Chapter 28 — Coast-to-Coast Cabling
Rufus connects taking random walks in life with the value of exploring.
Followed by Chapter 28 —— Coast-to-Coast Cabling, in which Saskia makes a grand gesture.
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Hello Friends,
Today’s chapter includes subject matter that I learnt about with no particular plan in mind. Thinking about this reminded me of how important random walks are in our lives. It’s the importance of letting yourself get disorientated and distracted.
There is obviously joy to be had in meandering through a foreign city, or the countryside, without a plan. But I suspect that part of that joy is a dopamine hit that our brain is giving us for flexing the `explore muscle’.
We’re so often counseled to consider why we should be doing something——tacitly being encouraged to consider: what’s in it for us. The problem, even beyond any issue I might have with this self-centered perspective, is that such advice misses one half of the age-old explore/exploit conundrum.
To borrow an example from David Epstein’s wonderful book Range: consider going out to dinner. The options you have can be effectively placed into two buckets: restaurants you’ve tried before, and restaurants that you haven’t. The first bucket has many advantages. You have some sense of what you’re going to get on many dimensions (flavor, service, price, to name just three). The second bucket, though, offers something new. Moreover, if you find something fantastic in the second bucket, you can move it into the first bucket and really exploit that knowledge when considering future meals. Of course, the second bucket probably also includes some stinkers that you would never want to revisit, but now you’d know better.
The conundrum is: that even if the top choices in your first bucket are far more likely to be a great meal than any random (or even otherwise recommended) restaurant in the second bucket, if you do happen to find a great restaurant in the second bucket you can prioritize that during all future meals. Basically, if you’ve only got one meal left in a city, you’re almost certainly better to choose from that first bucket, but if you’re going to be around for a while, it’s probably worth dipping into the second bucket now and again.
The other thing I like about the metaphorical second bucket is that often you have no idea of where a new find might take you. Perhaps you don’t just find a new dinner spot, but a new social circle too!
For those interested in exploring more deeply what to consider when weighing explore vs exploit in life, I very much recommend David’s book.
As just one specific example where I have personally found unexpected bonuses from exploring, consider my journey into AI. My initial foray into machine learning was guided purely by a curiosity for how a computer program could learn’ or `be trained’. Since then it has, however, led in so many different and disparate directions (from examinations about how our minds work, to the production of images, to nuclear fusion) that I would be a fool to try listing them. Suffice it to say that The Curve of Time is the most obvious and significant thing to come of wandering down this meandering path of wonder.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter twenty eight, in which Saskia makes a grand gesture.
— 28 —
Coast-to-Coast Cabling
Saskia pressed the send button and a little dollars icon whirled on her screen before slipping into profile and reemerging as a line sketch bird that flapped into the distance, disappearing to a point. The ease with which she had divested herself of her life-altering financial windfall had somehow matched the exceptionality of the singular way in which she’d acquired it in the first place and the whole thing left her head spinning.
As to what her donation might achieve, Saskia wondered if moving power through space really was equivalent to moving it through time.
She was sitting on her bed, still leaning against her pillows, reflecting on it all, when Tomato hopped up and settled near her feet. Saskia peeked over the screen of her laptop and tried stroking him with her foot. Tomato purred for a minute or so, but, as was his want, he tired of the attention and re-situated himself just out of her reach. Saskia watched him for a while but eventually decided that, sure, he didn’t want this, but maybe a little piece of him secretly did. He hadn’t left for the sanctuary of their back yard after all.
She put her laptop aside and reached down to pet him with her hand.
Just as she'd predicted, Tomato purred again. Equally surely, he upped and left not five minutes later.
Her thoughts returned to the major HVDC cabling project she’d just given life to. As Mica had informed her, high voltage direct current was the most efficient means of moving electricity over anything more than about 500km. It was the future of time-shifting power production to match power usage. A key piece in the puzzle that was the renewable economy.
Saskia wondered if she ought to win a few more lotteries to tip other projects into action. Big upfront capital requirements were something she was uniquely positioned to help overcome.
It wasn’t an entirely altruistic thing to do though, and she wondered if this was what it felt like to be rich. To donate the funds for a new library at your alma mater.
To be truly altruistic, Saskia felt, implied not just a generosity, but a generosity that came at some sort of personal cost. It was on that last point that her donation fell short, for there was a new lottery drawing every week. Many even.
Then again, she couldn’t simply keep winning the lottery. Never mind the ethics, they’d surely ban her from partaking at some point, even if they couldn’t quite figure out how she was predicting the numbers.
Still, there were plenty of cash cows out there to be harvested. Horse races. Roulette wheels. She wondered what it would take to get banned from a casino. She’d heard of it happening.
Whatever the case, Coast-to-Coast Cabling would no doubt put the funds to better use than she ever could.
In her mind, she imagined the electrons dancing down the giant cable that would link the west coast to the east, using peak desert sun in Nevada to power New York city at the time of peak power consumption. It was a nifty idea.
The image of the anthropomorphized dancing electrons made her think of her consciousness running along the curve that was Wassily’s model for her existence.
If batteries were time travel devices for electricity, which essentially they were, then moving electrons from a somewhere where they were redundant to a somewhere they were in demand really was like time travel. Space travel equaled time travel. Maybe Wassily was right, there was nothing that special about time; it was merely another dimension.
She paused for a moment. How had HVDC cabling come up again? ...The clutch move had made them think of cars. Mica had commented that that only held for a brief period in time——it was a lucky metaphor really——since battery electric cars didn’t have a clutch, and BEV’s were the future. That had brought batteries into the conversation, and Mica had called them time travel machines for electrons, before noting that there were alternatives: moving the electrons instead of hoarding them.
Life really was a funny jumble of coincidences that pieced together to determine our personal journey. Never mind the butterfly effect, more time ought to be given to considering the storm. Where would the flood be without each droplet of rain? Sure, it often came back to a broken levee or the like, but that was just an inverted umbrella in which many individual raindrops were collected together and named as a team. The butterfly’s wing beating was, in some sense, just the last drop in a carefully choreographed domino run, no more significant than the final drop of water that broke the levee, or turned the umbrella inside out.
How fun to make an anonymous donation, the individual droplets of which were comprised of a stupidity tax supplied by the same populace who created the climate problem in the first place, albeit inadvertently then, too. Saskia sat back up at the head of her bed and picked up her laptop again. She pulled up the messenger app and sent Mica a cheeky text: “You might want to give your friends at Coast-to-Coast Cabling a call. I think they might have something worth reporting ;) xoxo”
