you’ll have $433,557. In 40 years, you’ll have more than twice that. And that is a lot of money.

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Saving is more important than investing.

Next time you stress about the stock market, remember this: The amount of money you manage to sock away is much more important than the return on that money. You can take my word for it. Or you can consider this eye-opening example: You save $250 a month, which you then invest. If you earn 6 percent on that money, a year from now you’ll have $3,267. If you earn 10 percent, you’ll have $3,311–$44 more. But what if you waited a month to start saving? Then even at 10 percent you’d have $3,052–$215 less. What if you saved $200 a month instead of $250? Then, again at 10 percent, you’d have $2,649–$618 less. As your nest-egg grows and gets into the six figure range, the return on investment starts to matter more. But you can’t get to that level if you don’t start to save now. Right now.

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Your retirement trumps their tuition.

You know when you’re on an airplane and they always tell you to put your oxygen mask on first before assisting a child? Saving for long-term financial needs is the same. If you don’t save for your own future first, you won’t be able to help your children when they need it. Worse, they may be forced to help you just when they’re trying to put their own kids through school. There is no financial aid for retirement. There is plenty of financial aid for college. Don’t feel guilty about this.

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The best cost-cutting tool is a good night’s sleep.

With the possible exception of prescription medication, flashlight batteries, bottled water (under the pressure of a hurricane), and a few other true necessities, there is nothing you need to buy that can’t wait until tomorrow. So when you’re faced with a discretionary purchase, do your wallet a favor and sleep on it. If you’re not still thinking about it–whatever it happened to be–24 hours later, you didn’t need or want it anyway.

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Don’t shop hungry.

This is not just a rule that applies in grocery stores. Do you know why they ply you with samples at warehouse stores? Because exciting your mouth–literally making you drool–makes you spend more money not just on food, but on everything. It primes the same part of your brain that responds to the rewards you really want. So maybe you went to the store to buy diapers but now that your brain is active, you buy the tent. (That shopping trip is legend in our family. I should tell you: we don’t camp.) Oh, and when your favorite little boutique offers a special evening sale with wine and cheese? Steer clear. Alcohol not only primes the pleasure pump, it inhibits self-control.

How hard will it be to learn the language? What language(s) will I learn?

The Peace Corps approach to language learning has been hailed as one of the best in the world. Rather than the conventional method of starting with vocabulary drills, verb conjugations, and personal pronoun memorization, trainees engage in direct dialog with native speakers from day one. Before you know it, you’re making connections and picking up vocab tenses just by hearing them used correctly the first time around. The instructors are generally excellent, guiding you and correcting you, encouraging you and lauding your efforts regardless of your accent or speed. Every week or two you are reevaluated and placed in different groups depending on your progress. At the beginning of the day, you’ll go around the room and answer basic questions like “How did you sleep?” and “Tell us something that you did last night with your homestay family.” You’ll get to hear how others answer and figure out ways to communicate your own thought so you are understood, even if you aren’t “textbook” correct.

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How will I wash my clothes? Do my dishes? Clean my house?

If you’re into it, do it yourself. If not, hire someone. Peace Corps volunteers routinely hire locals to clean, cook, and wash for them. Don’t gasp–it’s not as paternalistic or colonial as it may sound. It’s offering someone in your village a job with wages that will pay their way through school or afford them the means of purchasing medicine for their children. In fact, when word gets out that you are in search of a house helper, there will be a line outside your door that winds around the village block.

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What if I’m vegetarian?

True to the stereotype, many Peace Corps volunteers are vegetarian, and many who are not convert once they arrive overseas. You shouldn’t have a problem preparing nutritious and balanced meals if you are a vegetarian, but you should pay careful attention to your protein intake.

You may be wondering why meat eaters would be inclined to become vegetarian once they join the Peace Corps. In many cases, it’s because they are posted to remote villages where the only meats available are taken from surrounding forests and savannah–animals like monkey, bat, and antelope–and they don’t care for the taste or idea of eating them. In other cases, they visit the market in their villages and see the proverbial cow head and body parts hanging from hooks in the open air, flies and other bugs gorging freely.

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Will I get sick?

Yes, you will get sick. As with my response to “Will I be lonely?” irrespective of where you are or what you’re doing in any given two-year period, you are guaranteed to get sick at least a few times. The difference, and the real worry, is whether or not you’ll be sick for the whole two years (or for a good part of it).

I was one of the most anal volunteers around when it came to hygiene and attempts to ward off diseases that commonly afflicted my fellow PCVs. I washed my hands before every meal, I let my clothes dry for three days before wearing them (to kill any mango-fly eggs), I boiled and filtered my water, I took my malaria prophylaxis religiously, I soaked my veggies in iodine before eating them, and so on. Yet, within my two years, I still managed to get giardiasis, bacterial dysentery, amoebas, malaria, chiggers, turbo worms, fevers, diarrhea, and strange bites, marks, scratches, and rashes that came and went with the winds. I’m not trying to scare you; I only wish to convey to you how how common, bearable, and in many ways unavoidable getting sick in the Peace Corps is. In fact, PCVs often perceive illness as more of an inconvenience and a hot topic of conversation than anything else.

I present here a series of rules pertaining to the ethics of means and ends: first, that one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue. When we are not directly concerned our morality overflows; as La Rochefoucauld put it, “We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.” Accompanying this rule is the parallel one that one’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s distance from the scene of the conflict.

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Those who opposed the Nazi conquerors regarded the Resistance as a secret army of selfless, patriotic idealists, courageous beyond expectation and willing to sacrifice their lives to their moral convictions. To the occupation authorities, however, these people were lawless terrorists, murderers, saboteurs, assassins, who believed that the end justified the means, and were utterly unethical according to the mystical rules of war. Any foreign occupation would so ethically judge its opposition. However, in such conflict, neither protagonist is concerned with any value except victory. It is life or death.

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For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes: if you have organized a vast, mass-based people’s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat. It also means a collapse of communication, as we have notes.

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

The fourth rule carries within in the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.

The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

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The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying “You’re right–we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Contour Bias: A tendency to favor objects with contours over objects with sharp angles or points.

…This seems consistent with the kind of innate response one would expect from potential threats and suggests a tradeoff between angular and contoured features: Angular objects are more effective at attracting and engaging thought; contoured objects are more effective at making a positive emotional and aesthetic impression.

From the top left to bottom right, the Alessi il Conico, 9093, 9091, and Mami kettles arranged form most angular to most contoured. At the extremes of this continuum, the il Conico will be most effective at grabbing attention, and the Mami will be most liked generally. The 9093 and 9091 incorporate both angular and contoured features, balancing attention-getting with likeability. Historically, the il Conico and 9093 are Alessi’s best-selling kettles.

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Interference Effects: A phenomenon in which mental processing is made slower and less accurate by competing mental processes.

In populations that have learned that a traffic arrow always means go, the introduction of a red arrow in new traffic lights creates potentially dangerous interference.

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Law of Pragnanz: A tendency to interpret ambiguous images as simple and complete, versus complex and incomplete.

The law of Pragnanz is one of several principles referred to as Gestalt principles of perception. It asserts that when people are presented with a set of ambiguous elements (elements that can be interpreted in different ways), they interpret the elements in the simplest way. Here, “simplest” refers to arrangements having fewer rather than more elements, having symmetrical rather than asymmetrical compositions, and generally observing the other Gestalt principles of perception.

Therefore, minimize the number of elements in a design. Note that symmetrical compositions are perceived as simpler and more stable than asymmetrical compositions, but symmetrical compositions are also perceived to be less interesting. Favor symmetrical compositions when efficiency of use is the priority, and asymmetrical compositions when interestingness is the priority.

Low resolution images (let) of a rock formation on Mars led many to conclude that intelligent life once existed there. Higher-resolution images (right) taken some years later suggest a more EArth-based explanation: Humans tend to add order and meaning to patterns and formations that do not exist outside their perception.

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Mapping: A relationship between controls and their movements or effects. Good mapping between controls and their effects results in greater ease of use.

The relationship between the window control and the raising and lowering of the window is obvious when it is mounted on the wall of the door (good mapping), but ambiguous when mounted on the surface of the armrest (poor mapping).

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Recognition Over Recall: Memory for recognizing things is better than memory for recalling things.

The advantages of recognition over recall are often exploited in the design of interfaces for complex systems. For example, early computer systems used a command line interface, which required recall memory for hundres of commands. The effort associated with learning the commands made computers difficult to use. The contemporary graphical user interface, which presents commands in menus, allows users to browse the possible options, and select from them accordingly. This eliminates the need to have the commands in recall memory, and greatly simplifies the usability of computers.

We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have co-evolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. As we domesticated the dog (in all its breeds) from wolves and bred cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors, we, too, have been domesticated. We have domesticated ourselves. Our teeth continue to shrink (because of cooking, our external stomach), our muscles thin out, our hair disappears. Technology has domesticated us. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are co-evolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology-every last knife and spear-were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology.

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We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature itself is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago and continue to garden even today.

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As we refined this stuff through generations of technological evolution, it lost much of its hardness. We began to see through technology’s disguise as material and began to see it primarily as action. While it inhabited a body, its heart was something softer. In 1949, John von Neumann, the brainy genius behind the first useful computer, realized what computers were teaching us about technology: “Technology will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, in- formation, and control.” No longer a noun, technology was becoming a force-a vital spirit that throws us forward or pushes against us. Not a thing but a verb.

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A Thousand Years of Helmet Evolution. The American zoologist and medieval armor expert Bashford Dean sketched out this diagrammatic “genealogical tree” of the evolution of medieval European helmets starting in the year 600.

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There is a more precise way to say this: Of all the sustainable things in the universe, from a planet to a star, from a daisy to an automobile, from a brain to an eye, the thing that is able to conduct the highest density of power-the most energy flowing through a gram of matter each second-lies at the core of your laptop. How can this be? The power density of a star is huge compared to the mild power drifting through a nebulous gas cloud in space. But remarkably, the power density of a sun pales in comparison to the intense flow of energy and activity present in grass. As intense as the surface of the sun is, its mass is enormous and its lifetime is 10 billion years, so as a whole system, the amount of energy flowing through it per gram per second is less than that in a sun- flower soaking up that sun’s energy.

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I make the case in this chapter that the course of biological evolution is not a random drift in the cosmos, which is the claim of current text- book orthodoxy. Rather, evolution-and by extension, the technium- has an inherent direction, shaped by the nature of matter and energy. This direction introduces inevitabilities into the shape of life. These nonmystical tendencies are woven into the fabric of technology as well, which means certain aspects of the technium are also inevitable.

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From this single omnipotent quasicrystal [of DNA] the awesome variety of life in all its unexpected shapes springs forth. Subtle rearrangements along its tiny, ancient spiral will produce the majesty of a strolling sauropod 20 meters high, and also the delicate gem of an iridescent green dragonfly, and the frozen immaculacy of a white orchid petal, and of course the intricacies of the human mind. All from such a tiny semi-crystal. If we acknowledge no supernatural force working outside evolution, then all these structures-and more-must in some sense be contained within the structure of DNA. Where else could they come from? The details of all oak lineages and future species of oak are resident, in some fashion, in the original acorn of DNA. And if we acknowledge no super-natural force working outside evolution, then our minds–which all descended from the same original first cell–must also have been encoded implicitly in DNA. And if our minds, then what about the technium? Were its space station, Teflon, and internet also dissolved in the genome, only to be precipitated later by constant evolutionary work, just as an oak tree is finally manifested after billions of years?

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Homo sapiens is a tendency, not an entity. Humanity is a process. Always was, always will be. Every living organism is on its way to becoming. And the human organism even more so, because among all living beings (that we know about) we are the most open-ended. We have just started our evolution as Homo sapiens. As both parent and child of the technium-evolution accelerated-we are nothing more and nothing less than an evolutionary ordained be- coming. “I seem to be a verb,” the inventor/philosopher Buckminster Fuller once said. We can likewise say: The technium is a tendency, not an entity. The technium and its constituent technologies are more like a grand pro- cess than a grand artifact. Nothing is complete, all is in flux, and the only thing that counts is the direction of movement. So if the technium has a direction, where is it pointed? If the greater forms of technologies are inevitable, what is next?

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Technologies are like organisms that require a sequence of developments to reach a particular stage. Inventions follow this uniform developmental sequence in every civilization and society, independent of human genius. You can’t effectively jump ahead when you want to. But when the web of supporting technological species are in place, an invention will erupt with such urgency that it will occur to many people at once. The progression of inventions is in many ways the march toward forms dictated by physics and chemistry in a sequence determined by the rules of complexity. We might call this technology’s imperative.

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Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:
Increasing efficiency
Increasing opportunity
Increasing emergence
Increasing complexity
Increasing diversity
Increasing specialization
Increasing ubiquity
Increasing freedom
Increasing mutualism
Increasing beauty
Increasing sentience
Increasing structure
Increasing evolvability