Kids These Days...

So, iOS7 has been released. I can proudly declare that, after a moment of thought, I know what it stands for. And...that's about it.
I know that it makes my phone's screen fade in and out in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. It makes my apps fly in and out like Yoda tanked up on Red Bull. Some things are different colours, some are different shapes, and iTunes is now even more of a pain to use than before.
But as for what it actually does for my phone's inner workings, I wouldn't have the foggiest. Soak it in Apple tech-juices? Something to do with nanotechnology? Reversed the polarity of the neutron flow??
Oh, how little we know about our world.

I'm not really what you'd consider to be a tech-head. Sure, I know my way around an iPhone, can solve most computer problems experienced by over-40s and I don't enter panic-mode when confronted with HTML, but by the standards of my generation, I'm not a technical whiz. What I do have is a curiosity regarding how things work.

I often imagine I'm explaining technology to a person from the middle-ages. Obviously time-travel shenanigans have ensued, and this very confused squire is wondering exactly how cars work.

"Simple!" I say, with a short burst of laughter that suggests I'm watching a kitten trying to inflict bodily harm upon its own reflection. "They have something inside them called an engine that drives the car along."
"But how does the engine work?" the squire replies.
The laughter dies on my lips. I hurriedly move on to an explanation of why he should never, ever, ever take YouTube comments seriously.

After all, cars are commonplace. There has never been a time, and there has rarely been a day in my life, that I have not traveled inside them. Yet I open the hood of my own automobile and it's like I'm staring into a warp-drive from Star Trek. Apart from making me feel thoroughly devoid of masculinity (as if the Star Trek metaphor didn't accomplish that already), I'm struck by how little I know about cars. Y'know, those things that are absolutely everywhere that we rely upon every single day.

The squire, who has not yet done me the decency of either tumbling back into the vortex that will take him home or having a shower, asks how my phone works.

"Simple," I reply, sipping my tea with an imperious air. "Electricity."
The squire frowns.
"Is that some form of dark sorcery?"
The mug freezes halfway to my lips. I think for a moment and realise that I have no better explanation.
"Yes," I say, warily nodding. "Sorcery indeed."

Then he'd teach me the motion to ward off the evil eye, and I'd teach him the fist bump.

But our hypothetical squire raises a valid point, and that's that we often don't have the slightest clue how the world around us functions. We are adept at taking technology for granted, as if it were handed down to us one day by the gods of Olympus as our eternal right.

Who here knows how a toaster works beyond 'it heats up'? How does a bulb produce light? Why have projectors and printers worldwide taken it upon themselves to be the bane of mankind?

Few people know, and even then it's mostly because it's their livelihood to know. So does this make us a race of ignorant, ungrateful toddlers who demand gadgets and do nothing but stomp our feet when they fail?

Well, not exactly. If you're reading this, and you're a human person (congratulations?), you have only a finite number of years to live. We can't possibly understand our entire world- there's just too much stuff. And more of this proverbial stuff is created every day. Imagine trying to learn the full names of everyone in the world, including correct pronunciation. Not only is there too much to learn, but people are constantly being born, so the learning never ends (printers and projectors are French names in this analogy, because obviously).

Technology is the same. This planet is so complex and brimming with information that one lifetime simply isn't enough to learn all of it. It's folly to even try.
And that's why it's okay to take technology for granted. Knowing that will allow you to bear the scorn of IT professionals who think their knowledge of SEO makes them somehow superior to other humans (just ask them how many pull-ups they can do. That usually shuts them up).

It's a big, scary, wonderful, incandescent, indescribable, mysterious, adjective-filled world, and you won't so much as find knowledge as it will smack you in the face. Especially if you're a frequent visitor to Wikipedia.

There's no grand moral to this tale, except perhaps that you can rest easy knowing that lots of intelligent people in white coats are working around the clock to bring you a USB with even more storage space.

No, that's a terrible moral.

Beware of gaps in the fabric of time?
People from the middle ages lacked a proper understanding of dental hygiene?
Have you tried turning it on and off??

Take your pick from any of those.
I might go and see if I can fix the wifi with some medieval curse words.

Reflections of Reflections

Lefou, I'm afraid I've been thinking. A dangerous pastime, I know.
(I'm not even going to aplogise for opening with a Disney quote. You can't make me.)

But it's true- I think a lot. And so, I assume, does everyone else. They keyword there is 'assume'. Because Professor X is a fictional character and Uri Geller is an idiot, humans have never been able to read each other's minds.
I should say at this point that is an extremely good thing, in my opinion. Fiction (such as the aforementioned Professor Xavier) likes to present mind-reading as a rather trite, clean-cut affair. The user will frown, place two fingers to their temple (to...massage the psychic juices? Bonus points if they use BOTH hands) and suddenly the audible, perfectly formed sentences of the target's mind shall unveil themselves. Then the guy with the laser eyes will blow something up so the kids don't get bored. But can you imagine actually reading a mind? If the average person's mental processes are anything like mine, the result will be less coherent information and more like:
DIDIBRUSHMYTEETHTHISMORNINGTHATDOGISSOCUTE*THEME FROM ANIMORPHS*HANGONTHEREARETWOWEEKSLEFTTILLIHAVETOHANDINTHATASSIGNMENTOMYGOODNESSIDIDN'TLOCKTHECARDOORIFDINOSAURSSTILLEXISTEDIWOULDRIDEONETOWORKIWONDERWHATDOGFOODTASTESLIKE*THEME FROM SOME ANIME*DOCATSHAVEDREAMSICAN'TBELIEVEIT'SNOTBUTTEROOHANOTHERPUPPY*INCESSANT K-POP*

Sorry, professor. You now have an aneurysm.

Getting back on topic, until we invent some clever, technological method of rendering a person's thoughts in some kind of tangible, comprehensible form, they remain our most private possessions. And this means that our understanding of other people will always rely on empathy.

Often I find myself performing a mundane task and wondering if I might have been doing it wrong my entire life. How did I learn to butter toast? By observation, but it's been a while since I keenly paid attention to someone else's procedure. For all I know, there is a socially acceptable way to spread butter that I am entirely unaware of, and for years I have been spreading in utterly the wrong way, and I will soon be hunted down and made to pay for my crimes of butter wastage by the Supreme Council of Effective Dairy Usage, which probably exists only for the purposes of this analogy but may, in fact, be a thing.

I feel like I'm off-topic again.

So we can never know another person fully. We often go about our lives under a number of assumptions, but if these are ever examined, we would find that many opinions we believe to be common are actually exclusive to us.

Everyone hated Harry Potter 7 Part II, right? Well, actually, it was beloved by all. I hated it, for reasons I have been able to make abundantly clear to my friends (did you see Voldemort and Draco's hug? Did you actually see it??) but in this matter, I know I'm truly alone.
How is it that we can differ in opinion so radically? Does this make each of us fundamentally different as humans, to the point where it's a wonder we can even pretend to understand one another? Does Ralph Fiennes even know what a real hug looks like??

Okay, back up. To answer that last question first, no. He does not. You ruined the concept of hugs for me, Ralph Fiennes, and you should be ashamed.

As for whether we're so fundamentally different...well, depends on the depth. Culture is a huge factor. I have a lot of friends from various parts of Asia, and while this may be partly due to my general introversion, I've always found a cultural block that prevents our friendship going past a certain point. We were raised to think differently, and that's a difficult thing to change.
But as humans, it's a different story. In the end, we all want the same things: to be valued, to be part of a group, and to be needed. We want to be respected, we need companionship (some more than others...) and we simply want to feel loved. We also occasionally want to see videos of cats doing stupid things, and I include this for the reason that I have not yet met an exception.

So what it boils down to is this: we can't fully understand our fellow man's thoughts. We won't all hold the same opinions, we can't all come to the same conclusions, and we can never expect people to simply 'see things our way'. But what really matters in the end is that we know this. That's what empathy really is; not understanding a person's inner workings, but simply knowing that we are all different and bearing that in mind when dealing with your fellow humans. We can make an effort to put ourselves in other people's shoes, certainly, but the first and most important step is knowing that those shoes are almost definitely a different size, shape and brand to yours. And the laces won't be done up quite the same way.

I'm going to finish this metaphor before it becomes as awkward as one of Ralph Fiennes' hugs.
That's pretty awkward.

Is Anyone Surprised?

So you might have heard, but Australia has a new prime minister.
Hey.
OI.
GET BACK HERE.

No, this is not a political blog. I'm actually about as non-political as a person could possibly be. Somewhere, sometime during the election weekend, a very confused government worker unfurled a ballot slip to find my carefully worded explanation on why a monarchy would be so much simpler.
So no. No politics. I do not care for them.

But the significant thing about the election was the landslide victory that firmly ousted the Labor Party and saw the rise of innumerable Facebook groups whining about Tony Abbott that will inevitably become entirely redundant within days (he won the election. He is Prime Minister now. Your vigorous clicking of the 'like' button won't change a thing. Kindly get over yourselves). It was almost a given that things would turn out the way they did. All the polls pointed to the same result. And so things happened as they were predicted. The Liberal Party won. Kevin gave a speech conceding defeat despite wearing an expression that suggested he'd just received definitive proof that both Santa Claus and unicorns were real (there is such thing as laying it on too thick, Mr Rudd).

In this and many other similar situations, it's often our hope that we'll be taken by surprise. Despite insurmountable odds, the underdog will pull through and score a shocking victory, cementing the event in the pages of history. We're certainly fed this image enough in fiction; our entire understanding of conflict is that the hero must be at a severe disadvantage, lest their story not be worth telling.

Remember that one film with the sports team? The one where they were the underdog, but they managed to set aside their differences and come from behind to score a tear-jerking, fist-pumping victory against a group of arrogant rivals?
Oh, right...that's every sport movie ever. People raved about Remember The Titans, otherwise known as 'that one film that you totally have to see' and 'omigosh you haven't seen Remember the Titans yet you TOTALLY have to see it because it will change your life', or sometimes 'you've seen it seven times well you need to watch it again because you REALLY get the message on the eighth watch'. I got a lot of recommendations for that one, is what I'm saying. But despite being based on real events, the stakes were wildly exaggerated. The real-life Titans breezed through their entire season and utterly destroyed the team they were facing in the finals. Which is nice for them, but not so much for Hollywood.
In real life, they were simply the better team, so they won. Barely scraping a dramatic victory outside of a movie means that you may not have been the best, but simply played better on the day.
NO, Hollywood barks, slamming its metaphorical fist against its metaphorical desk. DRAMA. EMOTION. INTERRACIAL COOPERATION. And that's what made them all the money. Well, that and Denzel Washington.

But real life is devoid of such surprises. It always is. Even fiction is predictable, in that we know that the good guys must triumph. Call me a cynical old man, but I believe that the world is a very, very predictable place. Elections, sporting matches and anything of the same ilk almost always have a transparent result. We even predict the weather with rapidly growing accuracy.
And sure, we'd love to see a blazing, glorious underdog triumph over adversity, but it never happens. The world's events play out as they should, because that is the way of things. If just once we were allowed to be surprised - genuinely surprised, in the sense that even the informed/educated were unable to predict- the world would cease to follow its own principles.

This realisation doesn't mean that my life has been deprived of all joy. After all, while every conclusion is a foregone conclusion, I can't see the future. I don't have all the answers, nor does anyone else, so surprises are still par for course in life.
It does mean that I don't hang out for the impossible, or waste time wishing for an unlikely resolution. So when everyone is reeling from an utterly expected development, I can simply shrug. Because despite being inhabited by unpredictable people, the world is still a predictable place, and that's something that physically cannot change.

Although I should mention that anyone who says they can predict Melbourne weather is lying. That is something no man shall ever accomplish.